My little one wanted to watch "My Little Pony" this morning, so I had to pass on Chelsea-Aston Villa and instead sat down at the computer.
Our front room workstation looks out the bay window at the street, so I was facing the drizzling rain that started Thursday morning and has not ceased since then. And I stared at the phosphors on the screen and, honestly, could not think of what to say.
The seemingly endless winter rains have gone past depressing into hopeless. And all around me the news from the wider world seems equally oppressive. All the worst aspects of humanity; hate and greed, foolishness and violence, and good old-fashioned brutal ignorance seem to be all the rage.
From pointless fulmination about private murders to thoughtless prosecution of pointless foreign wars, to the apparent inability of certain members of the federal judiciary to distinguish insurance from broccoli and insist instead on the "freedom" to get sick and sleep under bridges...I just felt like Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill. In the cold rain. Staring at that fucking rock and wondering despairingly why the hell I would even want to do this again.
There just seem so many things "wrong"...sometimes its hard to keep my perspective on the reality that we are not threatened by a global pandemic, or a barbarian invasion, or massive famine, or civil war. I am safe and comfortable in my home with my family about me. But, for the life of me, I cannot look about me without a little growl deep in my throat - partly anger, partly despair - at the bigger world around me. It just seems like we're fated to be pelted with a persistent rain of ignorance and stupidity and there's nothing that most of us can do about it. Grrr...
And enough with the fucking rain, already!
Storm Warnings
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.
~ Adrienne Rich
(h/t to the Rude One for the poem)
Showing posts with label opinions and rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opinions and rants. Show all posts
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
Sex in 500 words or less...
I've spent a couple of days thinking about love, and sex, my country and how we seem to think about and act about these things, having started off with the post I wrote about the bizarre attitude the GOP seems to have taken towards the whole business of sex as it plays out in the politics of birth control.
We seem to have a very, very hard time with all of this. And I'm not sure why; it all seems pretty straightforward to me.
Let's look first at the physics of this stuff.
On the one hand we have feelings, our emotions; love, tenderness, caring, the affection that we feel for another person. Although we think of them as the adjunct of sexual love - more of which in a bit - these aren't exclusive to adult lovers; we feel them for our children, our parents, sometimes our friends, occasionally (and frighteningly, perhaps) for people we barely know - the obsessed fan believes he or she truly "loves" the object of the obsession, and how can you possibly draw a bright line between that love and another, when all are the product of our own emotions?
On the other we have physical desire, lust, the wanting for and need of bodily intimacy. That is - hopefully - both a mutual attraction as well as between adults of the age of consent (unfortunately it's often not) and is one of the most powerful of human inclinations. One of the main reasons I consider the mainstream religious and political hissy about sex as completely moronic along with irritatingly useless is that trying to harness something that has wrecked lives and destroyed great nations by simpering "Oh...but thou shalt not..!" is like trying to sop up a typhoon with a fucking tampon.
The West, the Christian West, anyway, has tried since Rome to consciously bind these two - love and sex - together, and then put a bird on it by neatly wrapping them both up with marriage.
Now I've been married twice. And I can tell you that in my experience when a marriage is good it is a wonderful thing.
But all sorts of things make a marriage good. And - while sex is a part of them - you can have good times in a marriage when the sex isn't great. And while love is part of them, too, you can have incredible sex during times then the marriage isn't doing so well with the Love Connection.
Sadly I can report that when both of them go to hell there is no hell quite like it.
But for all that we usually take the Love-Sex-Marriage Axis seriously, I'm not so sure that we're doing ourselves a favor trying to wrap the heavy machinery of sex in the pretty shiny paper of love and marriage.
Or...no, wait. Let me come at this another way.
Love.
Love is an emotion that we can feel for many people, in many different ways, even for places, and things. Love is infinitely adaptable; I can love my children in something of the same way that I love my wife, and I can love her in something of the same way that I love my friends Brent and Julie, say, or my friend Lisa even though Lisa and I have never stood face-to-face, and I've known my wife as intimately physically as a man can know a woman.
So love is a sort of universal solvent for human interaction.
Marriage..?
Well, there's a lot of reasons for marriage and when you come right down to it, almost none of them have anything to do with love.
Or sex, for that matter.
Really. Think about it.
Does a scrap of paper, or a birdshot spray of words from some prelate, mean that I love my bride more, or less, or differently? Does it place a physical impediment, or remove some real barrier to our making love? Will our sex be better, or worse, or different, because we're swiving in socially accepted approval, humping to the applause of Church and State?
No.
Marriage is a property transaction, frankly, a social and legal convenience. It's about inheritance and bastardy
and the lust directly involved is the tumescence of litigation that inspires lust in attorneys.
Marriage is something we've made sentimental and tried to tie into love and sex, but its fundamental purpose is purely to confine all that messy love and sloppy lust in a nice fenced social, economic, and legal corral that the prelates and politicians can feel good about.
I like being married only because of the promise it implies; Western marriage is worth a moment's consideration only in what it requires of the parties - a promise of fidelity, of emotional and physical exclusivity.
Now that's a lovely idea, and a lovely promise.
But let's be honest with ourselves; how many humans can make that promise with confidence that they will mean it a year, five years, ten years from now? How many of us live up to that promise? How many of us try and fail?
How many don't really try?
My personal belief is that the real infidelity is not of the body but of the mind and soul; if you can't or don't intend to be monogamous - don't be. Don't say the words. Don't make that promise. If he or she takes you on those terms? Fine.
The lying is what makes the sin. To me. Breaking your word.
What you do with your body afterwards is just an insult.
But...back to love and sex.
So. I think a big part of our troubles come from trying to tie a big pink bow around all this entropy of love on the one hand and wild rumpus of sex on the other.
We're trying to mate together water and fire; the ocean of love with the burning fire of lust, trying to convince ourselves and, in particular, our kids, that the water and fire are really one, that love and desire are Janus-faced, and that they always will arrive and depart together.
And I think this is a huge, enormous, monstrous mistake, and one that has produced more problems for us humans than sweet malt beverages and bad pop music combined.
Not because people should have sex without loving and caring for each other, or that love must go with love-making.
But because our bodies and minds, dirty things that they are, will produce all sorts of lascivious and lusty feelings for other people regardless of who those people are, how well those people would be for us, whether or not we should be making the sign of the two-humped whale with them.
And...
If you convince people that if they desire someone there must be love - real love, committed love, deep, intense, long-term love - around somewhere you're going to end up with a LOT of people who mistake their groinical itches for emotional attachment and the fulfillment of their genital desires with enduring love. Because you've told them that it MUST be love because it feels so good...
And...just my personal opinion you also do sex a disservice when you chokehold it to love.
Physical congress is a chancy thing. It is wildly dependent on moods, health, rest and vigor, settings, and more than anything on an interplay of communications, experience, and sensitivity.
You may love someone desperately and be utterly incapable of making love to them adequately.
And that failure - sadly - is often taken not for what it is; a bad night's rest, an upset stomach, the clumsiness of ignorance, the haste of youthful excitement, but for a failure of love. A mismatch in emotion. You wouldn't be such a bad lover if you really loved me..!
Let me confess; when I was in my twenties I had a lover who was a woman who knew her own wants, knew something of young men, and was unafraid to patiently explain what pleased her to a young man whose knowledge of the female body pretty much stopped at "Tits!"
And then later in life I married - and am still married to - another woman who had the rare gift of understanding love as a gift, as a blessing, as a union while understanding that sex is a craft, a delicately brutal dance, a thing at once maddened, and delicate, and perhaps the most importantly, unlike love in that it can and sometimes often needs to be looked on as any other physical skill that can be bettered with practice, coaching, and communication.
But I know that many, many people never get this luck. Like ignorant armies, we wrestle and gasp in the dark, and from our misfortunate collisions draw out emotional heartache we don't deserve.
Because sexual intimacy can be, should be a delight, a gift, a benediction. To reduce it to mere friction, to the bullish satisfaction of immediate needs, is to give away the gift. Because when I enjoy my beloved's body, when I immerse myself in all of the intimate scents, sounds, tastes, and textures of her, I find within them with a closer knowledge of her, a sweeter tenderness for her.
Sensual thing I am, the physical closeness to her brings me unending delights, delights I want like cool water and a warm bed at night.
I want to sit up in the pale morning light beside my lover and watch the shadows cross her hair as she sleeps and throw the intricate angles of her chin and point of shoulder into a Dürer chiaroscuro.
I want to share coffee and crullers and the morning paper and then kiss the pastry crumbs off her breasts.
I want to laugh as she does a silly dance dressed only in her woolly socks.
I want to linger over her wrist kissing, feeling the heat of her body, her pulse through my lips, inhaling the scent of her warm flesh, watching her blue life move beneath the skin.
I want to listen to her explain hemstitching to me as I contemplate the deft workings of her ankle.
I want the feel the soft weight of her when she drapes herself over my shoulders and feel her warm breath on the back of my neck in that way that makes me shiver, thinking of the pressure of her hips against mine, of the way she gasps when I kiss her in that gentle crease between the top of her thigh and the swell of her belly, of the dark moist warmth of the back of her hair when we lie together after making love.
Because in those moments, as close as we can be in our minds, and hearts, in the complex strands of the web we weave with our bodies we bind ourselves together in ways that the voices and eyes and minds and hearts cannot.
Update 3/11: Here's Erick Loomis with a bit of late Victorian sexual curiosity; the history of the vibrator.
I can't say I agree with all of his connections between Victorian "morality" and the sudden recent outbreak of "OMFG-wimmens-are-sexing-without permission!" in the election debate, but the general concept that certain (types of) people want to banish the notion that women enjoy the physical aspects of sex and both desire and should get orgasmic fulfillment as a socially acceptable starting point seems a reasonable conclusion.
We seem to have a very, very hard time with all of this. And I'm not sure why; it all seems pretty straightforward to me.
Let's look first at the physics of this stuff.
On the one hand we have feelings, our emotions; love, tenderness, caring, the affection that we feel for another person. Although we think of them as the adjunct of sexual love - more of which in a bit - these aren't exclusive to adult lovers; we feel them for our children, our parents, sometimes our friends, occasionally (and frighteningly, perhaps) for people we barely know - the obsessed fan believes he or she truly "loves" the object of the obsession, and how can you possibly draw a bright line between that love and another, when all are the product of our own emotions?
On the other we have physical desire, lust, the wanting for and need of bodily intimacy. That is - hopefully - both a mutual attraction as well as between adults of the age of consent (unfortunately it's often not) and is one of the most powerful of human inclinations. One of the main reasons I consider the mainstream religious and political hissy about sex as completely moronic along with irritatingly useless is that trying to harness something that has wrecked lives and destroyed great nations by simpering "Oh...but thou shalt not..!" is like trying to sop up a typhoon with a fucking tampon.
The West, the Christian West, anyway, has tried since Rome to consciously bind these two - love and sex - together, and then put a bird on it by neatly wrapping them both up with marriage.Now I've been married twice. And I can tell you that in my experience when a marriage is good it is a wonderful thing.
But all sorts of things make a marriage good. And - while sex is a part of them - you can have good times in a marriage when the sex isn't great. And while love is part of them, too, you can have incredible sex during times then the marriage isn't doing so well with the Love Connection. Sadly I can report that when both of them go to hell there is no hell quite like it.
But for all that we usually take the Love-Sex-Marriage Axis seriously, I'm not so sure that we're doing ourselves a favor trying to wrap the heavy machinery of sex in the pretty shiny paper of love and marriage.
Or...no, wait. Let me come at this another way.
Love.Love is an emotion that we can feel for many people, in many different ways, even for places, and things. Love is infinitely adaptable; I can love my children in something of the same way that I love my wife, and I can love her in something of the same way that I love my friends Brent and Julie, say, or my friend Lisa even though Lisa and I have never stood face-to-face, and I've known my wife as intimately physically as a man can know a woman.
So love is a sort of universal solvent for human interaction. Marriage..?
Well, there's a lot of reasons for marriage and when you come right down to it, almost none of them have anything to do with love.
Or sex, for that matter.
Really. Think about it.
Does a scrap of paper, or a birdshot spray of words from some prelate, mean that I love my bride more, or less, or differently? Does it place a physical impediment, or remove some real barrier to our making love? Will our sex be better, or worse, or different, because we're swiving in socially accepted approval, humping to the applause of Church and State?No.
Marriage is a property transaction, frankly, a social and legal convenience. It's about inheritance and bastardy
and the lust directly involved is the tumescence of litigation that inspires lust in attorneys.Marriage is something we've made sentimental and tried to tie into love and sex, but its fundamental purpose is purely to confine all that messy love and sloppy lust in a nice fenced social, economic, and legal corral that the prelates and politicians can feel good about.
I like being married only because of the promise it implies; Western marriage is worth a moment's consideration only in what it requires of the parties - a promise of fidelity, of emotional and physical exclusivity.
Now that's a lovely idea, and a lovely promise.But let's be honest with ourselves; how many humans can make that promise with confidence that they will mean it a year, five years, ten years from now? How many of us live up to that promise? How many of us try and fail?
How many don't really try?
My personal belief is that the real infidelity is not of the body but of the mind and soul; if you can't or don't intend to be monogamous - don't be. Don't say the words. Don't make that promise. If he or she takes you on those terms? Fine.
The lying is what makes the sin. To me. Breaking your word.
What you do with your body afterwards is just an insult.
But...back to love and sex.
So. I think a big part of our troubles come from trying to tie a big pink bow around all this entropy of love on the one hand and wild rumpus of sex on the other. We're trying to mate together water and fire; the ocean of love with the burning fire of lust, trying to convince ourselves and, in particular, our kids, that the water and fire are really one, that love and desire are Janus-faced, and that they always will arrive and depart together.
And I think this is a huge, enormous, monstrous mistake, and one that has produced more problems for us humans than sweet malt beverages and bad pop music combined.
Not because people should have sex without loving and caring for each other, or that love must go with love-making.
But because our bodies and minds, dirty things that they are, will produce all sorts of lascivious and lusty feelings for other people regardless of who those people are, how well those people would be for us, whether or not we should be making the sign of the two-humped whale with them.And...
If you convince people that if they desire someone there must be love - real love, committed love, deep, intense, long-term love - around somewhere you're going to end up with a LOT of people who mistake their groinical itches for emotional attachment and the fulfillment of their genital desires with enduring love. Because you've told them that it MUST be love because it feels so good...
And...just my personal opinion you also do sex a disservice when you chokehold it to love.Physical congress is a chancy thing. It is wildly dependent on moods, health, rest and vigor, settings, and more than anything on an interplay of communications, experience, and sensitivity.
You may love someone desperately and be utterly incapable of making love to them adequately.And that failure - sadly - is often taken not for what it is; a bad night's rest, an upset stomach, the clumsiness of ignorance, the haste of youthful excitement, but for a failure of love. A mismatch in emotion. You wouldn't be such a bad lover if you really loved me..!
Let me confess; when I was in my twenties I had a lover who was a woman who knew her own wants, knew something of young men, and was unafraid to patiently explain what pleased her to a young man whose knowledge of the female body pretty much stopped at "Tits!"And then later in life I married - and am still married to - another woman who had the rare gift of understanding love as a gift, as a blessing, as a union while understanding that sex is a craft, a delicately brutal dance, a thing at once maddened, and delicate, and perhaps the most importantly, unlike love in that it can and sometimes often needs to be looked on as any other physical skill that can be bettered with practice, coaching, and communication.
But I know that many, many people never get this luck. Like ignorant armies, we wrestle and gasp in the dark, and from our misfortunate collisions draw out emotional heartache we don't deserve.Because sexual intimacy can be, should be a delight, a gift, a benediction. To reduce it to mere friction, to the bullish satisfaction of immediate needs, is to give away the gift. Because when I enjoy my beloved's body, when I immerse myself in all of the intimate scents, sounds, tastes, and textures of her, I find within them with a closer knowledge of her, a sweeter tenderness for her.
Sensual thing I am, the physical closeness to her brings me unending delights, delights I want like cool water and a warm bed at night.
I want to sit up in the pale morning light beside my lover and watch the shadows cross her hair as she sleeps and throw the intricate angles of her chin and point of shoulder into a Dürer chiaroscuro.
I want to share coffee and crullers and the morning paper and then kiss the pastry crumbs off her breasts.
I want to laugh as she does a silly dance dressed only in her woolly socks.I want to linger over her wrist kissing, feeling the heat of her body, her pulse through my lips, inhaling the scent of her warm flesh, watching her blue life move beneath the skin.
I want to listen to her explain hemstitching to me as I contemplate the deft workings of her ankle.
I want the feel the soft weight of her when she drapes herself over my shoulders and feel her warm breath on the back of my neck in that way that makes me shiver, thinking of the pressure of her hips against mine, of the way she gasps when I kiss her in that gentle crease between the top of her thigh and the swell of her belly, of the dark moist warmth of the back of her hair when we lie together after making love.
Because in those moments, as close as we can be in our minds, and hearts, in the complex strands of the web we weave with our bodies we bind ourselves together in ways that the voices and eyes and minds and hearts cannot.
Update 3/11: Here's Erick Loomis with a bit of late Victorian sexual curiosity; the history of the vibrator. I can't say I agree with all of his connections between Victorian "morality" and the sudden recent outbreak of "OMFG-wimmens-are-sexing-without permission!" in the election debate, but the general concept that certain (types of) people want to banish the notion that women enjoy the physical aspects of sex and both desire and should get orgasmic fulfillment as a socially acceptable starting point seems a reasonable conclusion.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Sheik Yerbootie
I gotta tell ya.
Having to live through this year's Republican primaries has been like being jumped and beaten and then tied to a tree on the walkway just outside Monkey Island with my eyelids propped open with toothpicks and forced to watch the priapicly stupid simians inside perform unspeakable acts on themselves while those not frantically performing the Sin of Onan pelt me with rock-hard nuggets of used Purina Monkey ChowTM.
It's been a living Hell.
Not content to cut off the head of Zombie Lincoln it seems that this overpaid crew of impudent protohominid snobs is trying to shrink it, paint it black, stuff it full of over-ripe kumquats and then jam the rotting horror into a gaudily painted circus cannon labeled "No New Taxes" and blue the filthy mess all over the republic.
Sigh.
I've long since given up hope that the GOP is in any way, shape, or form saveable. The 2012 edition of the Republican Party is a gibbering loony, a tale told by a congeries of idiots in tri-cornered hats, full of sound and fury, signifying that if you pay Rush Limbaugh to puff out his flabby cheeks, rattle his newspaper, and shove enough rats and old socks in your brain and tell you that the moderate Republican elected three years earlier is a Market-Hating Commie Kenyan Muslim said brain will devolve into a puddle of thick drool and slime mold before breakfast.
The combination of Islamophobia, Taxophobia, Modernophobia, and Thoughtopobia have driven the modern GOP utterly batshit. There is no saving it; ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam - the GOP must be destroyed.
But of all the utterly bizarre, completely clueless things the GOP has done this election year, it's feckless pursuit of contraception strikes me as beyond utterly mad.
And that was before the Walking Id of the Republican Party, ol' Rushbo himself, went all Morals Proctor on some poor woman with the unhappy name of Fluke who stood up in public and stated the simple fact that hormonal contraceptive pills are a form of medication and as such in her opinion were a legitimate part of a health care coverage plan.
Aside from the fetid outburst of stupid that revealed that there's a room inside Rush's brain (the one with the "Gurlies!" sign on the door) that's papered over with tattered Maxim and FHM covers and soggy Hooters T-shirts from Rushbo's early pubesence, this slut-shaming seems to have brought the entire howling crew of "conservative" C.H.U.D.s out of their sewers, shrieking about sluts and ho's, and chaining together the notion that a woman who wishes her insurer to cover her birth control is some sort of lust-crazed harlot with a sexual orifice as deep as a well, as wide as a church door, and as insatiable as a swarm of locusts, and that her sole purpose in life is to ingest free oral contraceptives so that she may swive the entire UCLA Marching Band, including the women and the costumed mascot, and, presumably, the wind instruments.
I mean, just look:
This is your GOP, circa 2012. It's hard to tell which is bigger, the racist forebrain or the woman-having-sex-hating hindbrain.
But either one is completely batshit insane.
I mean seriously fucking insane.
Canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves, shoes-off, scribbling-with-feces-on-the-padded-walls insane.
Leaving aside the question of the other effects hormonal contraceptives have, the simple fact is that this entire nonsense is based on the notion that sex without the threat of pregnancy is bad.
Sex; fun sex, companionable sex, sex as affection, sex as bonding, even sex as recreation, or sex as friendship - all of these are BAAAAAADDDDDD!!!
Even for the Party of the Incredibly Dumb Fucking Platform, the notion that pursuing this issue as an electoral winner?
Insane.
But...I want to pause here for a moment and reflect on the fact that this got ANY traction at all.
What does that say about us, us 21st Century Americans, and especially the sort of people who are clustering around the radio listening to Rushbo, or busily typing away at letters or e-mails about sluts to Powerline and the usual hives of scum and villainy that serve as watering holes for the terminally patriotic?
Why are all these people so wrapped around the axle about sex without the threat of babies?
I mean, human beings have been leaping upon each other for all sorts of reasons since - and probably before - we descended from the trees.
Certainly sexual congress is a way of procreating. But let's be honest; how many times have you approached your lover with the thought, oh, yeah, honey, let's start a family!
Okay, well, if you're the Duggars, yeah, maybe every time. But don't get me started on that one-family football team. For most of us...there's all sorts of reasons for making love.
We may want to hold our lover, or be held. We may just be crazy-wild with lust; he or she may just be driving us completely berserk. We may be lonely. Or sad. Or joyful, and want to share that in the closest way possible.
We may want a challenge, or a reassurance, or tenderness. We may want to make ourselves a chalice to hold the one we love, or overwhelm someone with pure physical sensation.
And there are times when we just want to get laid. Personally - and this is just a suggestion, guys - my feeling is that if you're not interested in the woman attached to the vagina?
Take yourself in hand, let's say. Masturbation would be better for all concerned; quicker, cheaper, safer, and nobody has to lie to anyone else.
But that's just me talkin'.
So here's the point; there's a hell of a lot of times and places where two people want to put the totem pole in the donut hole - or whatever else they feel like doing with someone that, hopefully, in the best of all worlds, they deeply care for. And a hell of a lot of them don't - and shouldn't! - risk producing a kiddo as a result.
For the record, I'm all in favor of those of us who want and intend to make sweet, sweet love to do so, in the times and places and ways we deem best. That is our great strength and our great joy as humans - as often as we fuck it up, screw the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and get ourselves and others in trouble because of it - and we should cherish that sacrament, not hate or fear it. Let us love; let us MAKE love; honestly, openly, truthfully, recklessly.
But that unless we are very, very, very sure that we want a child, are aware of what that entails, and are prepared to deal with the consequences...I want us to make sure the joint venture between my little wrigglers and your egg never gets to float an IPO. Birth control? That's part and parcel of the deal unless we decide otherwise. We should be able to love without risking our lives, and the life of a child, every time we do.
And anyone who thinks they should is a complete and utter moron.
Or a Republican.
But I repeat myself.
Having to live through this year's Republican primaries has been like being jumped and beaten and then tied to a tree on the walkway just outside Monkey Island with my eyelids propped open with toothpicks and forced to watch the priapicly stupid simians inside perform unspeakable acts on themselves while those not frantically performing the Sin of Onan pelt me with rock-hard nuggets of used Purina Monkey ChowTM.
It's been a living Hell.Not content to cut off the head of Zombie Lincoln it seems that this overpaid crew of impudent protohominid snobs is trying to shrink it, paint it black, stuff it full of over-ripe kumquats and then jam the rotting horror into a gaudily painted circus cannon labeled "No New Taxes" and blue the filthy mess all over the republic.
Sigh.
I've long since given up hope that the GOP is in any way, shape, or form saveable. The 2012 edition of the Republican Party is a gibbering loony, a tale told by a congeries of idiots in tri-cornered hats, full of sound and fury, signifying that if you pay Rush Limbaugh to puff out his flabby cheeks, rattle his newspaper, and shove enough rats and old socks in your brain and tell you that the moderate Republican elected three years earlier is a Market-Hating Commie Kenyan Muslim said brain will devolve into a puddle of thick drool and slime mold before breakfast.
The combination of Islamophobia, Taxophobia, Modernophobia, and Thoughtopobia have driven the modern GOP utterly batshit. There is no saving it; ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam - the GOP must be destroyed.
But of all the utterly bizarre, completely clueless things the GOP has done this election year, it's feckless pursuit of contraception strikes me as beyond utterly mad.And that was before the Walking Id of the Republican Party, ol' Rushbo himself, went all Morals Proctor on some poor woman with the unhappy name of Fluke who stood up in public and stated the simple fact that hormonal contraceptive pills are a form of medication and as such in her opinion were a legitimate part of a health care coverage plan.
Aside from the fetid outburst of stupid that revealed that there's a room inside Rush's brain (the one with the "Gurlies!" sign on the door) that's papered over with tattered Maxim and FHM covers and soggy Hooters T-shirts from Rushbo's early pubesence, this slut-shaming seems to have brought the entire howling crew of "conservative" C.H.U.D.s out of their sewers, shrieking about sluts and ho's, and chaining together the notion that a woman who wishes her insurer to cover her birth control is some sort of lust-crazed harlot with a sexual orifice as deep as a well, as wide as a church door, and as insatiable as a swarm of locusts, and that her sole purpose in life is to ingest free oral contraceptives so that she may swive the entire UCLA Marching Band, including the women and the costumed mascot, and, presumably, the wind instruments.
I mean, just look:
This is your GOP, circa 2012. It's hard to tell which is bigger, the racist forebrain or the woman-having-sex-hating hindbrain.But either one is completely batshit insane.
I mean seriously fucking insane.
Canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves, shoes-off, scribbling-with-feces-on-the-padded-walls insane.
Leaving aside the question of the other effects hormonal contraceptives have, the simple fact is that this entire nonsense is based on the notion that sex without the threat of pregnancy is bad.
Sex; fun sex, companionable sex, sex as affection, sex as bonding, even sex as recreation, or sex as friendship - all of these are BAAAAAADDDDDD!!!
Even for the Party of the Incredibly Dumb Fucking Platform, the notion that pursuing this issue as an electoral winner?Insane.
But...I want to pause here for a moment and reflect on the fact that this got ANY traction at all.
What does that say about us, us 21st Century Americans, and especially the sort of people who are clustering around the radio listening to Rushbo, or busily typing away at letters or e-mails about sluts to Powerline and the usual hives of scum and villainy that serve as watering holes for the terminally patriotic?
Why are all these people so wrapped around the axle about sex without the threat of babies?
I mean, human beings have been leaping upon each other for all sorts of reasons since - and probably before - we descended from the trees.
Certainly sexual congress is a way of procreating. But let's be honest; how many times have you approached your lover with the thought, oh, yeah, honey, let's start a family!
Okay, well, if you're the Duggars, yeah, maybe every time. But don't get me started on that one-family football team. For most of us...there's all sorts of reasons for making love.
We may want to hold our lover, or be held. We may just be crazy-wild with lust; he or she may just be driving us completely berserk. We may be lonely. Or sad. Or joyful, and want to share that in the closest way possible.
We may want a challenge, or a reassurance, or tenderness. We may want to make ourselves a chalice to hold the one we love, or overwhelm someone with pure physical sensation.And there are times when we just want to get laid. Personally - and this is just a suggestion, guys - my feeling is that if you're not interested in the woman attached to the vagina?
Take yourself in hand, let's say. Masturbation would be better for all concerned; quicker, cheaper, safer, and nobody has to lie to anyone else.
But that's just me talkin'.
So here's the point; there's a hell of a lot of times and places where two people want to put the totem pole in the donut hole - or whatever else they feel like doing with someone that, hopefully, in the best of all worlds, they deeply care for. And a hell of a lot of them don't - and shouldn't! - risk producing a kiddo as a result.
For the record, I'm all in favor of those of us who want and intend to make sweet, sweet love to do so, in the times and places and ways we deem best. That is our great strength and our great joy as humans - as often as we fuck it up, screw the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and get ourselves and others in trouble because of it - and we should cherish that sacrament, not hate or fear it. Let us love; let us MAKE love; honestly, openly, truthfully, recklessly.
But that unless we are very, very, very sure that we want a child, are aware of what that entails, and are prepared to deal with the consequences...I want us to make sure the joint venture between my little wrigglers and your egg never gets to float an IPO. Birth control? That's part and parcel of the deal unless we decide otherwise. We should be able to love without risking our lives, and the life of a child, every time we do.
And anyone who thinks they should is a complete and utter moron. Or a Republican.
But I repeat myself.
Monday, January 2, 2012
The Last "U.S. Politics" Post I Will Ever Write
Because, honestly...what can you say?
Really, it's worth going to spend some time with Charlie Pierce in Iowa if you want a clear, cold, brutal picture of what politics in the United States is and will be for the remainder of our political lives.
Two days into 2012 the United States is in real social, economic, and political trouble, and the fact that the Oregon Ducks broke 75 years of shit-luck in this year's Rose Bowl isn't going to change that.
The U.S. economy has gone south. And I don't mean in "whoa, it's beginning to look like we're in some sort of Lesser Depression" sort of way. I mean in a very fundamental, "Holy...this changes everyfuckingthing" sort of way.
The GOP and their corporate stooges (or perhaps that should be "the large corporate "citizens" of the United States and their Republican stooges"? Enh, who cares. You know who they are and who's putting what in whom...) have spent the better part of the past thirty years torquing, twisting, screwing, tilting, and raping the commercial and regulatory systems in this country to favor the sort of crony-corporatism that helps bring them immense amounts of lucre. This has also entailed and has since the late Forties the destruction of the "Grand Bargain" whereby the U.S. bought labor and social peace at the cost of some minor corporate profits by making the corporations the middlemen between the consumer and the workers (often the same people) who made the corporate gidgets the corporations profited off of.
This has mushroomed into a whole nutroll of interlocked problems, including;
- a vast and increasing disparity between the tiny, wealthy few and the increasingly un-wealthy many, who are trapped in
- an economy that has been shedding jobs, living-wage jobs, since the Seventies and who were then conned into trying to use their houses as ATMs and their credit cards as income - admittedly, largely with their own complicity (just because you get swindled doesn't mean that you're not a willing mark) and now becoming
- a badly educated, credulous public dominated by fear; real fear of losing their jobs and consequently their homes and health care and insurance as well as the ridiculous ginned-up fears of things like Hordes of Brown Meskins and Dusky Muslim Terrists - ridiculous but real to them and thus grounds for making stupid, self-destructive decisions in their own and others' lives, because they are "informed" by
- a debased, corporate-owned, lowest-common-factor media composed of people who are either mendacious fools or cynics; they either genuinely believe that talking about Kim Kardashian's vulva is more important than detailing the behavior of the malfactors of great wealth or they don't care and do the former because "the readers/viewers want it" and
- a relatively-bipartisan, highly-toxic federal consensus about a number of fairly critical issues; that "deficits matter more than jobs" (as long as a Kenyan socialist is president), that "We Are At War", that it is and always will be the responsibility of the United States to intervene whenever dusky foreigners are busy with something that might, possibly, potentially, or hypothetically be a future "threat" to "American interests", and that spending tax dollars on aircraft carriers is good but spending it on educating people is not.
All of these represent a problem if you are a citizen of the U.S. who believes that the national charter represents a mandate to promote the general welfare - in ways that do the least harm to the most people (including those dusky foreigners whenever possible) - and secure the blessing of Liberty to themselves and their posterity.
But.
None of this will appear on your evening news, or on the front page of your paper. Your political candidates will not speak of them except in scaremongering terms. And some of these problems - for example, the multigenerational, bipartisan effort to free labor from the bonds of higher wages through "globalization", offshoring, downsizing, "increased efficiency", and deunionization - will not be mentioned at all.
I'll give you just one example; fracking.
Using the overpressuring of injected fluids to increase permeability of a geologic formation to boost petroleum or natural gas yields has been used in the petrochemical industry since I worked there in the early Seventies.
It works, it has worked, it is not in itself dangerous or frightening although it's worth noting that "fracking" is never a first-choice. If a formation must be fracked it tells you that it's an unpromising reservior rock to begin with, and that every other easier, more accessible, cheaper source of petrochemicals has been tapped. In other words, fracking is telling you that drilling is getting more expensive and more difficult, not that it is an exciting new prospect for domestic supply.
It may also have some problems, including the potential for air and groundwater contamination - but these may be controllable, or avoidable, and may be limited by developments that allow for a reduced shut-in pressure.
Because there IS NO absolute good or evil in fracking; it is a technique, and one that has the potential for benefits and for damage.
In my opinion the best way to deal with hydrofracturing is carefully. It is not the same as conventional drill-and-pump techniques and the secondary and tertiary recovery methods used to scavenge the reservoir rock. In the same way that deepwater drilling involves considerably higher risks than shallow platform drilling, fracking should be approached carefully to ensure that both the potential hazards are reduced as well as that the benefits are proportionate to both the economic and environmental costs.
But you will not hear any of this in the public debate in this country. For God's sake, look at effing Iowa!
Because there it is, in its most awful, unvarnished, plain-vanilla form. Watch the antics of the idiots that Doghouse Riley once called the "Seven Specks of Granite" as they try to pander to the stupidest notions about "fracking" held by their already-debased electorate. Listen to electable-grade morons like Santorum, Romney and Gingrich parrot some version of the weapons-grade moron Palin's "drill, baby, drill" nursery rhyme.
You will hear nothing about the economics that has led to the Lesser Depression other than nonsensical rhetoric about "job creators" and taxes. You will hear nothing about a nation that has the largest military budget in human history and more citizens living in poverty than since the end of WW2. You will hear nothing but nonsense about issues that matter little and mean less; abortion, prayers, guns, and queers.
I'm picking on the Republicans because they've gone further into the Crazy. But their loss of sanity has allowed the Democrats to build their own little echo chamber of lies and prevarications, evasions and delusions.
The combined result has been that the United States of America is rapidly becoming a vast and fetid political sewer where it doesn't matter all that much which of the turds in the punchbowl are red and which are blue except the red ones will get flushed quicker and more thoroughly.
Needless to add, this benefits only those who can afford to have their own private septic plant; those of us who need a decent public sewage treatment system have or will find that that the shit can get deeper quicker than any sane individual could imagine.
But by then I believe it will be too late; I have little hope for my country's political system.
So IMO there's really no value in writing or talking any more about the would-a and the should-a. There's really no significant factor on the political horizon I can see changing our direction. The rot is just too deeply engrained, the sickening corruption of money, greed, power, and mental dysfunction so destructive throughout, that there really is no power base outside the "system" to reform it.
If, and when, I ever do it will be worth taking up this issue again. But until then...
The oligarchs, with that venal purblindness that has characterized oligarchs since the days of Versailles, will pursue their greedy vision of a new Gilded Age.
And - let me remind you - the U.S. has functioned as an open oligarchy and can again. So there's no reason to assume that the race to the bottom cannot end with the vast majority of Americans in the position they were in in 1885, working at dangerously chancy jobs for shit wages at the mercy of their employers - when they could find a job at all - and starving when they couldn't.
The only objection I've heard to this is the notion that somehow the system will "crash" and that something better will rise from its ruins. And, in the long run, perhaps something will. After all, the chaos of the Parisian Terror eventually resulted in the cosmopolitan pleasures of modern Paris.
But to get there the French had to live through generations of war, revolution, conquest, and occupation.
I don't want to have to live through those sorts of interesting times. And IMO the chances are that a "crash" will, instead of a return to sanity, bring to the surface the worst in the American public; fear, hatred, a desire to be "saved" by The Leader.
So, sadly, I think all the rest is just rearranging deck chairs. We have chosen our political fates; to be pulled down into late Imperial poverty by midgets who will repeat the lies we have told them we want to hear while we look in vain for something better. Our destination is determined, and the only variable is the length of the trip.
And all that remains now is the wait.
Update 1/3: Here's Ed at "Gin and Tacos" with his opinion on the Iowa Caucauses that pretty much mirrors mine, but which I think can be expanded to cover the U.S. political system circa 2011 as a whole (emphasis mine):
Really, it's worth going to spend some time with Charlie Pierce in Iowa if you want a clear, cold, brutal picture of what politics in the United States is and will be for the remainder of our political lives.
Two days into 2012 the United States is in real social, economic, and political trouble, and the fact that the Oregon Ducks broke 75 years of shit-luck in this year's Rose Bowl isn't going to change that.
The U.S. economy has gone south. And I don't mean in "whoa, it's beginning to look like we're in some sort of Lesser Depression" sort of way. I mean in a very fundamental, "Holy...this changes everyfuckingthing" sort of way.
The GOP and their corporate stooges (or perhaps that should be "the large corporate "citizens" of the United States and their Republican stooges"? Enh, who cares. You know who they are and who's putting what in whom...) have spent the better part of the past thirty years torquing, twisting, screwing, tilting, and raping the commercial and regulatory systems in this country to favor the sort of crony-corporatism that helps bring them immense amounts of lucre. This has also entailed and has since the late Forties the destruction of the "Grand Bargain" whereby the U.S. bought labor and social peace at the cost of some minor corporate profits by making the corporations the middlemen between the consumer and the workers (often the same people) who made the corporate gidgets the corporations profited off of.
This has mushroomed into a whole nutroll of interlocked problems, including;
- a vast and increasing disparity between the tiny, wealthy few and the increasingly un-wealthy many, who are trapped in
- an economy that has been shedding jobs, living-wage jobs, since the Seventies and who were then conned into trying to use their houses as ATMs and their credit cards as income - admittedly, largely with their own complicity (just because you get swindled doesn't mean that you're not a willing mark) and now becoming
- a badly educated, credulous public dominated by fear; real fear of losing their jobs and consequently their homes and health care and insurance as well as the ridiculous ginned-up fears of things like Hordes of Brown Meskins and Dusky Muslim Terrists - ridiculous but real to them and thus grounds for making stupid, self-destructive decisions in their own and others' lives, because they are "informed" by
- a debased, corporate-owned, lowest-common-factor media composed of people who are either mendacious fools or cynics; they either genuinely believe that talking about Kim Kardashian's vulva is more important than detailing the behavior of the malfactors of great wealth or they don't care and do the former because "the readers/viewers want it" and
- a relatively-bipartisan, highly-toxic federal consensus about a number of fairly critical issues; that "deficits matter more than jobs" (as long as a Kenyan socialist is president), that "We Are At War", that it is and always will be the responsibility of the United States to intervene whenever dusky foreigners are busy with something that might, possibly, potentially, or hypothetically be a future "threat" to "American interests", and that spending tax dollars on aircraft carriers is good but spending it on educating people is not.
All of these represent a problem if you are a citizen of the U.S. who believes that the national charter represents a mandate to promote the general welfare - in ways that do the least harm to the most people (including those dusky foreigners whenever possible) - and secure the blessing of Liberty to themselves and their posterity.
But.
None of this will appear on your evening news, or on the front page of your paper. Your political candidates will not speak of them except in scaremongering terms. And some of these problems - for example, the multigenerational, bipartisan effort to free labor from the bonds of higher wages through "globalization", offshoring, downsizing, "increased efficiency", and deunionization - will not be mentioned at all.
I'll give you just one example; fracking.
Using the overpressuring of injected fluids to increase permeability of a geologic formation to boost petroleum or natural gas yields has been used in the petrochemical industry since I worked there in the early Seventies.
It works, it has worked, it is not in itself dangerous or frightening although it's worth noting that "fracking" is never a first-choice. If a formation must be fracked it tells you that it's an unpromising reservior rock to begin with, and that every other easier, more accessible, cheaper source of petrochemicals has been tapped. In other words, fracking is telling you that drilling is getting more expensive and more difficult, not that it is an exciting new prospect for domestic supply.
It may also have some problems, including the potential for air and groundwater contamination - but these may be controllable, or avoidable, and may be limited by developments that allow for a reduced shut-in pressure.
Because there IS NO absolute good or evil in fracking; it is a technique, and one that has the potential for benefits and for damage.
In my opinion the best way to deal with hydrofracturing is carefully. It is not the same as conventional drill-and-pump techniques and the secondary and tertiary recovery methods used to scavenge the reservoir rock. In the same way that deepwater drilling involves considerably higher risks than shallow platform drilling, fracking should be approached carefully to ensure that both the potential hazards are reduced as well as that the benefits are proportionate to both the economic and environmental costs.
But you will not hear any of this in the public debate in this country. For God's sake, look at effing Iowa!
Because there it is, in its most awful, unvarnished, plain-vanilla form. Watch the antics of the idiots that Doghouse Riley once called the "Seven Specks of Granite" as they try to pander to the stupidest notions about "fracking" held by their already-debased electorate. Listen to electable-grade morons like Santorum, Romney and Gingrich parrot some version of the weapons-grade moron Palin's "drill, baby, drill" nursery rhyme.
You will hear nothing about the economics that has led to the Lesser Depression other than nonsensical rhetoric about "job creators" and taxes. You will hear nothing about a nation that has the largest military budget in human history and more citizens living in poverty than since the end of WW2. You will hear nothing but nonsense about issues that matter little and mean less; abortion, prayers, guns, and queers.
I'm picking on the Republicans because they've gone further into the Crazy. But their loss of sanity has allowed the Democrats to build their own little echo chamber of lies and prevarications, evasions and delusions.
The combined result has been that the United States of America is rapidly becoming a vast and fetid political sewer where it doesn't matter all that much which of the turds in the punchbowl are red and which are blue except the red ones will get flushed quicker and more thoroughly.
Needless to add, this benefits only those who can afford to have their own private septic plant; those of us who need a decent public sewage treatment system have or will find that that the shit can get deeper quicker than any sane individual could imagine.
But by then I believe it will be too late; I have little hope for my country's political system.
So IMO there's really no value in writing or talking any more about the would-a and the should-a. There's really no significant factor on the political horizon I can see changing our direction. The rot is just too deeply engrained, the sickening corruption of money, greed, power, and mental dysfunction so destructive throughout, that there really is no power base outside the "system" to reform it.
If, and when, I ever do it will be worth taking up this issue again. But until then...
The oligarchs, with that venal purblindness that has characterized oligarchs since the days of Versailles, will pursue their greedy vision of a new Gilded Age.
And - let me remind you - the U.S. has functioned as an open oligarchy and can again. So there's no reason to assume that the race to the bottom cannot end with the vast majority of Americans in the position they were in in 1885, working at dangerously chancy jobs for shit wages at the mercy of their employers - when they could find a job at all - and starving when they couldn't.
The only objection I've heard to this is the notion that somehow the system will "crash" and that something better will rise from its ruins. And, in the long run, perhaps something will. After all, the chaos of the Parisian Terror eventually resulted in the cosmopolitan pleasures of modern Paris.
But to get there the French had to live through generations of war, revolution, conquest, and occupation.
I don't want to have to live through those sorts of interesting times. And IMO the chances are that a "crash" will, instead of a return to sanity, bring to the surface the worst in the American public; fear, hatred, a desire to be "saved" by The Leader.
So, sadly, I think all the rest is just rearranging deck chairs. We have chosen our political fates; to be pulled down into late Imperial poverty by midgets who will repeat the lies we have told them we want to hear while we look in vain for something better. Our destination is determined, and the only variable is the length of the trip.
And all that remains now is the wait.
Update 1/3: Here's Ed at "Gin and Tacos" with his opinion on the Iowa Caucauses that pretty much mirrors mine, but which I think can be expanded to cover the U.S. political system circa 2011 as a whole (emphasis mine):
"When will this process get so absurd that it will change? It's not impossible. It happened in 1824, it happened during the Progressive Era with the introduction of primaries, and it happened in 1968. The question is, given the current health of our political system and electorate as a whole, would we end up replacing it with something worse? The evidence suggests that we would. And that has become the guiding principle in American politics – disgust followed by detachment, apathy based on the conviction that we can always make things worse by opening them up to change."
Friday, December 16, 2011
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Any man's death may diminish me but I'm prepared to accept that there are cases which may be an exception to that rule.
I find a delicious irony in that yesterday two gravely ill patients finally died: Chris Hitchins and, officially, the U.S. "Operation Iraqi Freedom".
Hitchens never wavered from his love for the Third Gulf War, and, in retrospect, he might have done better to have gone to fight and sought a more merciful death there, stopping his ears before the inevitably dirty and sordid little finale to this ridiculous mess of hubris, treachery, lies, foolishness, and error made something tawdry and mocking of his ferocity in fighting the "war" from behind his keyboard.
I wonder (because I can't and won't ever know how ill he was at the end)...did the news of the official ignominious retreat from the Bush Salient contribute to ol' Hitch's willingness to depart this Vale?
Because if so he might well be included in the wretched toll this reverse-Machiavellian nonsense exacted from the West.
And as for OIF, well, that sucker was shot in the head eight years ago, when a clown-car full of rage-drunk idiots and cynical thieves tried to sneak into a foreign land and steal it on the cheap, justifying their theft with lies and evasions, muffing the thievery with ignorance and arrogance, and then taking years and years to accept that they couldn't change thousands of years of human history and hundreds of years of poverty, misgovernment, sectarian hatred, and Ottoman incompetence by their pure will alone. The entire mess was doomed from the start, it just took eight years for the fantasists in D.C. to recognize it was walking dead, and the only beneficiaries of its zombie progress since then have been the various outfits that have made millions looting the Occupation and the Malikist strain of Iraqi Shia who now stand to consolidate their kleptocracy with the help of the pals to the northeast.
It's not "over" for the ordinary Iraqi, mind you. The mess that Dubya and Dick created when they knocked over the Baathist toybox in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates won't be "over" for years, or decades. The social, economic, and political disaster that the idiots who truly believed that they "made their own reality" will haunt the poor bastards that live in that haunted land for generations.
What a congeries; Saddam, Dubya, Darth Cheney, Hitchins...can you imagine a more seedy and disparate group when they foregather in Hell twenty years from now?
Saddam peering at the others with his shifty, bluffing eyes hard in his dough-face, looking, as always, for the openings of fear or avarice that bullies always recognize, even after years of devilish torment still the Tikriti hardman.
Cheney snarling and defiant, knowing that he's still the smartest guy in the room, even in Eblis.
Dubya, still his patrician bobo, with that look of earnest and clueless vacancy still on his mug, at the same time gormless and venal - he can't understand why a Good Christian Man like him should be here with the Devil getting red-hot pokers shoved up his jacksie three times a day.
And Hitchins, drink in hand, fleering and mocking the other three idiots while, perhaps, just perhaps, recognizing the same hint of bully and grifter in himself; for all his faults he was a perceptive man. He may well have the worst of it; lacking the supreme egotism of the dictator, the dupe, and the schemer beside him he may just have a dark glimmering of the disaster they helped create between them and, worse, feel some sort of dim shame at the results.
Because all around them, the shades; the children ripped to pieces in a Ramadi street, the women buried in rubble of a Fallujah home, the trooper missing a leg that the landmine tore from his body, the widow dead of suicidal despair, the orphan raped and murdered by his captor, the hopeless, the fool, the martyr, the criminal, the lost, and the devoured.
And for what?
This fucking disaster is now just another day for most of the rest of the world, and I have little hope that it will be long remembered or regarded in my own country, either. Saddam and Hitch are beyond penalty, and neither Dubya nor Dick will ever pay the price they should. It's just done and dusted.
So all I can hope for is that somehow my vision might be accomplished; that in some future afterlife these dead men find a little of the misery and despair of the ghosts their evil created. That it penetrates the group around that table there in Hades, and that the sorry bastards enjoy a long, bitter draught of it before their tormentors herd them back to the Fires that they so deeply deserve.
I find a delicious irony in that yesterday two gravely ill patients finally died: Chris Hitchins and, officially, the U.S. "Operation Iraqi Freedom".
Hitchens never wavered from his love for the Third Gulf War, and, in retrospect, he might have done better to have gone to fight and sought a more merciful death there, stopping his ears before the inevitably dirty and sordid little finale to this ridiculous mess of hubris, treachery, lies, foolishness, and error made something tawdry and mocking of his ferocity in fighting the "war" from behind his keyboard.
I wonder (because I can't and won't ever know how ill he was at the end)...did the news of the official ignominious retreat from the Bush Salient contribute to ol' Hitch's willingness to depart this Vale?
Because if so he might well be included in the wretched toll this reverse-Machiavellian nonsense exacted from the West.
And as for OIF, well, that sucker was shot in the head eight years ago, when a clown-car full of rage-drunk idiots and cynical thieves tried to sneak into a foreign land and steal it on the cheap, justifying their theft with lies and evasions, muffing the thievery with ignorance and arrogance, and then taking years and years to accept that they couldn't change thousands of years of human history and hundreds of years of poverty, misgovernment, sectarian hatred, and Ottoman incompetence by their pure will alone. The entire mess was doomed from the start, it just took eight years for the fantasists in D.C. to recognize it was walking dead, and the only beneficiaries of its zombie progress since then have been the various outfits that have made millions looting the Occupation and the Malikist strain of Iraqi Shia who now stand to consolidate their kleptocracy with the help of the pals to the northeast.
It's not "over" for the ordinary Iraqi, mind you. The mess that Dubya and Dick created when they knocked over the Baathist toybox in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates won't be "over" for years, or decades. The social, economic, and political disaster that the idiots who truly believed that they "made their own reality" will haunt the poor bastards that live in that haunted land for generations.
What a congeries; Saddam, Dubya, Darth Cheney, Hitchins...can you imagine a more seedy and disparate group when they foregather in Hell twenty years from now?
Saddam peering at the others with his shifty, bluffing eyes hard in his dough-face, looking, as always, for the openings of fear or avarice that bullies always recognize, even after years of devilish torment still the Tikriti hardman.
Cheney snarling and defiant, knowing that he's still the smartest guy in the room, even in Eblis.
Dubya, still his patrician bobo, with that look of earnest and clueless vacancy still on his mug, at the same time gormless and venal - he can't understand why a Good Christian Man like him should be here with the Devil getting red-hot pokers shoved up his jacksie three times a day.
And Hitchins, drink in hand, fleering and mocking the other three idiots while, perhaps, just perhaps, recognizing the same hint of bully and grifter in himself; for all his faults he was a perceptive man. He may well have the worst of it; lacking the supreme egotism of the dictator, the dupe, and the schemer beside him he may just have a dark glimmering of the disaster they helped create between them and, worse, feel some sort of dim shame at the results.
Because all around them, the shades; the children ripped to pieces in a Ramadi street, the women buried in rubble of a Fallujah home, the trooper missing a leg that the landmine tore from his body, the widow dead of suicidal despair, the orphan raped and murdered by his captor, the hopeless, the fool, the martyr, the criminal, the lost, and the devoured.
And for what?
This fucking disaster is now just another day for most of the rest of the world, and I have little hope that it will be long remembered or regarded in my own country, either. Saddam and Hitch are beyond penalty, and neither Dubya nor Dick will ever pay the price they should. It's just done and dusted.
So all I can hope for is that somehow my vision might be accomplished; that in some future afterlife these dead men find a little of the misery and despair of the ghosts their evil created. That it penetrates the group around that table there in Hades, and that the sorry bastards enjoy a long, bitter draught of it before their tormentors herd them back to the Fires that they so deeply deserve.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Logical Fallacy
Driving south to Oregon City this morning (at a truly uncivil hour of the pre-dawn) I was pulled from my post-sleep/pre-waking numb by the pickup in front of me, which was doing some sort of cross-lane carioca.
In southeast Portland you have to be circumspect dealing with erratic drivers in the pre-dawn hours. They may be weaving around only because they're coming off the night shift and their errata comes from mere exhaustion. But there are also a lot of tweakers and all-night drunks down here. And no few of them travel strapped, so getting into an altercation with one of these brain-baked bastards can cause you to contract a case of death or serious injury.
So I tend to give these gomers a fair amount of room.
As I backed off this guy I had some time to study his rig. All things considered it was pretty restrained for SE Portland. No rubber scrotum hanging from the trailer hitch, for one thing (these "truck nuts" are sort of the wattles-and-comb of the alpha SE Portland male, the latex finger shot at the rest of Stumptown for it's contempt and distain for his blue-collar cockitude). None of the other sorts of goofy redneck colors that these guys tend to fly; no rebel flag, no "Bad Boy" stickers, no mudflap nudes.
Just an NRA logo in the rear window and a single bumper sticker:
"Annoy a Liberal - Use Facts and Logic".
Maybe it was because I'd been reading about the latest GOP candidate debate and the Rise (or is it the "Re-Rise"?) of Newt I had been thinking about just that.
And I had to wonder - does this guy, and, by inference, guys like him - really believe that American conservatives, people like Newt, and the Romneybot, and Michelle the Girl With The Faraway Eyes, and Rush, and...well, you probably know the rest...are coming up with their ideas based on "facts and logic"?
And I had to admit that they probably do.
I've dealt with a fair number of "movement conservatives" over the past 30 years. I'd say that probably in the last twentysomething I've seldom met anything but the common or garden-variety GOP-er, the sort of people who are uncomfortable with Mitt Romney because he once actually endorsed something kinda-sorta like Obamacare because he was the then-governor of Massachussetts, thus having to worry about people in his purview getting sick or incapacitated and ending up on the public purse, and concluding (using, y'know, "facts and logic") that using said public funds to PREVENT them from getting sicker and unable to work might actually save the public money in the long run.
And that led me to thinking about the sort of things that modern U.S. conservatives are "supposed" to believe, and wondering - how many of them seem to be based on actual "facts and logic"?
Tax cuts.
The by-God Ultima Thule of modern American conservatism appears to be tax cuts. In good times and bad, in war and peace, for richer, for poorer, the conservative answer to any question appears to be "tax cuts".
I cannot see how this has anything to do with "facts and logic".
Would you consider a driver who drive in a howling sleetstorm the same way he drove on a sunny summer day to have been guided by "facts and logic"? Would a surgeon who operated on a ingrown toenail using the same procedure as one operating on a triple bypass seem to be employing "facts and logic"?
So how does this square with the conservative fixation on tax cuts?
I don't see how it does.
Fighting land wars in Asia, regardless of whether they're "on Terror" or not?
Deregulating, well, everything?
Considering the actions of "big government" innately Evil yet trusting "big business" to be inherently Good?
Preferring pre-partum fetuses over post-partum women? Considering regulating things like workplace safety, environmental cleanliness, and financial fraud to be an unmitigated wrong? Talking loudly about fear of "government" yet trusting that government with great powers of secrecy and espionage - providing that government is "conservative" and promises to use those powers against "enemies of the state". Talking loudly about "job creators" while watching the unemployment lines grow, the median wage drop and the concentration of wealth at the top increase?
Facts and logic?
What are these? Because if modern U.S. conservatism springs from "facts and logic" I am Dorothy Lamour.
In southeast Portland you have to be circumspect dealing with erratic drivers in the pre-dawn hours. They may be weaving around only because they're coming off the night shift and their errata comes from mere exhaustion. But there are also a lot of tweakers and all-night drunks down here. And no few of them travel strapped, so getting into an altercation with one of these brain-baked bastards can cause you to contract a case of death or serious injury.
So I tend to give these gomers a fair amount of room.
As I backed off this guy I had some time to study his rig. All things considered it was pretty restrained for SE Portland. No rubber scrotum hanging from the trailer hitch, for one thing (these "truck nuts" are sort of the wattles-and-comb of the alpha SE Portland male, the latex finger shot at the rest of Stumptown for it's contempt and distain for his blue-collar cockitude). None of the other sorts of goofy redneck colors that these guys tend to fly; no rebel flag, no "Bad Boy" stickers, no mudflap nudes.
Just an NRA logo in the rear window and a single bumper sticker:"Annoy a Liberal - Use Facts and Logic".
Maybe it was because I'd been reading about the latest GOP candidate debate and the Rise (or is it the "Re-Rise"?) of Newt I had been thinking about just that.
And I had to wonder - does this guy, and, by inference, guys like him - really believe that American conservatives, people like Newt, and the Romneybot, and Michelle the Girl With The Faraway Eyes, and Rush, and...well, you probably know the rest...are coming up with their ideas based on "facts and logic"?
And I had to admit that they probably do.
I've dealt with a fair number of "movement conservatives" over the past 30 years. I'd say that probably in the last twentysomething I've seldom met anything but the common or garden-variety GOP-er, the sort of people who are uncomfortable with Mitt Romney because he once actually endorsed something kinda-sorta like Obamacare because he was the then-governor of Massachussetts, thus having to worry about people in his purview getting sick or incapacitated and ending up on the public purse, and concluding (using, y'know, "facts and logic") that using said public funds to PREVENT them from getting sicker and unable to work might actually save the public money in the long run.
And that led me to thinking about the sort of things that modern U.S. conservatives are "supposed" to believe, and wondering - how many of them seem to be based on actual "facts and logic"?
Tax cuts.
The by-God Ultima Thule of modern American conservatism appears to be tax cuts. In good times and bad, in war and peace, for richer, for poorer, the conservative answer to any question appears to be "tax cuts".
I cannot see how this has anything to do with "facts and logic".
Would you consider a driver who drive in a howling sleetstorm the same way he drove on a sunny summer day to have been guided by "facts and logic"? Would a surgeon who operated on a ingrown toenail using the same procedure as one operating on a triple bypass seem to be employing "facts and logic"?
So how does this square with the conservative fixation on tax cuts?
I don't see how it does.
Fighting land wars in Asia, regardless of whether they're "on Terror" or not?
Deregulating, well, everything?
Considering the actions of "big government" innately Evil yet trusting "big business" to be inherently Good?
Preferring pre-partum fetuses over post-partum women? Considering regulating things like workplace safety, environmental cleanliness, and financial fraud to be an unmitigated wrong? Talking loudly about fear of "government" yet trusting that government with great powers of secrecy and espionage - providing that government is "conservative" and promises to use those powers against "enemies of the state". Talking loudly about "job creators" while watching the unemployment lines grow, the median wage drop and the concentration of wealth at the top increase?
Facts and logic?
What are these? Because if modern U.S. conservatism springs from "facts and logic" I am Dorothy Lamour.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Infamy
So I called my parents today, just because I was thinking that it was the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day and I happened to know two people who actually remembered it.Well, sort of.
My pop freely admitted that he didn't remember what he was doing that Sunday. He was 15 and in high school, so he thought he might have been hanging around with his pals. But he didn't remember being very excited, or even particularly worried. "We were a long way from the West Coast," the Master Chief recalled, "...and it didn't seem likely that Tojo would be coming ashore that day." and that it wasn't really a big fat hairy deal.
But the Master Chief is an engineer and he's always been that way, I think.
My mother was on the West Coast, though, and remembers that at 13 she thought it was a big deal - she was worried that the Japanese would invade San Francisco. She didn't remember many specifics, either, and perhaps after seventy years that's not surprising.
At any rate, that's their Pearl Harbor Day stories.
Four years later the Master Chief was an Ensign in the U.S. Navy and in the last stages of primary flight training on the way to the Fleet as an aviator.
(I don't know why I've always assumed that he would have been a dive bomber pilot; he doesn't seem the sort of cocky sort that fly in fighters but he has a sort of bounce that seems a little too impatient for a low, slow torpedo-bomber driver. But he and I will never know; the bombs of August 1945 ended his trajectory to the deck of a carrier and ensured my arrival twelve years later.)
Meanwhile my mother spent a good part of her war in California; long enough to see her parents' Japanese-American friends and fellow Salvation Army officers the Kobiyashis off to Manzanar, anyway. In the Sixties and Seventies I recall her telling me about working with her father, who was the West Coast Salvation Army commander, at railroad stations and embarkation ports and the long trains full of tired soldiers spilling onto the platforms hopeful for a last treat and a friendly face before the long journey resumed that would end, for some at least, in a grave on some crappy little island or in some southwest Pacific jungle.So I don't get anything from my family other than the long-dimmed sense of duty done and done well.
And I don't see any real reason to write up today's battle. It's been discussed, analyzed, hashed and re-hashed to death. I certainly don't have anything new to add to what smarter and better historians than I have written.
But I do have some thoughts on the events of the Sunday seventy years gone by, as general observations and for what it can tell us about ourselves and the lessons we have learned - or not - from the day that lived in infamy.
First, I think the single salient fact of Pearl Harbor is how it shows how individual military success can be - and often is - meaningless in securing political victory. Which is something we seem to have a hard time comprehending.
By the military calculus of 1941 Japan beat hell out of the U.S. Navy that day. Mind you, there will always be the open question of why Nagumo Chūichi didn't rearm his aircraft and return to finish the job, which would have included destroying the sub docks, the fuel tank farm, and the drydocks and other repair facilities as well as hunting for the U.S. carriers. But the battleship was still considered the naval arm of decision in '41, and Nagumo's force had pretty well hammered the Battleship Divisions of the U.S. Fleet. The USN of '41 was crafted like most of the other navies of its day, to bring its enemies within the big-gun range of its battleships and destroy them, and Pearl Harbor meant that wasn't going to happen.
But...
As we all know, the Pearl attack forced the brown-shoe Navy to lead the counterattack over the next year. And the battles of '42 - Coral Sea and Midway - proved that naval war had moved into a new era and that the Japanese Navy wasn't ready for it. Technically, yes; it had good aircraft, good pilots, and a solid carrier force. But many of the officers who lead it were, like Nagumo, cruiser and battleship guys. They were outguessed and outplanned by their USN counterparts who also had considerable access to the Japanese codes - the tremendous success of Allied decryption was the great secret of WW2 - and the IJN also proved fatally unable to adapt to the rapid changes of modern war.
Which brings us to my next observation; if you think you can design your military for the "next war" you're kidding yourself.
The combatants of Pearl Harbor couldn't even design their armed forces in 1941 for the war they were fighting three years later. And the Japanese industrial capacities of the Forties were completely inadequate, a fact Japan had no clue about until they dragged the U.S. into their war.
Look at the Japanese aircraft in the sky that day; A6M "Zero" fighter, D3A "Val" divebombers, and B5N "Kate" torpedo bombers. Good aircraft, well employed. But in the hangers of the U.S. carriers that Sunday you'd have found F3F "Wildcat" fighters, SBD "Dauntless" divebombers, and TBD "Devastator" torpedo bombers. The Grumman fighter and Douglas bombers were comparable to their Japanese counterparts
(the poor reputation of the Devastator seems to have developed after the massacre of the torpedo squadrons at Midway, an event caused largely by misfortune (the torpedo squadrons got separated from rest of the USN stroke force, arrived alone and were swarmed by the Japanese fighter cover) and the problems inherent in torpedo-bombing tactics (flying low, slow, and straight - the way you had to to deliver an aerial torpedo - turned out to be - surprise! - fatal when your enemy had decent AAA and fighter protection. Go figure)but had been completely replaced three years later.
By 1944 the F6F and F4U were better than the A6M, the SB2C at least no worse than the D3A (though the American aviators called it the "Sonuvabitch 2nd Class" and generally disliked it) and the TBF faster and more maneuverable than the B5N.And the IJN?
Well, the real problem for the Japanese at this point was death.
Seriously.
The Japanese pilot training system was never efficient and by 1944 it was completely broken. The IJN never developed the equivalent of the USN V-12 program that took in the Master Chief back in his day. Combat losses and the inevitable attrition of a high-risk profession combined with slow training meant that experienced pilots were irreplaceable. So when their fleet air arm guys started coming down with a bad case of death it didn't matter so much that poor industrial capacity meant that the D4Y "Judy" divebomber couldn't fully replace the Val or the B6N "Jill" torpedo bomber the Kate.
But they didn't, and even if the IJN had managed to produce enough decent pilots the USA/USN would have just shot them down as well. It just would have taken a little more work but the Hellcats and Corsairs (and Lightnings and Mustangs) were just that much better; in three years the military situations had changed that much.
Within three years the strike force, and entire the Japanese Naval Air Service, that had been so violently successful over Pearl Harbor was dead, maimed, and destroyed.
Anyone who thinks they can outguess war is an utter fool.
My other thought is that Petroleum will Fuck You Up.
Pearl Harbor and the Great Pacific War in general was as much about Blood for Oil as it was about anything. The Japanese wanted the petroleum then being produced in the South China Sea area, particularly in the then-Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). But the Dutch had cut a deal; Japan had to buy Dutch oil from us. And after the Dutch took their cut and we took ours the Japanese were paying a pretty steep price to kill all those Chinese they were killing.
Because the real objective of Japan's foreign policy in 1941 had nothing to do with the U.S.; it wanted pieces of China and the Asian mainland. We were just in the way.But we WERE in the way. The U.S. forces in the Philippines were a constant threat to the Japanese moves to the southwest into south China and French Indochina. In September 1940 Japanese forces attacked Vichy troops around the northern province of Indochina, Tonkin. In return the U.S. froze Japanese assets and - more devastating - on 26 JUL 1941 we embargoed all that lovely Indonesian and West Texas crude.
Without petroleum the Japanese conquest of China was going to grind to a stop.
And you know the rest: the military men who ran the Japanese government needed that fuel. They were going to get it from Indonesia. And to get it they were going to have to take a slap at the United States.
So the slapping commenced.
And we're still in the slapping business today.
Not slapping the Japanese, though. They came looking for trouble that Sunday morning and found all they could handle. After the millions they killed, and the million of their own people who died the nation of Japan now sits quietly as the western edge of the Pacific still mired in their second decade of economic depression.
So that leads me to my final thought on the anniversary just past; that war makes you do stupid things.
Not because it makes you stupid, but because you don't have the time or the inclination to look your options over, because war demands you make decisions NOW regardless of how much you know, or what you think you know that's wrong, or whether you really know anything at all.
So you make dumb choices. If you're Japan in 1941, you attack the Americans instead of taking that Dutch oil and then making them decide to fight you. You fight them in the mid-Pacific instead of making them come all the way to you at the end of a 3,000-mile supply chain. You risk everything on a throw of the iron dice...and then you fail, because of little stupidities like not returning to destroy the submarine pens, or the drydocks, or the fuel tanks outside Pearl City.
The Japanese appear to have learned the lesson of December 7th and are unwilling to revisit their dumb choices...but we seem to be demanding to be everything they were in 1941.
We're throwing the iron dice all over the world but especially in the Middle East, because petroleum and our craving for it.
We're powerful enough to take on the world, without wondering if taking on the world is the smartest thing to do, the enduring lesson of Pearl Harbor.
We seem to still collectively remember December 7th, 1941, and one would think we'd remember these lessons as well. But one has to wonder if we understand what they are.
Friday, December 2, 2011
...but for Wales..?
It's early in the pre-dawn. Or late in the night, I'm not sure, but I'm up to go to work early. I checked the weather to see how fucking cold it is (it's fucking cold!) and made the mistake of checking in to a couple of blogs only to find this.
I'd seen this bill mentioned over at my pal Labry's place - she was spitting fire about it, good woman that she is - and it occurred to me that what I feel is just a sort of tired, sad, inevitability.
How many times in history have we watched this play out?
The frightful, desperate "enemy" that must be "defeated" at any, and ALL costs. The populace tittilated and terrified by tales of that enemy's desperate frightfulness. The group (or groups) that insist that "the old rules don't apply". The rush to "do something" that results in granting power upon power without a moment''s reflection of whether that power can ever be taken away.
I know I use this quote a lot, and, yes, I understand the irony of making that rigid old tartar Tom More into a petty saint of restraint and good government (the man who delighted in the aroma of crackling heretic, honestly...) but the words spoken here are NOT the words of Thomas More but of Robert Bolt, his playwright:
I'm so tired. Just tired.
And I haven't really even been all het up about this nonsensical "War on Terror" and the way it's got us hitting ourselves on the head, the way my pals Jim and Lisa have, say, over at Ranger Against War, ringing the changes of our eagerness to put down our legal trousers and hand the rod to our "leaders" and policemen and soldiers like a firebell in the night.
Or the way Greenwald has.
Or the way a hundred better writers, better bloggers, better citizens that I am have decried this silliness, this mouse blown up by shadows and smoke to the size of an elephant.
Because, really, I mean, people?
The fucking "War on Terror"? How stupid are we, collectively, to buy into this? We're supposed to be the adults here, the "We, the People" that those guys in the wigs supposedly put in charge to sort things out. We're supposed to remember things like that in wars, or lovemaking, capabilities count, not intentions. We're supposed to be able to see that these ridiculous villains are no more capable of actually "warring" on us any more than a sneak thief can "war" on your television set, or a Newberg high school freshman of making love to Angelina Jolie.
And that for all that he may masturbate frantically over her picture and describe the business as a "love affair" that it is not, and will never, be in HER best interests to describe it as such or act as if it were in fact.
And that a pack of reasonable adults should be able to sort this out about this idiotic "War" on some-forms-of-terror-perpitrated-by-some-groups-we-don't-like-but-not-others-that-we-sorta-do before their coffee get cold.
But we don't, we aren't, and we haven't.
And what the fuck more can I do?
I elected the goddam Democrat three years ago, worked for all my local sane guys, people like my Senator Merkeley, wrote letters to the paper, talked to anyone who would listen...
...and for what?
We're stuck right where we were about five years ago. A third of the U.S. public recognizes the insanity of this idiot's tale. But - and despite that more than three-quarters of the same public is more than ready to end the misadventures that the active pursuit of the "war" brought in train - the Third Gulf War and the God-Knows-How-Manyth-Afghan-War - the other third is still all about killin' us some ragheads.
And the final third is just too fucking stupid, lazy, poorly-informed...or something. To care.
So...what the hell will it take to make the point to the ignorant third and the radical-conservative-wingnut third that Sun Tzu sussed out, like, two thousand years ago - that fighting long wars is NEVER good for the combatant...even if it "wins"? That war makes people and nations do incredibly stupid things to themselves because those things seem "right" at the time?
I have no idea.
But just thinking about makes me tired.
I guess I always thought that if my country was to go to hell it'd be in some dramatic fashion. We'd hand ourselves over to the devils of authority and oligarchy in the midst of some titanic struggle with the Great Foe; the Soviet Union bristling with nukes or the Chinese hordes of Asia. We'd go down in a monumental crash of great rhetoric and epic protests, with the last defenders of the old outmoded liberties herded into the cattle trucks for the journey to the Utah camps. I never pictured my countrymen lying about on our dead asses while we drift along in a state of perpetual "war" with a bunch of sorry ass Islamic fantasists...I mean, can you THINK of a stupider way to give away the gift?
Bolt again:
I'd seen this bill mentioned over at my pal Labry's place - she was spitting fire about it, good woman that she is - and it occurred to me that what I feel is just a sort of tired, sad, inevitability.
How many times in history have we watched this play out?
The frightful, desperate "enemy" that must be "defeated" at any, and ALL costs. The populace tittilated and terrified by tales of that enemy's desperate frightfulness. The group (or groups) that insist that "the old rules don't apply". The rush to "do something" that results in granting power upon power without a moment''s reflection of whether that power can ever be taken away.
I know I use this quote a lot, and, yes, I understand the irony of making that rigid old tartar Tom More into a petty saint of restraint and good government (the man who delighted in the aroma of crackling heretic, honestly...) but the words spoken here are NOT the words of Thomas More but of Robert Bolt, his playwright:
ROPER Then you set man's law above God's!And yet we are so fucking terrified of a bunch of raggedy ass Allah-pesterers that we won't give THEM the benefit of law for OUR safety's sake.
MORE No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact-I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .
(He says this last to himself)
ALICE (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he's gone!
MORE And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
ROPER So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
I'm so tired. Just tired.
And I haven't really even been all het up about this nonsensical "War on Terror" and the way it's got us hitting ourselves on the head, the way my pals Jim and Lisa have, say, over at Ranger Against War, ringing the changes of our eagerness to put down our legal trousers and hand the rod to our "leaders" and policemen and soldiers like a firebell in the night.
Or the way Greenwald has.
Or the way a hundred better writers, better bloggers, better citizens that I am have decried this silliness, this mouse blown up by shadows and smoke to the size of an elephant.
Because, really, I mean, people?
The fucking "War on Terror"? How stupid are we, collectively, to buy into this? We're supposed to be the adults here, the "We, the People" that those guys in the wigs supposedly put in charge to sort things out. We're supposed to remember things like that in wars, or lovemaking, capabilities count, not intentions. We're supposed to be able to see that these ridiculous villains are no more capable of actually "warring" on us any more than a sneak thief can "war" on your television set, or a Newberg high school freshman of making love to Angelina Jolie.
And that for all that he may masturbate frantically over her picture and describe the business as a "love affair" that it is not, and will never, be in HER best interests to describe it as such or act as if it were in fact.
And that a pack of reasonable adults should be able to sort this out about this idiotic "War" on some-forms-of-terror-perpitrated-by-some-groups-we-don't-like-but-not-others-that-we-sorta-do before their coffee get cold.
But we don't, we aren't, and we haven't.
And what the fuck more can I do?
I elected the goddam Democrat three years ago, worked for all my local sane guys, people like my Senator Merkeley, wrote letters to the paper, talked to anyone who would listen...
...and for what?
We're stuck right where we were about five years ago. A third of the U.S. public recognizes the insanity of this idiot's tale. But - and despite that more than three-quarters of the same public is more than ready to end the misadventures that the active pursuit of the "war" brought in train - the Third Gulf War and the God-Knows-How-Manyth-Afghan-War - the other third is still all about killin' us some ragheads.
And the final third is just too fucking stupid, lazy, poorly-informed...or something. To care.
So...what the hell will it take to make the point to the ignorant third and the radical-conservative-wingnut third that Sun Tzu sussed out, like, two thousand years ago - that fighting long wars is NEVER good for the combatant...even if it "wins"? That war makes people and nations do incredibly stupid things to themselves because those things seem "right" at the time?
I have no idea.
But just thinking about makes me tired.
I guess I always thought that if my country was to go to hell it'd be in some dramatic fashion. We'd hand ourselves over to the devils of authority and oligarchy in the midst of some titanic struggle with the Great Foe; the Soviet Union bristling with nukes or the Chinese hordes of Asia. We'd go down in a monumental crash of great rhetoric and epic protests, with the last defenders of the old outmoded liberties herded into the cattle trucks for the journey to the Utah camps. I never pictured my countrymen lying about on our dead asses while we drift along in a state of perpetual "war" with a bunch of sorry ass Islamic fantasists...I mean, can you THINK of a stupider way to give away the gift?
Bolt again:
MORE I have one question to ask the witness. (RICH stops) That's a chain of office you are wearing. (Reluctantly RICH faces him) May I see it? (NORFOLK motions him to approach. MORE examines the medallion) The red dragon. (To CROMWELL) What's this?
CROMWELL Sir Richard is appointed Attorney-General for Wales.
MORE (Looking into RICH'S face, with pain and amusement) For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales..!
Friday, September 30, 2011
Into the Fall
I am feeling tremendously pessimistic and depressed about my nation today.
And it's not because of any particular, or recent, event.
Although the generalized lack of public unease regarding the extralegal assassination of a U.S. citizen seems to point up the combination of overall indifference and governmental chicanery that has characterized our decade-long movement - I can't figure out whether to characterize it as a "march" (with the military associations of the term appropriate to the "War on Terror" that is used to justify it) or a "creep" (given the underhanded and duplicitous way it has been managed, for the most part) - towards a nation set about with the machinery of surveillance, secrecy, and "Nacht und Nebel"-variety legalisms.
No one has explained to my satisfaction why what happened to al-Awaki could not happen to anyone, anywhere, who is accused of "...inspiring attacks against the U.S." The guy was an anti-American SOB and an enemy of my nation. But not an "enemy" in the sense of a soldier, not even an "enemy" in the sense of an intelligence officer. He was a propagandist, a talker, the Tom Paine of Islamism. If talking shit about this country is a capital crime, if promoting violence against our "leaders" is punishable by death by missile without the bother of trial or conviction, I'd better be damn careful about driving around outside of busy public streets.
But that's not it, really.
Here we are, in Year Three of the Lesser Depression.
Millions of Americans are jobless. Millions more are clinging desperately to poor or part-time work. Corporations are sitting on fat piles of jack but neither hiring nor expanding capacity because - surprise - all those un- and under-employed Americans are purchasing two things; jack and shit.
They're mostly using this lucre to buy up OTHER outfits...which are then "streamlined" and "outsourced"...putting more poor dumb bastards out of work.
The wealthy, who have hoovered up the spare cash showered on them by tax breaks and Republican largesse like a commodities trader in Vegas going through blow and hookers, are wailing about "class warfare" (quite effectively!) while raining economic death on the lower 80% like Flying Pencils over Rotterdam. And at least half the public - those same poor dumb schmucks getting carpet-bombed with cramdowns, foreclosures, downsizing, and layoffs - seems anywhere from unconcerned to actually excited about this.
In fact, the only real opposition to this massive comforting-of-the-comfortable and affliction-of-the-afflicted seems to be coming in the form of a bunch of juggalos and slackers sitting down on Wall Street; maced by the coppers, mocked by the banksters, ignored by the press...a carnival of fools on a fool's errand.
How will this change anything?
Here we are in Year Nine of the "War on Terror".
The seemingly limitless capacity of my nation for pointless diddling in ungovernable foreign nations (or should I parenthesize that - "nations", since it's hard to characterize Afghanistan with the same term I'd use for Switzerland or Belgium. Or perhaps not...) remains without a foreseeable end in sight. Perhaps the most ridiculous - the eight-year tenure of Six Flags Over Nothing, a.k.a. the Third Gulf War, a.k.a "Operation Iraqi Freedom" - is heading for the ash bin but the Afghan farrago looks set to run longer than "Cats" and given the lack of either interest in or condemnation of the Libyan capriole by press and public there seems to be no reason why this Adminstration or any other shouldn't repeat the same business in some OTHER Third World shithole tomorrow or next week.
And here we are.
We've got people running for office who spout patently comical nonsense and are taken as serious in the national press. We have a national identity that seems more than ever to be composed of trashy reality television, muscular acephalic "patriotism", fiscal and financial rapacity, and public indolence.
And the REALLY depressing part is that I have no idea what I, or "we" - those like me who dislike the idea of Back to the Gilded Age as the next three decades - can do about that.
The degree to which partisan politics has bent to wealth has made me feel like my widow's mite is less mighty than ever. Which forces me into either trying to bend one party or the other to my pitiful will or contemplating a Third Party, the iocaine powder of U.S. politics.
My hope for some sort of political backlash of the sort that blew in the New Deal after the LAST time the plutocracy shat the bed is all but gone. We had the opportunity for that in 2008 which only proved the degree to which our Galtian overlords had learned the lessons of 1932; choke the populists with cash, flood the public forum with bought stooges, and deflect the moron mob with trivialities and manufactured fears.
And - as delightful and cathartic as the notion of taking Wall Street and Capitol Hill by storm and decorating the Tree of Liberty with the plutocrats and their purchased legislators is - the idea of violent revolution isn't really acceptable. The historical examples are dire; always followed by either anarchy and counterrevolution, or tyranny.
So I enter this autumn as morose about the next decade as I've been in a long, long time. I cannot see a way forward, and there is no way back.
What will come, I cannot guess.
But looking around me I feel very...fragile. A glass vessel in a wilderness of hammers.
I like to think that I can "control" my life, and have a strong effect on the lives of my family.
But it's when I look at the world and my country that I realize I'm deluding myself. We're are ALL riding the whirlwind. It's the times we think we have everything under control that are the illusion. The corrupt politician, the remorseless corporation, the random inattentive driver, the casual virus, the slippery stair...all of these are out there, waiting to change our lives in a moment.
And those of us without the wealth and power to hold back those changes...all we can do is live every day to the fullest, love our children recklessly, caress our lovers without thought of tomorrow.
Because tomorrow may bring horrors.
Or may never be.
All we can have is each other, and today, and hope. And just for today, for me, hope is a guttering candle, flickering in the hard winds of a trouble world, looking despairingly close to snuffing out.
And it's not because of any particular, or recent, event.Although the generalized lack of public unease regarding the extralegal assassination of a U.S. citizen seems to point up the combination of overall indifference and governmental chicanery that has characterized our decade-long movement - I can't figure out whether to characterize it as a "march" (with the military associations of the term appropriate to the "War on Terror" that is used to justify it) or a "creep" (given the underhanded and duplicitous way it has been managed, for the most part) - towards a nation set about with the machinery of surveillance, secrecy, and "Nacht und Nebel"-variety legalisms.
No one has explained to my satisfaction why what happened to al-Awaki could not happen to anyone, anywhere, who is accused of "...inspiring attacks against the U.S." The guy was an anti-American SOB and an enemy of my nation. But not an "enemy" in the sense of a soldier, not even an "enemy" in the sense of an intelligence officer. He was a propagandist, a talker, the Tom Paine of Islamism. If talking shit about this country is a capital crime, if promoting violence against our "leaders" is punishable by death by missile without the bother of trial or conviction, I'd better be damn careful about driving around outside of busy public streets.
But that's not it, really.Here we are, in Year Three of the Lesser Depression.
Millions of Americans are jobless. Millions more are clinging desperately to poor or part-time work. Corporations are sitting on fat piles of jack but neither hiring nor expanding capacity because - surprise - all those un- and under-employed Americans are purchasing two things; jack and shit.
They're mostly using this lucre to buy up OTHER outfits...which are then "streamlined" and "outsourced"...putting more poor dumb bastards out of work.
The wealthy, who have hoovered up the spare cash showered on them by tax breaks and Republican largesse like a commodities trader in Vegas going through blow and hookers, are wailing about "class warfare" (quite effectively!) while raining economic death on the lower 80% like Flying Pencils over Rotterdam. And at least half the public - those same poor dumb schmucks getting carpet-bombed with cramdowns, foreclosures, downsizing, and layoffs - seems anywhere from unconcerned to actually excited about this.
In fact, the only real opposition to this massive comforting-of-the-comfortable and affliction-of-the-afflicted seems to be coming in the form of a bunch of juggalos and slackers sitting down on Wall Street; maced by the coppers, mocked by the banksters, ignored by the press...a carnival of fools on a fool's errand.
How will this change anything?
Here we are in Year Nine of the "War on Terror".The seemingly limitless capacity of my nation for pointless diddling in ungovernable foreign nations (or should I parenthesize that - "nations", since it's hard to characterize Afghanistan with the same term I'd use for Switzerland or Belgium. Or perhaps not...) remains without a foreseeable end in sight. Perhaps the most ridiculous - the eight-year tenure of Six Flags Over Nothing, a.k.a. the Third Gulf War, a.k.a "Operation Iraqi Freedom" - is heading for the ash bin but the Afghan farrago looks set to run longer than "Cats" and given the lack of either interest in or condemnation of the Libyan capriole by press and public there seems to be no reason why this Adminstration or any other shouldn't repeat the same business in some OTHER Third World shithole tomorrow or next week.
And here we are.
We've got people running for office who spout patently comical nonsense and are taken as serious in the national press. We have a national identity that seems more than ever to be composed of trashy reality television, muscular acephalic "patriotism", fiscal and financial rapacity, and public indolence.
And the REALLY depressing part is that I have no idea what I, or "we" - those like me who dislike the idea of Back to the Gilded Age as the next three decades - can do about that.
The degree to which partisan politics has bent to wealth has made me feel like my widow's mite is less mighty than ever. Which forces me into either trying to bend one party or the other to my pitiful will or contemplating a Third Party, the iocaine powder of U.S. politics.
My hope for some sort of political backlash of the sort that blew in the New Deal after the LAST time the plutocracy shat the bed is all but gone. We had the opportunity for that in 2008 which only proved the degree to which our Galtian overlords had learned the lessons of 1932; choke the populists with cash, flood the public forum with bought stooges, and deflect the moron mob with trivialities and manufactured fears.
And - as delightful and cathartic as the notion of taking Wall Street and Capitol Hill by storm and decorating the Tree of Liberty with the plutocrats and their purchased legislators is - the idea of violent revolution isn't really acceptable. The historical examples are dire; always followed by either anarchy and counterrevolution, or tyranny.
So I enter this autumn as morose about the next decade as I've been in a long, long time. I cannot see a way forward, and there is no way back.What will come, I cannot guess.
But looking around me I feel very...fragile. A glass vessel in a wilderness of hammers.
I like to think that I can "control" my life, and have a strong effect on the lives of my family.
But it's when I look at the world and my country that I realize I'm deluding myself. We're are ALL riding the whirlwind. It's the times we think we have everything under control that are the illusion. The corrupt politician, the remorseless corporation, the random inattentive driver, the casual virus, the slippery stair...all of these are out there, waiting to change our lives in a moment.
And those of us without the wealth and power to hold back those changes...all we can do is live every day to the fullest, love our children recklessly, caress our lovers without thought of tomorrow.
Because tomorrow may bring horrors.
Or may never be.
All we can have is each other, and today, and hope. And just for today, for me, hope is a guttering candle, flickering in the hard winds of a trouble world, looking despairingly close to snuffing out.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
I Blame Al Gore
This occurred to me whilst arguing about - of all things - post office and library closings over at MilPub.
And that is; does the Internet actually make you LESS informed? Has the Internet helped make Americans dumber?
There seems to be a swathe of opinion out there that says yes. One of the commentors over at the 'Pub seems to think that closing libraries is an inevitable side-effect of electronic commerce and knowledge. My snide observation is that it does indeed seem to be an artifact of the "dumbing" of the U.S. public.
I got to wondering; I've been involved in learning and teaching (in some aspect) nearly all my adult life. What have I observed that might help in figuring out whether all this Internet-shaming is factual or not. And I came to several conclusions, some germane, some less so.
Among the less germane but IMO affecting the argument is the effect of the electronic media in general.
As little as three or four generations ago you had to have some intellectual heft to get your ideas in front of the public.
Not that you had to be intelligent, or clever, or even particularly sane. All sorts of fucking idiots got published - Ayn Rand, forchrissakes! - and still do. But the ordinary garden-variety gomer had a hard time getting his or her empty head in front of others' to spout off moronic opinions. The media just wasn't there.
But with the proliferation of electronic outlets anyone; Glenn Beck, Osama bin Laden, me, can get all up in your grille with our whackadoodle ideas. The cumulative effect is to raise the apparent Whacko Factor.
Remember that intelligence, like pretty much all other human traits, is distributed on a bell curve. So by definition half of all humans are below the intellectual mean. And nearly all of them either have blogs or seem to work at Fox News. But, again, the increase in outlets for this tomfoolery provided by the electronical internet, 24-hour-cable-news, bizarre cable channels...it's impressive, and not really in a good way.
So I think that part of this "issue" is an artifact of the fact that there are just more ways for fucking idiots to be heard, not that Americans are necessarily more fucking idiotic.
But...
I do think that in at least one aspect the Internet does contribute to debasing what intellectual content our public debate contains.
It allows you (me, anyone, everyone) to gain an nearly instant but extraordinarily shallow and facile learning about damn near anything. And I've noticed that my students - the electronic generation - are particularly bad about this.
Part of me wonders if this has to do with growing up with visual entertainment as a constant sort of intellectual elevator music in their lives. Movies and television don't encourage reflection. It requires a great deal of effort to stop a video because you want to ponder a certain point, issue, or question. From childhood we vidiots learn to suspend our disbelief to make video "work". We know that that actor isn't Paul Revere...but we go along with the gag to make the story work.
I wonder how far a stretch it is from there to hearing Rick Perry say "Fifty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all" and going along with THAT gag..?
But whatever the reason, I've noticed that an overwhelming majority of my high school and community college students over the past decade are bad; really, genuinely, extraordinarily bad at researching information.
If it isn't on Google or Wikipedia, they can't find it.
And I wonder; maybe this has to do with ONLY having used Google or Wikipedia...
As antediluvian as they are today, when I and those of my generation had to look something up all we had were dead-tree media (and microfilm...)
So we had to learn to use card catelogs. Dictionaries. Encyclopedias. Being a geologist I also had to learn to use the Science Citation Index, and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, to research topics discussed in journals in my field.
All this paper-shuffling tended to make me, and my contemporaries, slower but fairly thorough (some, obviously, more than others...). And I often find that even when researching on-line I tend to do what I used to do; using one article to chase down several others from the citations, checking multiple sources to see if they confirm or contradict each other. And when I don't - for example, when I accepted a single source for the so-called "Irene Incident" in the Philippines in 1898 - I find that I make the same mistakes my students made; accepting unsubstantiated claims as facts, including interpretation in with data, and passing along outright falsehoods.
So.
Has the Internet made Americans dumber?
I doubt it. For one thing, we were never all THAT smart to begin with. We, the People, have throughout our history tended to be credulous, emotional, badly-informed, and prey to all sorts of ridiculous nonsense.
What I think the Internet DOES do, though, is let us believe that we're smarter than we really are. It lends us a superficial knowledge that allows us to make all sorts of boneheaded choices thinking we know all the answers.
When we haven't even the slightest idea what the right questions should be.
And that is; does the Internet actually make you LESS informed? Has the Internet helped make Americans dumber?
There seems to be a swathe of opinion out there that says yes. One of the commentors over at the 'Pub seems to think that closing libraries is an inevitable side-effect of electronic commerce and knowledge. My snide observation is that it does indeed seem to be an artifact of the "dumbing" of the U.S. public.
I got to wondering; I've been involved in learning and teaching (in some aspect) nearly all my adult life. What have I observed that might help in figuring out whether all this Internet-shaming is factual or not. And I came to several conclusions, some germane, some less so.
Among the less germane but IMO affecting the argument is the effect of the electronic media in general.
As little as three or four generations ago you had to have some intellectual heft to get your ideas in front of the public.
Not that you had to be intelligent, or clever, or even particularly sane. All sorts of fucking idiots got published - Ayn Rand, forchrissakes! - and still do. But the ordinary garden-variety gomer had a hard time getting his or her empty head in front of others' to spout off moronic opinions. The media just wasn't there.
But with the proliferation of electronic outlets anyone; Glenn Beck, Osama bin Laden, me, can get all up in your grille with our whackadoodle ideas. The cumulative effect is to raise the apparent Whacko Factor.
Remember that intelligence, like pretty much all other human traits, is distributed on a bell curve. So by definition half of all humans are below the intellectual mean. And nearly all of them either have blogs or seem to work at Fox News. But, again, the increase in outlets for this tomfoolery provided by the electronical internet, 24-hour-cable-news, bizarre cable channels...it's impressive, and not really in a good way.
So I think that part of this "issue" is an artifact of the fact that there are just more ways for fucking idiots to be heard, not that Americans are necessarily more fucking idiotic.
But...
I do think that in at least one aspect the Internet does contribute to debasing what intellectual content our public debate contains.
It allows you (me, anyone, everyone) to gain an nearly instant but extraordinarily shallow and facile learning about damn near anything. And I've noticed that my students - the electronic generation - are particularly bad about this.
Part of me wonders if this has to do with growing up with visual entertainment as a constant sort of intellectual elevator music in their lives. Movies and television don't encourage reflection. It requires a great deal of effort to stop a video because you want to ponder a certain point, issue, or question. From childhood we vidiots learn to suspend our disbelief to make video "work". We know that that actor isn't Paul Revere...but we go along with the gag to make the story work.
I wonder how far a stretch it is from there to hearing Rick Perry say "Fifty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all" and going along with THAT gag..?
But whatever the reason, I've noticed that an overwhelming majority of my high school and community college students over the past decade are bad; really, genuinely, extraordinarily bad at researching information.
If it isn't on Google or Wikipedia, they can't find it.
And I wonder; maybe this has to do with ONLY having used Google or Wikipedia...
As antediluvian as they are today, when I and those of my generation had to look something up all we had were dead-tree media (and microfilm...)
So we had to learn to use card catelogs. Dictionaries. Encyclopedias. Being a geologist I also had to learn to use the Science Citation Index, and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, to research topics discussed in journals in my field.
All this paper-shuffling tended to make me, and my contemporaries, slower but fairly thorough (some, obviously, more than others...). And I often find that even when researching on-line I tend to do what I used to do; using one article to chase down several others from the citations, checking multiple sources to see if they confirm or contradict each other. And when I don't - for example, when I accepted a single source for the so-called "Irene Incident" in the Philippines in 1898 - I find that I make the same mistakes my students made; accepting unsubstantiated claims as facts, including interpretation in with data, and passing along outright falsehoods.
So.
Has the Internet made Americans dumber?
I doubt it. For one thing, we were never all THAT smart to begin with. We, the People, have throughout our history tended to be credulous, emotional, badly-informed, and prey to all sorts of ridiculous nonsense.
What I think the Internet DOES do, though, is let us believe that we're smarter than we really are. It lends us a superficial knowledge that allows us to make all sorts of boneheaded choices thinking we know all the answers.
When we haven't even the slightest idea what the right questions should be.
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