Mailbox Monday: Bratz

While not neglecting the really important things in life - our under-construction raised raspberry beds and the current state of the Portland Timbers - I wanted to take a moment to mention this interview with Ed Luce in Foreign Policy.I don't agree with all of it. Starting with the title; "A Nation of Spoiled Brats"? C'mon, Foreign Policy - that's the best your editor could do? Ranger Rick magazine could beat that. Christ.

But outside the bitching I have two main problems with Luce's ideas as expressed in the interview, both of which seem to proceed from his spouting "conventional wisdom" without having any real grounds for believing it.

Specifically;

1. I think Luce (the interviewee) is just bloviating wildly about

"...the swing towards celebrating the child, elevating the child, over-praising the child, boosting constantly at every opportunity the self-esteem of the child, assuming the child is a fragile little eggshell that can be broken at any moment..."

that is supposed to be the cause of educational decline in the U.S. I have kiddos in school AND have taught at several levels and that's, frankly, horseshit.

I honestly think this whole "A Nation At Risk" crap is, well, crap. And, especially this "Nation At Risk From Self-Esteem" crap. I think the problems we're seeing in education - and I think those problems are a lot less significant than they're commonly made out to be - have a LOT more to do with a combination of a) educating more of our population than at nearly any time in our history, and b) the thirty-year cramdown on middle and lower-middle class wealth.

Because the bottom line on education is this;

- Not all kids can "do" a pre-college curriculum, yet that is the current U.S. standard. Prior to about 1975 the kids who couldn't usually simply dropped out, or were shunted aside into vo-tech tracks. Today we're still dropping them out, but a hell of a lot more kids who would have otherwise have been slotted into what when I was in grade school we called the "'tard school" (since non-mainstream kids were retards, see?) are being mainstreamed. I don't know of any parents who want their kids to get a shiny pretty "A" for doing "C" work. But the whole point of a bell curve is that you're going to get 10% of the students in the top 10% of grades. To assume that everyone who breathes can do algebra at a high level? Quit kidding yourself.

- The tighter the household budget, the tougher for the kid to do well.

We've known this since the 1965 Coleman Report. Economic class has always been the single largest factor in predicting academic achievement. There's a number of reasons for that, but as a factor it has never been seriously refuted.

Over the past three decades times have gotten tougher for pretty much everyone outside the 1%, and definitely for those below the top 25%. So I'm not surprised that their kids are not as singleminded about school success. The correlation do well in school (regardless of where you start from) = do well in life just doesn't hold up anymore, and more and more parents, and kids, can see that. IMO that still doesn't give you an excuse to stop trying. But I can see how it would increase the "bad outcome" sort of data.

Either way, I just don't buy this "OMFG, the Republic is collapsing because our schools are shit!" meme. There's no question that we have problems in teaching and learning. But I don't think those problems are anywhere near as simple as over-worked mommies and daddies insisting their speshul snowflake get preferential treatment.

2. Luce seems to start from the conventional wisdom "global is good". At least, that is the implication of his statement here: "...if globalization were put to a referendum in America, it would lose -- which is troubling, and it's one measure of the degree of alarm and distemper felt out there, which I come across the whole time whenever I'm outside of the Beltway." Now, I'm sorry, but I don't understand this whole enthusiasm for "globalization" as an economic religion.

I won't argue that "trade" is usually beneficial for those who engage in it, but how does that follow that it's good for, say, industrial workers here in the U.S. to be pitted in a wage-race-to-the-bottom with industrial workers in China, where cost of living is a fraction of what an American would consider semi-human, where acts that would cost U.S. manufacturers millions - poisoning and killing their workers, dumping hideous shit into the air and water - are simply part of doing business, and where crony capitalism is enjoying a Golden Age (where here it's barely getting back to the Silver standard of our Gilded one...)?

Luce seems to deliberately elide the fact that the greatest period of growth in the U.S. coincided with the time that the rest of the world was either a) walled off from U.S. markets by tariffs, or b) bombed into the Stone Age.

You can make all sorts of arguments about trade and tariffs, but to assume that a reasoned dislike for the sort of unequal playing field inherent in "globalization" as it currently exists is some sort of "troubling" attitude on the part of U.S. citizens is to assume that U.S. citizens are fools with no sense of self-preservation.

Which is often true! But not in this case, I would opine.But...overall the interview is damn well worth reading. Luce has some terrific observations about U.S. politics and economics, and in particular the way the U.S. seems to be politically incapable of either recognizing, or dealing, with the fairly obvious things that are bludgeoning it at the moment; social and economic stratification (and especially the grossly skewed distribution of the "recovery" since 2008), political distemper, and military hubris. And the problems he sees looming like icebergs ahead because of these. So while he's not perfectly correct I think he sure has some scary ideas, and ones that seem to fit what I see around me.And, sadly, I find myself shaking my head especially ruefully at his final paragraph:

"I hope that in the near future America will be able to remind itself that strength comes from its domestic economic muscularity and the degree to which America can again be a beacon to the world, a model worth emulating, rather than by the range and deployment of its weaponry, or by the spending power of those at the top. But I'm not optimistic -- given the trajectory of the debate today and in recent years -- that things will necessarily shake out that way. I wish I could see more cause for hope."

Because from where I see it, it is by our own goddamn feathers, and not by others' shafts, that we now stricken.

Over the Mountains

Sorry for the light posting - I was out of town all last week working in Walla Walla, WA (a place I am told by a native drysider should always be referred to as "the town so nice they named it twice") and was off the net. I have a crazy busy day tomorrow than then should be back on schedule.

I did want to make a brief observation on the latest news-time obsession; the murder of young Trayvon Martin.

Y'know what the really messed up part was?

That the shooter wasn't immediately escorted to the Crossbar Hotel.

Because I'll give you all the rest of the "backstory" here. You know what I'm talking about, right? All the things this is supposed to "tell" us about the U.S. circa 2012?

The perception of young urban black guys as dangerous and scary. The possobility that young urban black guys ARE dangerous and scary. The degree to which this makes it dangerous to be a young black guy. The throwaway quality of life as a young black guy.

Race. RacISM. Class. Bad Laws. Inequal Justine Under Bad Laws. Republicans vs. Democrats.

The fucked-up-ness of writing a law that makes it possible for a knucklehead with a weapon to, in effect, go looking for a fight. The overarching place that race and class plays in American life. The sociology of race, class, weapons, and American urban life. The propensity for places like Florida, where being an ignernt goober is no disqualification for public life, to make fucked-up laws that enable knuckleheads with a 'tude to pull a hogleg whenever they feel disrespected, or spooked, or like scaring somebody, or for no goddamn reason at all.

Let's just take all those as a given, K?

But even given all this, the fucked up part of this story, for me, doesn't come until the local constable doesn't even attempt to take the shooter downtown and book him for manslaughter.

At least.

Because, as we discussed earlier about the Afghan shooter, when you don't do that, you make it obvious to everyone that the dead guy (or women, or kids) doesn't really matter to you.

And when you do that you prove that you've forgotten that the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

Let's thing about what the law is for; what it's "supposed to be for, and what it really IS for.

We all like to cling to the ideal that the law is ground rules for our society; the lines on the playing field. And how we're supposed to be all "equality of opportunity", liberty, and justice for all. But, look, we already know that there are two laws in this country, or, rather, one law that, in its impartial majesty, forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges.

Steal a car, steal a stereo, and you'll probably end up in jail.

Steal an entire pension fund, steal a family's house, steal a company and run it into the ground and put thousands of people out of work?

You'll probably get a job on the Securities and Exchange Commission and never lose a night's sleep.

So we've pretty much admitted by our actions that we don't really CARE about that part of our laws.

But the other part of what the law is for is to keep everyone inside society's fences. To maintain just enough public order that we don't get convinced we're in some sort of Hobbsean war of all against all and then start acting like that. To maintain "public order" in the same way that the rules of engagement of an Army of Occupation are there to convince the occupied that doing what the foreigner tells them to is healthier than planting mines in the roads at night.

So, sure, I'd like my country to actually have one law for rich and poor, powerful and powerless. I'd like to believe that the magnificent words over the courthouse door "Equal Justice Under Law" were true. I'd like for there to be good work, decent work, living-wage work for everyone who wants it. I'd like for my country to be the best it can for the most people it can.

But I'll settle for just enough equality to keep the village quiet.

Because unlike a lot of people - unlike nearly all of our wealthy white folks, the people who are benefiting from the kind of nation where people like Trayvon Martin are, and are shown to be, disposable - I remember what happened the LAST time this country was so open an oligarchy that even the dimmest prole could figure out that both ends of the stick he or she was going to get were dirty.Yeah, that.

We forget that the Gilded Age and the Ragtime Era had a scary edge to them, because the people on the Outside knew they had no way in and many of them decided to kick the thing to pieces rather than put up with that. We had a president assassinated, the first one outside wartime. Anarchists and Reds were under every patrician's bed, and armies of Pinkertons and goons - and the real Army - was employed to "fight them". This damn situation lasted until the Depression, when the New Dealers forced some of the oligarchs to bend a little to stave off what happened to Italy in 1922 and Russia in 1917.

And I'm on the wrong side, here: the kind of people I was then were the ones shot down by troops breaking strikes, beaten by company goons, lynched by American Legion thugs, and railroaded by corrupt judges. They were shot by people very like this Zimmerman who shot the kid Martin; because they didn't like the way my sort of people; poor people, union people, working-class people, looked.

Like I've said here before; the United States was founded as a sort of oligarchy and can work perfectly well as one.

But it's not much fun unless you're an oligarch and, can you tell me, sitting there reading this, that you feel lucky?

I didn't think so.

So while I'm sorry for Martin, his family, nice black guys everywhere, and my country in that we've made it possible for jackholes like Zimmerman to exist, because of who I am and where I am I have a vested interest in keeping the lid on enough to keep my society from flying apart.

So, for me, the important thing here, now, is that this shooter goes to jail. Goes to trial. Gets convicted - assuming the evidence shows that he did what he seems to have done, pursued an unarmed man into a fight and then killed him - and spends a long, long time in prison. Hell, we all have an interest in seeing that the people who use bloody-handed methods to emphasize the fucked up things we believe swiftly take the long step to the end of the short rope that German soldier took in Pont-avec-Crap back in 1878.

Because if we don't; if we convince enough people that the law is for you and not for me, that they might as well be hung for what they did do rather than what they didn't and some ignernt asshole thinks they did...well...

...then the village becomes unquiet and we've taken the first steps up the pass over the mountains of madness.

Jesus Loves Me

...this I know.(h/t to mike, who posted this to FB...)

The Post After The Last "U.S. Politics" Post I Ever Wrote

I know, I know. I said I was done.

But this is so brilliant, so succinct, so perfect an illustration of the level our political discourse had sunk to that I cannot with good intent pass on commenting on it. Here's the quote, from Charlie Pierce again, citing Rick Santorum on the evils of putting the totem pole in the donut hole without throwing the pregnancy dice (emphasis mine):

"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

Now sit back and think about that for a moment.First of all, this man isn't running for stake president of the local Mormon outfit. He's not a cardinal hustling votes for the Papacy. He's supposed to be one of We the People, a citizen of a nation explicitly designed around not codifying religious dogma into civil law ("an establishment of religion") who is trying to convince you to vote for him as its Chief Executive.

And this is part of his platform.

Second, consider the semantics of his statement; "do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be".

Obviously, for Santorum, it's how GOD wants them to be.And this is...why?

Why should we care what Santorum's Bible says? Or even what PART of it Santorum wants us to listen to.

My grandfather was a Salvation Army officer, and I'm as familiar with the Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments, as a heathen can be. And in my opinion there's a ton of stuff about sex, almost all of it archaic, almost all of it confusing, and none of it applicable to the job of the President of the United States.

There's all the old Hebrew stuff; "be fruitful and multiply", the Sin of Onan, but you'd expect that from a culture that demanded progeny due to the insane rate of death in infancy, childhood and childbirth.

But there is also some genuinely bizarre shit. Like how you're supposed to fuck your brother's widow? Or the etiquette for raping your female slaves? (Hint - make sure you have a spare ram around in case you get caught...).

In other words, there's all SORTS of ridiculous desert-wandering God-pesterer crap in the Bible, sexual or otherwise.And that Rick Santorum cherry-picks some of it says more about him than it does about the Christian Bible.

But that's kinda not the point, really, isn't it?

The point is that we're supposed to be living in a non-sectarian state, as in, you can't circumsize my daughter - or my son - because of what YOU believe. You don't get to decide whether my wife and I have kids when we have sex because YOU believe we should, or even if your GOD believes we should and tells you so. And we don't have to figure out what part of the Bible that's in; it's right in the Constitution.

That's really all there is to it.

And Rick Santorum doesn't believe this.

And Rick Santorum is not being laughed, reviled, and mocked off the public stage.

Rick Santorum is not being held up as a living example of the very dangers of theocracy by the sort of people who will swear to you that Muslims want you to live by sharia law.No.

Rick Santorum is being taken seriously as a Presidential candidate by the "news media" and by a significant number of people in one of our two major political parties.Update 1/4: And the fact that this god-botherer pulled a quarter of the GOP vote - that between them this religious whackaloon who believes that it is the President's job to intone on what my wife and I do in bed and the goldbug who thinks that our country is still working under the Articles of Confederation pulled half the GOP electorate in Iowa - should tell you all you really need to know about our nation and why we are where we are today.

We Are So Fucked.

The Lament of the Frontier Guard

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,

Lonely from the beginning of time until now!

Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.

I climb the towers and towers

to watch out the barbarous land:



My friend jim recently posted an extended rumination about the combat loss of a CH-47 and the embarked team of Navy SEALs. In this post he uses President Obama's term "sacrifice" to compare the way these men died to the offerings presented to the gods; in this case, the twin gods of War and Hubris that have ruled lately in the East. He asks "How can a nation sacrifice the best that we have to offer in such a blithe manner?" and suggests that these dead men were sacrifices for our national sins of arrogance and foolishness.Now I have no end of respect for jim's opinions on things military. He's been there and done that and got the O.D. T-shirt. He's probably forgotten more about soldiering than I'll ever know.



But in this case, I think he's looking at this as an American and a citizen-soldier, and that's the wrong way to look at this.



Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.

There is no wall left to this village.

Bones white with a thousand frosts,

High heaps, covered with trees and grass;

Who brought this to pass?

Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?

Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?

Barbarous kings.



For most of these guys the Saturday in Wardak Province was just another day at work. They are long-service professionals - imperial troops in all but name - and they are doing what imperial troops have done since Augustus' day; carrying our imperial policy in the far reaches of the imperial frontiers.



This was no army of liberation storming ashore on the beaches of Normandy or Italy, no army of vengeance pouring gasoline into the caves of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. This wasn't even "Lafayette, we are here" or "Remember the Maine". While I'm sure that one or two of the guys who augered in somewhere in the Tangi Valley comforted themselves with the fiction that they were avenging 9/11 I'll bet most of them thought about their mission as imperials have always thought about the mission of civilizing the savages with a rifle.Long, tiring work, typically boring, occasionally terrifying, often fruitless. Pitied and ignored by the civilians safe at home, feared or swindled by the natives nearby, tasked by the uninformed higher-ups to perform everything from the pointless to the dangerous, taking successes wherever and however possible, accepting failures as part of the game.



A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,

A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,

Three hundred and sixty thousand,

And sorrow, sorrow like rain.

Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,

Desolate, desolate fields,

And no children of warfare upon them,

No longer the men for offence and defence.



And I believe we do them a disservice when we use the language of popular mass wars for what they do and how they die. The President, of course, well, it's his job to drape the charred bits of meat and bone - all that remain after JP-4 and airframe aluminum combine to combust human bodies - in patriotic bunting. He is, after all, both our national mourner and national cheerleader, saying the correct and solemn words over the caskets filled with sand, fanning the fire in the faint hearts to continue the fight that will bring more dead men home to more bereft hearts.



But we should be big enough to overlook these public platitudes and see these men for what they are; imperial legionaries of a most unimperial empire, manning the milecastles we build for them with our taxes, our reflexive rage, our incurious sloth, and our ignorance of the world and the people in it.



Those dead men, could they reassemble themselves, could they pull the poncho-liner of whole flesh back on so as not to frighten us with the gibbering horror of their deaths in a rage of fire and metal, might tell us of the people in those far places who killed them and whom they killed, the broken places and the broken tribes within them, whose ferocities and griefs they and we will never understand. They might tell us about the meaningless strobing of parachute flares in the night sky, of little villages with yesterday's bulletholes in walls that Alexander's troops passed by, of walking over the same ground they walked yesterday and finding new death buried by the roadside.



But, then again, they might not.



Because there is no way we in the soft lands and the quiet places could understand what it means to try and defeat the 14th Century with the weapons of the 20th.



Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,

With Rihoku's name forgotten,

And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.



Because they are atop the milecastles, peering out to the barbarous lands, and we are peacefully asleep in the fat lands within the walls. Because they know war and we do not. Because they are not our sacrifices; they are our proxies. Because, although we have never seen a tiger or know what it does...



...we feed them to the tigers.And then go home to our dinners.

Banana Republicans

I cannot express how depressing the "debt ceiling" deal is.

Not because of the substance.

We knew the wingnuts were going to kill the hostage. We knew that Obama would cave rather than let his financial interest cronies take a bath when Standard & Poors downgraded U.S. bonds. We pretty much knew how this was going to play out because we've watched Obama and the Teatards play this game for the past couple of years. The Nobel-Prize-Winner-In-Chief would make some good speeches, there would be some posturing and scuffling, like third-graders in a playground, and then the GOP would man up and Obama would roll on his back like a Gresham hootchie mama with six mojitos in her in a waterfront bar on Fleet Week.

No, the depressing part is that process has exposed us as the banana republic we are.

"Banana republic" is defined in Wiki as "...a pejorative term that refers to a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions (e.g. bananas), and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy, corrupt politico-economic plutocracy or oligarchy"

Accepting that we at least are not yet dependent on bananas - although video entertainment may be the New Yellow - but the rest seems to fit us pretty well. The bulk of the nation doesn't want the "shared sacrifice" to be shared between those making $7,000 a year and those making $70,000. The majority of U.S. citizens doesn't want to face an uncertain future without reliable food inspections, safe bridges, clean air and water, and some hope of dying outside of poverty and desperation.

But the GOP minority and the oligarchs who love them would accept all that and more rather than accept taxes on those oligarchs. And, to echo the Rude Pundit, the thing I keep coming back to is that through all this the wars continue. That we prefer war to roads and health care and education here is unfathomably depressing.

Well, I give up. It appears that the U.S. is going to get the squalid little dictatorship of the conservatives it seems to either want, or not care about. So I'm going to open my campaign for the GOP in 2012 with the slogan "Vote Republican; Let's Just Get It The Fuck Over With". Let's elect all these batshit fuckers and open the cage doors and let them rampage amongst the populace, flinging their teabag monkey shit, hooting and leaping, tearing down the remnants of the New Deal.

A New Deal, let's not forget, that wasn't built from a cloud of eleemosynary fluffiness of FDR but from that cold-hearted old patrician's savage political calculation that his own class had to pay up in order to prevent a destitute and despairing U.S. public from making the choice that the Russian people had in 1917, the Italian in 1922, and the Spanish and German people would in years to come; the choice between the freedom to starve and want and be forced to fight, and the peace-work-and-bread slavery of fascism or communism.

Well, all right, let's have it, then.

Perhaps when enough people have watched their parents sink into destitution, when we have returned to Gilded Age levels of inequality, to Hoovervilles and bread lines, when the gated communities of the few stand like proud beacons above the decaying suburbs of the many...perhaps then the two-thirds of those in this country who describe themselves as "conservative" or "moderate" will see what their moderation and conservatism has brought them.I only hope that I am long dead by then.

(Cross-posted to MilPub)

Evolution

I'm feeling fairly dismal at the moment.

Not because of anything personal. No, life here in North Portland continues fine. Mojo is out shopping at IKEA, I'm home with the kiddos, still in my b-robe on a lazy Sunday as the littles watch a movie on the cable.

It's the damn human race that is getting on my nerves.

It started late last week with the news about the final disgrace of "Doctor" Wakefield, the man whose 1998 publication spurred the formation of coteries of "anti-vaccination" supporters over much of the English-speaking world. An investigative piece confirmed the British medical conclusion that Wakefield had committed the ultimate scientific sin; he had deliberately faked his data. Of the twelve patients in his original "study", "...five showed developmental problems before receiving the MMR vaccine and three never had autism."There is nothing left to the man. He has been disgraced, exposed as a greedy charlatan and a naething of a researcher. His work, which was originally distrusted after no other researchers, even his own co-authors, could duplicate it, is thrown in the garbage heap of historical revulsion along with cold fusion and credit-default swaps.

And yet...

Jenny McCarthy, whose qualifications as an authority on children and health seem to be nothing greater than a pair of mammaries large enough to nourish an entire village of little ones, insists that the Wakefield news is "much ado about nothing", as if the breaking of the seminal link between vaccines and autism has no effect on the validity of the remainder of her now-unsupported assertions. Her supporters such as this woman, Meryl Dorey, the leader of the "anti-vaxxers" in Australia, are undeterred. Presumably these women are typical of their cohorts, who will continue to insist on their delusion at the expense of the health of others and others' children.And McCarthy will continue to command attention for no reason other than her exaggerated proportions. And other hominids will listen to her, and be convinced by her. And others' children will become sick, and some will die.

And in Tucson, a random nutter walked into some sort of "town meeting" between the local congresswoman and her constituents and opened fire. He killed six people outright, including a nine-year-old girl and three ladies in their seventies. He has, in my opinion, also killed the congresswoman.

The U.S. Army has had a LOT of experience with brain trauma lately. The experience suggests that if as I suspect and her left hemisphere must be effectively destroyed that if she survives she will spend the rest of her life regaining her basic human functions. The woman who entered that mall is dead; the person who leaves that bed - assuming she does, as brain injuries are horrible and have a history of turning for the worse suddenly - will be reborn as someone with a new personality and an incredibly hard life ahead of her. I mourn the young woman who went to that event; the miserable fucker ended that woman's life as effectively as if he'd shot her as stone dead as he did a nine-year-old girl.

First, let me say that while I have no strong opinions about "gun control", if this doesn't drive a stake in the damn heart of the notion that letting people wander around with semiautomatic weapons "makes us safer" nothing will.

Arizona has one of the least restrictive carry concealed laws in the U.S., which in turn has among the least restrictive gun control laws in the world.

But despite the fact that I'll bet that there were several "law-abiding" citizens at the event carrying their hoglegs this nutjob was able to empty an entire magazine into the crowd and was only brought down by a tackle when the slide on his Glock locked back.Because an ambush works not because the victims in the kill zone are unarmed but because the ambusher is prepared for deadly violence and the targets - unless they are certifiably paranoid insane - are not.

The natural lag in human response to such unexpected violence will always enable the killer(s) to commit their crime, no matter how well armed and well trained the bystanders will be. Add semiautomatic weapons - capable of firing as rapidly as the shooter can pull the trigger - and you will have lots of dead and wounded.

Always.

Arming more people will not stop this. If anything, the more people you arm, and the more of them you encourage to walk about armed, the more likely it will be that one of them will turn out to be one of these ambush-nutters.

You can still make a political case for wanting people walking around armed. But socially? No. Practically? No. Armed people in public will ALWAYS mean more dead people, and always mean that many of the dead will have been killed for no good reasons. You should be forced to argue, when you argue for liberal carry-concealed laws, that the dead and injured that will result are the "acceptable collateral damage" of your beliefs. If you can still convince people of your position, than good on you. I'm willing to accept that you have a Constitutional case to make for it.But right now you can't make me feel any more optimistic about it.

Update 1/11/10: Here's Bill Saletan at Slate (a forum and a writer that I will admit to having problems with) with some illuminating points on the counterpoint issue to "gun control" - that armed citizens will "make us safer". Apparently there WAS an armed bystander, or at least a near-bystander - who arrived with his bullet launcher at the ready...just in time to almost slot a good guy.

"As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!' But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out."

Yep. GIs know that one of the most likely outcomes of shooting without good situational awareness is a blue-on-blue. Add untrained civilians with their hoglegs?

Christ on a crutch.

Second, the man who fired the shots appears to have been a random maniac. His online rantings are said to include "...deep distrust of government and religion, calling US laws "treasonous" and calling for creation of a new currency." This is not a standard Teabagger sort of party line, and as Jim Fallows points out, the sort of people who commit political assassinations are often not "political" in themselves. So there doesn't seem to be a direct connection between Glenn Beck's big mouth and the hole in Gabrielle Girrofd's skull.But Fallows continues;

"But we know that it has been a time of extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery, including SarahPac's famous bulls-eye map of 20 Congressional targets to be removed -- including Rep. Giffords. It is legitimate to discuss whether there is a connection between that tone and actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be. At a minimum, it will be harder for anyone to talk -- on rallies, on cable TV, in ads -- about "eliminating" opponents, or to bring rifles to political meetings, or to say "don't retreat, reload."

And yet...the first reactions from the Right are typified by the Teabag blog "Big Government", which screams "Unbelievable: Democrat Group Using Gifford's Shooting for Fundraiser!" (and no, I'm not going to link to the douchebags. You can Google it yourself under "Gifford shooting"). The wingnut blog Redstate jumps on the story - not to mourn the woman but to deny that "Conservative Politics" have anything to do with the shooting.

So I think Fallows is wrong. I think the "let's wipe out liberals" talk will continue. I think that the Right will, like Peter, deny this man as they have denied the abortion shooters, as they denied the Oklahoma City bombers, as they deny all the other antigovernment wreckers, and the intellectually incoherent teabaggers shouting for more weapons, more war, and lower taxes.

And I think that my country will have gone another day, another mile, down the road that seems to have leveled out from the rise out of the prehominid East African Rift. We seem to have gotten so far, but no further, from the hairy savages crouching on the savannah, shrieking, and hooting, and flinging their shit at one another and at their predators.The only difference seems to be that the only predator left is ourselves.

So I'm not feeling very loving towards the damn human race at the moment. For all our technological "progress" and social complexity we seem determined to persist in stupidity even when shown the way to learning, to the pursuit of our own selfish worst interests when mutual assistance is clearly to our benefit, in angry self-justification when empathy and human compassion would seem the natural and most decent things to do.

We seem to learn nothing, we seem to forget nothing, we are our own worst fucking enemy, and right now I am wretchedly convinced that all those unvaccinated kids, and Gabrielle Giffords, and little Christina Taylor-Green, and Judge Roll, and old Dottie Morris, have died for nothing.

Petty Men

With the Senate's refusal to repeal the anti-homosexual "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule covering the U.S. armed forces I think it's about time to seriously consider whether it's time to stick a fork in the Obama Presidency.

You may remember that I never bought the whole "change" rhetoric. Obama was and is a product of the same politics that has brought us to this, the most egregious imbalance in wealth since the Great Depression, the accelerating erosion of whatever remained of the perilous cease-fire between Wealth and the rest of the nation that held from 1932 to about 1966 but has now failed, is failing, and shows no vital signs whatsoever.

Adding this to the ridiculous "compromise" on the Bush tax giveaway, in which Obama's people gave away 200 billion in tax breaks for the two-yacht family in return for 25 billion in unemployment benefits (and set the stage for making the iniquitous Bush budget-breaking scheme permanent) and I think it has become obvious that, far from representing any sort of "change", the former junior Senator from Illinois is virtually captive to the oligarchy that has reestablished its firm control over the legislative and executive process within the Beltway.

But Christ Jesus! How simple was this? To end the nonsensical prejudice against honest men and women who simply want to risk their lives in their nation's service, consider the contrast between Obama's pusillanimous actions and the hard graft of Truman sixty-two years earlier.

The U.S. in 1948 was a violently, openly racist nation. Most states had de jure segregation, all had some form of de facto discrimination against blacks and other minorities. The white majority largely hated and feared their fellow black Americans where they didn't simply hold them in contempt. As recently at 1946 six black men had been lynched by white mobs. The laws forbidding blacks and whites to marry would remain in place for another twenty years. My father can remember going to Dodger games in the Fifties where white men would throw shoe polish tins at Jackie Robinson and scream "Shine!" and "Nigger!" until their voices broke.

And yet Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in July of 1948.

Truman knew perfectly well that the racist bastards in his Congress would have prevented any legal attempt to end segregation, because they already had. And the people he had to fear were in his own party, the Dixiecrats, remnants of the Klan Era of Counterreconstruction. But he understood that prejudice and bias are despicable in person, anathema in governing. So he went ahead and ended the wrong.

Obama, by contrast, would have the support of a majority of the nation, and of the armed forces themselves. He would be acting in accordance with the will of the People. An executive order ending the official prohibition against homosexuals serving openly would be far easier to enact, far easier to enforce, than Truman's was. A black man cannot be anything but black; he cannot simple stand there and be anything else. You cannot tell from an arm's length away which gender the man or woman beside you finds desirable. And his enemies are the damn Republicans, who no longer even pretend to be anything but the Party of God, Guns, Tax Breaks, and Hatin' Us Some Ragheads; intellectually bankrupt, still fellating the shrivelled corpse of Ronald Reagan in hopes of one last magic moment, the Party of Tom DeLay, Christine O'Donnell, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh - bloated, complacent, sneering, toadying, fiscally insane and socially medieval. The Congressional Repubs are hated by more people in the U.S. than hate crab lice, tax audits, cold floors, and raw beets combined.

And yet, here we are. Still clinging to this ridiculous and childish official prejudice, like a grade schooler who finds kissing yuckky. With a Chief Executive who appears to have Johnson & Johnson cotton balls; 100% sterile. Who is utterly in thrall to the banksters and wealthy and influential.

And yet...what else have we?

The GOP is worse. Awfully, moronically, terrifyingly, appallingly worse. If Obama is a house servant to the Malefactors of Great Wealth, the GOP is the leather slave, complete with ball gag and ballet boots. Those Republicans who aren't complete idiots are either lying - they know the truth of their economic policies but are unwilling to clue the rubes - or self-deluding fools who believe that they can sup with the oligarchs and not end up an oligarchy.

The United States has always been a place where some men are more equal than others. But the failure of Obama to even pretend to hold to any sort of liberal principles shows that we have failed to retain what equality we gained after the plutocrats last screwed the pooch back in 1929. The pendulum has swung back, and I see no one, nothing, in the American political scene that shows any promise of reclaiming any measure of that power for the working and lower middle classes.

So while Obama's failure is despicable in its reflection on the man himself, it is also a judgment on us. We have given up on the promise of the United States. We have become little better than a Russia or a Zimbabwe, run by and for the oligarchs for their own benefit; we are content with the crumbs that fall from their tables. As has our President, we have chosen the easy lies of borrowed wealth over the hard truths of fiscal responsibility, the conservative falsehoods of conventional prejudice and frivolous entertainment over the hard work of integration and sacrificing for the public weal, the slothful ease of vicarious democracy over the chastening vigor of active republicanism, and now little remains but to find ourselves dishonorable graves.