"All the Stones the Builders Rejected"
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Rick Perry and the New Apostolic Reformation have downgraded all non-Republicans to soulless demon status. They are not speaking metaphorically. This makes anything they do to achieve power justifiable, as those who oppose them are not even human.
Their "Seven Mountains Mandate" calls for religious control of business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, the family and religion. They believe that God, or their idea of God, must take "dominion" over the political and legal structures of the United States.
Welcome again to Weimar America, land of Glorious Godfrey.
Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have thrown up his hands and asked of the French,"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?" I'm starting to wonder about the United States-- how can you govern a country with 300 million opinions, half of those uninformed, half-baked or selfish-- but every single one of them convinced that they're righteous and deserving of the same respect? During an NPR story on the Three Cups of Tea controversy, a woman called in to attack the expose because it came from "journalists, elitists and intellectuals" who only wanted to tear down someone who'd actually "done something" for girls in Afghanistan. It startled me, because she used the same malediction and emotional straw men you'd expect from a teabagger on a scooter. When archeologists of the future sweep away the rubble of the American republic slash empire, will they find the same chemicals in the water supply that destroyed the Roman ruling class? There is learned speculation that the bizarre behavior at the top of the Roman social structure was caused by lead and mercury in the glazes used on aristocrats' tableware. I don't think it's lead in the water supply that's making us stupid and mean-- we test for that, surely? Or is wickedness contagious, like the social breakdown observed in a crowded rat cage?
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule." -- Walter Benjamin
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." -- Sinclair Lewis
“Now that blind ambition no longer carries the slightest taint and the term "sell-out" holds no meaning, now that earnest young men sing not of love but of ‘want(ing) to be a billionaire so frickin' bad,’ now that narcissistic outbursts and trips to rehab are tantamount to self-promotion, now that, on blogs and Facebook and Twitter, millions of self-branding voices cry out and are never silenced, now that reaching for the stars is encountered less, by young people, as euphemism than high-priority action item, it may be time to question, at long last, the reigning ethos of super-sized individualism.... Warrior-speak is so much the common lexicon of reality TV that each on-camera confession could stand in for any other: She wants to win at all costs. He's not going to give up, no matter what. She doesn't care who has to eat dirt along the way. The parlance of high school football coaches and insurance salesman has become the native tongue of cable TV.” -- Heather Havrilesky, in a review of Limitless, a film of Alan Glynn's novel The Dark Fields
Now I will tell Meader’s story; I have a moral in view. He was pestered by a grizzly so bold and malicious That he used to snatch caribou meat from the eaves of the cabin. Not only that. He ignored men and was unafraid of fire. One night he started battering the door And broke the window with his paw, so they curled up With their shotguns beside them, and waited for the dawn. He came back in the evening, and Meader shot him at close range, Under the left shoulder blade. Then it was jump and run, A real storm of a run: a grizzly, Meader says, Even when he’s been hit in the heart, will keep running Until he falls down. Later, Meader found him By following the trail – and then he understood What lay behind the bear’s odd behavior: Half of the beast’s jaw was eaten away by an abscess, and caries. Toothache, for years. An ache without comprehensible reason, Which often drives us to senseless action And gives us blind courage. We have nothing to lose, We come out of the forest, and not always with the hope That we will be cured
-- Czeslaw Milosz
“Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.” -- Joseph E. Stiglitz, ”Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%”
“You go to war with the liquor cabinet you have, not the liquor cabinet you wish you had.” -- Memzilla, commenter on Wonkette
Don’t know much about physiognomy, but remembering what Lincoln said about a man earning his face, the cartoonist in me has been thinking about the noses worn by J.P. Morgan and his current avatar, Rupert Murdoch. Is there something about a bulbous nose that is not content with owning just part of the world, but has to own everything, knock any opposition to the ground?
Both men reached the enviable postion of doing whatever they damn well please and ignoring the laws of lesser men. Morgan got fat by controlling railroads and steel, dominant of their day, while Murdoch has sought hegemony over the space between the electorate’s ears. Morgan had a famously bulbous, purple nose deformed by rhinophyma, the result of untreated rosacea. Rupert Murdoch's seems to have been shaped by character, curling his upper lip and squinting his eyes at all the smells of a world he doesn’t like. He wears a frown that cannot, cannot permit any serious worldview that diverges from the worldview of Rupert Murdoch.
We have the miserly, pinched image of acquisitiveness, as captured in cartoon shorthand by the likeness of Scrooge, caricatures of Rockefeller, and Henry Ford— traits combined in the design of The Simpsons' C. Montgomery Burns, and before that, the stock figure of Pantalone. Morgan and Murdoch and their noses are of some different order altogether. Did this nose possess W.C. Fields, who could never drink his fair share, but had to drink it all?
How powerful was Morgan? It was Morgan who bought out Andrew Carnegie from U.S. Steel, the first billion dollar deal in history. How rich was he? In 1895 Morgan bailed out the federal government itself, then rescued it again in 1907. (It was the second bailout, incidentally, that prompted creation of the Federal Reserve system as an alternative to the whims of billionaires). The New York Times itself was purchased by the Ochs family with a loan from Morgan. And Murdoch? Murdoch is "the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows every quiver of each of them-- beg pardon-- that's Moriarty, not Murdoch. Of Moriarty's nose we know very little, though Alan Moore might make something of these connections, il miglior fabbro. and all that. Rupert Murdoch has shaped the world in his own image, sold his prejudices to the English-speaking world, giving the uber-rich a grip on power and resources that a medieval despot would envy. No need to instill a belief in the divine right of kings-- Rupert has empowered the ruling class to steal the common man’s shoes and then sell them back to him, taught them to deny the existence of a ruling class, hold out the pretense that the economic deck isn’t stacked, mock anti-Murdoch forces as fools and villains.
Urologists in London have debunked the penis-to-ratio myth-- so what is it about these men, that they spend their lives trying to fuck us?
Gabrielle Giffords, U.S. Representative for Arizona's 8th congressional district, was shot in the head today while attending a meet-the-representative event outside a Safeway grocery store. After shooting congresswoman Giffords, the assailant fired into the crowd at random, killing a nine year old child, a federal judge, and several others.
Sarah Palin's webmasters quickly moved to take down her PAC ad that featured crosshairs on Giffords' name. When asked about this during the campaign, Giffords told MSNBC, "We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action.” Giffords' opponent held a rally during the election with the following ad: "Get on Target for Victory in November / Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office / Shoot a fully automatic M15 with Jesse Kelly".
It is expected that the political right will profess to be "horrified" and describe this act as "random" and "senseless". If they were capable of insight into their own culpability, they would not be who they are.
The death of Rachel Corrie and the map below ought to cure us of any sentimentality over Israel. An essay by Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic, "What If Israel Ceases to Be a Democracy?" should finish the job. Unblinking support for Israel isn't ennobling, it's enabling.
I already live in a country that cannot reconcile its stated intentions with the behavior of its governing class. Carrying a genetic rap sheet from the likes of Ireland, France and the Confederate state of Tennessee only adds to my chagrin. Add the tax burden of three billion for Israel, one billion for the Palestinian Authority, pretty soon I'm sponsoring a blood feud between relatives I didn't know I had. Do they really need another Hotchkiss Gun at Wounded Knee?
I held out longer than most of my friends, trying to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. I was trying to be "sensible".
Excuse #1: Realpolitik means that progressives would have to swallow some things we don't like, in order to inch a little closer to a better world. I told my angry friends they underestimate the death grip of the intransigent right.
Excuse for Barack #2: Inheriting a dog's dinner of deficit, depression, and two trillion-dollar wars, I defy anyone to make Bush's mess into a chef d'œuvre.
Excuse #3: Obama is intentionally bending to the right so that when he finally implements the needed change, no one can accuse him of not trying to work with his opponents.
The Sharrod fiasco, followed fast by the administration's reaction to the Wikileaks affair finally tipped me over. No more excuses; "sensible" no longer.
Tom Tomorrow has introduced a new character, Chuckles the "Sensible" Woodchuck, who nails it better than anyone in the drawing above. Such is the power of the cartoon-- although Josh Shrei and Matt Hamlin come close: "If you’re changing your views or apologizing for a politician who has not met your expectations, something is wrong."
Hug, nay, kiss and buy drinks and dinner for the comic book geek of your choice (ahem.) And pass this along to the PFLAG community, community organizers, and other people of good will.
Apparently a few members of the the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas, notorious and reviled for their "God Hates Fags" protests outside military funerals and other events, thought they would get their picture taken by protesting outside the Comicon in San Diego, biggest event in the comic book year. The Eisner Awards, comics' equivalent of the Oscar or the Pulitzer, happen there, and the big movie studios stalk the halls for "buzz", which I suppose attracted Fred Phelps.
Somehow, the fans at the convention not only got advance of the demonstration, they put together a counter-demonstration with materials at hand (costumes, signs) that was ten times larger and MUCH funnier. More in-jokes than ... than.. well I can't think of anyplace with more in-jokes than a comics convention, unless it's a couple of "Monty Python" fans, and those groups overlap.
Where else would you find a loving Jesus side by side with an invocation of the Hypno-Toad? Gail Simone was one of the pros there; she spoke clearly and simply about the protesters' intentions as you'd hope from the writer of Birds of Prey, Welcome to Tranquility, and the best run on Wonder Woman since Greg Rucka. I hope word spreads, because this seems much more effective at dissipating Phelps' power than the righteous anger and well-intentioned complaints he encounters elsewhere.
My friend Wayne hopes the Baptists try again in Chicago, giving him an excuse to break out the crotchless Riddler costume and a "KNEEL BEFORE ZOD" sign. As if he needs an excuse.
We need a book for children that explains propaganda and media manipulation, from the Pharaoh's pyramids through Edgar Bernays, Madison Avenue and modern "spin doctors". For every seeker of the truth, there's a roomful of advertising executives and media consultants working overtime to create a perception that flatters their client.
"As part of a public diplomacy program similar to Radio Free Europe or Voice of America, the State Department had allocated more than $4 million a year to launch a magazine about American culture, which would be translated into Arabic and sold across the Arab world. ... One of my favorite sections loosely translated to 'Window on America.' It was a simple conceit: a photo essay showing what America actually looks like, unfiltered. A bass fishing tournament, a breast-cancer walk, the Puerto Rican Day parade—these were exotic images to most Arabs, too often poisoned about the United States by their inflammatory local press. But during one review meeting, held before a star chamber of 10 high-level State Department officials, the co-leader specifically took offense to a photograph from a classic Western scene: campers and pack mules heading out on a rugged weekend expedition.
Our team always remained vigilant about cultural sensibilities, avoiding the bottoms of shoes, or bare arms, or other seemingly innocuous images that could backfire with the Arab audience. This official’s concerns, however, were more parochial. She held up the offending photo, as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting, and pointed to a pack mule that, by other names, might be known as a donkey. This has to go, she said. Too pro-Democrat. And out it went."
This sort of report is why I asked to be Cultural Czar after the revolution: Day One, a guillotine set up on Madison Avenue and we'll see how long it takes the media consultants to get the message. Place will look like a berserker's bowling alley.
My fellow revolutionaries may perceive a note of hostility in this plan. Let me make amends with this more pleasant reminder of Miss Betsey Trotwood, the old lady in David Copperfield equally obsessed with trespassing donkeys:
"Janet had gone away to get the bath ready, when my aunt, to my great alarm, became in one moment rigid with indignation, and had hardly voice to cry out, 'Janet! Donkeys!' Upon which, Janet came running up the stairs as if the house were in flames, darted out on a little piece of green in front, and warned off two saddle-donkeys, lady-ridden, that had presumed to set hoof upon it; while my aunt, rushing out of the house, seized the bridle of a third animal laden with a bestriding child, turned him, led him forth from those sacred precincts, and boxed the ears of the unlucky urchin in attendance who had dared to profane that hallowed ground.
To this hour I don't know whether my aunt had any lawful right of way over that patch of green; but she had settled it in her own mind that she had, and it was all the same to her. The one great outrage of her life, demanding to be constantly avenged, was the passage of a donkey over that immaculate spot. In whatever occupation she was engaged, however interesting to her the conversation in which she was taking part, a donkey turned the current of her ideas in a moment, and she was upon him straight. Jugs of water, and watering-pots, were kept in secret places ready to be discharged on the offending boys; sticks were laid in ambush behind the door; sallies were made at all hours; and incessant war prevailed. Perhaps this was an agreeable excitement to the donkey-boys; or perhaps the more sagacious of the donkeys, understanding how the case stood, delighted with constitutional obstinacy in coming that way. I only know that there were three alarms before the bath was ready; and that on the occasion of the last and most desperate of all, I saw my aunt engage, single-handed, with a sandy-headed lad of fifteen, and bump his sandy head against her own gate, before he seemed to comprehend what was the matter. These interruptions were of the more ridiculous to me, because she was giving me broth out of a table-spoon at the time (having firmly persuaded herself that I was actually starving, and must receive nourishment at first in very small quantities), and, while my mouth was yet open to receive the spoon, she would put it back into the basin, cry 'Janet! Donkeys!' and go out to the assault."
Here's five bucks says that General McChrystal pulls a McClellan, and runs for president against his former boss after Hopey fires him. Getting fired for being an asshole is the best thing to happen to him, career wise. Now someone else gets to take the heat for losing in Afghanistan. McChrystal can now spend the rest of his life posing as the guy who Would Have Won the Afghan War If Only.
I wanted to say something about the general's thirty years in black-ops as an unquestioning assassin for the emperor, but life's too short and how many ways can you say "murderous" and "self-fellatio"? That's just another motivation to stay limber.
Then there's Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”
“He had seen society in its three great phases—Obedience, Struggle and Revolt... and he hesitated in his choice. Obedience was dull, Revolt impossible, Struggle hazardous.” (Balzac, Pere Goriot)
“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.” (William Drummond, some old Scotsman)
“Something nice this way comes. It begins with the awful—whether it’s as enormous as the Holocaust or the World Trade Center or as intimate as family dysfunction or the death of a loved one—and then finds comfort. None of this Anna on the tracks, Emma in the dumps, or depressing Father Zosima’s corpse smells stuff; that’s sooo 19th century. ... Instead, let’s just book passage on a gentle, healing voyage. Sound trite? It is, but it’s apparently the literature of our time as exemplified by Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, along with everything McSweeney’s, the magazine founded by Eggers.” (Melvin Jules Bukiet , ”Wonder Bread” in The American Scholar)
“In American popular culture, the private detective is a unique heroic figure: champion of last resort for the vulnerable client, a knight-errant for hire, bringing rough or poetic justice to cases unserved by more official powers that be. [Robert Parker] wrote dialogue that at once informed, amused and gave a sense of character; and he conjured characters a reader wanted to spend more time with—especially Spenser, a fixed point in a footloose world, take him or leave him. A pragmatist whose ethics were situational. A tough and decent type who did what needed to be done in the service of a moral cause, affirming the worth of the individual regardless of race, sexual orientation, social status, age or occupation. He made timeless points that need to be remade every generation, in a society ever able to find ways to betray the public and private trust.” (Obituary by Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal)
“As Juke [on a 1974 Lily Tomlin special], Richard Pryor gave one of his relatively few great performances in a project that he had not written or directed. He made use of the poignancy that marks all of his great comedic and dramatic performances, and of the vulnerability—the pathos cradling his sharp wit—that had seduced people into loving him in the first place.... The concert films are excellent examples of what the Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey once described as Pryor’s ability to “scare us into laughing at his demons—our demons—exorcising them through mass hyperventilation.”... Taken together, the concert films show the full panorama of Pryor’s moods: brilliant, boring, insecure, demanding, misogynist, racist, playful, and utterly empathetic.... Pryor embodied the voice of injured humanity. A satirist of his own experience, he revealed what could be considered family secrets—secrets about his past, and about blacks in general, and about his relationship to the black and white worlds he did and did not belong to.” (Hilton Als profile of Richard Pryor in The New Yorker
“So Wonder Woman counts among one of the very few superhero genre characters that are legitimately a gift to young women. She is not a character to be marketed to young men. Marston assured the company the boys would read as well, but she's custom designed for young women. For god's sake, she's a princess who talks to animals. Her entire supporting cast, with the exception of one blockheaded love interest, was women. She is a character made with little girls in mind. The bondage urban legend always struck me as a mean-spirited attempt to rob us of that. To strip her of all innocent and generous beginnings in favor of something uber-sexualized. To say that we weren't worth our own superhero princess, she had to be secretly aimed at young men. That she was really meant for boys. It's a way to steal Wonder Woman, and claim she wasn't ever stolen. To be honest, that's why I've always felt they had trouble with her. She is a female-oriented character that they keep marketing to a widely male audience.” (Ragnell on her blog Written World”
“I think that's a big part of it — she COULD tear someone's head off, she COULD destroy a country if she chose. But she would consider that a failure as a warrior for peace. The death of an enemy is not victory to her. I love that stuff. I think it's a far better blueprint for the future than most of the action hero stuff out there right now. But there are a million reasons. I love that she's the DC universe's premiere badass. I love that she was giving messages of the power of womanhood in the 40's, you know, decades before Buffy or Xena or Lara Croft. And there's a part of me that loves the pegasi and the princess-ness of it all, and all the trappings of Paradise Island. She's just brilliantly conceived. And I like her with a dry sense of humor, while we're at it. The sisterhood aspect of the Amazons is tremendously compelling to me. Who wouldn't love to have that many sisters who loved you AND carried bladed weapons?” (Gail Simone, current writer on Wonder Wonan, in an interview at After Ellen)
“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men.” (Saint Francis)
“The largest single survey to date of serial killers found: 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as children; 46 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adolescents; 36 percent admitted to committing animal cruelty as adults.” (Human Society of the United States)
“When John Paul II appointed Cardinal Ratzinger head of the department that watches over theological orthodoxy (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF), it was in full confidence that he would curb the proliferating dissidents, not least the liberation theologians of South America who argued that sin could often mean not wrongdoing by individual moral agents, but the injustice of social and political structures leading to poverty and oppression. He soon earned himself the sobriquet "the Pope's Rottweiler". Theologians guilty of unorthodoxy were summoned to his inquisitorial office: some were deprived of their teaching licences, and others were excommunicated. ... Benedict... continues to think of the abuse as a spiritual lapse, rather than a psychological, social and criminal problem. Priestly pedophile abuse, in his view, is a failure of priesthood, a failure of holiness, asceticism and piety. ... The cause of the crisis, he said, had been secularism, and the temptations secularism has posed to the holiness of priests. The innocent majority of priests in Ireland... are infuriated by Benedict's implied exculpation of the Vatican and the papacy.” (John Cornwell in The New Statesman)
“Scientists suspect that small inherited predispositions are either enhanced or suppressed by experience, and computer models show that tiny discrepancies at the start can become enormous over time, through feedback loopings of positive reinforcement. Evidence is also emerging that certain physical setpoints affect temperament globally. Notable among such setpoints is the relative rate at which one’s nervous system processes sensory information. “There are low information processors who don’t attend much to their environment and bulldoze through life,” said David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Then there are the sensitive ones who are always taking things in, which can be good because information is valuable, but it can also be overwhelming.” Studies of highly sensitive people show their delicacy is “domain general,” Dr. Wilson said. Not only are they “exceptionally moved by symphonies” and find graphic depictions of violence “too hard to bear,” but they are also sensitive to drugs like caffeine, and their skin is easily irritated by the wrong soap, sunscreen and fabric. Highly sensitive pigs squeal a lot; highly sensitive people feel a lot. Sure, it’s painful at times. But just switch on some Bach and I’ll squeal my thanks for thin skin.” (Natalie Angierin The New York Times)
“Most TV comics trade in brand-name jokes or jokes that play off physical stereotypes. They don’t question their culture so much as pander to its insatiable hunger for distraction. But [Bill] Hicks’ mischievous flights of fantasy bring the audience back to reality with a thump. Hicks is a kind of ventriloquist of his contradictory nature, letting voices and sound effects act out both his angst and his appetites.... He started writing and performing his jokes as an alienated thirteen-year-old in Houston in 1975, and, by his own count, for the last five years he has been performing about two hundred and sixty-five days a year, sometimes doing as many as three two-hour gigs a night. Few contemporary comics or actors have such an opportunity to get their education in public.” (Profile of the late Bill Hicks by John Lahr in The New Yorker)
"Ms. Stoeger, my plastic surgeon doesn't want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose." "Well, there goes your social life."
The Teabaggers' complaints about Obama's tax plan-- after years of taking it up the yinyang from both Bushes, giving tax cuts 'til it hurts to the richest people in America, then resenting the poor-- reminds me of Mark Twain's comment about the difference between a man and a dog.
The group hug for the bad craziness of Sarah Palin, and the ratfuck Republican co-opting of Teabagger rage, reminds us again that there are some things a rat just won't do.
I do think that the Obama administration will be complicit in its own undoing, if Obama persists in getting Wall Street's stank all over himself. It may be that the Bush-induced bailout couldn't be helped, but Obama has the college professor's knack for not knowing what goes on in the trenches between people's ears. As a public school teacher, who wrestles daily with ignorance, I've seen a lot of his manner at academic conferences, and too many times seen progressives wrest defeat from victory.
You can't scold people for ignorance if you let others educate them. The working class joins the far-right for the same reason orphaned children join gangs; no one else bothers to give a shit. Twice a week, my little country school hosts military recruiters, twice a year I get offers for a free classroom set of Ayn Rand, something Howard Zinn and his admirers never bothered to do.
There are amusing compensations. Was there ever a time when a nude model, impersonating a political figure, sounded more qualified than the political figure she was impersonating? Submitted for your approval, a reasonably safe-for-work interview (warning, some artifical cleavage involved) with "Lisa Ann": "... This was more of a political piece, so people were asking me my political views and why I did this or that. It wasn’t as much about the sex and it wasn’t as ridiculed as I’ve seen on some mainstream television." Did you ever have any hesitations about doing the movie? "Honestly, I didn’t like Sara Palin. I got a chance to do something I felt strongly about. She was just so ridiculous. Such an easy target."
Compare Lisa Ann's syntax with any unscripted speech by Caribou Barbie, and tell me who gets a C and who gets a D-. I don't think we've seen such a topsy-turvy world since Nell Gwynn led the British aristocracy around by the... well, I guess we could call it a nose.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
-- Rudyard Kipling, "The Young British Soldier"
Dr. William Brydon, shown here, was the sole survivor of a 16,500 man British invasion of Afghanistan in 1842. Dr. Brydon and two others were harassed by the Afghans to the gates of Jalalabad; the other two were killed, with Brydon deliberately left alive to tell the tale. A detailed account is available in Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress by Jan Morris. Morris interviewed an old man (this was before the Russian invasion) who still carried a British rifle taken from the dead. Morris asked what would happen if an invader came again. "The same," the old man said.
Remember those embarrassing, unfunny sketches when Bob Hope put on a wig and pretended to be a hippie? That's what the "health care advocates" looked like who testified before Congress last week and pretended to care. The Business Roundtable was there. The Chamber of Commerce was there. The insurance companies were there, naturallement. Gods help us and save us, the Heritage Foundation showed up, still wanting revenge for Hoover's defeat and Reagan's canonization, or whatever it is they do besides peeing in everyone's soup. There was not a single witness asked to testify in favor of a single payer system, although that seems to be what the majority of the American people-- including doctors and nurses-- want. The foxes who bought the hen house-- $512,042,660 it cost them in lobbying last year, and they own it goddamnit!-- voted in favor of fatter hens. Single payer advocates were treated as protesters, and removed from the chamber by police. Bill Moyers' Journalhas the best coverage of this I've seen, naming names and doing the math: there are thirty times more health care "administrators" than there are doctors and nurses in this country, for one instance. Drug and insurance companies profit from the current fragmentation, the fix is in so far as Congress is concerned, and the president is trying to do this without making the insurance companies mad.
Is anyone else worried about what's happened to Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the shoe-throwing journalist still in "detention" in Iraq? This is, after all, the land where habeas corpus went to die, and no one's seen or heard from him other than second-hand reports from his brother in the week before Christmas. We don't really know what "detention" means to the people holding the keys. We don't know if he "tripped and fell down the stairs" or if his arm really was broken in the arrest. The New York Times itself can't make up it's mind whether he's been tortured by the cops or handled with kid gloves because the Whole World is Watching.
His lawyers might make a case for diminished capacity, PTSD, (Al-Zaidi has been covering the widows and orphans of Iraq, been kidnapped once and arrested twice) but that would erase the meaning of al-Zaidi's quixotic gesture, like that killer last line of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer": "It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said." What I'm hoping for is five years minus time served, compensation if he has indeed been abused while in detention-- and a guarantee of a free pair of custom-made shoes for life. If he ever visits Kalamazoo, his money's no good here. This heartfelt anger was political theater that turned the propaganda of professionals, their jet planes and "Mission Accomplished" signs, into tinkling brass.
I love the man. "This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog! This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!" What most commentators have missed is that technology has made our leaders as remote from any consequence of their actions as any ancient autocrat. Somebody (I thought it was Bertrand Russell, but I can't find the quote) said of Khruschev and Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis: "If they say 'live', we shall live; if they say 'die', we shall die." This is an unhappy thought for a culture that can grant an utter fool the power of a god, and puts our entire species at the whim of distant torturers. Predator planes, satellite spies, the NSA's erosion of privacy and the Army's research into robot soldiers are become so commonplace that this power to murder and ruin is now in a hundred hands instead of a few. Who would begrudge a man who has seen too many dead children the throwing of a shoe?
"Now the movements of nations have become like a huge slow solemn dance of the elephants, random power swaying in unpredictable directions, their movements obscured by a stifling rain of paper, pastel forms in octuplicate, programmed tapes, punch cards. Through this low rain, in the shadowy patterns of the dance, scurry a half a billion bureaucrats, each squealing self-important orders. Beneath the wrinkled gray legs, ten thousand generals squat, playing with their war game toys. The billions of mankind sit in the huge gloomy reaches of the stands, staring without comprehension... and because tension and waiting can only be sustained so long, they can make their own little games and charades in the stands, the charades of art, sex, money, power and random murder." -- John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold.
Mr. al-Zaidi appears to have been a gentle soul who specialized in human interest stories about widows and orphans. The popinjay he targeted is responsible for three times as many innocent deaths as were killed on 9/11, spent money that would make a Nero or Caligula blush-- and still professes not to know what the fuss was about. That he is insulated from shame is no surprise; I've never seen a crime that a Bush couldn't wriggle out from under, from banking for Nazis to drug running by the Contras to... Good luck pinning one down with the sword of Justice; they must be covered in protective slime like a catfish. Will there, should there be, a commission to investigate crimes committed by the Bush administration? President Obama is playing his cards close to the chest, and too many members of Congress are guilty of aiding and abetting. You won't see an American standing trial in the Hague as long as Kissinger's still alive, but an independent "truth commission", like the ones in South Africa, might be nice.
When frothing near the ceiling about seeing the whole crew in leg irons, I have to keep reminding my friends that incompetence isn't punishable by law. They remind me that George Bush left so many fires burning in his wake, it could be years before anyone got around to pursuing the firebug. This in itself is a kind of brilliance, like those beasts that escape their pursuers by defecating. Someday, perhaps, with the wheels of Justice grinding very slow, but exceedingly small.
I didn't realize just how happy I was until I arrived at my friends' house and opened that first Guinness, with Rachel Maddow and the BBC interviewing survivors of the Little Rock Nine, and the joint realization that this is the first time in my lifetime that the guy I wanted to be president actually won. Sure, I voted for Clinton (Damn Near Republican) and went door-to-door for whoever was running against the Shrub, but this time...
Working with schoolchildren all day, with the inauguration on in the background, one tries to be a voice of moderation, explaining the process, asking leading questions, supplying the humorous anecdote: Andrew Johnson showing up drunk for his inauguration, William Henry Harrison (the Indian killer) literally talking himself to death by droning on for two hours in an icy rain. But children, for all their enthusiasm, don't get it. Being but strangers to this world, they recognize that it's "important", but they can't be expected to understand that there's anything unusual about today's events. If this day was going to be truly savored, it needed to be shared with adult friends.
The gore-crow of the Bush administration has finally taken its beak from out my heart. Complete sentences were spoken. Thomas Paine was quoted. The King James Bible was invoked. The wicked were politely admonished. My favorite was the benediction by the Reverend Joseph Lowery (co-founder of the SCLC with M.L. King) who with a twinkle in his eye, went beyond the lyrics of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" to end with a paraphrase of the bluesman Big Bill Broonzy:
But it wasn't just about seeing John Lewis and wondering what was going on in his scarred head, or seeing the cover painting of The Nation and tearing up when I realized that was Emmett Till and the four little girls killed in Birmingham standing on the podium with Obama. When Pat said there was a weight off her shoulders, I recognized there was a childlike element to my happiness; it felt like... when I was 10 or 11 years old... like that moment in Amazing Spider-Man #33...
The BBC is talking about the death at age 91 of Helen Gavronsky Suzman, apparently the best known Caucasian anti-apartheid activist in South Africa. I've never heard of her before this, but something she said in a recording struck me as so simple and profound that I'd like to attach it to any description of my politics.
It's weird that Americans don't have "politics" the way Europeans do; there's even a bestseller making the rounds about how we vote with our gut and not with our heads. (The thought that our stomachs have a brain almost as powerful as our cerebrum is a scary thought I'll save for a science-fiction story). This is what happens in a culture when schools function as employment agencies for coaches, and you let them teach civics and history as a seat-warming exercise-- before you scoff, I knew at least one high-school librarian who spent his day drawing up football plays. I was complimented by a French Swiss once and I had to tell him that I really wasn't that smart, but just had the habit (unusual for an American, apparently) of thinking about why I believe what I believe.
Before this, I've been content with Brendan Behan's summary, that I first read at a bar in Chicago: "I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer." This sums up the goals of good government, and implies the need to build a lasting peace (which, despite the chest thumping of warriors, will always be harder to build than war. Emotionally and materially cheaper in the long run, though.)
But there was something missing, that kept this from being a complete political manifesto, at least for me. Behan's phrase tells us what to build, and leaves policy up to us, but doesn't deal with the Problem of Evil, the killer ape within, what Jungians call the Shadow (and for once, I'm not talking about Lamont Cranston). This is the oversight that collapses philosophical anarchism (what do we do with those who won't co-exist peacefully?). James Madison addressed the problem in The Federalist Papers: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Our refusal to acknowledge the shadow killed the Sixties just as dead as CIA-sponsored drugs-- the Summer of Love was stabbed to death at Altamont, chopped into pieces by the Manson family, and shoved in a trunk by the Unicorn Killer. What, then, must we do?
I look through my other rule books: Camus, Confucius, Orwell and Paolo Friere, and re-read the political attitudes etched in my bones, in The Once and Future King, Travis McGee and the superheroes, Pogo and Heinlein and Hannah Arendt, Angel and "Rumpole of the Bailey". All these things have shaped my thinking, help me define my moral compass (buy me a Guinness and I'll go on for hours), but there's no simple phase that can fit on a sign and still be understood out of context. Even Travis McGee admits that his own manifesto, a banner embroidered by countless maidens, keeps trailing on the ground and getting stepped on. Suzman to the rescue this morning, one last note of a grace from a woman I never heard of. Here, then, is the Helen Suzman amendment to the Brendan Behan manifesto. It was a simple answer (with profound implications) to the question of what started her on her long road : "I hate bullies and I like simple justice."
Canadian Coup Corner: What the hell is going on with Canada? They're supposed to be the sane ones. Sure, they've just as many guns as the U.S., and their junior hockey program would give a Spartan pause, but they mostly leave the craziness on the ice. With habeas corpus suspended in the land of Mickey Mouse, the U.S. in the thrall of busy, evil men, and labyrinthine Mexico reviving human sacrifice as a pastime along the Juarez border, I thought we could count on Canada to be the designated driver of North America. Now their election is suspended? By Her Majesty's representative? The 21st century might not be about democratization, but more and more about crowd control by the governing class, walling themselves off from desperate mobs in the drowning streets.
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Both men reached the enviable postion of doing whatever they damn well please and ignoring the laws of lesser men. Morgan got fat by controlling railroads and steel, dominant of their day, while Murdoch has sought hegemony over the space between the electorate’s ears. Morgan had a famously bulbous, purple nose deformed by rhinophyma, the result of untreated rosacea. Rupert Murdoch's seems to have been shaped by character, curling his upper lip and squinting his eyes at all the smells of a world he doesn’t like. He wears a frown that cannot, cannot permit any serious worldview that diverges from the worldview of Rupert Murdoch.
James Madison addressed the problem in The Federalist Papers: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Our refusal to acknowledge the shadow killed the Sixties just as dead as CIA-sponsored drugs-- the Summer of Love was stabbed to death at Altamont, chopped into pieces by the Manson family, and shoved in a trunk by the Unicorn Killer. What, then, must we do?
"A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?" -- While Raj from What's Happening looks on.
Canadian Coup Corner: What the hell is going on with Canada? They're supposed to be the sane ones. Sure, they've just as many guns as the U.S., and their junior hockey program would give a Spartan pause, but they mostly leave the craziness on the ice. With habeas corpus suspended in the land of Mickey Mouse, the U.S. in the thrall of busy, evil men, and labyrinthine Mexico reviving human sacrifice as a pastime along the Juarez border, I thought we could count on Canada to be the designated driver of North America. Now their election is suspended? By Her Majesty's representative? The 21st century might not be about democratization, but more and more about crowd control by the governing class, walling themselves off from desperate mobs in the drowning streets.
