Kaepernick Versus the Police Unions

(stock photo)

Among far too many people the faith in law and fairness takes a distant second to a faith in force and power, when the chips are down. We saw this immediately after the events of 9/11. Before the fires were out the Congress was hard at work building a new “patriot act,” which overturned formerly accepted civil protections. Waterboarding, an interrogation tactic which had been ruled a kind of torture by international agreements since at least World War II, was suddenly accepted by top police and intelligence agencies if the threat was deemed too serious to worry about the legal niceties. By the end of 2003 or 2004 we were seeing the photos from Abu Graib prison in Iraq. CIA interrogators who argued that tactics like water-boarding yielded lies were pretty much ignored.

For decades in this country many police agencies have apparently believed that extreme force was justified when their authority was questioned by minority citizens. Questioning authority might mean a person running from a traffic stop for a broken tail light, or simply a person objecting to being stopped with vehemence. If a minority citizen was foolish enough to be impaired or mentally unstable, they might be killed on the spot even if they had no weapon, or if they were brandishing a knife at a distance. On too many occasions, citizens of color have been shot and killed because a particular policeman has been on a kind of “hair trigger,” expecting the worst kind of trouble as soon as the encounter with the citizen began. The child with the pellet gun in Cleveland comes to mind, and the man shopping in an Ohio Walmart and carrying a plastic toy rifle he was intending to purchase for his son. Meanwhile, white citizens in similar situations tend to be “talked down,” often never charged with anything. It's passing strange.

It is too many instances like John Crawford's killing at Walmart, or the mysterious death of Freddie Gray, which have led people like Colin Kaepernick to kneel when the National Anthem is played at games, or the flag displayed. The protest, which does no more that remind all of us that the flag actually stands for the best American values, has spread because the patent injustices keep coming, week after week, in the headlines. A lot of people think about it and find they agree with Mr. Kaepernick. Kneeling, by the way, is pretty respectful. No one is burning the flag, as they did during Vietnam for similar reasons. Now police unions are threatening to remove police protections from teams who join in the protests. This threat, while it may give immediate pleasure to people who do not want to hear anything from the downtrodden but “yessir,” is almost elegantly misguided.

If you think about it in the abstract, it is the removal of expected police behavior which underlies almost all the questionable actions of police against minorities. Everyone expects police to be restrained, since they hold the power of life and death. This expectation is overturned when a policeman rolls up and blasts a 12-year-old within literally seconds of their arrival. When such actions are then justified by grand juries, there is an overall loss of something we all expect. The police, after all, work for all of us.

If a particular force is needed at a particular football game, removing such force because someone on the field did something some of the policemen don't like (and actually don't understand) is arbitrary and in it's own way another example of the same thing being protested against in the first place. You'd think the police unions would get this. What they are suggesting instead is that since police have life and death power, they should be feared and whatever they might do in a particular circumstance must be accepted without question. Force and power, in other words, win out over fairness and justice.

This is fundamentally a racist or fascistic position. It's not what we want our civil servants to assert. Since Mr. Trump is asserting pretty much the same idea, it's also perhaps a dangerous harbinger of what life in the United States might well become under a Trump regime. When he talks about “getting tough,” what he means is ending legal niceties. The groups we fear for whatever reason will be targeted for rough justice. A naturalized Afgani-American is now a suspect in the New Jersey bombings over the weekend. Trump immediately suggests that all such Afgani-Americans should expect a knock in the night. This is a return to a dark world the United States is working to leave behind. If police unions endorse such a world they had best study up on how these things worked in the Soviet Union and East Germany. You don't have to be ethnic to become a suspect, you just have to be subject to an anonymous whisper campaign. Perhaps Kafka's The Trial would make for good weekend reading, before the boys in blue tune in the NFL.

In the 1950s here in the US our government denied J. Robert Oppenheimer a security clearance. It can happen here. It did, in fact, happen here. Tony Stewart says Kaepernick is an "idiot." Perhaps that's reassuring, in the sense that it illustrates the obliviousness of white privilege which connected white men usually exemplify. Mr. Stewart was generously given the benefits of many doubts a couple of years back. He probably didn't even notice. John Crawford: not even one.

The Place Where the Circle Squares

Mr. Edroso takes note today of a fresh new column by Ron Dreher:

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2015/01/ass-man.html

In the column, Dreher follows the corkscrew tail of Satan right up Satan's... errrrm... fundament, and never even notices. Here's his genius conclusion, after two chalk-boards of equations:

...But the decadence represented by Charlie Hebdo is probably a greater threat to Western civilization than anything the Islamists can dream up, and it’s important to keep that straight even as we defend the right to free expression and a free press.

Dreher then goes on to put Lena Dunham's tv show, Girls, into the same bucket with the swill he's sloshing, based on a brief glimpse of a sex scene which for reasons unknown to me in 2015 has apparently caused some sort of "stir" amongst some folks or other:

Scrolling my Facebook feed last night, I found this New York magazine feature about the season premiere of HBO’s Girls, which featured a scene in which a man performs oral sex on his girlfriend’s anus. It turns out that this is a thing in pop culture now.

Edroso rightly questions the "pop culture" reference, which can mean little more than "on the teevee". What's shocking--but also revealing--is the ease with which Dreher essentially defends the real actual no shit murder of a bunch of cartoonists (one of them was 81 years old, another just 18) as a blow for I guess you could say the 'murrican way.

Here's something everyone needs to get straight. It's a lesson in logic I guess. The deal is, you can't actually just say one thing, and then a contradictory thing, and then by simply stipulating that there is no contradiction, go right on to whatever conclusion you might desire to achieve before your space limit is attained and you can draw your check from your publisher. This is one way that logic is rather like math. And a corollary of this is probably that if you do mix in a contradiction or two in your argument, you'll find that you can seem to conclude damn near anything you want to conclude, and even convince yourself. And once you've convinced yourself, if you're a decent writer, you can probably convince your readers, or some significant percentage of them. This is how we are making our sad way to a fully American authoritarian, fascist society, one red state at a time, one police force after the next. What would DesCartes make of the new police dictum: "I thought he had a gun."

In point of fact--I watched the episode of Girls in question, as HBO was free last weekend--and what exactly Ms Williams' boyfriend was doing is not actually depicted in said scene. Mr. Dreher has lept to yet another conclusion, as has the New York magazine's reviewer (if indeed such conclusion was lept to in Dreher's cited source). We don't know what exactly is happening between Ms Williams' character on the show and her character's partner on said show. We can only say that they were having sex, as later Ms Dunham's character on the show has sex with her boyfriend. Ms Dunham, by the way, engages (acts) a scene of traditional woman-on-bottom facing man-on-top sex, thus defending the barricades alongside of Mr. Dreher, against the charging Orcs. Moreover, Dunham's fingernail polish is as perfect as my mother's was, in 1958. Orcs surround the bed in their death throes by the end of the scene, and Dunham leaves for Iowa, where possibly Dreher is scheduled to teach an elective course in blather in the coming semester.

Meanwhile, Presidential Hopefully Mike Huckabee (sheesh, he was actually elected to a governorship one time!) has taken a shot at the Obamas' parenting abilities, suggesting that they should not "allow" their teenage daughters to view Beyonce's videos. Does he think that task would be easier that trying to get the Tea Party Congress to actually cooperate in governance? And as was pointed out by a blindfolded archer, this same Huckabee hangs around with Ted Nugent, who had a published song back in his rock days lauding sex amongst the preteens. Hell, even the Stones got the girls into teenhood before they pointed out the truth: "it ain't no hangin' matter, ain't no capital crime."

The right trades in this Major Hoople rocking chair shock. Why it never grows too old to work it's hard to say. Maybe blood just trumps every logical synapse. As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, the French parliament voted 488 to 1 to attack ISIS militarily, in a reaction to the murders at Charlie Hebdo. The voices who ask the right questions are buried under the hurricane's wind.

The question is: why does the radical islamist movement want the West in a mindless tizzy. Because. OBVIOUSLY!! That is the goal, just as it was on 9/11. As happened then, now fourteen years ago, the trap worked. George Armstrong Custer must be turning in his grave. David Seaton spells it out in his most recent post:

If these attacks cause anti-Muslim sentiment in western countries, so much the better... France's Marine Le Pen and Germany's Pegida movement are some of radical Islam's most valuable western assets as they prove to the masses of "Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan" the Islamist message that their unelected rulers are collaborators with the enemies of their religion and culture. http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/2015/01/like-9-11-paris-massacre-is-not-about-us.html

In Saudi Arabia last year the government beheaded 83 people.

And On D-Day Week No Less

Lance Mannion wrote this on Friday, June 6th:

The Republican flip-floppery, hypocrisy, cynicism, and demagoguery on the release of Bowe Bergdahl is routine---a routine---for the GOP these days. But it’s also defining. They’re showing once again how willing and eager they are to write people off.
Their position now is that Bowe Bergdahl should have been left to die in the hands of the Taliban.
Just as it’s their position that the uninsured should be left to die of whatever ails them, the homeless should be left to freeze on the street (just out of sight, of course), the hungry should starve, the children of the poor left to grow up in poverty and want.
The establishment media’s insistence that there’s a difference between Tea Party Republicans and sensible,rational/establishmentarian Republicans and it’s a good thing the Tea Party types are being put back in their place by their betters would be amusing if it wasn’t so stupid and destructive.
I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again because the need to doesn’t seem to be going away.
There is only one type of Republican, just it comes in three different flavors.
The Christian Right, the Tea Party Right, and the Corporatist Right.  They dress differently, use different idioms, have different manners, but they are all alike in the way they divide the nation in two, between the Deserving (narrowly defined to the point of pretty much meaning “Me and my family”) and the Undeserving (broadly defined to mean “Everybody who isn’t me or a part of my family”).  The damned and the saved, the makers and takers, Us and THEM! Three ways of saying the same thing.
“We got ours, the rest of you can do us a favor and drop dead.”

Rachel Maddow on Thursday night showed screen captures of quite a few Republican Congressional representatives who had tweeted or otherwise initially congratulated the Bergdahl family and by implication, the President, upon achieving the release of a volunteer American serviceman who had spent five years in captivity in Afganistan. All of these congratulations had subsequently been deleted by their authors, as a general and unwavering line of Republican condemnation had developed over the past week. Maddow and others have also shown recent audiovisual clips by Senator McCain and other Republican bigwigs demanding the events concerning Bergdahl that have actually unfolded this past week. This remarkable about-face by the GOP is probably far more important to the health of our tattered Republic than Sgt. Bergdahl's release; it is a symptom for the worse. It shows yet again that one of our two major parties has no regard for either the truth or human decency. It is a dangerous thing when one of the organizations from which the next Presidential candidate will emerge is so degraded in both intelligence and moral fiber. These people might just be running the country in two years.

If people aiming to wield political power have no compunction about lying at every turn, the exercise of democratic choice is endangered. This is even more true when the country is saddled with a “news” organization that disseminates lies as deep and rich as Lord Haw Haw, and in American English no less. Fox News is, for millions, simply “the news.” It's the same brand that brings millions of Americans their favorite sports every weekend, and many of their favorite entertainments throughout the work week. When commentator after commentator suggests that Sgt. Bergdahl is a traitor, and that his parents are the same, quite a lot of people who will go to the voting booth will believe this to be the case. It's that simple.

Meanwhile, the insidious proliferation of firearms continues. Open Carry has become a Gucci-zation of the AK-47. Mr. Stewart wondered recently if there weren't a logical intersection of the Stand-Your-Ground idea, meaning the legal incorporation of some sort of right to “shoot if you're afraid”, with the freight train coming from the opposition direction: a band of guys in bermuda shorts carrying semi-automatic firearms anywhere and everywhere they choose. This disaster builds like a super-cell over the Oklahoma panhandle. And if the rest of us somehow get used to the idea of bands of folks carrying weapons into Walmart and the post office, how different will that be from the commonplace, in Rwanda, of a man with a machete. “Jas wackin' da bush, bas. Keepin' eye out for da mamba.” Mr. LaPierre's logic contains a lot of buried premises. Ultimately, the “good guy with the gun” really means, “me with a gun.” Everyone else is the Other.

Or, see Mr. Mannion, above. Ibid. D.c. al fine. Fortissimo.

As Driftglass noted this week, in amazement, David Brooks has so far stood against the tide of jingoism and defended Bergdahl. But for a couple of days the NRA actually took a sensible position, only to walk it back. We'll see.

______________________

Sunday Morning Update: Ah, Mr. Hannity is quite the fellow on the Bergdahl story. Last night he was running a "special news report" on the "Bergdahl trade," as he called it. He had a live audience for the rah-rah, and featured the parents of a soldier in Bergdahl's unit who also died in Afganistan. He alleged that this serviceman died "searching" for Bergdahl, although that detail is disputed in the general discussion, if not on Fox. I changed the channel before I could hear whatever it might be the parents of this soldier might say. Judging from his emails (and already I've jumped straight into the briar patch, since none of us should be "judging" Sgt. Bergdahl), Bergdahl was disgusted by the "mission" he found himself a part of. Mr. Hannity reads Bergdahl's complaints to the parents of his dead comrade. This is shooting fish in a barrel, incendiary, and entirely irrelevant to anything. Hannity, Fox News, and the right wing generally, are performing a true high-tech lynching, to use a fine phrase coined twenty years ago by the joke George H.W. Bush played on the African-American community. With this full-bore character assassination of Sgt. Bergdahl, they aim to lynch their true target, President Obama. We can only hope and pray that the Nation will soon perceive the character of this GOP lynch mob.

This unfolding tragedy is not entirely irrelevant to the open carry crowd either. The weapons they want to brandish in every corner of the country are only Gucci bags as long as the spell holds. When they walk into a 7-11 run by a man in a turban, or a coffee shop where Sgt. Bergdahl is having coffee, they may turn back into what a crowd with guns really is, like it or not. Big trouble.

Potentate

Have you noticed how Wayne LaPierre and the NRA generally present themselves not as lobbyists, or as simply members of a group via paying dues to it, or as subscribers to the NRA magazine (Best Ammo For Saturday Varmit Huntin'; Why Did My Ruger 627-B Jam Up--Questions and Answers). No way. Ever since the Newtown murders (if not before), the NRA presents itself as a foreign potentate, available for public remarks just exactly now, on a busy schedule. They are oracular, and calculatedly so. They expect--demand--deference.

In LaPierre's initial presser a week after Newtown, no questions were allowed. This was, in fact, a theft of power, and the press writ large let it happen. Then there was LaPierre's first appearance with David Gregory. That time he did allow a certain sort of question, but once again, LaPierre controlled the flow of the conversation. I never heard any sort of serious followup. Couple of weeks ago, same interviewer, same relationship. Gregory talks to LaPierre like he's the King of Siam. No matter how rediculous LaPierre's assertions, they just get to stand there.

What's being constructed by the NRA is a facade of omnipotence. LaPierre is the Pope of Rifle. Couple of days ago there was a new big presser, with former Arkansas Congressman Asa Hutchinson driving the bus. Charlie Pierce reports:

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nra-plan-for-armed-schools-040213

I particularly noticed the following:

...task force led by Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas, who unveiled the plan before a packed news conference with an unusually heavy security presence, including a bomb-sniffing yellow Labrador retriever. A dozen officers in both plain clothes and uniforms stood watch as Mr. Hutchinson spoke; before the event began, one of them warned several photographers to "remain stationary" until it was over....

By all means read the whole piece. But notice. This is set up like a press conference in The Sudan. (Or like a George W. Bush personal appearance.) There is a psychological game at work. The NRA is working tirelessly to establish itself as a entity which has the literally last word on anything involving firearms in the US. And their efforts are in many quarters succeeding. Already many local and state governments defer to whatever the NRA happens to assert re firearms. In my state, within days of LaPierre's assertion that what all schools need is more guns our Legislature and our Governor were setting up a study aimed at how best to implement this idea. There has been much discussion, across the country, about the NRA actually teaching school guards. And so it goes. There's also the parallel illusion being foisted: talking about "real solutions" to our fire arms problem is dangerous, so we have to have bodyguards at hand. Thus does the NRA sell fear 24/7.

Meanwhile, the NRA is now opposed even to the provision of the weapons legislation being considered by the United States Congress which makes it illegal to purchase weapons for a third party. Back when I was a kid, if you wanted to buy a pint of whiskey, you could find some guy hanging out near the liquor store and get him to go in and get a bottle for you, for a small fee. That, by the way, was illegal. But it's not illegal at the moment to run that same dodge with firearms.

So, no doubt, the photogs "remained stationary." Too bad one of the great photographers who covered WW II wasn't in the room. He or she would surely have recognized the trappings. The NRA frequently warns of "jackbooted thugs." I guess they know exactly how intimidating jackboots can be.

Here's Dana Millbank's report on the presser:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-the-nra-displays-its-muscle/2013/04/02/8b548a92-9bd3-11e2-9a79-eb5280c81c63_story.html

Larger Consequences

Ted Frier raises the larger issues masked by the sequester flap, and the on-going stalemate between the Congress and the President. There is also a nod, in Frier's spot-on analysis, to the breath-taking remarks of a Supreme Court Justice this week, concerning the alleged sociological coercion at work upon even (gasp) Virginia's senators, who voted with the majority to reinstate yet again the Voting Rights Act, in 2006. Mr. Scalia cited an unnamed theorist ("it has been written about") for the view that when in comes to "racial entitlement," once "they" gets it "they wont's let its go." On these "grounds" he proposes to overturn a 98-0 Senate vote!

Here's Mr. Frier, drawing on Walter Lippmann:

Republican calls that President Obama show "leadership" in this crisis by "capitulating" to their political demands are the same cynical wordplay we've become accustomed to hearing from Republicans, to be sure. Like those who said we needed to destroy the village in order to save it, Republicans say the President needs to save the nation from the "devastating" consequences of $85 billion in budget cuts by cutting $85 billion from the budget.

But the darker side of these calls for executive action to overcome legislative gridlock is the one that Walter Lippmann understood so well decades ago. It's one the President referred to obliquely in his press conference yesterday when he reminded reporters asking why he did not just "do something" that presidents under our Constitution are neither kings nor "dictators" (Obama used that word) able to dispatch the Secret Service like a Praetorian Guard to prevent legislators from catching their planes, or forcing these duly-elected, if recalcitrant, democratic leaders from doing a thing if they have a mind not to.

It does not take a genius -- or unhinged conspiracy theorist - to imagine that one strategy a right wing authoritarian movement might embrace to concentrate political power in the hands of a few might be to: First, allow the wealthy to make unlimited, undocumented political contributions; Second, rule the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional as part of a package to disenfranchise the opposition; and finally, make democracy unworkable so that the public will choose "authority to freedom" just as Lippmann said, even against its will. http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com/diary/11500/dictatorship-or-democracy

All the pieces are in place. It's a very disturbing situation we're in, and what is the alternative view? Possibly that the entire charade is just that--a way to mask responsibility for the destruction of our safety net in the cause of a "debt crisis" that is utterly a figment of imagination. For it is quite true that Mr. Obama also favors draconian reductions, and the argument now seems to turn on mere details, and whether sequestered cuts are or are not "blunt" enough, or too much. I experienced a weird small shift in perception last night, watching Ed Schultz and Ms Maddow. Mr. Obama became rather small and frail, his gestures weak, puny. One of the primary "stories," in show after show, was a concern with whether a mixed Star Wars/Star Trek metaphor was a blunder, or a stroke of subtlety.

A ghastly civil war once ended, it was thought forever, an understanding of the United States as a collection of small governments which had surrendered their sovereignty provisionally, and could take it back if they so decided. Blood decided that this way of looking at things was never again to be a true perspective. Yet, today, states rights are everywhere, and the government of the United States sits for the most part, silent.

And a Supreme Court Justice alleges that some deus ex machina is coercing the votes of Senators in the cause of "race privilege."

The Pre-Speech SOTU Show

It's too bad Mr. Obama couldn't have used some of the footage in the long pre-speech Live from Big Bear show in his section on mild, sensible gun-control measures. And they didn't even cover some very important aspects of that terrible story comin' down, such as this one:

http://hypervocal.com/news/2013/lapd-manhunt-shoots-wrong-truck/

No one will ask Mr. LaPierre how his vaunted "give 'em more guns" solution applies to this case. Should the two newspaper ladies have returned fire? Now that would have been a really bad idea. But the fact is, as anyone with any sense surely knows, all the training in the world will not necessarily produce fire arms activity which is necessarily on the right side of murder and mayhem. Fear and fire arms are a dangerous combination. In a sense, they resulted in every case of mass murder we've witnessed over the past forty or fifty years, give or take a few cases of I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. While a lot of folks see the specific problem as reflecting the specifics of the Los Angles Police Department, it takes little more than Occam's rusty razor to perceive the general point. Indeed, to miss it is a symptom of that margin where the Religion of Baal, in the form of the Semi-Automatic Rifle and its accompanying 30 round magazine, supersedes any rational perception of events in the real world.

Of course the toil in service of illusion is unceasing. This is because there are simply no limits to what is required to keep one's eyes open, yet unseeing. If the Auto Industry had been as hip to the science of advertising back in the day, we'd not now be saddled with driver's licenses, speed limits, or stop signs. After all, criminals drive without licenses when they want to, rarely observe the speed limit unless it is to remain unnoticed in the immediate aftermath of a crime, or stop for lights and signs when it is an inconvenience. LaPierre's world is free indeed, as free as the world of a squirrel or a herd of bison, or a Lakota warrior in 1650, before anyone from the other side of the planet had made their way to the Black Hills.

Mr. Ornery Bastid makes the points well:

http://bustednuckles.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/a-little-after-action-analysis/

The argument isn't to disarm the police. The argument is that weapons convey power beyond any completely realizable power of restraint. This is actually a very conservative notion, one might say, Burkean: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We're all doomed by reality to work along that thin window ledge, six stories up, sometimes in rain and ice. What's saddest of all is to listen to the gigantic amount of dissembling being generated by our various representatives in the service of this modern Baal. Well, at least if you don't count watching Ms Giffords' efforts to clap, or the piles of slaughtered children.

[photo: The Sun, John Valenzuela/AP Photo]

_____________________________

Sunday Update: This post was actually prompted by the bustedknuckles post cited above. Over there, "Moe" responded to my comment (which I later expanded herein) with the retort (I paraphrase), "who's going to protect me and my family if I don't--obviously not the cops, who can't shoot straight." That's of course part of the "gun problem" we all face in a succinct nutshell. All of us are individuals, living behind our individual doors, looking out at a world that is indeed dangerous on occasion. It's very easy to imagine particular exemplifications of danger which we might well meet with a weapon. We've all seen exactly those examples portrayed over the years with better and better precision in the movies. From the widder woman standing at the door with the shotgun, to Elmore Leonard's "Kill Shot," we all thrill (vicariously) when the bad guys are thwarted. "Lookie here, Lon, there warn't no bullets." Even in that case, evil is thwarted with the help of a weapon.

The hard part is to try to imagine not just the one particular scenario, but a more general hubbub of events which carry with them many "morals," some contradicting others. The Lanza boy got his weapons from his mother by murdering her with one of them. Like Moe, she would have probably said, before the tragic events silenced her and all those children--"well, I want to defend my home against all the crime I see--we all see--on the teevee every night." Fear and ambiguity will always be part of the context. The cops who shot up that truck were not crazy. They were misperceiving. And, they were most likely reasonably well trained.

LaPierre's foolish idea, to put armed, trained guards in every school, does not mitigate every thing, only certain particular things. An armed guard might well shoot a certain, particular school assaulter. He might well deter another. And he might himself be killed or disabled by yet another. As someone noted, some school boys in Arkansas decided to sit out in the woods near a school with high powered rifles and, after calling in a false fire alarm, picked off children who were exiting the school due to the alarm. What exactly is an armed guard going to do with that scenario? Yes indeed, a citizen might well defend his home against a particular home invader or even several. And a particular citizen might also mistakenly shoot his kid coming home late and sneaking in. Both things have happened, in "real" life.

The point is just this. There's a place for some sensible restrictions on the unfettered weapons market we now have. Just as there was a place for a restriction on owning a machine gun, or a bazooka. What happens when folks like "Moe" bring up defending their homes is, our perception of the overall problem is reduced to tunnel vision. We start looking at one particular way things can happen. This kind of tunnel vision is also part of being human. Ask George Zimmerman.

But I Didn't Hear Nobody Pray

Hop-skipping around my favorite blogs this morning the AIG suit story is "trending," and also the ongoing effort to kick-start some kind of domestic weapons control, and the fact that last year was hotter than all but one in our record-keeping era. Makes me want to keep this little page a saga of the Houdahenian race. Even stuck in Stalag 109 as they are (for their own good of course), things are pretty swell. This morning they heard a squirrel either on the roof of the kitchen, or possibly even in the ceiling of the kitchen (it's happened and has been a big problem). The three went to investigate and managed to bring down to the brick floor a glass vase, which they then walked around in the shards of, apparently to no pied damage. Houdahenianland is a small province in the east (est) of France, very near La Chaux-de-Fonds, just before you get to Switzerland. They make good cheeze, and some really excellent white wine. There is always a cool breeze blowing down the Alps, and no signs of hurricanes. The nuclear power plant is nestled in a valley to the southwest, and not visible from our porch. This does not explain why Mokey loves only fish (le poisson).

The worst thing I saw briefly on the teevee last night was some ex-Marine, a veteran of the Iraq war I think it was, who said he'd resist any sort of gun control because he wanted to be able to pass down his arsenal to his children and grandchildren, and under any registration system, he said, that would not be possible. This is a very bad sign for any sort of successful steps towards sanity. The Marine was not, as far as I could tell, working for the NRA or Colt Arms. He was just a regular guy.

Another worst thing. Mr Hagel, who in some ways is surely a good idea as Secretary of Defense--the fact that he actually faced combat suggesting that he might empathize with the kids he tosses into the meat grinder--turns out to have views on the physiology of rape and conception similar to that of Todd Akin and Paul Ryan, as well as dubious views concerning gay people. It is flabbergasting to me that these views would be ignored by Mr. Obama. On the women's issue front, one might well say that Mr. Obama owes his re-election to the idiocy of Republican positions on women's rights.

There was also a shining moment. Mr. O'Donnell interviewed a woman from Tucson who actually grabbed the magazine away from the guy who was killing people at the Tucson mall last year, before he could reload. She's become a gun control advocate, oddly enough, and is articulate, very sensible, and obviously grounded in, um, what's the word... Oh yes, reality. She told O'Donnell she's had many conversations with people who are against any sort of gun control, even including limitations on magazine size. Their main argument is, "I have a right to any size magazine I want, and I want a big one."

There is really a breathtaking obliviousness about too many Americans. It's probably always been a problem for us, and probably for humans. In my lifetime this tendency has been fostered and nourished by crackpot moral "philosophers" such as Ayn Rand and her followers, many of whom now occupy daily slots on the radio, and a whole television network which sisters with the network that airs most of the major sporting events and sports genres in the United States. The result is what we now see. Lord Haw Haw has immigrated to Missouri, and walks among us.

But this depressing trend is probably not grounded entirely in the machinations of the Randians. A couple of weeks ago two local kids were killed while racing on a rural road here in central NC. It's not a very uncommon thing, and kids were doing this--and getting killed--back when I was a teenager in the '50s. In this case the driver of the pickup that wrecked was only 16. One of his passengers, a girl of 17, was also killed. They had a big service for the boy at his church, in Durham. Everyone wore camo because he was known to be a hunter. The minister said it was a mystery why these things happen, he was such a good boy, etc.

I do understand, of course, that the minister was aiming to console the boy's parents. There is little more devastating that losing a child. I have to wonder, however, just what the passenger's parents made of these comments--which were public enough to have been printed in the news story about the service. It was in no way a mystery why these deaths occurred. The driver was RACING. The boy was responsible.

The nasty thing about the Randian moral view, even when it's held by people who never heard of Ayn Rand, is that it offers a justification for having no moral view at all. Any concern for others is dismissed as a confusion, a systematic mistake of thought, or even worse, a conscious manipulation of the naive by those who have something to gain. For Rand herself of course, this analysis was among other things a grounding for her efforts to destroy Christianity as a social institution. The Christian Randians among us ignore this salient fact.

The kid ran off the road, over-corrected, crossed the road and hit a tree. That sentence is probably hot-keyed in the Highway Patrol's computers. The woman in Tucson grabbed the magazine before it could be inserted into the weapon. CO2 is a green house gas. This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin' around. If you're standing around at a blood-soaked wreckage, you might want to pray. If you're sitting in the speeding vehicle you might want to say "slow the hell down, NOW, and let me outa here." Of course the drivers of the planet's economic system might have the problem that their accelerator is already stuck to the floor boards. If so, prayer would both be in order, and a public hypocrisy akin to Mr. LaPierre's new proffered "solution." I saw last night that Mr. LaPierre will be talking with Mr. Biden about the gun problem today. Where's that head-slap key anyways?

What He Said

It long has been my opinion that, sooner or later, it is the responsibility of the Democratic party to the future of the republic and the political commonwealth to beat the Republicans so badly in so many areas that the Republicans are faced with a choice of either historical irrelevance, or wringing the craziness out of their party by enforcing a set pf party orthodoxy that does not include creationism, gay-bashing, anti-science lunacy, and the crackpot economic theory that has infected the party ever since Arthur Laffer found that cocktail napkin in the airport bar. Until that glorious day when we have proportional voting, viable third parties, and sparkling white unicorn ponies, like it or not, the Democratic party is the only political institution capable of doing that job. That it largely has shirked that job ever since the first time somebody yelled "peacenik!" at it in the late autumn of 1972 does not make the job less real, or the urgency of doing it less immediate.

--Charles Pierce, Esquire, just now

Meanwhile, in the real world, one of the Boys just ate all the kitty bits I put out for all three of them, while one made the classic covering poop signs over the dish, and the third one, 'Mokey," looked plaintively at me while I ate the last piece of cherry pie for breakfast, even though if he were to jump directly into my plate, he would immediately think he'd been poisoned.

It is a gorgeous Saturday here in central North Carolina. It's the weekend where the leaves fall slowly through the still colorful backdrop of leaves, and the deer move like grey ghosts amongst the oaks and hickories. Towards evening there will be just a whiff of distant wood stoves cranking up. Somewhere not so far away, they are playing football, and oil is getting changed.

The following also goes with a crisp fall day:

As the New Day Unfolds

Friday already, and almost a frost here into November. We used to have the first frost in early October. Warn't so long back neither. It's another big music weekend for us'n. We'll leave the Houds to their own devices for a good chunk of tomorrow and return to busted open bags of catfood and broken crockery on early Sunday morning, most likely. They've already managed to toss a bucket of sheet rock putty off the loft. They are capable of anything. They might even open a door and get the hell out into the night. Hopefully they'll mostly just sleep and eat, and oh yeah, poop, till we get back.

I'm finding the concern in progressive quarters about the utter failure of Republican prognosticators to predict the election's outcome of some interest. I think it's genuine, this concern, and addresses a deep national problem. Oh it's easy to laugh at them in their moment of despair and failure. There's a whole website of pictures of shocked Republicans in the moment when Romney's loss was mostly admitted. It's funny. And it's funny, some of the details. I like the part where Romney's staff found their credit cards canceled within seconds of the End. They might have seen that coming. It was predictable from much that he said.

But it's actually a pretty bad thing for our country that so many are living with seriously false perceptions. It's no wonder there's so much hate, and so little constructive work achieved. Maybe the problem was captured in the tragedy of Trayvon Martin. It was an utter misreading of reality that got him killed, and his murderer is now stuck in a trial that will probably lead to some years in prison, and a stunted life. It was all so unnecessary.

Just like all the hate and ill will coming from Republicans generally. And it continues. Meanwhile, the country actually needs all of its citizens. There is a lot to do and deal with in the next few years. People who call themselves Republicans can't get much of anything done as long as they think our President is an alien Marxist. It's a wonder they can get to the store, or spend their social security checks. The first thing they might want to do is stop listening to Limbaugh.

Will they? Well, this is what's getting said by allegedly serious prognosticators of the Right, three days in:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/332978/sifting-through-wreckage-george-weigel#

Or, la-la-la-la-la.

[photo found at http://whitepeoplemourningromney.tumblr.com/ ]

While I'm Thinking & Saturday

I've been thinking about this whole debate thing--how we've turned it into magic, which is what we tend to do with stuff, us humans. If I get something written that I like enough, I'll post it. Meanwhile, and apropos the fact/performance chasm that mostly people tend to think on the wrong side of, here's something worth reading:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/10/04/958801/at-last-nights-debate-romney-told-27-myths-in-38-minutes/?mobile=nc

As for performance, if we're going to make decisions on that, then the President should get a rematch--a serious game of H.O.R.S.E. All that happened was, Romney won at J.A.C.K.A.S.S.

_______________________________

Today, well this afternoon, Libby and I are planning on jumping on stage at Shakori and doing a few numbers with the Unknown Tongues Cajun/Zydeco Circus. We're invited. Amazingly it's not raining. Thank gawd it's not raining. I was able to mow Thursday after work--an early sign of the drying October weather we usually get. There were a few early red leaves, sumac maybe, along the edges of the always encroaching jungle that surrounds the "orchard" that was never planted. The Hudahenians are being delightful. As the weather cools they like to snuggle up. To get us up in the morning, they chirp while jumping around on the bed. Their happiness is a delight. This is typically one of their best features, and why their ancestors made their pact with us long, long ago. Momma is regularly around morning and evening. She eats, then either sits on the race car and surveys the scene from a height, or simply heads out to the rest of her domain. Now and then, maybe twice a week, the big yellow Dad also slinks by. We give him some dry food so he won't steal Momma's. They seem to be pals of some kind. We still may try to capture him and get him neutered too. No doubt the woods doesn't need more cats.

The deer drift in close. The light dapples the tree trunks at 8 AM now. I wish we didn't go back to standard time at all--I don't like that moment when there's no more time after work for anything outside. I miss my outside life, but not the concrete dust. Thus doth October begin in earnest.

__________________________________

If you want to watch a strikingly good movie, check out Another Earth. It is nice to see poetry and myth realized, and the hope that somehow mistakes can be rectified embodied in a literal new planet. It isn't done much. Unsurprisingly, the movie is an independent, small-budget affair. I watched Drive as a companion. Two different studies in isolation I guess one might say. Drive rectifies something too, but in the nihilistic mode. I thought Another Earth was much more joyous, and contained much concerning human emotion--both real grief and real hope. Hope is not something to deny utterly, even if it might be denied ultimately. Drive, on the other hand, clenches its teeth as firmly as Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, or John Wayne in the Searchers. Still, and in the end, as my late friend Bob Barrett used to quote his elderly aunt whom he cared for in her declining years, "Old age is not for the faint of heart." I'd like to teach a course some day with two texts: The Tractatus and After the Ice Age. This would be an update on a classical education involving Plato and Aristotle, but more in tune with our brief moment.

__________________________________

If it's not a game of H.O.R.S.E. we're talking about:
http://www.juancole.com/2012/10/extreme-oil-costly-dirty-and-dangerous-klare.html

No Soup For You

It's not just Mitt Romney who imagines that poor people are the same people that mooch off of the hard-working millionaires that provide all the jobs, and would be working if they weren't lazy. Here's a local example of what I mean.

In North Carolina, as elsewhere in the country and probably the world, people stealing copper and items containing copper have become a real problem. One part of this developing problem is that copper, qua commodity, has risen a great deal in value in the past few years. A pound of the best grade copper is about 3/4s the value of a gallon of gas at the moment. Plenty of people have been willing to go to construction sites and rip out freshly installed wiring and plumbing. Some have even gone to occupied houses and commercial buildings. Since copper is a component in air conditioners, stories abound of whole shopping centers missing their H&A when the place opens up of a Monday morning. Sometimes businesses are shut down, sometimes for days. There are stories of police departments having their roof-top central airs go missing. People even drive around the country-side with boom-trucks snipping the wires off the poles. They'll chop up the wire so it's not easily recognized, take it to scrap recyclers in buckets, make a bundle. Or the wire and pipe and air conditioner radiator coils might in some cases get traded for other more usable commodities in the black market. Copper is basically just like silver and gold. When something is just like silver and gold, it draws to it the same economic attributes. You can trade copper futures. You can give someone copper and get something else for it. Most likely you could have a man come and paint your metal roof for a few buckets of copper. For example.

Of course all the folks who are having their copper stolen are pissed off about it. This would include big players in the American economy: power companies, home builders associations, insurance companies who are in some cases paying for these damages. And the loss of value in some cases is surely staggering--a brand new central air unit might cost upwards of $10,000 installed. The unit, scrapped, might be worth $500, or less. The rest of that value is not "retrieved" you might say. It's just gone.

This situation is, as you probably know, not new. There has been copper theft going on in large quantity for a number of years. It was going on at the turn of this century. When they made the HBO series "The Wire," copper thievery is depicted therein. The Wire first aired in 2002. No doubt the thievery was happening a number of years before the series started--otherwise the series writers wouldn't have noticed. A few years back, North Carolina, like many other states, passed more stringent laws dealing with copper theft. For example, it is now required by law that any amount of copper sold for a value over $100 be paid for by check. Other requirements include the buyer obtaining photos of the driver's license of the seller, the license plate of the seller's vehicle, and the seller must tell where he obtained the copper. Law enforcement can at any time ask that these records be produced, and in some NC counties law enforcement requires buyers of copper to fax them every purchase receipt (which includes all this required information) at the end of each business day. Copper thieves have been apprehended with this information. Crooked buyers, not so much. Enforcement is also expensive, and people don't like taxes. Thus doth the rubber meet the macadam.

Last election North Carolina fell into the Tea Party camp, and our current Republican Legislature decided, at the behest of fierce lobbying efforts by the power companies and the building associations, to "do something" about copper theft. They passed a new law, which goes into effect on October 1st, 2012. There are various provisions in the law, but the primary one can be stated as a dictum: NO CASH FOR COPPER. Our little newspaper just ran the press release announcing the advent of this new law. A power company spokesman, who wrote the "story," says in the release that it is believed that NO CASH FOR COPPER will reduce theft, because "thieves want quick cash." This logic was apparently behind the legislature's action earlier this summer.

Well, but if paying by check stops theft, how come paying by check didn't stop theft back when the original law requiring payment by check for copper in amounts valued at $100 and up was enacted? Because as far as we can tell, it didn't. Copper theft continued. My guess, which I'd say is 99% a certainty, is that copper theft will continue after October 1. This is because a valuable commodity remains fairly easily obtainable by "the public." Imagine if the electric wires and plumbing pipes were made of gold. It's really not any different, from an economic standpoint. Like gold, copper has a significant intrinsic value. If all legal buying and selling of copper were outlawed, that value would not vanish, because copper is essential to our way of life. Probably, if all legal buying and selling of copper were outlawed, the value of copper would rise, and theft would likely increase. It's an experiment we might get to witness if Republicans gain more governmental power in the US.

Here's what will happen come October 1. The very poor people who struggle to survive with almost no income will now be given checks for tiny amounts of copper they decide to sell. There are folks who spend their days driving around the county, or walking around their neighborhoods picking up small amounts of various scrap metals discarded by people. If you want to spend a day driving around looking for every scrap of metal you can find, and picking it up, you can go to a scrap dealer and make a few dollars. If you're lucky you might make a bit more than you spent on gasoline. It'll depend on luck, and the kind of metal you happen to score. After Christmas, you might luck out and find a string of Christmas tree lights. The value of Christmas tree lights is, at the moment, $.25 a pound. If you got a few pounds of lights, and you picked up a few pounds of beer cans off the roadside, and maybe you found a rusty bicycle and a piece of metal that fell off a car, you might walk away with $15.35, say. After October 1 that payment will be in the form of a check. NO CASH FOR COPPER. If you go to a bank these days, you'll have to pay a fee of about $10 to cash that check. Third-party checks are becoming unacceptable at banks. So maybe it's possible that for the most destitute, selling their Christmas lights will no longer have any point to it. The Christmas lights will then go into the garbage with the rotten bananas, and from thence to the landfill.

From the lofty heights from which Mr. Romney and his friends view the passing cavalcade, it's all pretty much a bunch of ants down there. Mr. Romney and his friends in the power and building industries can't imagine how a person could end up 70 years old with an income of $540 a month. Must be because they were lazy. And the Social Security System, which was designed to mitigate abject poverty in the elderly, was deemed by Mr. Romney and his cohort (including Ronald Reagan, President) to be a ponzi scheme, so contributions, e.g., the payroll tax, was capped at $96,000 per year, where it still remains. If you thought Social Security was there for you, you deserve what you get. You can still sell aluminum cans (for the moment), but NO CASH FOR COPPER.

Here in North Carolina there is a political example to be taken or ignored. Our legislature made an authoritarian decision last summer. NO CASH FOR COPPER. It's just like the '50s daddy in action. NO CAR KEYS. LOWER THAT HEM, MISSY. WASH THOSE DISHES NOW, MISTER. The fact that there was already no cash for copper in any significant amount, and that such a policy did not seem to have much effect, in toto, was lost on the legislature. They pounded the gavel and went home to campaign, and it was DONE. That we will now have the absurdity of a $.25 check for a pound of Christmas tree lights in the hands of a starving elderly person with no bank account is of no interest to our authoritarian overlords. As Mr. Romney has told us, "some of my best friends are NASCAR team owners."

In related news, our local trucking company has a big sign that just sprouted in front of his parking lot of trailers and road tractors. It says "I Built This." It's pretty hilarious for a business that depends on...wait for it...

ROADS.

Why They Booed

You can't reasonably argue with this:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/09/07/blamer-speaks-for-absentee-aunt/

A salient quote:

You have to wonder what good it is to bother supporting women for political posts when they can’t summon the courage and common sense to knock out insulting language like this in the 2012 Democratic Platform under the heading “Protecting a Woman’s Right to Choose”:

“Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.”

Well shucks, if her family, doctor, and clergy get to make a woman’s decision for her, why not drag in politicians, governments, and any stray passerby and his dog to have their say as well? What kind of a personal decision is that??

The fact is, the Democrats are a muddled, nervous lot, and that includes their President, Mr. Barack Obama. After Fox News spent hours snarking on the "fact" that the Democratic Platform didn't "include" God, well by gawd the next day they damn well included Him in the Platform, ex post facto, and for that matter, deus ex machina, which caused consternation amongst a majority of delegates (not your low info voters, who make up the vast majority of voters apparently). The Speaker then ruled, and it was Law.

Mr. Clinton made the point that Mr. Obama exemplifies the truth, in his management philosophy, that in order to get something done you have to deal with them what's there, across the table. Mr. Clinton even said that Mr. Obama still maintains this brave approach to dealing with the nihilists who have captured the GOP, and who swore an oath never to cooperate with Mr. Obama on anything, including propositions he might offer which were identical to propositions they had already asserted themselves, such as, e.g., the Health Care Reform Act and Cap and Trade systems.

So who's to say that the political women of the Convention didn't summon the courage and common sense. Who knows. The Chair counted the "votes."

But. Let us be clear. Democrats at the moment face an implacable opposition determined to do just about anything to win, certainly including all manner of appeals to racism, sexism, chauvinism, nativism, and just plain dumbass. Mr. Romney has now suggested that Mr. Obama plans to remove "In God We Trust" from the coinage. Last night during the ragged start-stop last race before the Chase that NASCAR put on in Richmond, Capital of the Confederacy, Mr. Romney asserted in several ads that he would bring 250,000* jobs to North Carolina. That's pretty fucking amazing for a guy who believes that a government job "policy" is equivalent to reducing regulations, period. He didn't address the loss of all those jobs filing the coinage either. Some of them would surely have been happening in the old Nawth State.

Chris Hayes suggested this morning that one reason to vote Rom would be, some "governance" would at least occur, versus another four years of total cynicism from a Republican controlled Congress. This of course presumes that any law-making is better than none. Tell that to the wimmens.

I'd love for the Democratic Party to take better positions. I'd love for the Democrats to tell Fox News it is a lying, obfuscating political advertisment masquerading as a news network. I agree with Charles Pierce--why the hell don't the Democrats simply stand on the law of the land--women have a right to choose, no further modifiers needed or required. I surely do hope that if Obama wins, and if he is saddled with a Republican controlled Congress, that he will STOP with the compromising, with the eye to eye reasoning, with the grand bargain after grand bargain. The last Republican Administration wrecked the country, and they know it--that's why they didn't even invite their last President and Vice President to their Convention. (Not much made of that on Fox "News.") They have no new ideas or plans. They have a Robber Baron as their Presidential Candidate, and an Objectivist as their Veep. They have made promises to their core constituents of racists, chauvinists, nativists, and Christianists, which there ain't no way a President as weak and craven as Mr. Romney can possibly renege on. Sandra Fluke was exactly right in her comments at the Democratic Convention--women will be returned to the '50s at best, and that's just the start of it.

I know it's a broken record here, but what we have is a two party system. The purity objection, when made at the moment by Democrats and progressives who are sick and tired of compromise with the breathtakingly dumbass, only gives dumbass more votes. It ain't rite, but it's true.

Nonetheless, the dissonance created when sensible people are confronted with a deus ex machina or two ought to at least be acknowledged and respected. Somewhere, sometime, the Democratic leadership owes the people who keep voting for reason an apology. Juan Cole is dead right:

http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/dear-democrats-if-you-do-that-you-have-do-do-this.html

Maybe, win or lose, late November, 2012 might be the moment for such an apology.

*The ad keeps running, and I noticed that he's saying 350 K, not 250 K. On the other hand, I'd expect that if queried on a Wednesday or Saturday, Romney will say that he's talking about the whole Great Land of Ours, not just NC. Doing the math, I discovered that he's promising 7,000 jobs per state if that is indeed his actual "promise."

Contrast and Compare; or This Guy? 1.1

From an essay on breasts implants:

"...I assert that even adult women who ostensibly agree to breast mutilation cannot have arrived at that choice from a position of full human agency. I assert this because no woman anywhere enjoys full human agency."

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/01/15/fairy-tale-sunday/

From an essay on Mormonism by a resident of Salt Lake City:

"... Mormonism is a successful religion precisely because it's a business that requires total belief in a paternalistic dogma. Big Daddies are at the top. Mommies are in the kitchen popping out babies and children fall in line to do their share based on their gender. Chores are gender specific and so are rewards at home and in the Church. As it is on earth so it is in Heaven. Heaven is as hierarchical as the Church."

http://utahsavage.blogspot.com/2012/01/mitts-mormon-and-mormonism-is-great.html

Curiously, what one might term "gender issues" are not even in the primary discussion of our Presidential conversation this time around. They're buried, way down the page, or amount to a footnote. We'll probably be killing Iranian children before the question surfaces. And that's no matter who's elected in November.

Last week at work someone called to asked whether we took today off for "Martin Luther Day." Plus, they even messed up the quote on his statue in D.C. I said, "No, we're gonna do Martin Buber Day this year."

Hank Jr. on Fox

(Hank Williams, Jr.)



http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/obama-is-hitler-hank-williams

This is pretty funny in many ways. Of course it's funny at one level that Fox News actually got upset because Hank Williams, Jr. trashed Mr. Obama. Must be the nuance meter was set on 7 and Hank ran it up to 13 or something. It's not like Fox News doesn't insinuate that Obama is Hitler, Stalin, Jomo Kenyata, et al., every day. It's not like Fox News didn't carry the Glenn Beck show until fairly recently. Where's Claude Rains when we need him.

On the other hand, Mr. Amato's piece in crooksandliars is pretty pathetic too. Who cares if Hank, Jr. was drunk? It's part of his public persona. The shades? He always wears shades, always. He has since he was in a bad accident which disfigured his face. And ESPN jumping on board and kicking Hank off Monday Night Football? Exactly why? "All my rowdy friends are coming over tonight." That's the Monday Night Football theme song fer christs sake. One of Junior's biggest hits, now decades old, featured a chronicling of the Williams' family traditions (that was the name of the song I think), including using drugs and alcohol to excess. And really--Hank Williams himself died in his twenties from a drug overdose while riding in the back of a Cadillac in West Virginia on the way to a New Years Day gig. At least back then Country Music was about real things--that's what Hank wrote about, over and over again. So yes, ESPN should have some principles, and yes, while Hank, Jr. always represented the Copperhead Road side of country, he hadn't come right out and screamed it, or at least not on the teevee. Maybe ESPN should have at least made a bargain of some sort: if SC removes the stars and bars from its state flag, we'll drop Junior. That'd work.

Liberals don't need to be nambypamby about country culture. It is what it is. Mr. Amato and his commenters ought to give a listen to James McMurtry's "Choctaw Bingo" some time. That's where Hank, Jr. is coming from. It doesn't have to be laced with political genius. In fact, the trouble with political genius is, it comes often packaged in Rush Limbaugh, who knows how to stay perfectly on the razor's edge of whatever line the long-term crafters of our fascist future are walking at the moment. While Amato was wringing his hands about something as predictable as Hank Williams Jr.'s political views on President Obama, Limbaugh managed to get Herman Cain to walk back his mild-mannered objection to Gov. Perry's having a hunting ranch called "Niggerhead." And if Mr. Cain can't say Fuck You to Rush Limbaugh on that topic, he's as weak a plank of "presidential timber" as John McCain was for selecting Ms Palin for Veep.

Hank III already said all that needs to be said about his uncle Hank's generation of Country Stars. "If Toby Keith's country," Hank III said, "then fuck country."
Hank III might have said that around the fire at Uncle Slayton's big birthday party in Oklahoma. At least Hank Jr. wears his gun outside of his pants, for all the honest world to feel.

Look, this is country, courtesy of McMurtry. Read 'em and weep. That's the point:

Strap them kids in
Give 'em a little bit of vodka in a cherry coke
We're going to Oklahoma to the family reunion for the first time in years
It's up at uncle Slayton's cause he's getting on in years
You know he no longer travels but he's still pretty spry
He's not much on talking and he's just too mean to die
And they'll be comin' down from Kansas
and from west Arkansas
It'll be one great big old party like you never saw
Uncle Slayton's got his Texan pride
Back in the thickets with his Asian bride
He's got a Airstream trailer and a Holstein cow
He still makes whiskey 'cause he still knows how
He plays that Choctaw bingo every Friday night
You know he had to leave Texas but he won't say why
He owns a quarter section up by Lake Eufala
Caught a great big ol' blue cat on a driftin' jug line
Sells his hardwood timber to the chipping mill
Cooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell
He cooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell
You know he likes his money he don't mind the smell....

You can have the saccarine part or you can have the shine, with the good bead. In country, the ladies make the men go out to the car to drink amongst themselves. When they stagger back inside, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing, the ladies don't notice a thing, but exchange glances. This is how it works in the GOP, and mostly on teevee generally. Over on Jon Stewart's show they pointed out that there are old racist names all over the map of the US of A, and they sang a fine alternative verse to America the Beautiful. That's one way to actually see both sides of the coin at the same time. It's dizzying, but it's real.

The Seals

chinook-helicopter.com

Riding to work Monday I learned that to become a member of Seal Team 6 requires at least 5 years of training over and above all the training a person has already received to become a capable member of the military, and that even people who have already become Seals frequently wash out of the program which leads to Team 6 qualification.  There were also stories available everywhere concerning the remarkable individuals who made up the group killed in the Chinook crash--people who knew them told of their leadership qualities, their focus and desire.  Some wanted to be Seals from early childhood.  All seemed to be exemplary Americans.

I have to wonder why in the world anyone thought it was a good idea to pack twenty-two of these highly skilled "resources" into a closely packed target and run them into enemy territory?  This seem like a fundamental mistake of all combat--never bunch up, because a group is a bigger and better target.  Read Captain Dick Winters' story in Holland, in World War II.  He killed some fifty German soldiers with a rifle because they huddled together in a small group.  Isn't this simply basic in our high-tech modern military?  And worse, is this a symptom of the too many terribly long years our people have been at this Afganistan War? A question for later on I guess, and another feature of our Presidential inertia, which may in historical terms be the overarching feature of the Obama years.

And as a minor footnote--and because I've given Brad Keslowski a hard time for appropriating the American flag in his post race celebrations--cudos to his guts last weekend, and a tip of the hat to his obvious sincerity concerning the loss of the Seals.  Maybe we should all see his flag-waving as a genuine salute to the young soldiers who labor on, and thank him for reminding us that their labor continues, even in obscurity.  As in all war, it seems like the gruesome absurdity is always ignored at the start, but becomes more and more apparent as time passes.  I do not understand why we (and the rest of humankind) do not learn this age-old lesson, which is written in blood across the sky.  Mr. Bush's shocking amnesia was one of his most remarkable features to me, back when he cranked up these two wars, a gigantic and open-ended commitment in response to Mr. bin Laden's audacious political theatre of blood.  Historical perspective vanished on September 12, 2001.  Vietnam was no more, not to mention Inchon, Iwo Jima, Gallipoli, Paschendale.  Oh, I forgot.  Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg.

The deal is, courage and valor and bravery are tragically honorable human qualities, and perhaps the more so for being so frequently enlisted in the dimmest of larger causes.  Reckon we'll ever manage to elect politicians who get this?  It seems more and more doubtful, doesn't it.  Even after eight years of the obvious, the current crop trudge on and on, in the same bloody footsteps.  Like my old fiddling buddy says, "we're just primates muddling through."  There's way too much wasted in our American adventure. 

Darlington

Just a few words on the events near the end of the Sprint Cup race last Saturday night.  (Disclosure, there's an 18 on my bumper.)  Mr. Harvick has through the years made it clear that he'll punch you in the mouf if you object to his racing tactics by on-track retaliation.  Close to the end on Saturday, Harvick whammed Kyle Busch in the rear as he worked his way forward, then slammed him side-to-side while trying to get past him to the best groove on the track--a place Kyle was holding firmly.  In the process of this elbowing, Harvick managed to wreck Clint Bowyer, which caused a number of cars to loose control.  At that point, Mr Busch had enough, made a move to the inside of the track around Harvick, avoiding the wreck and in passing nudging Harvick, who spun out.  There was no doubt at all that Harvick initiated the banging, and no doubt that Busch eventually got tired of it.  That should have been that. 

What happened next, after the race was over, was Harvick's attempt to cash in his bully-boy threat, by physically punching Busch.  Busch avoided the confrontation several times by simply driving away from Harvick.  Finally Harvick managed to block Busch at the entrance to pit row, and jumped out of his car.  There were a number of Harvick crew team members assembling as well--more or less a four to one punishment squad.  As soon as Harvick cleared his car, Busch pushed the car aside with his own vehicle and drove away.  As he was departing Harvick threw two punches into Busch's cockpit--presumably Busch was still helmeted and these hurt Harvick's hands more than Busch's head.  The Harvick machine turned left and hit the pit row wall.  No one was hurt.  Harvick looked pretty silly.  That's a good way for a bully to end up looking.

The fact is, Busch initiated nothing, Harvick everything.  And Harvick seems to presume that if an opponent resists on the track, he will met out punishment with his fists later on.  There is no reason for anyone to play by these NHL rules.  Now, after the fact, various commentators are waxing purple on the terrible danger Busch engendered by pushing the Harvick car.  This is pretty silly given that all the folks any where near the car are pit crew--guys who stand in traffic as a job and know how to get out of the way.  Harvick's car wasn't going nearly as fast as cars entering the pits normally travel.  And, more important--Harvick was using his car to pin Busch--to keep him from simply avoiding the confrontation, as he had been doing.  In those circumstances, Busch did what he had to.  He was under no obligation to fist-fight Harvick, or to take punches from Harvick and possibly Harvick's crew members (who later tried to fight with Busch's crew members).

The patter on the racing shows should not influence NASCAR officials on this matter.  I guess we'll find out today.  It was pretty laughable to hear Elliot Sadler last night chastising Busch--when Sadler drives for Harvick!  Hopefully Busch will have some folks in his corner--folks who were sadly absent in last night's chatter.  Busch does not deserve any penalties from NASCAR for protecting himself.  And NASCAR should not let the racing "culture" devolve into professional hockey. 

Update (5-14):  Kevin Harvick's interview last night on Trackside (Speed Channel) pretty much confirmed my perception of him as stated above, although I wish his interlocutors had also followed up along my line of analysis (oh well, guess they just don't read this little blog).  Harvick waxed about how Busch didn't want to fight, wasn't a fighter, etc.  Well, so since when was a race driver supposed to be able to punch people?  Busch is a terrific race driver--at that skill he's pretty much defeating Harvick and the rest of the field of competitors right now, which of course isn't to say that he wins all the time (except in Nationwide and Trucks).  NASCAR is not professional hockey.  Harvick is playing 8th Grade school bully, both now and at Darlington.  Busch simply thwarted him.  Hopefully, Harvick's attitude will just focus Kyle that much more--on winning on the track.  Yesterday's truck race at Dover was a good example--Kyle just walked away from the field, Harvick included.  But I thought Kyle's bows at the end were a little pro forma--that this whole incident has taken just a little of the joy of racing out of him.  That's really a shame.  

Dots

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/01/challenger.html

This brilliant post by driftglass connects a lot of important things that don't usually get connected.  I don't have much to add.  I particularly like the comparison of the flawed thinking involved in the Challenger disaster to that regarding global warming "denialism."  It might also be noted that the truly flawed decision-making that led to the Challenger launch is pretty much vanished from press discussions of the anniversary.  Yet it would seem to me that actually reminding ourselves that bad decision-making has gigantic consequences, the reminder being that vapor trail explosion in the sky, would be the best commemoration of those brave lives lost that day.  When Mr. Bush decided to start pulling the war levers after 9/11, my first thought was, "Didn't he learn anything from Vietnam?"  Of course that question has buried within it other questions, such as, "Why are we spending such a gigantic fortune on a military machine that can, in the end, only be so effective?"  Such a question gores too many oxes I guess.  Meanwhile, the world continues to out pace and out flank our notions of control--today Egypt is "doing" what Egypt wants to do.  Like everyone, I hope peace will return to that ancient and beautiful country. 

Taking the Long View

Jack Palance in "Shane"

Here's a piece of reporting you probably didn't see on your teevee yesterday:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-thomson/white-supremacist-site-ma_b_809755.html

It's one of those facts that I do realize makes my attempt, in the last post, to actually reason with people committed to whatever it is the Right is committed to, naive, laughable even.  The truth is, the Right is happy to accept the collateral damage, if it should occur.  But the Right is also unwilling to admit that straight out, except when expounding to its own committed audience.  The conversation between Hannity and Palin last night was instructive.  They both understand that Palin happens to be holding the "smoking gun" of that "crosshairs poster," not to mention Giffords own objections to it, in advance, months before the massacre.   And since that's not really a problem beyond being a problem of publicity, what can they do but hem and haw till the hour is blessedly over.  Amongst their true believers, there is no problem.  Jesse Kelly ran a campaign against Giffords which suggested that "2nd Amendment Solutions" were needed.  He posed with assault weapons.  He suggested that Ms. Giffords was a thief of public monies.  Since the shooter was "crazy," there can be no question of any of the rhetoric actually having any consequences.  The Limbaugh poster has been removed as it was tasteless under the circumstances.  Perhaps Limbaugh has even stopped pillorying the Sheriff.  These things have a shelf life. An actual victim of the shooting has already been arrested for losing it in a public forum and shouting what could be construed as threats at the man who actually has said that Giffords bears responsibility for the massacre for not having private security in place at her meeting with the public. 

And anyways, if you wanna know who this guy Martin Luther King, Jr., really was.  Why just google him. 

Goddard made a good movie once called "Contempt."  It starred Jack Palance and Bridget Bardot, and had a role for Fritz Lang, playing a director.  It'd make a good double feature with Blake Edwards' "SOB," which I watched over the weekend.

Update.  The FCC has approved the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal.   Of course Olbermann and Maddow have the right to have blogs just like this one--we have freedom of speech in America. 

See That Man On the Corner..... No, the One Over There....

Sam Ervin, 1974

This article has so much information in it I can only give you the link and hope that you read it several times:

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/12/10/hatfill-and-wen-ho-lee-and-plame-and-al-awlaki-and-assange/

Emptywheel is the most serious part of the Firedoglake conglomeration (well, if you don't count the bassets).  It's hard to read, and I don't, except when I do.  But in most cases, there's something there which is packed with information.  Marcy Wheeler covered the Scooter Libby trial, and the Plame "outing," more in depth, and with more seriousness, than anyone in the mainstream media, or even in the general blogisphere, for that matter.  When things come to trial, we tend to go to sleep, Watergate being possibly the only exception.  But in the case of Watergate we happened to have N.C.'s own Sam Ervin, an old-style Senator who kept things interesting.  When Iran/Contra came around, twelve years or so later, the most riveting character was Ollie North, at which point the truth went quite off the rails. 

With the topsy-turvy world of Bush II politics, the public is now swept along from one thing to the next, with almost no comprehension of what underlying themes are of serious note.  It's just this crisis, that crisis, the next crisis.  Meanwhile, there is a flow of real events.  Marcy Wheeler's article reminds us of that.  Underlying much of where we stand today is a mountain of propaganda.  And apparently the Obama Administration is more concerned with keeping the lid on, than with actually educating the public on what has happened. 

For a Democratic Administration to collaborate in deceit is, it seems to me, a very fundamental mistake of policy.  After all, the Republicans are the ones who have mastered deceit.  For the Democrats to continue keeping the public in the dark is to, basically, enhance the Republican base. 

Nader? Really?

Norman Thomas, probably running

Well yes, I do think Chamberlain is a decent comparison for the situation, particularly if you understand that Chamberlain, at the time, may well have been making the best deal he could make, since obviously the Brits were absolutely and certainly not ready for the German war machine.  That's what Dunkirk proved, right?  So to actually understand Chamberlain you have to understand that.  The name isn't a cuss word.

So now Lawrence O'Donnell has a panel of Alan Grayson, Jane Hamsher, the editor of Tikuun, and Nader?  Nader?  Mr. Nader has certainly over his extensive public authorial life had many intelligent things to say about the American condition.  He was in the forefront of those who recognized that, no, corporations really didn't care so much about the citzen's wellbeing, other than that the citizen had enough money and credit to purchase the Mcguffin of choice.  That is, Ralph Nader understands that corporate power has molded America into a corporate vision of democracy, where "freedom" means the economic freedom to operate.  This corporate molding of America has gone on apace until now corporations are actually citizens, and since they have most of the money, they are in fact, taken as a group, the most influential citizens, owning probably a majority or at least a relevant minority of Senators, and plenty of House members, and quite a few governors, state houses, county commissioners, sheriffs, and justices of the peace.  Nader saw it coming early, and he's been fighting it, with some success, for a long long time.

But back in 2000, let us recall, Mr. Nader managed to accomplish the election of George W. Bush.  This is  a kind of existential proof.  Just like Dunkirk.  So, I understand the frustration, the exasperation, the annoyance.  I would like to see Congress simply let the Bush Tax Cuts expire, and see how things actually shake out after that.  I would like to see the Democratic Party, and Mr. Obama's Administration, make the argument, and forcefully, that if the Bush Tax Cuts expire, this is the last consequence of The Bush Tax Cuts and not current administration policy.  And I would like to see the Administration, and the still-Democratic Senate, then present bills to remedy the problems with the tax code which will follow the restoration of Clinton era rates, hopefully without including new mistakes, such as lowering the "social security" tax rate.  Hell, maybe they could raise the social security tax rate ceiling just a bit?  Who understands why there's a ceiling on that?

But there's two things about Nader, and the idea that Obama needs primary opposition to some how "make" him toe the line.  One is, Nader got George Bush elected.  The other is more from Obama's side of it.  It's unseemly for Obama to be arguing the case I'm arguing, which without mentioning Nader by name, he sure is.  Obama cannot say "look, make a primary fight and it'll be just like Kennedy-Carter, or Nader-Gore, and you know how that turned out."  But Democrats cannot forget that either.

This is exactly the difference between words and events, the demarcation point.  The Democratic Party must attempt to remain in the real world, where events occur, rather than retreating to yet another abstract world, where anything goes.  The Republicans already live on an abstract planet where anything goes.  We don't need another major party to go "there."  Democrats are and must remain reality based.

Mr. O'Donnell, of course, is yet another shrewd journalist/entertainer.  He's fine with bringing Nader into it.  But it's a cynical play, and Republicans and Fox News already own cynicism pretty much.  If he must bring Mr. Nader's voice into the conversation, then Mr. O'Donnell owes us to have a discussion of Don Quixote next week.  The country can't afford another round of George Bush.  Or some gawdawful President Huckabee, or President Gingrich, or President Pawlenty.  Republicans aim to entrench still further, with each turn of the wheel, the America of International Corporate Citizenry.  In this America, its former human citizens, who love, bleed, have children, sing songs, cry, get sick, get well, die--people--are "a means of production." 

We can only hope that at some point the contradictory alliance between vast numbers of ordinary people with simple religious or "small town" values (which sadly include, too much of the time,  unconsidered racial  and minority prejudices--see, e.g., Uganda's "kill the gays" bill, discussed in depth just prior to O'Donnell's show), and a fundamentally materialist philosophy which views those people as fodder; that this contradiction will become more apparent.   At that point, if there is still a vote, the winds may change again.  Meanwhile, we all need to stay in the real world, where there are two parties, and a vote for a "third" choice is nothing but a kind of illusion, making the voter feel briefly better, but doing nothing but most likely the opposite of the hoped for result.