Book Watch Lives!

For a long time there's been this quite innocuous program running on UNC-TV around here. It's called "Book Watch," and is hosted by one D.G. Martin. Mr. Martin, who does the show gratis, features writers of books that have some North Carolina content, some fiction, some non-. He offers writers the opportunity to introduce their book or books to whatever viewing audience happens to show up on late Sunday afternoons. You'll note that on late Sunday afternoon there are frequently big deal sporting events on other channels, and that the weekend is generally about to end, with not nearly enough accomplished, whether one likes it or not. I'm a very infrequent viewer of Mr. Martin's "show," but when I've watched it, I've been impressed with his tact and fairness to the author of the moment. He isn't out to demolish anyone, but simply to provide information about a book; which to the author has been a work of possibly years, and which matters a great deal.

Mr. Martin also writes opinion columns for some state newspapers. Here's what happened when our juggernaut state Republicans got wind of one of his recent columns:

http://www.wral.com/ncgop-seeks-ouster-of-unc-tv-host/12734835/

Nice, huh. Goes right along with the cookies thing Governor McCrory pulled on Monday last. There were some women out in front of his rented mansion protesting the fact that he had just signed into law one of the most draconian anti-women's choice laws in the whole country, and after promising in his campaign to change nothing in NC law concerning women's rights. Protected by a phalanx of security McCrory hand-delivered a plate of cookies, and offered a "god bless you" to the surprised recipient. Nothing like hiding behind Jesus's skirt.

Meanwhile, on the national level, Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist has pretty much agreed with the content of Mr. Martin's piece:

Right now, if inherent importance were all that mattered, I wouldn’t be writing about the effects of sprawl, or the Fed succession, or even, probably, about China’s brick-wall problem. I would instead be writing all the time about the looming chaos in U.S. governance.

...
The trouble is that it’s hard to give this issue anything like the amount of coverage it deserves on substantive grounds without repeating oneself. So I do try to mix it up. But neither you nor I should forget that the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/chaos-looms/?_r=2&

No doubt most of our NC Republicans will write off anything in the New York Times as predictable left-wing gibberish. They've already brushed aside various pieces, in the NY Times, the Washington Post, and other national publications, remarking with some astonishment that our state is rapidly ratcheting itself back into the good old '50s. The list of appalling acts by our just adjourned Legislature and signed by our appalling Governor is too long to list here, but I'll bet you can google it and find hundreds of links. The bookends tell the tale pretty well: back in the winter these good ole boys repealed the "racial justice act." Last week they removed any teacher pay incentive for getting a Masters, expanded places where one can carry one's pistol to pretty much anywheres, even against the appeal of the President of the University of North Carolina that allowing weapons on campus would probably make campus a more dangerous place. Of course there was the new anti-women's health law, and odd little deals like the effort to remove control of the Charlotte International Airport from Charlotte, and the reneging of a done deal to develop a decrepit state mental hospital and grounds situated in the heart of downtown Raleigh.

Like I said. It's too much to list, but the work of this Legislature is breathtaking, a veritable blitzkrieg of legislative activity.

And I hope Mr. Martin feels better standing in the sparkling company of Nobel-prize-winning Dr. Paul Krugman. A tip of the Hatlo Hat to them both, and to Charles Pierce as well, Pierce having remarked a few weeks back that North Carolina seems to have gone insane.

Possibly there's a real quibble of note between Martin and Krugman, over whether Republican governance is more akin to fascism, or to Nazism. I'd personally go more for Benito, the man Ezra Pound called the Thomas Jefferson of Italy.

You go, Mr. Martin!

Here's a link to Martin's column:

http://themountaineer.villagesoup.com/p/egypt-nazi-germany-and-north-carolina/1037023

Wonder what the NCGOP would be hollering if some government entity somewheres went after some right-wing ranter's job on account of something he said in print? Reckon we'd hear a lot of Kenyan Usurper mumbo-jumbo right off the bat?

Update--after visiting the UNC-TV website I discovered that Mr. Martin's fine show, North Carolina Book Watch, now airs Sundays at 12 Noon, and again on Thursdays at 5 pm. You can find out more about his show at:

http://www.unctv.org/content/ncbookwatch

RIP Doug Case

I started nearly every day for the past few years, since whenever it was I first clicked some link and found him, with Doghouse Riley. I was so amazed that after the first or second post of his that I read, I sent him a mash note as though he was actually someone I knew. Because, like the Dylan song, every one of them words rang true. Doug was nice enough to reply. I might have sent him a CD, I can't recall now. I know we talked movies once or twice. At some point fairly early I realized he was busy and didn't really need a lot of correspondence. He had writing to do, and write he did. I've quoted him here extensively. I'm hoping his "poor wife" will be able to at least keep his blog up on line, for the archives. One really couldn't go far wrong simply going back through what he said on life in the US over the past several years.

Doug was also funny, in the best sense. His "labels" were funny. His blog title, "Bat's Left, Throws Right," was profound. He was acute at sniffing out bullshit. He could eat Limbaugh for breakfast, Hannity for lunch, and use David Brooks as a biscuit to sop up the gravy.

I was shocked, yesterday, to read via Alicublog (Roy Edroso), that Doug had died suddenly last Saturday. It was the first time I even knew his name. To his readers, he was Doghouse Riley. (It was a nice surprise to be watching The Big Sleep a while back and realize that's where the moniker came from--yet another brilliance.) Riley was never off his game.

Here's his last post, in entirety. It's wry elegance is a fitting epitaph:

Thursday, July 25
Fun With Monogamy, Vol. MMCDLXXXI

TELEVISION Blitherer: The baby's name will be George Alexander Louis.

My Poor Wife: Damn! I was hoping for “Dakota”!

I'll leave my link in place here, so you can go archive-surfing.

Governor Liar

You've probably seen or read that our NC Legislature is pretty much done fouling the punch bowl for now. We've become national news here, supplanting Wisconsin, the state where the nullification counter-revolution funded by the oligarchs and driven by the folks who know they've lost their heritage of white entitlement and are damned pissed off about it. Back in '72 these same forces elected Jesse Helms, in a race where the Democratic Party of that era was split between the traditional southern conservatives who hadn't yet jumped to the other party, and the moderate wing, who were behind a sitting congressman from Chapel Hill with a Greek name. Helms had been spewing hate and racism for ten years at our flagship Raleigh teevee station, WRAL, having his own five minutes every weekday news hour to opine on whatever was eating at his craw. Serial topics included the civil rights activities in Chapel Hill and Washington, Martin Luther King's seditious intentions, and Jane Fonda.

Once Helms got to Washington he was pretty much the same guy running his red-neck mouth, and he spent the rest of his life tossing whatever spanners were in reach at whatever spokes were available. For the most part, his accomplishments included simply giving North Carolina a public black eye, and doing a decent job at the other job of a senator--getting favors done for specific constituents, including many ordinary NC citizens who had some problem or other that could be addressed by some grease on the rails of the gubment which, running on spoked tires, Helms continued to publicly sabotage as he could. He held up many capable appointments. He stymied various sensible foreign policy measures. He passed the pork and gravy. And in NC he won election after election against capable Democratic opponents by mustering the forces of racism and aggrieved white privilege, people who were fine with voting against even their own specific interests if it meant they could land a blow against some hippie or queer or uppity women or black person. Mr. Helms had the championship sneer of all time.

Helms is of course gone. His side of North Carolina, however, remains, and these days it holds all the reins of power. Back in the late '80s and again in the early '90s, the liberal black mayor of Charlotte ran against Helms twice, and lost twice. Now we have an ex-Charlotte mayor as our Republican governor. Pat McCrory. He came down here with his cloth suitcases as a callow youth, got a good job at Duke Power, and acted like a moderate. Possibly his first run for Governor embittered him, since he lost, and often an egotist who loses becomes a person aiming to find payback. Possibly and more likely Mr. McCrory decided, like George Wallace before him, that warn't nobody gonna "out nigger" him again. McCrory made a deal with power.

Here's how you can smell a deal. Back when we were having debates and stuff, before last fall's election, Pat McCrory, Candidate, guaran-damn-teed that he would make no change in the nature and status of women's choice law in North Carolina. McCrory is absolute. Asked directly what changes he would make, he says flatly and simply, "none." There's no nuance, no equivocation.

So much for being "on the record." Possibly we are generally being tested these days on what "being on the record" means, if anything, to our voting public. Certainly the case of Mr. Weiner comes immediately to mind. He brazens on, dragging his missus behind him (or maybe she's dragging him?). My view of McCrory was, previous to this women's right to choose issue, that he was aiming for national office in the next Presidential Election, a fresh new face, articulate, with lots of business experience, yet not a true oligarch himself (as was Romney). Now he's got this, a flat-out guaran-damn-tee lie. The Legislature gave him a bold new law that comes close to being the most regressive with regards to womens health clinics as any in the United States--and that includes the fresh, similar laws passed in Mississippi, South Dakota, and Kansas. McCrory signed it with a smile.

What this really shows, I think, is that Mr. McCrory made private promises to power. The first promise was, forget any scruples you may have had, you're ours now. So I am at least hopeful that McCrory's national ambitions are obliterated. While plenty of women choose to hitch their wagons to white male power no matter what the price, these days a majority of women are at least aware enough to know that returning to the days when abortions killed, and when shame ruled a woman's life, are not acceptable options. The women who know this include quite a few who, publicly, might well picket a woman's health clinic. For women, the dilemma will always be existential. This means, hopefully, that McCrory's elephantine ambition must slowly starve on the little bag of peanuts his governorship of North Carolina amounts to. After this term, McCrory may well go back to being what he was, some anonymous manager of something or other. Possibly, should the Republicans come to power after Mr. Obama's term, he'll get some job in DC destroying some agency or secretariat. That'll be it, at best. And if the Republicans do come back to national power, there will be larger concerns, if not horrors, for all of us. These people aim to burn down the world.

Meanwhile, here's the lie:

Lord Haw Haw Lives in Kansas

It is an ongoing thesis of this little blog (and certainly not mine alone) that one of the cancers growing and thriving on our democratic system of government is the Fox media empire--and particularly Fox "News." You can of course find obvious examples of propagandizing in nearly every broadcast by the network, and not just in the bizarre harangue shows such as O'Reilly or Hannity. The Fox News task is to obfuscate and confuse the electorate. This ongoing task, bought and paid for by people who view democracy as an impediment to making the most money possible in the least time, is effective in bringing us less and less competent and capable governance. The long term goal is probably to make government so incompetent that it will eventually be replaced by a committee of fatherly overseers, who will probably "get things done" at last. The trains will again run on time. Bridges will be rebuilt. And so forth.

One feature of this toil is to make most rational thought seem the very opposite. This task is carried out even in the most esoteric of regions, such as the scholarly study of comparative religion--a distinguished field with a history of centuries of scholarship behind it. Just as with the faux discrediting of the whole of climatology, which has at this point yielded the desired result in government, namely, paralysis; just as with the hysterical amplification of paranoid NRA talking points, which has lead to total paralysis of any government action concerning the proliferation of firearms, now Fox takes on a scholarly analysis of Christianity. Check it out:

http://www.juancole.com/2013/07/muslim-write-jesus.html

This is star-chamber-worthy dialog. I am embarrassed for this obviously capable, distinguished scholar to have to endure a second of this crap. It reminds me, more than anything, of the moment at the beginning of the great film Katyn (directed by Andrzej Wajda), when the faculty of a Polish university is rounded up by Nazis and briefly interrogated. The only thing missing in the Fox piece is the men with machine guns at the margins. The questions, by the ignorant or clever Fox interrogator, are exactly the same sort of questions the SS Captain asks of the stunned professors.

We are losing our democracy in increments. Fox News is a major factor in an ongoing disinformation campaign. It is ubiquitous in our culture, probably on more public television screens than any other network by far, and even in its omnipresence Fox manages, like Jesse Helms did in the US Senate, to push the entire conversation that is our national understanding "what's going on" farther and farther rightwards, and into regions of fear and confusion, where our prejudices and given misapprehensions are the driving factors in our public choices.

As I've said more than once here, to understand the authoritarian yearning one must appreciate the aphorism in this little account of Mussolini and the reporter:

"What will you do, sir, if you are elected?"
"Why, first of all, I will kill you."

We saw, in the days after 9/11, how quickly rationality gives way to fear and anxiety. There is a reason why "fire" is not shouted in a crowded theatre. It's not because it's a lie, or even because it's true.