Mendacity, the Human Trait

Well of course chimps are surely mendacious, and I also suspect the kitties, who profess to love us dearly but possibly love the fact that we love them more. Mokey, who is the most straightforward, will lovingly climb into your plate if there's chicken aboard, and makes a habit of flicking Libby on the lip with a claw if he would really like his bit bowl filled right now please. But then perhaps they've learned this particular behavior from us, as part of weaving of the bond between us.

Today we learn that Mother Teresa is now a Saint. This is a fact of culture, nothing more. A large group of people with like beliefs have had a ceremony. It's just one of those things. Mostly in the spirit of live and let live we just let it go. We likewise let go the dubious beliefs of other cultural entities, short of certain things we simply do not let pass, because they go "too far." The Taliban did itself no favors by executing women in soccer stadiums for alleged adultery. The Filipino President does himself no favors by executing drug dealers without trial. But mostly, things just go on, because we can't really be the world's policeman. There is no answer for Syria, but alternative strategies of death.

Still, Mr. Hitchens has a point:



I found the video on this very fine web page:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/513fll/christopher_hitchens_mother_teresa_hells_angel/

(It might play better if you go directly to Youtube.)

In other news of mendacity, Phyllis Schlafly died. Corey Robin has a nice piece on her at Crooked Timber:

http://crookedtimber.org/2016/09/06/phyllis-schlafly-1924-2016/

He quotes a very elegant argument against Schlafly made by Catharine MacKinnon back in the early '80s, as the two debated about the ERA Amendment, namely that Schlafly's own anti-feminism actually worked against her personally by upholding the implicit sexism of the age. It's too bad mendacity can be so effective as a tactic. Would that the world were like chess.

In 1976 a genius chess player named Judit Polgar was born in Hungary. She had two older sisters, and all three were raised to be chess masters by their father Lazlo. He in fact succeeeded to a remarkable degree. When Judit retired from competitive chess at the age of 40 she was viewed as the greatest woman chess player ever, and one of the greatest chess players of all time. Judit and her sisters refused to compete in women's only matches, and faced through much of their rise in the sport the sexist criticism of noted masters such as Garry Kasparov, who believed that women by their very "nature" could not achieve the chess prowess of men. Something or other about not being aggressive enough. Ms Polgar defeated Kasparov in the late '90s, and there is some question of an earlier victory he posted against her being tainted by a move he made after briefly releasing a piece. I'll include a youtube of one her Judit's beautiful chess games, nicely annotated so you can understand her thinking.



In the case of Ms Polgar and her sisters, the argument is quite settled on the field of play, where the stench of mendacity is blown away by the sea breeze. A lot of folks could learn something. But it's not what Tom Wolfe apparently thought he learned when he wrote in his new book that human kind is likely not evolved out of the genus of mammalia, or at least that language suggests non-evolutionary explanations.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2016/08/29/the-kingdom-of-speech-tom-wolfe-book-review/89005006/

But see, as well:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/his-white-suit-unsullied-by-research-tom-wolfe-tries-to-take-down-charles-darwin/2016/08/31/8ee6d4ee-4936-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html?utm_term=.4c5da9cfe9a1

As ever, the principle of Occam's Razor is a good one. Or as Polgar's annotator says, "she's not after the Queen, she's after the King, because that is the game." Not that language doesn't raise deep questions well worth a lot of thought.

Locally, Libby and I were over in the next county, in Liberty, last night. A trip to the laundro. There we found stacks of a little town paper called the Liberty Leader. It had, on page 2, an explanation of a mystery I've been noticing around these parts for some months. More and more homes are sporting a yellow and black yard sign which proclaims, in large type, "Thank You Jesus." It's a free country of course. But it's also felt a little like a modern Passover. There's a broad message in such signs, as well as the obvious one. Or maybe several messages, some friendly, some not so. There might even be a tipping point somewhere, if, say, nine out of ten driveways are sporting their sign. What's that tenth guy going to do? It reminds me of the old controversy about the the avocado mailbox on Randolph Road. Bobbie Thompson didn't want to paint her's avocado, even though the road as a whole somehow "decided" that was a mark of respectability and taste. As it turned out of course, Bobbie, a trained fine artist who taught intaglio print making at Duke, was right. Seen any avocado stoves lately?

Anyways, the Liberty Leader offers something of an explanation. Here it is. I photographed the story.

Prosperity Gospel, that's for sure.

Yes It Was

Mr. Robert Bateman writes frequently on Charlie Pierce's blog, mostly about the American Civil War. He offered this post free of charge, as a civic gesture aimed at creating in our citizenry at better understanding of American history. I figured it would be ok to repost it here:

The American Civil War is one of the few demonstrable cases in which the losers gained control of the narrative of history. Much as the Nazis developed the myth that the German Empire did not lose the First World War on the battlefield (they did) but instead that their armed forces were, "stabbed in the back" by liberals and Jews on the homefront (they were not), the Confederates in the post-Civil War era managed a concerted effort to conceal the causes of their rebellion. The cause of the war, they tried to claim, was "states rights." They tried to conceal that the cause was actually slavery, and that they themselves had said as much right at the outset. In this, over the course of the past 148 years, they have been depressingly successful. And that is not all.

Neo-Confederates have also tried to push the idea that the rebellion actually had units that consisted of slaves who had been freed and wanted, yes WANTED, to fight for the rebellion. (And that would be, exactly, why?)

This distortion of history and reality has gotten so bad that back in 2010 one Virginia school book was slammed for this gem:

"A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict. The passage appears in "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans."

Let me double-check what we just read there: The "Sons of Confederate Veterans" are the unbiased source of an uneducated-in-history person who is writing textbooks for Virginia, which she found, "primarily through internet research." Whoa. Well done Virginia. But truth be told, there is more to the story, as old as it is today.

"The book also survived the Education Department's vetting and was ruled "accurate and unbiased" by a committee of content specialists and teachers. Five Ponds Press has published 14 books that are used in the Virginia public school system, all of them written by Masoff."

I should note at this point that among her other scholarly works Ms. Masoff also wrote "Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty," which has to have one of the classic covers of all time, and "Oh Yikes! History's Grossest Moments."

While most schools now all use mostly the same textbooks (that was not always true, as there used to be two versions, one for the southern states and one for the rest of the country), many states also choose "supplemental" materials such as Ms. Masoff's. How can anyone wonder why we see such deep divisions when we see children who live south of the Mason-Dixon line are being taught about the war between the states, when they are kids. They learn that black slaves actually fought for the Confederacy (ummm, not true except on the internet), apparently because they loved being slaves so much (we will get to that in a minute), and that the "Sons of Confederate Veterans" are a legitimate academic source. Gang, every actual academic, North or South, or Northwest, Midwest, Southwest, or the loonies in California, agree -- all of that is pretty much complete and total BS.

But when the neo-Confederates come out of the woodwork, like our old friend "General Goodson," we learn all sorts of "facts." Like the idea that the war was not about slavery. Well, no, it was, as they themselves declared at the time. But one need not take my word for that, you can read some of these yourself if you have the stomach.

Mississippi leads the way by being quite direct:

"A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union."

"In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."

While the state of Georgia goes for a slightly less forthright statement, but still one that leaves no question at all, the cause is slavery:

"The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia."

And then there is wily old South Carolina, the original secession state. They bob and weave, but in the end they cannot get around what they said at the time. They try to make it about the states in the North not upholding the slavery clauses in the Constitution. Irony alert: In other words, they are against the right of the States in the South to self-determine!

"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection."

But my all-time favorite has got to be Texas. They not only identify slavery as the issue, then they double down.

"The government of the United States, by certain joint resolutions, bearing date the 1st day of March, in the year A.D. 1845, proposed to the Republic of Texas, then a free, sovereign and independent nation, the annexation of the latter to the former, as one of the co-equal states thereof. The people of Texas, by deputies in convention assembled, on the fourth day of July of the same year, assented to and accepted said proposals and formed a constitution for the proposed State, upon which on the 29th day of December in the same year, said State was formally admitted into the Confederated Union. Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?"

Well, that is clear, but they did not stop there. Nope, they had to take this one to eleven by referring to the "beneficial and patriarchal system."

"…In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States."

"…We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states."

Feel free to print this out and distribute them as flyers when you bump into a Neo-Confederate. I do.

The opinions herein are those of the author, the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the Tennessee, the Army of the James, and every single loyal American soldier who fought in the War of the Rebellion. They do not represent the current US Government, the DoD, the Army, or any unit with which he is affiliated. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.

Yeah, What She Said

The other day Trey Gowdy (R, SC) popped off about our efforts to make health care more available to all of us and used being a poet as an alternative to being a tax payin' real workin' 'murrican. You can probably easily find what he said. Roy Edroso, at alicublog.com, quotes him extensively, giving me a good fume earlier this week, before the snow. Now although I posted a poem of mine yesterday, and although I do read poetry, and in some sense I am also a practitioner of the art in my small way, Jill McDonough is a "real" poet with poetry awards and books and all, and I am not in her league. But--by gawd she absolutely nailed Mr. Trey Gowdy, third (?) son of a nice doctor from Spartanburg, so Master Trey as well as everything else started on 3rd Base with a nice lead and a guy on the mound who has a sore neck and can't even look over there--Ms McDonough nailed him from Right Field no less, caught him before he could even start to turn back and tag the bag. And, well, HA, I say. HA HA. What in the hell is wrong with South Carolina?

I got Ms McDonough's pitch from Mr. Charles Pierce. I copied it. Here 'tis:



I am an American poet, and I am delighted my taxes help pay for Trey Gowdy's health care. I believe I live in a rich country, one that can provide money to pay for health care even for Trey Gowdys -- Trey Gowdys, who get $174,000 for working one out of every three days, not doing much of anything I can see. Plus which I'm a poet: I just want to say "Trey Gowdy" over and over again. Trey Gowdy is adorable: he believes he lives in a rich country, one where poets just put in a smidgen of time at some magical health-insurance-giving job, and spend the rest of their hours writing sonnets. I'm an American poet, and I am here to say "Oh, Trey Gowdy: I wish."

Being an American poet means that, while I have been writing poems, I have had the following jobs:

cleaning hotel rooms
teaching English in Japan
teaching writing in a high school
teaching English in a Japanese nuclear power plant
washing dishes
making salads
deviling eggs
painting houses
cleaning houses
teaching college writing classes in prisons
tending bar
waiting tables
calling sick people to ask about the quality of their home health care
catering
teaching writing in adult education programs
running an online writing program
teaching writing in a college
teaching writing in a college
teaching writing in a college
teaching writing in ten more colleges

Guess how many of those jobs came with health insurance? Three. And one of those was in Japan. See all those college teaching jobs? Those were mostly "part-time" "adjunct" jobs. That's code for working more than fulltime -- way more than Trey Gowdy, Trey Gowdy! -- but without a promise my job would still be there the next semester. No promise = no insurance. Isn't this better, Trey Gowdy? I promise to keep paying taxes so you can keep buying health insurance. Because we live in a country rich enough for all of us to have health care, even those of us who only work one day out of three, going on the TV machine to talk smack about poets.

The Republican Party is so full of pure T horse pucky it's hard to imagine that any day now the whole lot of 'em won't just explode from the intestin...errrr... internal pressures. Thank you Ms McDonough. I kiss your feet! Here's one of Ms McDonough's poems, which I selected because she mentions the gig in her mash note to Trey:


JILL MCDONOUGH

Women's Prison Every Week

Lockers, metal detectors, steel doors, C.O.
to C.O., different forms, desks—mouth open, turn—so
slow I use the time to practice patience,
grace, tenderness for glassed-in guards. The rules
recited as if they were the same rules every week:
I can wear earrings. I cannot wear earrings. I can wear
my hair up. I cannot wear my hair up. I dressed
by rote: cords in blue or brown, grey turtleneck, black
clogs. The prisoners, all in grey sweatshirts, blue jeans,
joked I looked like them, fit in. I didn’t think about it,
until I dreamed of being shuffled in, locked
up in there, hustled through the heavy doors.
In the dream the guards just shook their heads, smirked
when I spelled my name, shook the freezing bars.
Instead of nightly escorts out, I’d stay in there
forever. Who would know? So I went to Goodwill,
spent ten bucks on pink angora, walked back down those halls
a movie star. When I stood at the front of the class
there rose a sharp collective sigh. The one
who said she never heard of pandering
until the arraignment said OK, I’m going
to tell her. Then she told me: freedom is wasted
on women like me. They hate the dark cotton, jeans
they have to wear, each one a shadow of the other
their whole sentence. You could wear red! she accused.
Their favorite dresses, silk slips, wool socks all long gone,
bagged up for sisters, moms—maybe Goodwill,
maybe I flicked past them looking for this cotton candy pink
angora cardigan, pearl buttons. They can’t stop staring, so
I take it off and pass it around, let each woman hold it
in her arms, appraise the wool between her fingers,
a familiar gesture, second nature, from another world.

Oh look. Gowdy's out again.

[the McDonough poem: http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/024/mcdonough_jill_001.html ]

______________________________________

Update: not far away from South Carolina, Allan Grayson is running for the House in Florida. He's written a little piece about a beautiful song (poem) by Joni Mitchell, and he quotes the song to start. Wouldn't it be nice to have more Congressmen like Mr. Grayson. http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-best-blue-america-contest-ever.html

______________________________________

Note: Initially I was under the mistaken impression that Trey Gowdy was the son of Curt Gowdy. My verbalization of this error has been excised from the post.

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

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.

Groundhog Day

[Photo: Our Last Aspiring National Politican, captured in photo at the moment when charges against him were dropped.]

North Carolina's fresh new Governor must have grander political ambitions. Why else would Pat McCrory appear on William Bennett's radio show so soon after taking office. What possible business of North Carolina is being served by our governor pontificating on the place of philosophical inquiry, much less "gender studies," in the public university system of our state.
Nevermind the odd fact that Mr. McCrory was talking with the most financially successful trained philosopher in the United States, or that said philosopher, Mr. Bennett, once published a book on "virtue" and then was revealed to be a compulsive gambler in his private life.

Mr. McCrory said, on Mr. Bennett's show, that he thought state funding of universities should be based not on the number of students enrolled, but on the job placement rate of the university after graduation. He said, moreover, that since he knew of no jobs in "gender studies" or "philosophy," these areas of studies should be reserved for expensive private institutions. Moreover, he complained that the university system was "in the hands" of an "educational elite."

Here's the link to this part of the story: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/01/29/2641893/mccrorys-call-to-revamp-higher.html

Meanwhile, in the real world, a couple of weeks back our Dish subscription gave us a weekend of free HBO, which included Lena Dunham's "Girls," the entire first season as it turned out, plus the first episode of season 2. I accidentally watched one episode, then DVR'd the rest, and I'm working through them. That same weekend we also watched Ms Dunham receive two awards for her work on the show. This isn't particularly a serious review of "Girls," even from a geezer of 70 who used to build chimneys. Some episodes I like more than others. Every episode I've seen contains at least some delightful, wry humor and insight. The show seems to me to be honest, and very "real." Ms Dunham, ditto. She's trying to talk and show real women (and men) in their '20s, at the start of adulthood, in a particular place (New York City). There are things in the show that might remind one of "Seinfeld," and I think Ms Dunham is in a way "doing" a distaff and updated Woody Allen. Like Mr. Allen, she is able to play characters she writes, to direct, to be much more than what she acts, yet to inhabit her characters. As with Mr. Allen, we are all lucky that Ms Dunham gives her talent to us. She blesses our culture.

And, obviously, "Girls" is in some ways a course in "gender studies," and probably goes down a lot easier than a treatise by Andrea Dworkin, even if more academic feminist thought might well inform a viewing of "Girls," and surely informs Ms Dunham's creative process. At the same time, and blessedly perhaps, "Girls" is not directed by Goddard.

So then we come in the cavalcade of days to this bit of right-wing confetti regarding "Girls," which I stumbled on via Roy Edroso: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/01/18/girls-challege-conservatives
Edroso highlights Kurt Schlichter's money shot as is his wont, and the metaphor is apt: Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation. Edroso also quotes Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator, on the grain of sand under his shell:

It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera pratlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.

Edroso's whole post is worth reading, including the copious comment section:
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2013/01/annals-of-culture-wars.html

Not to be missed, the commentor's remark that perhaps Schlicter hopes for an HBO series called "Boys," and the further comment that perhaps he'd be happier at YouPorn, where all the girls are quiet, because their mouths are always full of things other than words.

All of which is of course addressed more or less directly in various episodes of "Girls," had these right-wing chuckleheads bothered to do more watching and less meat-grinding. The episode where Lena's character goes home for the weekend and endures a one-night-stand is not only real, but instructive. Her vapid partner could have written either of the columns Edroso cites.

Which brings us back around to our new Governor I think. For the American Right, of which Mr. McCrory yearns to become a new fresh face, gender studies begin and end with internal vaginal probes as a prerequisite of any considered abortion. In their brave new world, academic inquiry will be reserved for a tiny minority, the "educational elite." What they say or think or do doesn't matter much, because they are always a tiny minority. Just keep them away from the kids, who should be funneled into specific jobs, and nevermind if large blocs of such specific jobs get whisked away to the 3rd world at the behest of an industrial policy that can never be tampered with by the likes of the jobholders themselves, or a government that represents them.

Gender studies? It's a fainting couch affair. Gawd knows the wimmens don't need to be a-thinkin' about any of that stuff. The Southern Baptist Church is the official state church of North Carolina. There they have decreed, some ten years on, that indeed a wife is to submit to her husband. Here in NC the placement of a constitutional "gay marriage ban" on our ballot helped insure Mr. McCrory's victory, and the achievement of total Republican control of our Legislature. Here we're well on the way to a special voter ID requirement, and some of our legislators have bristled at the idea that such requirements are racist and discriminatory to the elderly and to young people. (See, e.g., http://www.wral.com/house-freshman-calls-naacp-chief-racist-/12050778/ ) Ms Dunham has said that she won't consider marriage until there is legal same sex marriage in the United States. That moral logic is both obvious and inescapable. The only counter is to ban thinking about such things. Defunding is of course just such a ban.

McCrory, according to the News and Observer story cited above, is already backing away to some degree from his statements on Bennett's show. This is just more conservative methodoogy. In our fragmented and confusing media jungle, it is frequently possible to take all sides of any given position, and frequently that's exactly what politicians manage to do. At the very worst, there's always the fallback position: well, Democrats do it too.

The sun's bright and the sky's very blue around here. The trees cast dark shadows across the ground. Hopefully there will be a few more weeks of winter.

_________________________

Sunday Update: It's possible, of course, that Mr. McCrory is actually dead serious, and that he's offering us something he views as a personal insight, after a considerable time as a successful adult. If so, I'd submit that this side of the coin is far more disturbing. Because what he's suggesting, in implication, is a rigid class system based almost entirely on money. In McCrory's revamped education system, the wealthy get to study the underpinnings of life, the presumptions and presuppositions that exist under every facet of human existence. No doubt such insights may serve these elites well as they travel their paths of managerial splendor. Perhaps in a perfect world these elites will even be insightful in the moral sphere, managing their charges, the poor blinded working class, with love and a true concern for their puny fates. This was exactly the fantasy which slaveholders in the South entertained, particularly at church and at the family dinner table. Some of McCrory's Republican ilk are actually giving speeches, at least in certain circles, on the topic of slavery as a not-so-bad institution, and David Bossie, the elite lawyer who won the Citizens United case, has published briefs arguing that Brown V. Board is actually unconstitutional when applied to Federal Law (hat tip to Charles Pierce):

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/01/1526591/citizens-united-to-supreme-court-landmark-school-desegregation-case-was-wrong/

Such a fantasy has its limitations, I'm afraid. For one thing, here's a real cross-section of life, if you want to look at it:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/saturday-night-at-movies-56-up-what.html

Seems very little of these folks' lives is about the structure Mr McCrory imagines, or even the lack of it, and Great Britain has a lot more class structure than we do here in America. Seems like what all those folks depicted as they paddle down the river of life could use is insight. Insight doesn't necessarily make you money though it certainly can. Insight helps you understand things better. In McCrory's whipping boy example, "gender studies," one might find a deeper understanding of the constant advertising storm we're all immersed in. For example. Or one might perceive more clearly various office dynamics in which one finds oneself--whatever one's gender. Or one might notice certain threads of continuity in the daily Limbovian rants one might well listen to, or see in the way we structure our jobs certain themes. The curious hysteria quite a few on the Right are currently exhibiting with regard to the "women in combat" issue might well become clearer. If Mr. McCrory is actually serious, what he's saying to his fellow citizens is, basically, "shut up and swing that hammer."

Mr. McCrory's suggestion that the central purpose of public higher education is simply job placement has, in fact, a rather Soviet ring to it. It reveals, more than anything, his Republican underpinnings. Republicans do not believe in democracy, which when applied simply to life means that each person gets as much chance at his own personal fulfillment as is possible. Republicans do not want to run on their actual beliefs, or to reveal them to the public. Mr. McCrory, for example, said nothing at all during his campaign about such drastic "reforms" in higher public education. But then he must believe he is one of the elite.

North Carolina is in for a dark time I'm afraid. Mr. McCrory has at his back a fully Republican Legislature.

How They Make It Up

There's a video from Bill Maher's latest show floating around the internet right now. It was reposted on Digby this morning. Check it out; link's at the bottom. It's pretty amazing how completely Mr. De Souza ignores plain and obvious facts. But if you think about what he says in response to Maher's point on the Health Care Reform Act, you will recognize that this obvious circularity is exactly what the whole GOP is saying about Mr. Obama. He's a "hateful," "uncompromising" President because he didn't accept ideas that the GOP allegedly presented to him in 2009. Never mind that the whole Health Care Bill is based on a GOP designed framework, namely the plan their own current Presidential Candidate actually instituted when he was Governor, and which he based on their own 1996 Presidential Candidate's plan.

The GOP is not interested in repairing things that need repairing. They are interested in power. Period. Mr. Obama's mistake, in his first term, was to assume that the GOP was a reasonable body of politicians interesting in co-governance. Mr. Obama was, in a word, too reasonable.

Oh yeah. Here's the link:

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/bill-maher-takes-apart-dinesh-d-souza-over

Cudos to Chris Hayes

Well, there was finally some realistic and clear thinking coverage of the RNC just past. Go find the 9/1/12 Chris Hayes show--surely it's at the MSNBC website. Watch the whole thing. Even the Republican representative, a nice naive young man who writes for Bloomberg News, pretty much told the truth. http://upwithchrishayes.msnbc.com/

The trouble with the Republicans is, their positions are so wrong that they dare not tell the voting public what they are voting for. That's the truth, on all fronts, foreign and domestic. (The Republican representative on the Hayes panel is of the view that Mr. Romney is too nice to start a new war, no matter what he or his advisors might imply.)

Instead, the Republicans simply invoke the general angst of an old guard that knows things are changing, and doesn't like it a bit, then toss in all the racism and sexism they can to get the rest of us to vote against our own interests for the sake of some seeming small step for redress.

For leadership to do this--and this has been the Republican way for decades--is a betrayal of itself. All it takes is to see this clear and the voters should run away in droves, leaving only the residue of true racists and sexists.

And, as Bob Herbert says on Hayes' panel, there are just not that many of those. Which in my view is the question.

Meanwhile, Doghouse has found a piece by the Washington Post Fact Checker, which is interesting to read after listening to the factchecking discussion on the Hayes show:
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2012/09/our-politics-in-nutshell-where-it.html

The problem is, it is exceeding hard for many people to awake from this dream. Including, apparently, even people like the Washington Post Fact Checker, who manage to sleep and write at the same time.

Re Clint Eastwood's RNC moment, Juan Cole has the best response:

http://www.juancole.com/2012/09/top-ten-clint-eastwood-empty-chair-falsehoods.html

As all of these points resided in my memory, I cannot understand why professional reporters on the scene failed to recall any of them after Mr. Eastwood had finished his performance.

Small Houdahenian Events

Fuzzy has now achieved a new monniker, Puzzle, which I think is pretty nifty. He's growing the biggest (and possibly the fattest). We're trying to keep him from tending to always eat the leftovers, but it's hard to do that without being more constantly alert to their every notion and whim than we already are. We do have other aspects of our lives. I took out the trash, and the recycling, and changed the oil on both vehicles, and went to work. Just for example.

Libby got the boys an electric water fountain water dish last night. She sat up pretty late getting it going. I plugged it back in for them this morning. Possibly they weren't thirsty. They just looked at it and went on. But it's true that moving water fascinates them. Somewhere in the fairly distant but still computerized past I saw a cat who someone with a lot more time on their hands had trained to used the toilet. It was remarkable. I think he might even have flushed. No doubt it's somewhere on Youtube. It clearly proves that cats are somewhat interested in moving water. Wuzzy likes to whack the water dish and watch the water splash out. Also dip his paw into it and flick it around. Sometimes he'll come into the back room, where I'm doing something important like watching Al Sharpton, and jump onto my lap with his wet paw. Then I can tell what he's been up to, and admonish him. Usually he purrs loudly when I'm admonishing him.

This morning when I got up the usual situation was at hand, namely Momma was sitting on the porch looking intently at the door at me. As she's trained us, that "means" "I am hungry, people." I immediately set to filling her bowl. She gets a can plus some dry food mixed in. I made sure the boys were not standing right at the door, opened the door, placed the food out on the porch from a kneeling position. Momma was watching from the ground (it's a kinda small stone stoop of a porch). She has even now and then meowed just a bit to me, a new interaction. She also does the eye thing cats do when they want you to know they like you. (We can get into the eye thing some other time, but people who read books about cats will already know about it, and some dog people, the Romney kind of dog people if you know what I mean, will think it's just more liberal cat malarkey I'd expect, so I'm not going to rush into getting into the eye thing with you.)

Anyways, Wuzzy leaps over my arm and is suddenly outside, and standing pretty much beside Momma on the ground. He's fast and as heedless as Kurt Busch during the last ten, on bad tires. Momma wasn't sure what to make of this identical black cat landing beside her. She retreated under the house. What's funny, however, is that Wuzzy never noticed her at all. He was interested in sniffing the ground where he'd landed, and never moved when I went out and picked him up and brought him back inside. I rattled her dish a bit and left it outside on the porch, and shortly she hopped up and ate breakfast. When she finished she sat on the porch for a little while, grooming, then headed out into the woods as she does. We won't see her again until the next time. It's her schedule. I'd say there's a 70% chance or so that she'll be around this evening, and somewhat higher percentages for tomorrow morning. One day a couple of weeks back she sat out on the little race car that's a yard ornament for most of a morning. That hasn't happened again.

Bruiser became Grey Bear and is now 'Mokey, which stands for Smokey. Once the biggest, he's now the smallest of the three. He's the most finicky eater, which might account for some of that size differential. He's plenty full of energy and if we can guess the food he's really into on a given moment, he'll chow down like the others. Otherwise he'll eat some and then go sit on the windowsill, and like as not Puzzle will clean his plate for him.

All of 'em can now leap up to nearly any surface in the house. We are slowly losing our surplus of crockery. They are all tending to sleep in the bed down near our feet, and to function well as kitty alarms in the AM. I'm concerned that they use the wood stove as a perch and leaping station to higher spots. I don't want them to burn they little footsies, but how to prevent at least one such moment I'm really not sure of. We're about six weeks or so away from the first fire, if the weather is typical. They also have lept on the gas range without warning, fortunately not when a burner was in operation. I'm sure it's quite possible that one Sunday morning I could find one of 'em standing in the middle of the bacon or the scrambled eggs.

There was a nifty short story in the New Yorker a long time ago, about the senior year of some kids in high school. The story was sort of wry (not to be oxymoronic), and at one point the mother of one of the girls in the story says, to a friend, something along the lines of "well, at least if they're driving too fast in the middle of the night, they can't be having sex." The girl who's the object of this comment leans in the door and says, "why not?"

This is the motto of the Houdahenian Tribe.

Information Your Pastor Might Actually Use

Here's an interesting post:

http://www.juancole.com/2012/07/states-with-highest-religiosity-most-opposed-to-obamacare.html

I'm sure the initial reaction of your average church-goer to this little musing on the connection between a sociological experiment and a matter of fact regarding the Obama Health Care Reform Act will be defensive. It is natural to feel defensive when one feels criticized. But here are some other things to note:

It is self-serving for big-time media ministers to encourage defensiveness amongst their "flock." Why? Because they remain firmly in control of what their "flock" is thinking and doing as long as there is a sense of fear and a sort of "circle the wagons" mentality at work.

However. I'd think that a person who was trying to keep the question, "What is the Christian thing to do?" in the forefront of their lives would actually be interested in this correlation--between an inclination of church-goers to ignore the accident victim, and a trend in strongly "religious" states to be against the Health Reform Act.

If there's one thing Jesus does, time and again, in his efforts to teach people how to live a moral life, it is to engage people in reflection--to get them to look again. Jesus does not encourage the "circle the wagons" mentality.

Christians ought to reflect, from time to time, on the fact that people like Jesus and Socrates--people who encourage reflection and openness--often get literally and terminally "shut up" by the powers that be. And that is a way of "circling the wagons," so to speak.

Reminds me of the story about the Baptists in Heaven: "shhhh," St. Peter says, "they don't believe anyone else is here." "When this kiss is over, it will begin again, it will not be any different, it will be exactly the same." Thus sayeth David Byrne.

Laura; or Small Victories

The following comes via Tbogg:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/05/23/look-what-you-guys-did/

Here's the thing. The Limbovians can listen every day to the radio hater and they can imagine that they are just like him, and can blow off just like he does, in any way they want to, with no consequences. And although they are actually and sadly far too correct about that state of affairs (witness, for example, NC's recent sad new Constitutional Amendment, which brings our fine Constitution down to the level of used toilet paper, now and again, ordinary people who imagine they are just like "El Rushbo" discover that, in true fact, they actually live in the world they think they are far far above.

So it is for Mr. Gene Tierney Junior of Greenville, South Carolina. His unmitigated obnoxiousness did not go unpunished.

Excellent.

For a full recounting of the tale of Tierney, you can go backwards through Tbogg's posts on the matter, and on, back back in time, to the start of the whole thing--where a nice law student from Georgetown University testified before a Democratic House non-hearing on the Republican House's Hearing concerning women's matters, which said hearing included no women at all, and where said law student was subsequently insulted by "El Rushbo," on the airwaves owned by all of us (so they say) for nearly a week, in the most obnoxious manner possible, stirring up all manner of controversy and leading, ultimately, to the immortal words of Mr. Gene Tierney of Greenville, South Carolina.

Once, Gene Tierney was the name of a beautiful movie star. That's her picture, above. Was she from S.C.?

Saturday Update: More good news. Amazing.

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2012_05_01_archive.html#8189934664222161062

Update 2. I just spotted this, from Tbogg:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/05/25/all-apologies/

Pro-Life

(photo (c) Marion Post Wolcott, 1941)


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/02/deportation-immigrant-children-foster-care_n_1072553.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

This phenomenon was predicted, over and over again, by people who could see the obvious--that draconian deportation policies founder on the rocks of the plain fact that many undocumented residents are parents of American citizens who cannot legally be deported.

As with many right wing political policies, logic bears little leverage on action (or as in climate change, inaction). And so we find the same people who are trying to pass a life-begins-at-conception amendment in Mississippi arguing for deportation (and electric fences). And probably those same people are fine with drone strikes in far away villages, and the collateral damage ensuing.

Mr. Cain is absolutely the candidate for these folks. Like them, he is uninterested in logic and implication. Mr. Cain is the Right Wing Talk Show Host candidate, and better at the "candidate job" than the last guy who tried it, Alan Keyes. He appeals to "jes folks." He's the guy on the nail keg, down at the Texaco, with a Pepsi bottle full of floating peanuts, on a hot August morning. He's got in all the shingling he's gonna do for the day, started at 5 when it was cool. He's on the way, slowly, to the river, with a pole and a can of worms. Along his route he's gonna visit some with whomever stops to fill up the tank, about whatever he feels like talking about.

"You know ma," the farmer says driving away from the pumps. "I'da vote for that guy if he was running. The pointyheads are just ruining the country. You'd a thought when we fried those two jew scientists for stealing the A-bomb, things would a changed."

9-9-9 is the same way. Polls now show that Iowans believe by a significant margin that Cain's tax plan is going to save them some serious tax dollars. In fact, math shows that for a person with an income below $100,000 it will actually cost them thousands a year more in taxes. But an appeal to math is really an appeal to "elitist thinking." It's the pointy heads again. Them jew scientists were traitors, but they were good at math.

This is where the mystery of poll results meets the political designs of oligarchs who aim to win the Presidency. In Herman Cain they might have got 'em a winner. After a week of "scandal," he's up in the polls, and the voters believe it's all a plot by the Liberal Press.

(I thought this post up entirely independently of Mr. R. Pundit (see his post of 11/1/11), who says it better:
The Rude Pundit )

That Dream Press

(from http://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/2_10.html#subindex)

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/10/28/the-scandal-is-that-jonathan-alter-doesnt-see-the-scandal/

This excellent piece by Marcy Wheeler exposes the problem with our mainstream media even better than, say, a random half-hour with Shepard Smith. Or perhaps it exposes the depth of the problem I keep making efforts to address herein. That is, one can mitigate the pernicious brain-cell killing effects of Fox News, or ABC News, with counter-doses of MSNBC. But MSNBC has its own issues, which are more subtle but still there. (And this is NOT an invocation of the horrible "balance" mistake yet again--a catch-all sewer which has sucked most of the thinking that used to occur in reportage right down the drain and into the Delta.) Jonathan Alter, for example, is frequently an analyst-guest on various MSNBC shows, and he is a thoughtful analyst and has his insights. But, as Marcy shows in the link, he also has blinders on.

Look at it this way: we're all seeing this phenomenon, the Occupy Movement, as an ongoing news story. But understanding it, that's the hard part. One proffered explanation is to be found on the Fox side of things--it amounts to a prolonged sneer, a Major Hoople snap of the evening newspaper, a hope that Oakland's rubber bullets are but a beginning, perhaps even a nostalgia for those glorious moments when fearful boys in the National Guard started shooting students at Kent State.
Hannity's big lead yesterday was, "Alleged Rape at Occupy Wall Street." That's the Right--the same Right that finds alleged racism in the simple reportage of facts.

But as Ms Wheeler rightly points out, the Obama Administration is also far too cozy with the same One-Percenters that are the focus of the Occupy Movement. Indeed, what the Occupy Movement is attempting, more than anything else, is an end run around the blanket media perception of power and wealth in the United States--a perception which in many ways forms the very field upon which the so-called "left/right" dichotomy plays out. Want an example? Ok. One of the biggest current sponsors of the various MSNBC shows running during prime time is the Natural Gas Industry, which is featuring a series of extremely well-crafted advertisements reassuring all of us that our nation's water supply will not be endangered by the fracking process used to release deep natural gas reservoirs. This claimed fact--that fracking is entirely safe--is (as far as I know) never challenged on MSNBC, not even by Rachel Maddow, who runs frequent stories on other energy industry pollutings. (Last night, between kindly ads about the safety of fracking, she showed pictures of a collapsed coal-ash slurry flood which poured into Lake Michigan.)

Or to put it another way, I have never heard Ms Wheeler's pointed conclusion stated on any MSNBC analysis of the upcoming Presidential contest. I'll paste it here for you:

There are people occupying squares all around this country to protest, largely, bankster corruption. The bankster corruption Obama has enabled. The corruption that caused the lousy economy.

And yet, because Alter doesn’t get that Obama’s coddling of the banksters exacerbated the lousy economy, he doesn’t see that that scandal–Obama catering to his donors the banksters while the biological people of this country suffered as a result–might be the only thing that gives the parade of nutcases auditioning to run against Obama an opening against him.

This is not an arcane bit of analysis. This is where we are at in the country, and this is the framework for our next election of a President.

It is remarkable that to find this analysis I had to dig deep into the blogosphere, to a place a relative handful of people even know about. This is the failure of the media system without which we cannot possibly have informed choice, not to mention a particularly pointed example of how both our national political parties are co-oped by monied interests--by the One Percent, so to speak.

One would almost think a kind of Heisenberg Principle is at work, with the Democratic Process being the moving parts of the atom, and money being the light electrons which affect things we're trying to "look" at. It didn't used to be this way.

World Series Starts Tonight

(latimes.com)

Well lets start with this little bit of information:

http://www.juancole.com/2011/10/news-that-makes-you-go-hunh.html

Ok, back? Now the other day Libby took her dad to Duke Hospital for some consultation, and she was sitting in the waiting room there and of course there was a nice color teevee the Hospital provides to help families pass the time while they wait, and on the teevee was Fox News. There was no way to change the channel either. The same experience awaits you at the airport, and at your McDonald's or Bo Jangles, although now and then you might see CNN or the Weather Channel. According to Cole's observation (based on media analysis), Mr. Obama and the government generally is framed in a certain negative way, while the framing of private endeavor is framed in a more positive way. Same with the ongoing and currently simmering political campaign for President, 2012, where, for example, only MSNBC takes note of the rather obvious fact that the GOP is putting forward candidates who are either craven or entirely muddled, and that no GOP candidate would make a competent President unless by President you mean (as perhaps the GOP does mean), a mouthpiece for hidden power who will never take the power of the office into his own hands. That is, one simple step back from even George W. Bush's view of the Presidency--that it comes down to a simple bi-pole light switch, On/Off--"I am the Decider." That is, one would still think, viewing the possibilities of a Republican President as the "clown car" stops in your living room each week, that none of these people would actually be President if elected. Rather, they would be the spokesman (...errrr... spokesperson) for the United States, reading the country's position on various issues from a script cobbled together the previous evening by skilled analysts and advisors. This sort of President, more and more the GOP definition of the office, never has to deal with anything in "real time." (Thus, that lurid few hours when W. Bush found himself flying hither and yon whilst the country seemed under attack.)

But, meanwhile, the World Series starts tonight. And it starts on Fox Sports, which will also carry the NFL on Sunday. And as the American people live their lives, teevees murmuring mostly in the background, it is reassuring that Fox, which brings them the National Passtime's season-crowning conclusion, and the fall/winter background of professional football, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Day, and then the start of NASCAR, Daytona 2012--well of course it's reassuring to know what Fox thinks about economic and political events and just plain old-fashioned news--such as the big blizzard/heatwave, or the psycho in Des Moines, or the plane that barely lands safely or doesn't, while the spaghetti sauce simmers and the kids do their homework, and dad gets home from work if he still has a job, or cracks a beer if he doesn't.

Also, October is Five Dollar Footlong Month. So did Subway steal this from Mr. Cain, or visa-versa? Perhaps Fox will tell us next Sunday, in the voice of George Will, who loves him some baesbol.

Meanwhile, the real world does its thang. For example:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2011/10/15/storytime-korner/

The Balance Thing

from Digby

David Gregory: You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that's extreme. Well people on the other side think that introducing health care reform for the whole country is akin to European Socialism.

The quote comes from Digby, and was made on Meet the Press yesterday.  It illustrates pretty well why Americans who simply watch the occasional Sunday opinion show to find out what's going on remain in a state of confusion or even decide they'd better go to the next Tea Party rally to make their voice heard.  What Mr. Gregory did in that quote was to suggest that secession and a flawed but needed reform of the American health care system are pretty much equivalent, because there are people who think that's so.  In the same way, the idea that in the recent Republican created debt ceiling crisis it was actually both parties who were causing the crisis and endangering the economy and the well-being of millions of Americans is pretty much what Americans now think--because that's how it was reported, pretty much.

The American tragedy is that essential to a working democracy is an informed voting public.  A vibrant journalism is essential for an informed public.  But weaknesses in our system have now allowed a Lord Haw Haw media to develop and blossom over the past thirty so years, unchecked, and even in less doctrine driven media outlets (such as David Gregory's), the balance muddle in fact distorts the truth of our political situation.

As someone pointed out over the weekend, the best President we could elect in 2008 was an Eisenhower Republican.  All the Republican candidates running against him next year assert that Mr. Obama is a radical socialist, and some even hint that he isn't even an American.  This state of affairs is extremely dangerous to the future of America.  As Digby also pointed out recently, some people saw Governor Rick Perry's execution of an innocent man as a positive character trait.  "It takes balls to execute an innocent man," a constituent is reported to have remarked at the time.  (And Bill Clinton, let us recall, pretty much made his chops the same way in 1992, as did George W. Bush in 2000.)  Meanwhile, the practical result of our more and more militarized foreign policy is permanent war, and in that regard both our major parties can be called simply "The War Party."  You doubt?  Mr. Gates.  QED. 

Tuesday morning update:
It's not like the Ayn Rand Cult has utterly eaten the brains of all our "job creators."  Warren Buffet offered this in the New York Times recently.  It's worth a read, if only for the statistics about jobs created in more taxing eras. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html?src=me&ref=general

You Gotta Take Out A "Political Ad"?

number crunching

A man named Thomas Duane Poole, of Clayton, NC, took out a full page ad on the back page of the News and Observer, Raleigh's newspaper and the political paper of record in NC, last weekend.  Here's a link:
http://shopping.newsobserver.com/ROP/ads.aspx?advid=1381770&adid=10012

At the bottom it's described as a "political ad."  While the text presents a bit of history which has some political implications (one would hope), it's hardly an advertisment at all, but a history lesson mostly concerning Federal surplus and deficit since World War II.  Mr. Poole is rightly angry with the insistent dissembling which has become a daily feature of political conversation, particularly on the Right.  Like me, he has tired of hearing endless falsehoods, and of watching a living experiment in the Big Lie.  Except Mr. Poole went and did the actual research and offers, in his "ad," a history lesson.  Good for him.  There's an actual address on the bottom of the ad.  I plan to send him a note of thanks, as I hope others will as well.

A couple of days ago, Mr. Limbaugh, whom I sample for a few minutes during my lunch drive, said that this year's election was entirely about "ideas."  That was one remarkable statement.  What ideas?  I haven't noticed any at all.  On the Right we find nothing but mischaracterizations of the current administration.  On the Democratic Party's side, there is mainly a frightened effort to stress that each election is local and involves the particular candidates on the local ballot--not Mr. Obama. 

Big cudos to Mr. Poole, a fine North Carolina citizen.  Maybe the N&O ought to put him on the team.

Santa Claus on the 4th

My old pals down at the Texaco were grumbling as to how President Obama made a mockery of the "Founders" in his recent 4th of July speech, because he mentioned that they were all men of wealth, and that it took Mr. Lincoln and the Civil War to free the slaves. I don't know whether he mentioned that it took a Constitutional Amendment in the 20th Century no less to free the womenfolk, but of course that's the truth too. Apparently these plain historical facts are not to be brought up during celebrations of our Independence Day.

But I have no idea why? Oh I do realize that the right-wing punditry has made this judgment out in radio and teevee land, but the boys at the Texaco say they never never ever listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, or any of those people. For them it's just country music 24/7, preferably Hank, Jr., and gospel on Sundays after church. And these fellers do think for themselves. I'm sure of it. They all hate Jimmie Johnson, for example.

So it beats me, but I'll just ignore the punditry and cut to the chase, because it seems like a strange kind of mistake to get upset with Obama for pointing out that the people who rebelled in 1776 and signed on to the Declaration of Independence were, indeed, men of wealth. Who ever said that was a bad attribute anyways? It's just the deal. And those men, who eventually lead the colonists to victory against a big world power of that era (proof that Mike Steele is right about undertaking a land war in Asia), knew that there were contradictions between the glorious Declaration and the much more detailed Constitution that they wrote some thirteen years later.

The way to understand 1776 is to see those men as striking a match. The Declaration of Independence is not a law. It's a metaphysical statement--a credo, an assertion of some basic beliefs--so basic, it is so asserted, as to be deeper even than the Laws of Great Britain which were the laws under which the writers of the Declaration lived, as citizens of the Empire. These truths are self-evident it is said. All men are created equal. It is said. And this would include and still includes not only white male Americans of wealth and taste, but Mexicans who just snuck under the fence of freedom, black people who didn't get un-owned until 1864, women who didn't get to vote in the United States until 1920.

So doesn't everyone above the age of eight or so quite understand this rather complex but very understandable fact? Namely, that the very man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, actually owned slaves as he took pen in hand, and moreover, actually had a long-standing intimate relationship with at least one of those slaves, producing children and a line of Jeffersons which still exists today and knows, in their family history, just who great great grampaw was: The Louisiana Purchase, the Third President, Monticello, UVA, the man on the $2.00 bill? None of this is a secret, not even the parts that the ummmm "white Jeffersons" tried to keep secret for nearly 200 years. (As Homer Simpson says about DNA, "Dhoahhhh".)

And of course what is any of this but to say that the founders of our country were not statues on court squares, made of alabaster, frozen at their perfect moment of being, mute because nothing is left to be said, cold because blood betrays. They got their blood up against the government of Great Britain, operating at too great a distance and with too high a hand, under a King who was not particularly capable. They were not in perfect agreement either--thus there's a Canadian border today. And as many of them were big land owners operating agri-businesses on a scale requiring either slaves or mechanical inventions still deep into the future, their fathers and grandfathers had kidded themselves into thinking that it was better to be a black man working in a Mississippi field in July than a "savage" hiding from a lion or a crocodile in the "dark continent."

Go read "The Sot Weed Factor" I mention to one of the Texaco boys--the guy with the DeKalb hat. "I don't read no books," he says. And there ain't no slot in the cash register for no $2 Bill neither. Why's that, I wonder? I get 'em at the bank now and then, on purpose, and keep 'em in the tip jar when I play gigs, back when I thought it was fun to play all night for 25 buckaroos. One guy says "Americans didn't make slavery, that was the British." Ahhhhhhh. Where's my Homer Head Slap key? What's the point of telling any of them that Robert E. Lee was the rightful heir to George Washington, that his revolution in defense of slavery (ummmm, er, states rights) was Jefferson's next and predicted cycle of revolution. Arlington National Cemetery was once Lee's plantation, where all the marble men lie forever at attention and at rest, blacks and women included, JFK's flame an eternal flicker lighting all with the obscurity of shadows.

The blood betrayed Lee too. Henry Adams, John Adams great grandson, said they should have hung Marse Lee. The abolitionists' blood boiled too, up in the rocky country where the big field crops couldn't grow. Some nitwit down in Charleston decided to shell Fort Sumter and it was by gawd ON. The Congress--same as it ever was--came out to watch First Manassas be the end of the rebels, and a few of them ended up being captured and hauled off to Richmond when it turned out that Stonewall Jackson knew a thing or two about war from his years at West Point and his time down in Mexico in the '40s. This same Jackson, and Lee as well, knew the whole damn thing was a mistake, but they understood that it was a union of States, and they knew a State was sovereign and could by gawd leave the dang party if they wanted. Which was Jefferson's idea. Jackson's own men, who loved him, killed him by mistake after his victory at Chancellorsville. Thus, he missed Gettysburg. Thus doth history's wheel turn with mysterious and inexorable precision.

So then, why the hell not celebrate the end of a contradiction, which was the match which lit the fuse, July 4th, 1776. And what a gentle, sweet-tea way Obama put it, the other day. He might have rightly and correctly said that on the 4th of July we celebrate the slave-holding, slave-fucking crackers who begat this great land of ours with an out and out lie, and led us eventually to a Civil War which killed and maimed a huge great number of very ordinary people on both sides who were swept up into a meatgrinder cranked up by jackasses who mostly lived down in Charleston, SC, far far away from the fighting until Tecumseh Sherman rolled into town from the south no less, some years later. What would have been the difference in the punditry's reaction, I have to ask--the pundits nobody at the Texaco ever listens to of course.

"Turn on the teevee," the guy at the Texaco hollers. "The green flag's about to drop, and Junior is on the pole." Don't tell any of them that there's no Santa Claus either.