Just before real writing, and the inclusive nature of the circumspect thought which it requires, was about fall from the precipice of our extremely temporal, sensationalistic and immensely dissatisfying existence, this comes along.
I never read The New Republic, and would never had seen this, if it were not for David Brooks in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02brooks.html?th&emc=th
“The American instinct to continuously remake ourselves in the image of Adam — to achieve a decisive and final break with history — has periodically proven seductive to voters. And, sometimes, this instinct can produce important, transformative results. Yet the past — in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities — has a way of lingering around.”
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a559152f-70db-4183-8a8e-ed818ce6df7c
Happy New Year(s).
Friday, January 2, 2009
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Woe is Me..And the Bombs Bursted in Air
I can’t decide what's worse, my crippled communications status (my TV died) or the lack of immediately incendiary political news. I am really glad that “yes we did”, but now what?
With no television, I cannot watch Christ Matthews yell and spit at his guests or Rachel Maddow crucify Rick Warren (again). The shortage of political firewood (Blago is asleep, Obama is in Hawaii) since Sarah Palin went away makes it tough, because no one wants to hear about the mundane realties of urban hunger or listen to another “expert” tell us why our economic conundrum sucks. But life must go on. And one more re-hash about why some Wall Street CEO thinks he deserves his multi-million dollar bonus and I will vomit. But anyway…
The economy: Today (12/28) the NYT had a new op ed from Paul Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/) in which he quotes and defends his use of the phrase:”niggling nabobs”. He essentially concludes that if you listen to all of the experts, you will, sooner or later, come to the conclusion that “nobody knows nuthin’ “. In the same newspaper, Thomas Friedman speaks up (Op-Ed Columnist: Win, Win, Win, Win, Win ... ) and while I think he makes some good points about the (needed) gas tax hikes, I have heard dissenting remarks from others who think he has got much of it wrong. You decide. All I know is I don’t “know nuthin’ “ except that somebody ran off with all the money.
I got this in an email from NOWAR (http://thirdcoastactivist.org/) this afternoon:
Hello, all. Over the weekend Israel has killed over 300 Palestinians and wounded at least 900 more with F-16 jets and Apache helicopters supplied by the United States. Anger at this assault has ignited spontaneous demonstrations in many cities, including Austin, where a protest called by UT's Palestine Solidarity Committee will take place at 5 p.m. on Monday, December 29 in front of the State Capital (11th and Congress). To read more about the ongoing crisis in Gaza, the complicity of the United States, and the broader historical context visit http://electronicintifada.net
The home pages of MSNBC.com and the BBC have been covering this firestorm and violence all day as well.
I am baffled about who to blame and why. Condi Rice and the Israeli Foreign Minister say the whole thing is the fault of Hamas for pitching rockets over the walls into Israel after breaking a truce. Hamas says it should be expected, since Israel won’t allow humanitarian food stuffs and medical supplies into Gaza. So Israel retaliates against the rockets with several hundred tons of bombs and kills at least 300 people right out of the box. The word “overkill” comes to mind.
However, I think this is all an environmental problem. Or rather a problem of environmental disruption. Perhaps we keep forgetting to remember that Palestinians and Israelis were both once nomadic desert warriors. They shared the sand, the sun, camels and brutality. Their morality was determined largely by desert survival. As the centuries progressed, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and (eventually) arrogant Protestant democracy got mixed in there and now these two camps live in artificial walled cities. They still hate one another for a thousand thousand wrong and bigoted, short-sighted reasons and religious tenets, but their environments have been altered to maximize the terror they can inflict upon one another. They are now walled-in and have much better and more lethal weapons to use against each other (perhaps if they were forced to hack one another to bits with scimitars and hurl camel dung back and forth at each other things would slow down). . There is nothing new in their brutality: they brought it with them from the desert. They are just much more efficient in how they can go about slaughtering one another in this new environment. It is very much akin to the economic “experts” Krugman decries: “Nobody knows nuthin”.” And nobody wants to be confused by the facts. Pardon my use of the phrase, but when it comes to the use of logic, it appears that both sides can only say, “God forbid”.
The Mid-east has high-powered explosives; Wall Street has loan default/debit/credit swaps covered by a TARP. In either case, the result is dead bodies and rubble. If there were a website for all of this, it would be called "Screwup.disorg/".
ThinkProgress.org is having great fun (as are the readers) with the fact that it looks like the Bush “libery” will be a “white elephant”. It seems that many of the restrictive directives that Bush has issued will prevent many of the materials that should be in a presidential library from actually being there, making it largely an empty building. But that is to be expected as we endure the attempts by the administration to make “valedictory” (say what?) speeches and to rush to artificially create W’s “legacy”. You can read about the legacy efforts anywhere you might care to look, but I can create only this one dominant image:
A legacy, something that one leaves behind, trailing after him/her following their time in the leadership limelight, should be at least somewhat noble and awe inspiring. But when I close my eyes, all I see is W leaving a stall in the men’s room, with a long trail of toilet paper, dangling from the back of his pants, following him down the hall. And he has made it clear he has no intention of looking back. So be it.
The related not-very-new news today was that both Condi Rice and Laura Bush gave separate TV interviews and defended the Bush leadership record. Condi gave him an A+ (she must be smoking crack) and Laura Bush said , “history will tell”. It sure will. So be it. And I hope he will be “it” soon, so can all tag him and run away. There is sad irony in the fact that at the end of W’s “reign” his two most prominent Sunday morning apologists are two women, both devoid of a sense of the real world and devoted to perpetrating lies.
“Hi. My name is Dick Cheney, and I’m here to help you”. That is written on the toilet paper. The stuff legacies are made of.
We are but three days from a new year. In the absence of a television, I am rummaging through my CD collection for entertainment. I have just heard singer/songwriter Steve Goodman go on with great eloquence about the fact that, no matter how bad or gruesome or awful that which has gone before us has been, every year on Jan 1 we get the chance to begin anew. And country singer Gretchen Wilson just warbled that she was “one Bud wiser than I was a minute ago.” Perhaps in three days we will all acknowledge Steve’s admonishment to begin anew and be like Gretchen, “one Bud Wiser”.
I don’t know if that will keep any bombs from bursting over head in Gaza, make our economic experts any smarter or keep money out of he hands of some Wall Street tycoon. , but it might be a start. It would certainly be better than “nobody knows nuthin” and “one Bud wiser” would be better than none. Of course, things could get worse, but “God forbid”.
Happy New Year.
Life Goes on in Texas.
With no television, I cannot watch Christ Matthews yell and spit at his guests or Rachel Maddow crucify Rick Warren (again). The shortage of political firewood (Blago is asleep, Obama is in Hawaii) since Sarah Palin went away makes it tough, because no one wants to hear about the mundane realties of urban hunger or listen to another “expert” tell us why our economic conundrum sucks. But life must go on. And one more re-hash about why some Wall Street CEO thinks he deserves his multi-million dollar bonus and I will vomit. But anyway…
The economy: Today (12/28) the NYT had a new op ed from Paul Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/) in which he quotes and defends his use of the phrase:”niggling nabobs”. He essentially concludes that if you listen to all of the experts, you will, sooner or later, come to the conclusion that “nobody knows nuthin’ “. In the same newspaper, Thomas Friedman speaks up (Op-Ed Columnist: Win, Win, Win, Win, Win ... ) and while I think he makes some good points about the (needed) gas tax hikes, I have heard dissenting remarks from others who think he has got much of it wrong. You decide. All I know is I don’t “know nuthin’ “ except that somebody ran off with all the money.
I got this in an email from NOWAR (http://thirdcoastactivist.org/) this afternoon:
Hello, all. Over the weekend Israel has killed over 300 Palestinians and wounded at least 900 more with F-16 jets and Apache helicopters supplied by the United States. Anger at this assault has ignited spontaneous demonstrations in many cities, including Austin, where a protest called by UT's Palestine Solidarity Committee will take place at 5 p.m. on Monday, December 29 in front of the State Capital (11th and Congress). To read more about the ongoing crisis in Gaza, the complicity of the United States, and the broader historical context visit http://electronicintifada.net
The home pages of MSNBC.com and the BBC have been covering this firestorm and violence all day as well.
I am baffled about who to blame and why. Condi Rice and the Israeli Foreign Minister say the whole thing is the fault of Hamas for pitching rockets over the walls into Israel after breaking a truce. Hamas says it should be expected, since Israel won’t allow humanitarian food stuffs and medical supplies into Gaza. So Israel retaliates against the rockets with several hundred tons of bombs and kills at least 300 people right out of the box. The word “overkill” comes to mind.
However, I think this is all an environmental problem. Or rather a problem of environmental disruption. Perhaps we keep forgetting to remember that Palestinians and Israelis were both once nomadic desert warriors. They shared the sand, the sun, camels and brutality. Their morality was determined largely by desert survival. As the centuries progressed, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and (eventually) arrogant Protestant democracy got mixed in there and now these two camps live in artificial walled cities. They still hate one another for a thousand thousand wrong and bigoted, short-sighted reasons and religious tenets, but their environments have been altered to maximize the terror they can inflict upon one another. They are now walled-in and have much better and more lethal weapons to use against each other (perhaps if they were forced to hack one another to bits with scimitars and hurl camel dung back and forth at each other things would slow down). . There is nothing new in their brutality: they brought it with them from the desert. They are just much more efficient in how they can go about slaughtering one another in this new environment. It is very much akin to the economic “experts” Krugman decries: “Nobody knows nuthin”.” And nobody wants to be confused by the facts. Pardon my use of the phrase, but when it comes to the use of logic, it appears that both sides can only say, “God forbid”.
The Mid-east has high-powered explosives; Wall Street has loan default/debit/credit swaps covered by a TARP. In either case, the result is dead bodies and rubble. If there were a website for all of this, it would be called "Screwup.disorg/".
ThinkProgress.org is having great fun (as are the readers) with the fact that it looks like the Bush “libery” will be a “white elephant”. It seems that many of the restrictive directives that Bush has issued will prevent many of the materials that should be in a presidential library from actually being there, making it largely an empty building. But that is to be expected as we endure the attempts by the administration to make “valedictory” (say what?) speeches and to rush to artificially create W’s “legacy”. You can read about the legacy efforts anywhere you might care to look, but I can create only this one dominant image:
A legacy, something that one leaves behind, trailing after him/her following their time in the leadership limelight, should be at least somewhat noble and awe inspiring. But when I close my eyes, all I see is W leaving a stall in the men’s room, with a long trail of toilet paper, dangling from the back of his pants, following him down the hall. And he has made it clear he has no intention of looking back. So be it.
The related not-very-new news today was that both Condi Rice and Laura Bush gave separate TV interviews and defended the Bush leadership record. Condi gave him an A+ (she must be smoking crack) and Laura Bush said , “history will tell”. It sure will. So be it. And I hope he will be “it” soon, so can all tag him and run away. There is sad irony in the fact that at the end of W’s “reign” his two most prominent Sunday morning apologists are two women, both devoid of a sense of the real world and devoted to perpetrating lies.
“Hi. My name is Dick Cheney, and I’m here to help you”. That is written on the toilet paper. The stuff legacies are made of.
We are but three days from a new year. In the absence of a television, I am rummaging through my CD collection for entertainment. I have just heard singer/songwriter Steve Goodman go on with great eloquence about the fact that, no matter how bad or gruesome or awful that which has gone before us has been, every year on Jan 1 we get the chance to begin anew. And country singer Gretchen Wilson just warbled that she was “one Bud wiser than I was a minute ago.” Perhaps in three days we will all acknowledge Steve’s admonishment to begin anew and be like Gretchen, “one Bud Wiser”.
I don’t know if that will keep any bombs from bursting over head in Gaza, make our economic experts any smarter or keep money out of he hands of some Wall Street tycoon. , but it might be a start. It would certainly be better than “nobody knows nuthin” and “one Bud wiser” would be better than none. Of course, things could get worse, but “God forbid”.
Happy New Year.
Life Goes on in Texas.
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