My cohort, Deb, over at Turn Left wrote this about Joe Lieberman:
http://turn-left.hypocrisy.com/2009/11/02/the-return-of-the-3-million-man/
Not to be outdone, I wrote this:
Until not long ago, as I watched the Lieberman antics, I was locked into the pseudo-Christian dilemma of trying to decide if what he is doing (or pretending to do) was moral or immoral.I was convinced I could think of it all in terms of right and wrong. Eventually I came to realize that I was barking up the wrong tree.
The problem is that this tree has NO ROOTS. Lieberman is neither moral nor immoral: he is simply AMORAL. His thoughts and actions have no substance. He is an over-paid entertainer, a showman, who plays for money, grins and giggles…mostly for his own amusement. Sadly, beneath the garish mirth is untold misery because he is a hollow man. He is masquerading as public servant, when in truth of fact, he is a parasite. In leech-like fashion, he has attached himself to the artery of the public employment roles and sucks it drier and drier every day.
Public life for Lieberman is a sordid circus. He loves the center ring, the brass band and the elephant parade, loves to play the clown and sell nutritionless popcorn, but wants no one to know the animals in the cages out back are starving and diseased.
Lieberman is a morbid and dangerous monument to the moribund face of what the crumbling edifice of what democracy is becoming. He is a harbinger of terrible times to come. I guess everyone needs someone to look down to.
If Lieberman is allowed to proceed and continue unchecked, then we deserve whatever we get. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
Any moment now, I expect to see the Connecticuit Israeli Police coming to arrest both of us.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Current events
I read this article (you might do so, as well),
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091019/kaufmann
Then I wrote this:
In a word? "Yes." Just as in the discussion (?) concerning healthcare reform, our elected officials have develpoed a deaf ear and are acting instead as the "chosen few." Instead of listening with any sensitivity to the opinions, desires and wishes of the consitutuents who elected them, with the exception of Barney Frank and handful of others, they have chosen to become aloof and unresponsive.
With respect to both healthcare and this credit regulation legislation, the "representatives" are failing to represent and choosing to ignore the will of the very people who entrusted them with this critical responsibility of oversight and shepherding.
The word that comes to mind is "arrogant," and if one takes a quick trip through the dictionary, you find that this word comes from the Latin, meaning "to claim." In these cases it would seem to mean to lay claim to a superiority of wisdom and intellect that they have conferred upon themselves. The definition also mentions "haughtiness," thereby implying (again) a self-imbued sense of a heightened ability to make value/judgement calls on behalf of others they seem to deem incapable of doing for themselves (us).
The sadness of this conundrum is that we seem to be facing the need to legislate fiscal morality, and the task has fallen to those who have no moral compass to guide them in their task.
To be regarded as a schmuck is to be regarded as inferior and stupid, and I am sorely offended. You should be, as well.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091019/kaufmann
Then I wrote this:
In a word? "Yes." Just as in the discussion (?) concerning healthcare reform, our elected officials have develpoed a deaf ear and are acting instead as the "chosen few." Instead of listening with any sensitivity to the opinions, desires and wishes of the consitutuents who elected them, with the exception of Barney Frank and handful of others, they have chosen to become aloof and unresponsive.
With respect to both healthcare and this credit regulation legislation, the "representatives" are failing to represent and choosing to ignore the will of the very people who entrusted them with this critical responsibility of oversight and shepherding.
The word that comes to mind is "arrogant," and if one takes a quick trip through the dictionary, you find that this word comes from the Latin, meaning "to claim." In these cases it would seem to mean to lay claim to a superiority of wisdom and intellect that they have conferred upon themselves. The definition also mentions "haughtiness," thereby implying (again) a self-imbued sense of a heightened ability to make value/judgement calls on behalf of others they seem to deem incapable of doing for themselves (us).
The sadness of this conundrum is that we seem to be facing the need to legislate fiscal morality, and the task has fallen to those who have no moral compass to guide them in their task.
To be regarded as a schmuck is to be regarded as inferior and stupid, and I am sorely offended. You should be, as well.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Relative Values
Yesterday, on ABC's "This Week", hosted by George Stepenopulence, the first guest was the venerable, beady- eyed, ex fed-chairholder/warmer, Alan Greenspan. (NOTE: he is not in anyway green, but has spanned much too much time in the pubic domain). Each time George pressed Mr. Not-Green-Spanned-too-long for an answer about the economy, the stimilus packages, the unemployment, the recession or the Fed's possible actions, he responded with either, " We don't know yet", "We will have to wait and see", "It is hard to project these things", "We will have to wait for the report from the GAO/CBO", "These things are hard to predict", or "We have never had a sustained period of unemployment/recession/imbalance of debt/etc. like this with which to compare it to" (that is, historcally speaking, by the way, a completel bald-faced lie...and very bad grammar).
It would seem that Mr. Greenspan would serve us all much better if he were to return to the relative obsurity of retirement, rather than muddy the airwaves and prove , once again, that he doesn't know anything. Since I am one now, I can excusably and with impunity therefore decry old, staid and stale men, with granite in their ass and noodles in their brains, who have moved way past their prime and should stay home and watch re-runs of "The Flintstones".
Last week, as I trudged down a rainy street in Austin, and pondered the weather forecast with my son, he reminded me of a quote from a wilderness book writer, who said that " weather forecasters were invented to make economists look good." Yesterday, on this same TV program, Cokie Roberts (NPR) reminded us that "economists were invented to make astrologers look good". I am guessing that Paul Krugman might somehow (at last partially) agree. I have also just become more trusting as regards my horoscope.
And my other guess (and I'm not waiting on a report from the CBO on this) is that the longer the President and Congress listen to the malarky we get from the likes of Alan Greenspan, the longer we will continue to drift towards becoming a third world country, economically.
It would seem that Mr. Greenspan would serve us all much better if he were to return to the relative obsurity of retirement, rather than muddy the airwaves and prove , once again, that he doesn't know anything. Since I am one now, I can excusably and with impunity therefore decry old, staid and stale men, with granite in their ass and noodles in their brains, who have moved way past their prime and should stay home and watch re-runs of "The Flintstones".
Last week, as I trudged down a rainy street in Austin, and pondered the weather forecast with my son, he reminded me of a quote from a wilderness book writer, who said that " weather forecasters were invented to make economists look good." Yesterday, on this same TV program, Cokie Roberts (NPR) reminded us that "economists were invented to make astrologers look good". I am guessing that Paul Krugman might somehow (at last partially) agree. I have also just become more trusting as regards my horoscope.
And my other guess (and I'm not waiting on a report from the CBO on this) is that the longer the President and Congress listen to the malarky we get from the likes of Alan Greenspan, the longer we will continue to drift towards becoming a third world country, economically.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
"How do we remedy the Situation?"
Or, As Shara said later, this about "the paucity of langauge".
From: shara_thome@hotmail.com
To: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 6:46 AM
Subject: shara_thome@hotmail.com has shared: Theodore Dalrymple on the Gift of Language
....but how to remedy the situation? Dumbfounded here.
Theodore Dalrymple on the Gift of Language Source: austrolabe.com
For starters, let me say that I am "dumbfounded" by discovering there were so many Muslims living amongst the Aussies. But I suppose I shouldn't be, because Muslims can now threaten Danish cartoonists and cause ghetto riots in Paris. Be that as it may, that there is so much sudden concern for how to deal with the "Muslim problem" and the Muslim language(s), in places like down under and elsewhere, is perplexing. I say this because in Australia, where the concern for the Muslim invasion gets front page coverage while they slaughter, ignore and denigrate the aborigine; in the U.S. , where we sought to obliterate the native Americans and today force them into encampments, while still not dealing with our history of slavery and contemporary racism ( and the language obstacles involved there, bro); in Scandanavia the Nordic past is being ameliorated and watered down to appease the Muslim outsiders; in France they are busier worrying about headscarve etiquette than they are the quality of education and have almost foresworn the problems with the Moroccan and Algerian populations in favor of the Arab refugees; in England the disparities over Scots and the Irish have been put aside to worry about the employment and education requirements of the Muslim Indian refugees, and in Germany, the concern with Turks has displaced recognition of Jewish issues ...Nearly overnight, it seems, the world is obsessed with acclimating to, absorbing, yielding to and incorporting the culture and language of a people we regarded as ignorant, backward, infidel in nature,bloodthirsty and heathen, not so long ago.
Would that we were so afraid of the perils of rampant Christianity.
Note: In earlier centuries,the Spaniards (in particular), always solved the problem of cultural and linguistic assimilation by simply trying to make everyone Catholic. That insidious and predatory (and arrogant) practice, coupled with the Inquisition, has not worked out so well, except to make Mexico City a safe place for the Pope to visit. And I dare say that catechism classes for the masses of Muslims will not get very far.
As for your query, "but how to remedy the situtation?" , I am stubbornly and narrow-mindedly in the camp of Robert Frost, on this one. Disregarding for a moment the question of which tongue do you speak when you are in which land, "When in Rome" rings a bell. If you are visiting, simple attempts at the mother tongue are acceptable and errors easily overlooked, since everyone knows you are going home soon. But if you reside, more less permanently, in a land where the mother tongue is other than your own, it would behoove you to learn it and speak it as best you can ( and my bias is that Hispanics in America are not excepted). Anything less is a gesture of disrespect. But back to Frost:
Frost said (approximately) that "to teach a person to write is to teach a person to think". And thinking, real thinking (I think), is encumbent upon all of us. And if you think, you arrive at ideas. And if you have ideas you must find a way to express them. And for that you need words, and often new words. The current mood that has been identified in the U.S. as "anti-intellectualism"reveals how not thinking precludes new ideas: recent town halls are regurgitations of old thinking and old ideas and old words.
If our educational systems, world-wide, (to mimick Ms. Scheslinger) were to focus upon teaching and enabling children to think and to ask "why", to be inquisitive and become logical searchers and researchers of meaning, they would learn to use the proper, appropriate and substantive words required to promote better understanding. (I might suggest, at this point, that immersion in the Bible or the Quoran does not lead to this lofty end. Thinking requires a working knowledge of cause and effect, and neither of these includes a clue as to either.)
Hedges (as in the piece I sent you), Safire (too bad), Carlin (way too bad), Chomsky, Maher, Reich, Buckley and Vonnegut are all some examples of linguists (my broken record is playing, again) who took (and take) the time to find the words to express their ideas. To them, I say, "Right on!", and "Awesome!" (Think about those two expressions as they relate to cause and effect)
And there are enough people down under who speak that almost-South Carolina garble the Aussies call "English" that any self-respecting Muslim ought to be able to pick it up. Blimey. I'll have a Foster's.
From: shara_thome@hotmail.com
To: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 6:46 AM
Subject: shara_thome@hotmail.com has shared: Theodore Dalrymple on the Gift of Language
....but how to remedy the situation? Dumbfounded here.
Theodore Dalrymple on the Gift of Language Source: austrolabe.com
For starters, let me say that I am "dumbfounded" by discovering there were so many Muslims living amongst the Aussies. But I suppose I shouldn't be, because Muslims can now threaten Danish cartoonists and cause ghetto riots in Paris. Be that as it may, that there is so much sudden concern for how to deal with the "Muslim problem" and the Muslim language(s), in places like down under and elsewhere, is perplexing. I say this because in Australia, where the concern for the Muslim invasion gets front page coverage while they slaughter, ignore and denigrate the aborigine; in the U.S. , where we sought to obliterate the native Americans and today force them into encampments, while still not dealing with our history of slavery and contemporary racism ( and the language obstacles involved there, bro); in Scandanavia the Nordic past is being ameliorated and watered down to appease the Muslim outsiders; in France they are busier worrying about headscarve etiquette than they are the quality of education and have almost foresworn the problems with the Moroccan and Algerian populations in favor of the Arab refugees; in England the disparities over Scots and the Irish have been put aside to worry about the employment and education requirements of the Muslim Indian refugees, and in Germany, the concern with Turks has displaced recognition of Jewish issues ...Nearly overnight, it seems, the world is obsessed with acclimating to, absorbing, yielding to and incorporting the culture and language of a people we regarded as ignorant, backward, infidel in nature,bloodthirsty and heathen, not so long ago.
Would that we were so afraid of the perils of rampant Christianity.
Note: In earlier centuries,the Spaniards (in particular), always solved the problem of cultural and linguistic assimilation by simply trying to make everyone Catholic. That insidious and predatory (and arrogant) practice, coupled with the Inquisition, has not worked out so well, except to make Mexico City a safe place for the Pope to visit. And I dare say that catechism classes for the masses of Muslims will not get very far.
As for your query, "but how to remedy the situtation?" , I am stubbornly and narrow-mindedly in the camp of Robert Frost, on this one. Disregarding for a moment the question of which tongue do you speak when you are in which land, "When in Rome" rings a bell. If you are visiting, simple attempts at the mother tongue are acceptable and errors easily overlooked, since everyone knows you are going home soon. But if you reside, more less permanently, in a land where the mother tongue is other than your own, it would behoove you to learn it and speak it as best you can ( and my bias is that Hispanics in America are not excepted). Anything less is a gesture of disrespect. But back to Frost:
Frost said (approximately) that "to teach a person to write is to teach a person to think". And thinking, real thinking (I think), is encumbent upon all of us. And if you think, you arrive at ideas. And if you have ideas you must find a way to express them. And for that you need words, and often new words. The current mood that has been identified in the U.S. as "anti-intellectualism"reveals how not thinking precludes new ideas: recent town halls are regurgitations of old thinking and old ideas and old words.
If our educational systems, world-wide, (to mimick Ms. Scheslinger) were to focus upon teaching and enabling children to think and to ask "why", to be inquisitive and become logical searchers and researchers of meaning, they would learn to use the proper, appropriate and substantive words required to promote better understanding. (I might suggest, at this point, that immersion in the Bible or the Quoran does not lead to this lofty end. Thinking requires a working knowledge of cause and effect, and neither of these includes a clue as to either.)
Hedges (as in the piece I sent you), Safire (too bad), Carlin (way too bad), Chomsky, Maher, Reich, Buckley and Vonnegut are all some examples of linguists (my broken record is playing, again) who took (and take) the time to find the words to express their ideas. To them, I say, "Right on!", and "Awesome!" (Think about those two expressions as they relate to cause and effect)
And there are enough people down under who speak that almost-South Carolina garble the Aussies call "English" that any self-respecting Muslim ought to be able to pick it up. Blimey. I'll have a Foster's.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Not NecessarilyThe News
And people wonder why newspapers are dying....I saw this headline
Defense Bill, Lauded by White House, Contains Billions in Earmarks(article below)in the WaPo this morning, and when I saw "billions" in earmarks, I thought, "Holy Shit!", stopped and read the story. It turns out that the "billions" is $2.65B out of $636B. If you have a calculator, you will see that that the earmark amount (still obscene in the manner in which it is being proposed) amounts to something like .04184% of the total defense budget bill under consideration. The Post has ponied up an eye-popping headline which misleads and agitates but largely misses the point, while stirring up, no doubt, false conservative ire over big government and waste.
The "obscene" number really is the $636B, which is nearly as much as the two TARP bills that were passed. Those were done with great fanfare and furor and debate, that this gets nary a notice. In fact, the headline says that it is "Lauded by White House". Well jolly good. Why? It never comments about that.
Let's see: that $636B for one year of "defense" (which is offensive to most) is only 80% of $800B for ten years of national health care would cost (or only 71% if you use the $900B estimate from the GAO), or only $80B or $90B per year to fund and yet we cannot even get a reasonable bill passed to enable, enact and accomplish that, in any reasonable form that does not throw billions in profits back at the insurance companies. Good work, WaPo. You make your industry proud.
And speaking of health care and insurance reform, there was only one (1) article that I could find concerning those issues. Here is the byline: In Delivering Care, More Isn't Always Better, Experts Say, by By Ceci ConnollyWashington Post Staff Writer . The thrust (if there is one)is this:
Medical professionals say the fundamental problem in the nation's health-care system is the widespread misuse and overuse of tests, treatments and drugs that drive up prices, have little value to patients, and can pose serious risks. The question, they say, is not whether there will be rationing, but rather what will be rationed, and when and how.
To begin with, just out of curiousity, who is Ceci Connolly and what qualifies he/she to pontificate on health care? May I see some credentials, please? Or perhaps a birth certificate? Is Ceci even an American name? Is this journalism or idle time gossip?
Secondly, this story an as old as a 60 Minutes program on the subject from two years ago. We have heard this old saw 1,000 times before, and it has not changed, one iota. And there is no substantive discussion in the article about either single-payer or the public option or how much money Max Baucus has in his pocket from insurance companies. The WaPo is making damn certain that we stay as wholly unfocused as possible. Journalism should help us define what is wrong in such a way that a corrective can be envisioned. This article merely reheats already overcooked leftovers. It is a half-eaten Big Mac, retrieved from a dumpster. This makes this newspaper (I use the term loosely)the Washington Posthumous, publishing obits instead of birth announcements.
Both stories provide unspectacular reporting about unspectacular non-news. They are misleading and erroneously fanciful and take up space, while wasting energy. And while so many bemoan the death of the newspaper media, and Obama speaks lately (and glibly)of bailing out the industry, the WaPo is not doing much to further its' cause when it publishes tripe like this. Maybe we should put an earmark in the defense bill for that bailout. A story about that would surely make the front page..on Saturday.
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 7:43 AM
Message from sender: really?
Defense Bill, Lauded by White House, Contains Billions in Earmarks
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Sen. Thad Cochran's most recent reelection campaign collected more than $10,000 from University of Southern Mississippi professors and staff members, including three who work at the school's center for research on polymers. To a defense spending bill slated to be on the Senate floor Tuesday, the...
Do you love D.C.? Get the insider's guide to where to stay, what to do and where to eat. Go to www.washingtonpost.com/gog for your guide to D.C. now.
© 2009 The Washington Post Company Privacy Policy
Defense Bill, Lauded by White House, Contains Billions in Earmarks(article below)in the WaPo this morning, and when I saw "billions" in earmarks, I thought, "Holy Shit!", stopped and read the story. It turns out that the "billions" is $2.65B out of $636B. If you have a calculator, you will see that that the earmark amount (still obscene in the manner in which it is being proposed) amounts to something like .04184% of the total defense budget bill under consideration. The Post has ponied up an eye-popping headline which misleads and agitates but largely misses the point, while stirring up, no doubt, false conservative ire over big government and waste.
The "obscene" number really is the $636B, which is nearly as much as the two TARP bills that were passed. Those were done with great fanfare and furor and debate, that this gets nary a notice. In fact, the headline says that it is "Lauded by White House". Well jolly good. Why? It never comments about that.
Let's see: that $636B for one year of "defense" (which is offensive to most) is only 80% of $800B for ten years of national health care would cost (or only 71% if you use the $900B estimate from the GAO), or only $80B or $90B per year to fund and yet we cannot even get a reasonable bill passed to enable, enact and accomplish that, in any reasonable form that does not throw billions in profits back at the insurance companies. Good work, WaPo. You make your industry proud.
And speaking of health care and insurance reform, there was only one (1) article that I could find concerning those issues. Here is the byline: In Delivering Care, More Isn't Always Better, Experts Say, by By Ceci ConnollyWashington Post Staff Writer . The thrust (if there is one)is this:
Medical professionals say the fundamental problem in the nation's health-care system is the widespread misuse and overuse of tests, treatments and drugs that drive up prices, have little value to patients, and can pose serious risks. The question, they say, is not whether there will be rationing, but rather what will be rationed, and when and how.
To begin with, just out of curiousity, who is Ceci Connolly and what qualifies he/she to pontificate on health care? May I see some credentials, please? Or perhaps a birth certificate? Is Ceci even an American name? Is this journalism or idle time gossip?
Secondly, this story an as old as a 60 Minutes program on the subject from two years ago. We have heard this old saw 1,000 times before, and it has not changed, one iota. And there is no substantive discussion in the article about either single-payer or the public option or how much money Max Baucus has in his pocket from insurance companies. The WaPo is making damn certain that we stay as wholly unfocused as possible. Journalism should help us define what is wrong in such a way that a corrective can be envisioned. This article merely reheats already overcooked leftovers. It is a half-eaten Big Mac, retrieved from a dumpster. This makes this newspaper (I use the term loosely)the Washington Posthumous, publishing obits instead of birth announcements.
Both stories provide unspectacular reporting about unspectacular non-news. They are misleading and erroneously fanciful and take up space, while wasting energy. And while so many bemoan the death of the newspaper media, and Obama speaks lately (and glibly)of bailing out the industry, the WaPo is not doing much to further its' cause when it publishes tripe like this. Maybe we should put an earmark in the defense bill for that bailout. A story about that would surely make the front page..on Saturday.
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 7:43 AM
Message from sender: really?
Defense Bill, Lauded by White House, Contains Billions in Earmarks
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Sen. Thad Cochran's most recent reelection campaign collected more than $10,000 from University of Southern Mississippi professors and staff members, including three who work at the school's center for research on polymers. To a defense spending bill slated to be on the Senate floor Tuesday, the...
Do you love D.C.? Get the insider's guide to where to stay, what to do and where to eat. Go to www.washingtonpost.com/gog for your guide to D.C. now.
© 2009 The Washington Post Company Privacy Policy
Monday, September 28, 2009
Wisdom borrowed from Bageant
Nice to know I am not alone in my musings. Noam Chomsky has been telling us, for years, that we have a one party system, called the "corporatocracy" and nobody listens. If , like myself and many others I know, are on SS, SSDI and/or Medicare, this should not be a pleasant read.
When "capitalism" ceases to be entrepreurship, but instead morphs into greedy, limitless and shortsighted, quick gain expansionist enterprise, we have lost our way.
We found out much too late that "compassionate conservatism" and "trickle down economics" and cheerful Clintonite free trade agendas were a bunch of bunk, that, altogether led us into our economic disaster and it is time to consider some alternatives. One would be what I have come to call "humanitarian, community based capitalism", where we are able to say to the profiteers, "OK. Thanks. Enough is enough", and we level the playing field and give everyone a chance. But, as I seem to recall, that is called socialism, Marxism or communism, and then people want to hang me from a light pole for even mentioning the possibilities.
I think that the much ballyooed "free market economy" is intent on making certain that some people are "more freeer" than others...sorta like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm who were more equal than others. And then current day conservatives, Libertarians and other ideologues warn us that we should be afraid of Obama and socialism? It is precisely that inverse, obtuse logic that drives Wall St., General Electric and CocaCola.
And let's see: by my latest reckoning, the U.S. goverment owns most of Genral Motors. And the largest auto company in Russia is state owned as well. And then there is China....But I must stop here: I must run down to Home Despot and buy the plastic plumbing fixture I can no longer buy from the local hardware store that is no longer here.
Subject: AlterNet: There Was Nice Talk About 'Change' and 'Hope' But the Money Party There Was Nice Talk About 'Change' and 'Hope' But the Money Party Won Again> http://www.alternet.org/politics/142840>
When "capitalism" ceases to be entrepreurship, but instead morphs into greedy, limitless and shortsighted, quick gain expansionist enterprise, we have lost our way.
We found out much too late that "compassionate conservatism" and "trickle down economics" and cheerful Clintonite free trade agendas were a bunch of bunk, that, altogether led us into our economic disaster and it is time to consider some alternatives. One would be what I have come to call "humanitarian, community based capitalism", where we are able to say to the profiteers, "OK. Thanks. Enough is enough", and we level the playing field and give everyone a chance. But, as I seem to recall, that is called socialism, Marxism or communism, and then people want to hang me from a light pole for even mentioning the possibilities.
I think that the much ballyooed "free market economy" is intent on making certain that some people are "more freeer" than others...sorta like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm who were more equal than others. And then current day conservatives, Libertarians and other ideologues warn us that we should be afraid of Obama and socialism? It is precisely that inverse, obtuse logic that drives Wall St., General Electric and CocaCola.
And let's see: by my latest reckoning, the U.S. goverment owns most of Genral Motors. And the largest auto company in Russia is state owned as well. And then there is China....But I must stop here: I must run down to Home Despot and buy the plastic plumbing fixture I can no longer buy from the local hardware store that is no longer here.
Subject: AlterNet: There Was Nice Talk About 'Change' and 'Hope' But the Money Party There Was Nice Talk About 'Change' and 'Hope' But the Money Party Won Again> http://www.alternet.org/politics/142840>
Friday, September 18, 2009
Got up on the left side of the bed
Deb Dellapiana wrote an opinion piece at a blog site we shrae (sort of) this morning( you can read it here: http://turn-left.hypocrisy.com/2009/09/18/the-bait-and-switch-presidency/#comment-455), and I had to say a few words (Oh no! Not again!). Here goes:
You have correctly identified the largely presidential symptom of a deeper causality. Obama did not bait and switch, he just baited and did nothing. In a classic case of lousy customer service (and we are the customer), he "over-promised and under-delivered". One obvious result is that nearly the entire country has now decided to "Bitch and wait". They bitch about Wall St., a lack of jobs, foreclosures, too many immigrants, high taxes,expensive education, credit card rates, a lack of adequate (or any) health care, indifferent legislators and, under it all, having a black man as president. There are several ways to look at this. The first (spoken clearly by Maureen Dowd (NYT), Jimmy Carter (town hall), Eugene Roninson (WaPo) et. al.), is that the unrest over everything else has unearthed our nation's long-hidden dirty little secret: we are bigoted (we don't care much for women) and hugely racist( www.alternet.org/story/142630/). Nearly all of the other bitching and complaining is driven by the ugly truth that caucasian white America is overhelmingly terrified of having someone of color be the POTUS. So they irrationally yell and scream (and bitch) about everything else, most of which has been wrong for a very long time and was ignored, looked-over and glossed-over by an America, content to let Bush and Cheney shred the Constitution and pile up the national debt via the military. And the obfuscation is so insidious that when Jimmy Carter call us out on it, the WH soft-peddles it, the moderate democrats deny it and Rush Limbaugh calls Carter a rectal anatomical disorder on the radio (among other embarrassments).
The two-facted reason for this is that the citizenry of the US, just like the government and Obama, THINK TOO SMALL. The libertarians and the conservatives have it largely wrong about the size of government and our taxing structure: it is not too big, our thinking about it is too small and so we make the same old decisions about problem solving we always have and the problems remain. We think too small when we re-elect the same people over and over, who behave the same way,over and over because they/we think too small. And Obama is in over his head,unable to coerce a government of any size to work at all, because he thinks "too small" (using the internet to get elected is not big thinking: it is opportunism)and he is powerless to move a congress which wallows in thinking too small (which we elected by thinking too small), because (and here is the second facet):
As Noam Chomsky puts it (and writers like Naomi Klein confirm), we do not have a two-party system, we have a CORPORATOCRACY, driven by the money and influence of the greed-oriented big businesses and the shareholder corporations of America. And they pay the congressman (like Max Baucus) to contiue to think small and maintain the status quo. Tiny, old, repetitive thinking does not give birth to big, new bold ideas (which we desperately need). And politicians (including the newly elected Obama) and are more concerned with becoming re-elected than they are with performing the tasks for which they elected in the first place.
So we bitch and wait. We are victims of our own complacency, old habits, small thinking, and lack of courage to challenge the status quo, as long as have enough to get by. We are content to let our rights get taken away and/or abused, to allow the conservative mentality to say, "I've got mone, screw you", and happy to get through the day living on Fox News, instant consumer gratification and lousy non-nutritional fast food. And we let the government pacify us with programs like "Cash For Clunkers" (which turns out to be an anti-economic recovery program to benefit Detroit auto makers and finance companies). We are numb from shock and awe (Naomi Klein, again) and live in a perpetual fear of losing even more than we have already. And we are angry and unhappy. We can rant and rave, we can yell and scream , but we cannot innovate. We cannot "think big" or elect anyone who can, either, from all appearances.
The citizenry of America is, at the moment, anti-intellectual, non- analytical, anti-investigative, racially biased, narrow-minded, complacent and unwilling to upset the status quo apple cart because it might be a little difficult or cause some short-term (or long-term) hardships in order to prevent the ship from sinking (which it is).
So we bitch and wait. We paint ugly signs and march about the wrong issues, paint Hitler faces on the president, listen to Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and McConnel and Enzi and let Baucus screw us and keep thinking small and prolonging the misery of doing nothing new. We allow the fear of possible poverty and of any non-white, non-Christian movement to keep us inert: it makes self delusional bitching easier. has anyone simply come out openly and conjectred that Glenn Beck is just plain crazy? I mean,"nuts" as in mentally ill?
Sadly, perhaps Obama has realized that the conundrum and behemoth of old/small political thinking in America is much bigger than he is. So right now, he is doing what every American institution has always done to stay alive and prosper: he is conducting a very aggressive marketing campaign, by being on the television and making speeches every five minutes,in an attempt to prevent us from seeing the real problems of big money and ignore the real manipulations of our corporatocracy. He is pulling an empty delivery wagon down main street. But he is a parade of one and the emporer has no clothes.
As long as we bitch and wait, Obama, Boehner, Pelosi,Wall St., big insurance, big pharma, big energy and the off-shore banks are safe and secure. But we are fooling ourselves: we are really bitching that the system does not work and is failing quickly, and have unkowingly discovered that we can try to blame the failure on a black man (again). And beneath all of that we wait. We wait for a savior or an economic/cultural messiah to save us from everything we brought upon ourselves through our innattention to detail, small thinking and repeated social episodes of uncritical observation. And all we know is that we don't want that savior to be anything other than white, male, protestant and from Iowa.
You have correctly identified the largely presidential symptom of a deeper causality. Obama did not bait and switch, he just baited and did nothing. In a classic case of lousy customer service (and we are the customer), he "over-promised and under-delivered". One obvious result is that nearly the entire country has now decided to "Bitch and wait". They bitch about Wall St., a lack of jobs, foreclosures, too many immigrants, high taxes,expensive education, credit card rates, a lack of adequate (or any) health care, indifferent legislators and, under it all, having a black man as president. There are several ways to look at this. The first (spoken clearly by Maureen Dowd (NYT), Jimmy Carter (town hall), Eugene Roninson (WaPo) et. al.), is that the unrest over everything else has unearthed our nation's long-hidden dirty little secret: we are bigoted (we don't care much for women) and hugely racist( www.alternet.org/story/142630/). Nearly all of the other bitching and complaining is driven by the ugly truth that caucasian white America is overhelmingly terrified of having someone of color be the POTUS. So they irrationally yell and scream (and bitch) about everything else, most of which has been wrong for a very long time and was ignored, looked-over and glossed-over by an America, content to let Bush and Cheney shred the Constitution and pile up the national debt via the military. And the obfuscation is so insidious that when Jimmy Carter call us out on it, the WH soft-peddles it, the moderate democrats deny it and Rush Limbaugh calls Carter a rectal anatomical disorder on the radio (among other embarrassments).
The two-facted reason for this is that the citizenry of the US, just like the government and Obama, THINK TOO SMALL. The libertarians and the conservatives have it largely wrong about the size of government and our taxing structure: it is not too big, our thinking about it is too small and so we make the same old decisions about problem solving we always have and the problems remain. We think too small when we re-elect the same people over and over, who behave the same way,over and over because they/we think too small. And Obama is in over his head,unable to coerce a government of any size to work at all, because he thinks "too small" (using the internet to get elected is not big thinking: it is opportunism)and he is powerless to move a congress which wallows in thinking too small (which we elected by thinking too small), because (and here is the second facet):
As Noam Chomsky puts it (and writers like Naomi Klein confirm), we do not have a two-party system, we have a CORPORATOCRACY, driven by the money and influence of the greed-oriented big businesses and the shareholder corporations of America. And they pay the congressman (like Max Baucus) to contiue to think small and maintain the status quo. Tiny, old, repetitive thinking does not give birth to big, new bold ideas (which we desperately need). And politicians (including the newly elected Obama) and are more concerned with becoming re-elected than they are with performing the tasks for which they elected in the first place.
So we bitch and wait. We are victims of our own complacency, old habits, small thinking, and lack of courage to challenge the status quo, as long as have enough to get by. We are content to let our rights get taken away and/or abused, to allow the conservative mentality to say, "I've got mone, screw you", and happy to get through the day living on Fox News, instant consumer gratification and lousy non-nutritional fast food. And we let the government pacify us with programs like "Cash For Clunkers" (which turns out to be an anti-economic recovery program to benefit Detroit auto makers and finance companies). We are numb from shock and awe (Naomi Klein, again) and live in a perpetual fear of losing even more than we have already. And we are angry and unhappy. We can rant and rave, we can yell and scream , but we cannot innovate. We cannot "think big" or elect anyone who can, either, from all appearances.
The citizenry of America is, at the moment, anti-intellectual, non- analytical, anti-investigative, racially biased, narrow-minded, complacent and unwilling to upset the status quo apple cart because it might be a little difficult or cause some short-term (or long-term) hardships in order to prevent the ship from sinking (which it is).
So we bitch and wait. We paint ugly signs and march about the wrong issues, paint Hitler faces on the president, listen to Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and McConnel and Enzi and let Baucus screw us and keep thinking small and prolonging the misery of doing nothing new. We allow the fear of possible poverty and of any non-white, non-Christian movement to keep us inert: it makes self delusional bitching easier. has anyone simply come out openly and conjectred that Glenn Beck is just plain crazy? I mean,"nuts" as in mentally ill?
Sadly, perhaps Obama has realized that the conundrum and behemoth of old/small political thinking in America is much bigger than he is. So right now, he is doing what every American institution has always done to stay alive and prosper: he is conducting a very aggressive marketing campaign, by being on the television and making speeches every five minutes,in an attempt to prevent us from seeing the real problems of big money and ignore the real manipulations of our corporatocracy. He is pulling an empty delivery wagon down main street. But he is a parade of one and the emporer has no clothes.
As long as we bitch and wait, Obama, Boehner, Pelosi,Wall St., big insurance, big pharma, big energy and the off-shore banks are safe and secure. But we are fooling ourselves: we are really bitching that the system does not work and is failing quickly, and have unkowingly discovered that we can try to blame the failure on a black man (again). And beneath all of that we wait. We wait for a savior or an economic/cultural messiah to save us from everything we brought upon ourselves through our innattention to detail, small thinking and repeated social episodes of uncritical observation. And all we know is that we don't want that savior to be anything other than white, male, protestant and from Iowa.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Proselytizing By Accident
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-05/inside-sarahs-church/?cid=bsa:mostpopular1
The various religious fundamentalists, deranged self-proclaimed luminaries, ritual sectarians and cultists who comprise groups like "Sarah's Church", Rev. Wright's isolated enclave-types, the ultra-conservative Jewish groups, primitive baptist snake-handlers, pseudo-oriental acseticists and miltant radical Islamists (to name but a few),
many of whom adhere to, promulgate and blindly wallow in strict misinterpretations of curiously arcane and out-moded ideological tenets and mythologies, thereby disabling their cognitive faculties and their awareness of reality,
therefore insisting to pretend to live in another, older, by-gone, anti-intellectual and unenlightened era...
are people practicing "religious pornography": they take what were in infancy good, purposeful and positive notions, and transform them into mental smut and emotional disingenuousness.
And those "other" people (like the author of the article above), who lend to these movements some degree of credibility and plausbility, by writing about them (with much of the same zealous bigotry they themselves decry)are literary voyeurs, using editorial gossip to describe the "oral" mental masturbatory rituals being performed. They proselytize by accident, by pouring gasoline on the fire and increasing the acrid nature of the smoke.
We would learn more about humanity by reading back issues of Playboy or Hustler. This sort of commentary is merely a lurid and arrogantly disdainful version of People magazine.
The various religious fundamentalists, deranged self-proclaimed luminaries, ritual sectarians and cultists who comprise groups like "Sarah's Church", Rev. Wright's isolated enclave-types, the ultra-conservative Jewish groups, primitive baptist snake-handlers, pseudo-oriental acseticists and miltant radical Islamists (to name but a few),
many of whom adhere to, promulgate and blindly wallow in strict misinterpretations of curiously arcane and out-moded ideological tenets and mythologies, thereby disabling their cognitive faculties and their awareness of reality,
therefore insisting to pretend to live in another, older, by-gone, anti-intellectual and unenlightened era...
are people practicing "religious pornography": they take what were in infancy good, purposeful and positive notions, and transform them into mental smut and emotional disingenuousness.
And those "other" people (like the author of the article above), who lend to these movements some degree of credibility and plausbility, by writing about them (with much of the same zealous bigotry they themselves decry)are literary voyeurs, using editorial gossip to describe the "oral" mental masturbatory rituals being performed. They proselytize by accident, by pouring gasoline on the fire and increasing the acrid nature of the smoke.
We would learn more about humanity by reading back issues of Playboy or Hustler. This sort of commentary is merely a lurid and arrogantly disdainful version of People magazine.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Responding to a Naderite
Thanks, Clint. While the "right" may be the worst abusers in this category, methinks the left is often just as guilty. And I think the "langage as symbols" you are referring to is really more a matter as "language as a weapon"...however...
The dance partner, whom I have brought along to the masquerade brawl of human understanding, for quite some time now, is the one that leads me to "linguists" for answers, insight and authenticity. I no longer rely upon politicians or their spokespersons, ideological promoters, "advocates", commentators (who twist what is already twisted to make their own point: Fox Noise?), pundits (Buchanan?), moderators (who don't really moderate: think Presidential debates) , faux observers, "columnists", or orators and rhetoriticians to help me understand what I have just been smilingly "told". They are a uniformly unreliable group.
My chosen "linguists", our generation's "straight talkers", range from Bill Moyers, to Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky, to Robert Reich, John Stewart, Jane Hamsher,George Carlin and even Paul Krugman, UT Professor Galbraith and William Grieder... even though some are thought of more as economists or comedians. But they deliver understandable language and word constructs that reveal the real meaning and import behind the endless facade' of multi-syllabic stew delivered by wordy alchemists of confusion like Frank Luntz.
NOTE: Luntz, by the way, is no "word wizard", as Nader would have us believe. He is a malevolent manipulator of simple truths, the worst of a bad breed, who clouds and obfuscates for evil purposes, and does so with glee and gusto. (I cannot think of an exact Luntzian counterpart on the left, but if you listen to Harry Reid, Keith Olberman or Gov. Dean, any of the progressive bloggers or to any of the carefully crafted Obamaspeaks, the same admixture of obscure implications and insinuations exists in all those as well).
Mr. Nader is right,of course, as usual, but a little late to the party. The founding fathers knew, over 200 years ago, how bumblingly wrong this democracy could all go through psycho-babble (and it has: look at the complete non-separation of church and state?) and worked tirelessly against the possibilities. Even Dwight Eisenhower warned that "something evil" was afoot with the military industrial complex, and today we spend SEVEN times more on defense and weaponry than any other nation in the world. I think "Blackwater"is a pretty lame euphemism for "security". And of course, we cannot wait to "give" democacy to the Iraqis and the Afghans.
What Nader should be railing against the loudest is the resultant cultural-behavorial outgrowth of this vocabularistic nightmare: nobody trusts anything anybody says. And when this mistrust erupts into non-sensical shouting matches and causes people to behave irrationally enough to bring AR-15 assault weapons to public gatherings and town hall meetings, the cumulative effect is civic chaos and nearly irreparable polarity and division. The state of our communal mental health comes into question and we live on the edge of violence. Blind understanding, caused by such far reaching deception, leads to blind rage. Everybody thinks everybody else is full of shit. Plain enough?
The three authors that Nader lauds for their recent efforts are not so much practicing "semantic discipline" (What the hell THAT, exactly,anyway , Mr. Nader? How many times have we heard someone dismiss a remark, by saying, "Well,it's all just semantics, anyway"?), as they are demonstrating appropriate applicability and some much overdue linguistic precision and clarity. (Let's see: I think the word transparency comes to mind: whatever happened to that famous campiagn buzzword, Barack?) Moreover, these writers, along with many other capable linguists, are the communicators that we can count on to come through "in the pinch", and tell us what we need to know, when we are forced, finally, to ask our "leadership" to "Tell us, please, what you really mean?"
Mr. Nader could have just easily said that we need to stop being thoroughly "euphemized" before we become completely mentally "euthanized". I wonder if these language abusers that Mr. Nader bemoans are the "Death Panels" of our public awareness?
And I used as many $10.00 words in this response as I could manage, so that everyone could blame me for being just as guilty of obfscation as everyone else I am complaining about.
END.
----- Original Message -----
From: Clint Ritter
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 6:07 PM
Subject: Fwd: Words Matter - Nader
Great column, if you're interested in language as symbols, and how they have been manipulated by the right.............CR
---------- Forwarded message ----------From: Ralph Nader <info@nader.org>Date: Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:56 PMSubject: Words MatterTo: alerts@lists.nader.orgEver wonder what’s happening to words once they fall into the hands of corporate and government propagandists? Too often reporters and editors don’t wonder enough. They ditto the words even when the result is deception or doubletalk.Here are some examples. Day in and day out we read about “detainees” imprisoned for months or years by the federal government in the U.S., Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn’t the media know that the correct word is “prisoners,” regardless of what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld disseminated?The raging debate and controversy over health insurance and the $2.5 trillion spent this year on health care involves consumers and “providers.” How touching to describe sellers or vendors, often gouging, denying benefits, manipulating fine print contracts, cheating Medicare and Medicaid in the tens of billions as “providers.”I always thought “providers” were persons taking care of their families or engaging in charitable service. Somehow, the dictionary definition does not fit the frequently avaricious profiles of Aetna, United Healthcare, Pfizer and Merck.“Privatization” and the “private sector” are widespread euphemisms that the press falls for daily. Moving government owned assets or functions into corporate hands, as with Blackwater, Halliburton, and the conglomerates now controlling public highways, prisons, and drinking water systems is “corporatization,” not the soft imagery of going “private” or into the “private sector.” It is the corporate sector!“Medical malpractice reform” is another misnomer. It used to mean restricting the legal rights of wrongfully injured people by hospitals and doctors, or limiting the liability of these corporate vendors when their negligence harms innocent patients. Well, to anybody interested in straight talk, “medical malpractice reform” or the “medical malpractice crisis” should apply to bad or negligent practices by medical professionals. After all, about 100,000 people die every year from physician/hospital malpractice, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report. Hundreds of thousands are rendered sick or injured, not to mention even larger tolls from hospital-induced infections. Proposed “reforms” are sticking it to the wrong people—the patients—not the sellers.“Free trade” is a widely used euphemism. It is corporate managed trade as evidenced in hundreds of pages of rules favoring corporations in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. “Free trade” lowers barriers between countries so that cartels, unjustified patent monopolies, counterfeiting, contraband, and other harmful practices and products can move around the world unhindered.What is remarkable about the constant use of these words is that they permeate the language even if those who stand against the policies of those who first coin these euphemisms. You’ll read about “detainees” and “providers” and “privatization” and “private sector” and “free trade” in the pages of the Nation and Progressive magazines, at progressive conferences with progressive leaders, and during media interviews. After people point out these boomeranging words to them, still nothing changes. Their habit is chronic.A lot of who we are, of what we do and think is expressed through the language we choose. The word tends to become the thing in our mind as Stuart Chase pointed out seventy years ago in his classic work The Tyranny of Words. Let us stop disrespecting the dictionary! Let’s stop succumbing to the propagandists and the public relations tricksters!Frank Luntz—the word wizard for the Republicans who invented the term “death tax” to replace “estate tax” is so contemptuous of the Democratic Party’s verbal ineptitude (such as using “public option” instead of “public choice” and regularly using the above-noted misnomers) that he dares them by offering free advice to the Democrats. He suggests they could counteract his “death tax” with their own term “the billionaires’ tax.” There were no Democratic takers. Remember, words matter.Using words that are accurate and at face value is one of the characteristics of a good book. Three new books stand out for their straight talk. In Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-party Tyranny, Theresa Amato, my former campaign manager, exposes the obstructions that deny voter choice by the two major parties for third party and independent candidates. Just out is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges. Lastly, the boisterous, mischievous short autobiography of that free spirit, Jerry Lee Wilson , The Soloflex Story: An American Parable.Not withstanding their different styles, these authors exercise semantic discipline.End.
The dance partner, whom I have brought along to the masquerade brawl of human understanding, for quite some time now, is the one that leads me to "linguists" for answers, insight and authenticity. I no longer rely upon politicians or their spokespersons, ideological promoters, "advocates", commentators (who twist what is already twisted to make their own point: Fox Noise?), pundits (Buchanan?), moderators (who don't really moderate: think Presidential debates) , faux observers, "columnists", or orators and rhetoriticians to help me understand what I have just been smilingly "told". They are a uniformly unreliable group.
My chosen "linguists", our generation's "straight talkers", range from Bill Moyers, to Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky, to Robert Reich, John Stewart, Jane Hamsher,George Carlin and even Paul Krugman, UT Professor Galbraith and William Grieder... even though some are thought of more as economists or comedians. But they deliver understandable language and word constructs that reveal the real meaning and import behind the endless facade' of multi-syllabic stew delivered by wordy alchemists of confusion like Frank Luntz.
NOTE: Luntz, by the way, is no "word wizard", as Nader would have us believe. He is a malevolent manipulator of simple truths, the worst of a bad breed, who clouds and obfuscates for evil purposes, and does so with glee and gusto. (I cannot think of an exact Luntzian counterpart on the left, but if you listen to Harry Reid, Keith Olberman or Gov. Dean, any of the progressive bloggers or to any of the carefully crafted Obamaspeaks, the same admixture of obscure implications and insinuations exists in all those as well).
Mr. Nader is right,of course, as usual, but a little late to the party. The founding fathers knew, over 200 years ago, how bumblingly wrong this democracy could all go through psycho-babble (and it has: look at the complete non-separation of church and state?) and worked tirelessly against the possibilities. Even Dwight Eisenhower warned that "something evil" was afoot with the military industrial complex, and today we spend SEVEN times more on defense and weaponry than any other nation in the world. I think "Blackwater"is a pretty lame euphemism for "security". And of course, we cannot wait to "give" democacy to the Iraqis and the Afghans.
What Nader should be railing against the loudest is the resultant cultural-behavorial outgrowth of this vocabularistic nightmare: nobody trusts anything anybody says. And when this mistrust erupts into non-sensical shouting matches and causes people to behave irrationally enough to bring AR-15 assault weapons to public gatherings and town hall meetings, the cumulative effect is civic chaos and nearly irreparable polarity and division. The state of our communal mental health comes into question and we live on the edge of violence. Blind understanding, caused by such far reaching deception, leads to blind rage. Everybody thinks everybody else is full of shit. Plain enough?
The three authors that Nader lauds for their recent efforts are not so much practicing "semantic discipline" (What the hell THAT, exactly,anyway , Mr. Nader? How many times have we heard someone dismiss a remark, by saying, "Well,it's all just semantics, anyway"?), as they are demonstrating appropriate applicability and some much overdue linguistic precision and clarity. (Let's see: I think the word transparency comes to mind: whatever happened to that famous campiagn buzzword, Barack?) Moreover, these writers, along with many other capable linguists, are the communicators that we can count on to come through "in the pinch", and tell us what we need to know, when we are forced, finally, to ask our "leadership" to "Tell us, please, what you really mean?"
Mr. Nader could have just easily said that we need to stop being thoroughly "euphemized" before we become completely mentally "euthanized". I wonder if these language abusers that Mr. Nader bemoans are the "Death Panels" of our public awareness?
And I used as many $10.00 words in this response as I could manage, so that everyone could blame me for being just as guilty of obfscation as everyone else I am complaining about.
END.
----- Original Message -----
From: Clint Ritter
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 6:07 PM
Subject: Fwd: Words Matter - Nader
Great column, if you're interested in language as symbols, and how they have been manipulated by the right.............CR
---------- Forwarded message ----------From: Ralph Nader <info@nader.org>Date: Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:56 PMSubject: Words MatterTo: alerts@lists.nader.orgEver wonder what’s happening to words once they fall into the hands of corporate and government propagandists? Too often reporters and editors don’t wonder enough. They ditto the words even when the result is deception or doubletalk.Here are some examples. Day in and day out we read about “detainees” imprisoned for months or years by the federal government in the U.S., Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn’t the media know that the correct word is “prisoners,” regardless of what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld disseminated?The raging debate and controversy over health insurance and the $2.5 trillion spent this year on health care involves consumers and “providers.” How touching to describe sellers or vendors, often gouging, denying benefits, manipulating fine print contracts, cheating Medicare and Medicaid in the tens of billions as “providers.”I always thought “providers” were persons taking care of their families or engaging in charitable service. Somehow, the dictionary definition does not fit the frequently avaricious profiles of Aetna, United Healthcare, Pfizer and Merck.“Privatization” and the “private sector” are widespread euphemisms that the press falls for daily. Moving government owned assets or functions into corporate hands, as with Blackwater, Halliburton, and the conglomerates now controlling public highways, prisons, and drinking water systems is “corporatization,” not the soft imagery of going “private” or into the “private sector.” It is the corporate sector!“Medical malpractice reform” is another misnomer. It used to mean restricting the legal rights of wrongfully injured people by hospitals and doctors, or limiting the liability of these corporate vendors when their negligence harms innocent patients. Well, to anybody interested in straight talk, “medical malpractice reform” or the “medical malpractice crisis” should apply to bad or negligent practices by medical professionals. After all, about 100,000 people die every year from physician/hospital malpractice, according to a Harvard School of Public Health report. Hundreds of thousands are rendered sick or injured, not to mention even larger tolls from hospital-induced infections. Proposed “reforms” are sticking it to the wrong people—the patients—not the sellers.“Free trade” is a widely used euphemism. It is corporate managed trade as evidenced in hundreds of pages of rules favoring corporations in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. “Free trade” lowers barriers between countries so that cartels, unjustified patent monopolies, counterfeiting, contraband, and other harmful practices and products can move around the world unhindered.What is remarkable about the constant use of these words is that they permeate the language even if those who stand against the policies of those who first coin these euphemisms. You’ll read about “detainees” and “providers” and “privatization” and “private sector” and “free trade” in the pages of the Nation and Progressive magazines, at progressive conferences with progressive leaders, and during media interviews. After people point out these boomeranging words to them, still nothing changes. Their habit is chronic.A lot of who we are, of what we do and think is expressed through the language we choose. The word tends to become the thing in our mind as Stuart Chase pointed out seventy years ago in his classic work The Tyranny of Words. Let us stop disrespecting the dictionary! Let’s stop succumbing to the propagandists and the public relations tricksters!Frank Luntz—the word wizard for the Republicans who invented the term “death tax” to replace “estate tax” is so contemptuous of the Democratic Party’s verbal ineptitude (such as using “public option” instead of “public choice” and regularly using the above-noted misnomers) that he dares them by offering free advice to the Democrats. He suggests they could counteract his “death tax” with their own term “the billionaires’ tax.” There were no Democratic takers. Remember, words matter.Using words that are accurate and at face value is one of the characteristics of a good book. Three new books stand out for their straight talk. In Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-party Tyranny, Theresa Amato, my former campaign manager, exposes the obstructions that deny voter choice by the two major parties for third party and independent candidates. Just out is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges. Lastly, the boisterous, mischievous short autobiography of that free spirit, Jerry Lee Wilson , The Soloflex Story: An American Parable.Not withstanding their different styles, these authors exercise semantic discipline.End.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Addendum to "Send More"
This came unsolicited. You might like the video. I did.
Hi Ivan,I read your post about Afghanistan where you compare the military effortto that of Viet Nam. In your post, you point out that military operativeshave an incentive to wage war. I think the following video will fit wellin your post:http://www.newsy.com/videos/afghanistan_strategy_more_troops_or_new_tacticsThe video uses multiple news sources to examine how the media are framingthe implications of the recently released Mc Chrystal report calling forincreased troop levels in Afghanistan. It compares these sources toquestion alternatives to increased military commitment in the region. Ihope you will consider embedding the video in The Way I See Things.Newsy.com videos analyze news coverage of important issues from multiplesources. Its unique method of presenting how different media outlets arecovering a story gives context to complex policy issues.Please let me know if you have any questions,Rosa Sowrosa@newsy.com
Hi Ivan,I read your post about Afghanistan where you compare the military effortto that of Viet Nam. In your post, you point out that military operativeshave an incentive to wage war. I think the following video will fit wellin your post:http://www.newsy.com/videos/afghanistan_strategy_more_troops_or_new_tacticsThe video uses multiple news sources to examine how the media are framingthe implications of the recently released Mc Chrystal report calling forincreased troop levels in Afghanistan. It compares these sources toquestion alternatives to increased military commitment in the region. Ihope you will consider embedding the video in The Way I See Things.Newsy.com videos analyze news coverage of important issues from multiplesources. Its unique method of presenting how different media outlets arecovering a story gives context to complex policy issues.Please let me know if you have any questions,Rosa Sowrosa@newsy.com
Send more!
Yesterday I blogged the report (from Politico), that the famed conservative columnist and pundit George Will had said that it is time to pull troops back from a seemingly un-winnable situation in Afghani-whats-its-place. The narrative noted that this surprising recommendation was coming, not only from a most unlikely source, but also just ahead of what would probably be a request from the General in Charge (that is a GIC, which is military lingo for geek) to raise the current troop level there by 21,000...which it just did (see below) This is after, you may recall, that even the SecDef (Deaf Sec?), Mr. Gates, a warmed over never-was-a-real-GIC from G.W. Bush... whom the benificient Obama allowed to keep his "over-all-the -other GICs " desk job... gave a "lukewarm" assessment of the situation and does not sound like he is very hot to up the ante in the anti-Taliban sand dune and poppy conflict: all this while Karzai practices US style-politics and steals the national election: perhaps Karzai thinks Afghanistan is Florida? If you hang enough chads you can be President? That whole process gores me.
At any rate, during the Bill Moyers interview by Bill Maher (which I so gleefully and enthusiastically forwarded to everyone on my blog list, as well), Moyers told the symbolic tale of a President standing before a large group of advisors, some of whom were military, asking what should be done to address a current conflict. After the suggestion was made to "send more troops, the President asks, "Are 20,000 enough?", and a military man says, "Send more". So the POTUS asks, "Are 40,000 enough?", and a miliary man says, "Send more". And when the President asks if 60,000 will do the trick, the military again responds, "Send more".
The job of the military is to make war, not achieve peace, and they will never be happy unless conflicts can be non-resolved and escalated and we spend more on troop deployments, bigger and more powerful weapons and maintain a devil-may-care attitude about how much collateral damage to the civilian population will be incurred. Hence, the answer will always be, "Send more". Lyndon Johnson kept following that advice concerning Viet Nam until Walter Cronkite exercised his influence on the American evening news audience and the citizenry of the U.S. said, "Enough!" and we took to the streets.
Inasmuch as there is no collateral damage occuring in this country, and the returning body bags and flag draped coffins are kept largely out of view (only George Stephanopolous tells us every week who and how many died), the majority of the American people are not either well enough informed or sufficiently outraged to tell Obama, "Enough!". This insulation from the reality of war in the middle East, and the passivity, prolonged ignorance about the horrors of the war and collective public indifference will continue to produce a deafening silence, about not only the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also about the current (and much obscured) debate about Cheney, the CIA, Blackwater and torture. Sadly, it seems as if the Geneva Convetion is thought by most Americans to be a rock band you can view on YouTube.
But the issue of the morning, the moment and of the week is Afghanistan. And in the face of an almost certainly untenable situation, where it is highly doubtful that US forces can "win" anything, in a country that does not want us, democracy or any other form of interference, the decision to "send more" looks suspiciously like the urging of idiots. Fools rush in, and later many are dead. Several other "empires" figured that one out, about Afghanistan, long ago. For a nation of smart people,we are pretty dumb.
A military escalation at this juncture will not even be as dubiously productive and worthwhile as the "Cash for Clunkers" ("Spend more!") elixir that was poured down the economic throats of the US public and Detroit ...and the benefits of that adventure are yet to be determned, to be sure. But many people are very happy with their new 18 MPG Cadillac hybrid Escalade that gets 4 MPG better than their "old" gas-guzzler version. Go figure. We sure know how to take THOSE to the streets!
Obama needs to say no and deny this both looney and lame-brained request to achieve a "conflict resolution" by "sending more troops" and broadening the nature of the conflict through troop escalation...because it doe not resolve anything. Although many are sick of hearing it , because everyone quotes it but does nothing to heed it, the fabled definition of insanity (from Albert Einstein) is "continuing to do the same old things you've always done and expecting to get different results" is still quite true. And the reality of this "send more" mentality is far more than merely disheartening. "Inane" comes to mind. Does anyone know the difference betwen an escalation and an Escalade?
We keep kicking this big fence post, over and over again, and getting a very sore toe. Are we just stupid and numb, or numb and stupid? Or are we just dumb and dumber? But let's"send more!". "Kick it again!" "Keep beating that dead horse until it comes back to life!" I think I am hearing Stephen Colbert in the distance.
----- Original Message -----
From: Clint Ritter
To: Ivan H
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 5:04 AM
Subject: ?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083101100.html
It may be time to replace General McChrystal with General George Will...........CR
At any rate, during the Bill Moyers interview by Bill Maher (which I so gleefully and enthusiastically forwarded to everyone on my blog list, as well), Moyers told the symbolic tale of a President standing before a large group of advisors, some of whom were military, asking what should be done to address a current conflict. After the suggestion was made to "send more troops, the President asks, "Are 20,000 enough?", and a military man says, "Send more". So the POTUS asks, "Are 40,000 enough?", and a miliary man says, "Send more". And when the President asks if 60,000 will do the trick, the military again responds, "Send more".
The job of the military is to make war, not achieve peace, and they will never be happy unless conflicts can be non-resolved and escalated and we spend more on troop deployments, bigger and more powerful weapons and maintain a devil-may-care attitude about how much collateral damage to the civilian population will be incurred. Hence, the answer will always be, "Send more". Lyndon Johnson kept following that advice concerning Viet Nam until Walter Cronkite exercised his influence on the American evening news audience and the citizenry of the U.S. said, "Enough!" and we took to the streets.
Inasmuch as there is no collateral damage occuring in this country, and the returning body bags and flag draped coffins are kept largely out of view (only George Stephanopolous tells us every week who and how many died), the majority of the American people are not either well enough informed or sufficiently outraged to tell Obama, "Enough!". This insulation from the reality of war in the middle East, and the passivity, prolonged ignorance about the horrors of the war and collective public indifference will continue to produce a deafening silence, about not only the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also about the current (and much obscured) debate about Cheney, the CIA, Blackwater and torture. Sadly, it seems as if the Geneva Convetion is thought by most Americans to be a rock band you can view on YouTube.
But the issue of the morning, the moment and of the week is Afghanistan. And in the face of an almost certainly untenable situation, where it is highly doubtful that US forces can "win" anything, in a country that does not want us, democracy or any other form of interference, the decision to "send more" looks suspiciously like the urging of idiots. Fools rush in, and later many are dead. Several other "empires" figured that one out, about Afghanistan, long ago. For a nation of smart people,we are pretty dumb.
A military escalation at this juncture will not even be as dubiously productive and worthwhile as the "Cash for Clunkers" ("Spend more!") elixir that was poured down the economic throats of the US public and Detroit ...and the benefits of that adventure are yet to be determned, to be sure. But many people are very happy with their new 18 MPG Cadillac hybrid Escalade that gets 4 MPG better than their "old" gas-guzzler version. Go figure. We sure know how to take THOSE to the streets!
Obama needs to say no and deny this both looney and lame-brained request to achieve a "conflict resolution" by "sending more troops" and broadening the nature of the conflict through troop escalation...because it doe not resolve anything. Although many are sick of hearing it , because everyone quotes it but does nothing to heed it, the fabled definition of insanity (from Albert Einstein) is "continuing to do the same old things you've always done and expecting to get different results" is still quite true. And the reality of this "send more" mentality is far more than merely disheartening. "Inane" comes to mind. Does anyone know the difference betwen an escalation and an Escalade?
We keep kicking this big fence post, over and over again, and getting a very sore toe. Are we just stupid and numb, or numb and stupid? Or are we just dumb and dumber? But let's"send more!". "Kick it again!" "Keep beating that dead horse until it comes back to life!" I think I am hearing Stephen Colbert in the distance.
----- Original Message -----
From: Clint Ritter
To: Ivan H
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 5:04 AM
Subject: ?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083101100.html
It may be time to replace General McChrystal with General George Will...........CR
Friday, August 7, 2009
Cash For Clunkers
This program spends a small amount of taxpayer money (relative to the size of bail-out packages) on a paliative program which puts perfectly serviceable used cars, that "regular"people could buy and drive, into junk heaps, money in the pockets of new car dealers ( who are too many and too rich), does nothing to put money in the pockets of those much ballyhooed "small businesses" like auto parts dealers and local auto repair shops (who cannot afford health insurance coverage for their employees), forces people to "feel good", gives swine flu shots to dead car companies like Chrysler (extended life support), does nothing to encourge plastic recycling, wastes dirty coal-fired electrical energy to grind up old cars that needn't be, lies to people about energy savings and makes them "feel good", will create mountains of used tires, make some people "feel good" and give those people with enough money to afford a new car one helluva deal (and feel good) on a new car/truck which may not be much more fuel efficient than the "clunker" which wasn't that they just let the dealer "kill". And it will sell lots of registration stickers and new license plates, fool people into "feeling good", give insurance companies a "reason" to up the ante on insurance rates for new, more expensive-to-repair autos and no doubt put money in the pockets of the auto industry leeches that sell extended warranties. But people with jobs will feel good by believing they are helping the economy by saving (?) $4500.00 of the money that we borrowed from China to let them give to a local dealer to give to a banker who got the money from Goldman Sachs...money which we will have to pay back later in taxes. But they will feel good. The program is too little too late, treats symptoms instead of causes (we should have challenged the auto companies to build cars with much better EPA standards decades ago) and puts a clown face on a social and environmental calamity. But is makes people feel good and creates another distraction. And the program does nothing to promote new technology: aside from a Prius or Insight or forty, most of the new, non-clunkers are still only oil and gas burning technological antiques. But buying anything new ( think flat-panel HDTV) makes people "feel good".
And Joe the Plumber can buy a new truck to drive to the town hall meeting where he speaks out against government programs and socialized health care, after he used his Medicare coverage to pay for his doctor visit after he hurt his back, reaching through the drive-through window (with engine idling) at the bank, cashing his Social Security check. So he can feel good. Note: he will feel even better after he stops at the drive-through window (with new engine idling) at the pharmacy to pick up his pain pills from the big drug company that opposes reduced drug costs and single-payer health coverage and homeopathic research.
The economy is badly in need of very serious surgery and a complete engine/drivetrain overhaul. Instead the government is handing out small $4500.00 boxes of band-aids and bottles of cod liver oil. The Cash for Clunkers program is simply another version of "take two aspirin and call me in the morning". It treats an ulcer with whiskey. The government is taking away the bread and having a "let them eat cake" sale. This is another example of a government sponsored program which recommends abstinence only while promoting unprotected sex or passes a bill to build football stadiums while health care clinics go un-staffed and underfunded and bridges fall down on the interstate. This is economic late-term abortion: kill the small child to give birth (birther?) to another mouth to feed that we hope will be more "perfect". But did I mention that it makes people feel good? Funny the right doesn't mention or object to all of this when they disrupt a town hall meeting. They don't hang in effigy the congressman who voted for THIS. Maybe they just feel too good
And Joe the Plumber can buy a new truck to drive to the town hall meeting where he speaks out against government programs and socialized health care, after he used his Medicare coverage to pay for his doctor visit after he hurt his back, reaching through the drive-through window (with engine idling) at the bank, cashing his Social Security check. So he can feel good. Note: he will feel even better after he stops at the drive-through window (with new engine idling) at the pharmacy to pick up his pain pills from the big drug company that opposes reduced drug costs and single-payer health coverage and homeopathic research.
The economy is badly in need of very serious surgery and a complete engine/drivetrain overhaul. Instead the government is handing out small $4500.00 boxes of band-aids and bottles of cod liver oil. The Cash for Clunkers program is simply another version of "take two aspirin and call me in the morning". It treats an ulcer with whiskey. The government is taking away the bread and having a "let them eat cake" sale. This is another example of a government sponsored program which recommends abstinence only while promoting unprotected sex or passes a bill to build football stadiums while health care clinics go un-staffed and underfunded and bridges fall down on the interstate. This is economic late-term abortion: kill the small child to give birth (birther?) to another mouth to feed that we hope will be more "perfect". But did I mention that it makes people feel good? Funny the right doesn't mention or object to all of this when they disrupt a town hall meeting. They don't hang in effigy the congressman who voted for THIS. Maybe they just feel too good
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Potpourri...Say what?
While waiting to watch The Daily Show yesterday, I watched this clip on The Comedy Channel:
A youngish, neatly dressed woman appears on stage and announces that she has “Roving Kidney Disease”. Since she does not know what it is, or what to do about it, she has asked her Dr. to speak.
A short, plump and bespectacled man in a white smock appears, chart in hand, and confirms her diagnosis. He points out that she currently has one kidney on her left thigh and another on the back of her neck. She asks, “What causes this?” He does not know, but asks if she has any bad falls lately?
At this point, as they talk (and she denies falling), we see short out-takes of comedic pratfalls: women being tackled unexpectedly by football players; women falling from kitchen counters; women walking into walls; women being knocked to the floor by clumsy oafs. Following these Dick Van Dyke-like routines, the DR. tells the woman that there is a cure: If she will bounce repeatedly on a small floor-mounted trampoline (shown), she will recover. She thanks him and he leaves.
The woman then begins casually jumping up and down on the trampoline, and talking about how grateful she is for her cure. After a few moments, she missteps and falls off, backwards into the (fake) wall behind her. The wall crumbles and she crashes onto the floor and out of sight. She quickly jumps up and reassures the audience: “It’s OK! I’m alright! Just a little set back!”
This is, I think, a metaphor for health care reform. We are treating the symptoms and not the cause, with antiquated technology after hasty prognoses. Then whatever meager steps are made toward wellness are then derailed by the un-health insurance companies and big pharma, and we fall off through a (fake) wall of recovery. And we get up say we are OK. Say what?
And then there is this quote, from the new book, The Death of Why, The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy, by Andrea Batista Schlesinger: “When was the last time you changed your mind on something important? I’ve changed my mind a few times. One thing I can say for sure is that I’ve never changed it while surrounded by people who agree with me.” Wow. I think this explains why so much of the “news” and “newsy” info we get is not news at all, but merely gossip. That is why I don’t read it or watch it much, anymore. We exist and subsist on newsfluff.
Faced with decisions about health care, gay and lesbian issues, the auto industry bail-out and the re-election of obviously corrupt politicians, we choose not to change our mind, and seek comfort and confirmation from those around us who will willingly and readily agree with us (read the book: the author does a much better job with this concept than I do).
With war raging in multiple countries, Goldman Sachs raping the country and foreclosures and unemployment at all time highs, why do we hear most of all about Michael Vick re-entering football for millions, what performance enhancing swimsuit will win the most contests and who is protesting it, and whether o r not Brittany has on underwear? Does it matter how much cash Ruth Madoff has stashed or that half of Michael Jackson’s brain is unaccounted for? Or that a man bit a dog? Say what?
And while I am at it, bringing together a cop and a college professor for beers (and the press speculating on who will drink which brand of beer) on a picnic table, outside the Oval Office, in order to quell racial tensions, is acting “stupidly”. Yet many of us (and the MSM) are fixated on the gesture. Say what?
We resist changing our minds; essentially we resist thinking. We listen to and tune in to what is easiest to accept without question or using the word “Why?” We accept half-truths or nonsense blindly and blithely. This is why Glenn beck has an audience that nods in agreement when he (stupidly) calls Obama a racist or Limbaugh says the same about Sotomoyor. Or how”birthers” gain an audience on a topic that is without substance or merit or grounding. Or Lou Dobbs calls Rachel Maddow a “tea-bagger queen” and gets away with the total absurdity of it all. Say what?
Having said all of this (so far), I am looking for a book, called, Idiot America, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. It should fit in nicely with the talk about “anti-intellectualism” that is flying around, these days. “Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s anti-intellectualism!”
And speaking of half-truths and nonsense, I heard a local minister, on the radio this morning, say this (with regard to the role of churches and religion in hard economic times): “We need to teach and embody hope because that is the realization that God intends”. Say what?
Which brings me back to “Why?”, and Schlesinger’s book. She reminds us that we don’t ask why often enough because we have settled for easy “answers” (you can find out anything from Google) and instant gratification. We think we can keep the world afloat by buying more stuff, when the simpler fact is that nothing which breaks which is not essential to life does not need to be replaced immediately. Wal-Mart is not the savior of the world. There are things and stuff and items in life we can and should learn to live without, despite what the TV commercials tell us. Did I just hear someone ask, “Say what?”
Let me leave you with one remarkably realistic conclusion (about life) and one unbiased and very realistic appraisal (about what we are facing in life right now ). One is more sobering than the other, but both may help you ask “Why?”
The first is by Derrick Jensen, in Endgame:
The truth is that I am going to die someday, whether or not I stock up on pills. That’s life. And if I die in the population reduction that takes place as a corrective to our having overshot carrying capacity, well, that’s life, too. Finally, if my death comes as part of something that serves the larger community, that helps stabilize and enrich the landbase of which I’m part, so much the better. [quoted via Carolyn Baker: Sacred Demise]
The second is from the economist, Paul Krugman, in the NYT:
Medicare versus insurers
“I notice from comments that a fair number of readers think that Medicare has had runaway costs. What you need to ask is, runaway compared to what?
Here’s the raw fact, from the National Health Expenditure data: since 1970 Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen at an annual rate of 8.8% — but insurance premiums have risen at an annual rate of 9.9%. The rise in Medicare costs is just part of the overall rise in health care spending. And in fact Medicare spending has lagged private spending: if insurance premiums had risen “only” as much as Medicare spending, they’d be 1/3 lower than they are.
We don’t have a Medicare problem — we have a health care problem.”
Now, after both of these, you may be saying, “Say what?”...which I must remind you is dangerously close to saying “Why?” But whatever you do, do not say, “So what?”
A youngish, neatly dressed woman appears on stage and announces that she has “Roving Kidney Disease”. Since she does not know what it is, or what to do about it, she has asked her Dr. to speak.
A short, plump and bespectacled man in a white smock appears, chart in hand, and confirms her diagnosis. He points out that she currently has one kidney on her left thigh and another on the back of her neck. She asks, “What causes this?” He does not know, but asks if she has any bad falls lately?
At this point, as they talk (and she denies falling), we see short out-takes of comedic pratfalls: women being tackled unexpectedly by football players; women falling from kitchen counters; women walking into walls; women being knocked to the floor by clumsy oafs. Following these Dick Van Dyke-like routines, the DR. tells the woman that there is a cure: If she will bounce repeatedly on a small floor-mounted trampoline (shown), she will recover. She thanks him and he leaves.
The woman then begins casually jumping up and down on the trampoline, and talking about how grateful she is for her cure. After a few moments, she missteps and falls off, backwards into the (fake) wall behind her. The wall crumbles and she crashes onto the floor and out of sight. She quickly jumps up and reassures the audience: “It’s OK! I’m alright! Just a little set back!”
This is, I think, a metaphor for health care reform. We are treating the symptoms and not the cause, with antiquated technology after hasty prognoses. Then whatever meager steps are made toward wellness are then derailed by the un-health insurance companies and big pharma, and we fall off through a (fake) wall of recovery. And we get up say we are OK. Say what?
And then there is this quote, from the new book, The Death of Why, The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy, by Andrea Batista Schlesinger: “When was the last time you changed your mind on something important? I’ve changed my mind a few times. One thing I can say for sure is that I’ve never changed it while surrounded by people who agree with me.” Wow. I think this explains why so much of the “news” and “newsy” info we get is not news at all, but merely gossip. That is why I don’t read it or watch it much, anymore. We exist and subsist on newsfluff.
Faced with decisions about health care, gay and lesbian issues, the auto industry bail-out and the re-election of obviously corrupt politicians, we choose not to change our mind, and seek comfort and confirmation from those around us who will willingly and readily agree with us (read the book: the author does a much better job with this concept than I do).
With war raging in multiple countries, Goldman Sachs raping the country and foreclosures and unemployment at all time highs, why do we hear most of all about Michael Vick re-entering football for millions, what performance enhancing swimsuit will win the most contests and who is protesting it, and whether o r not Brittany has on underwear? Does it matter how much cash Ruth Madoff has stashed or that half of Michael Jackson’s brain is unaccounted for? Or that a man bit a dog? Say what?
And while I am at it, bringing together a cop and a college professor for beers (and the press speculating on who will drink which brand of beer) on a picnic table, outside the Oval Office, in order to quell racial tensions, is acting “stupidly”. Yet many of us (and the MSM) are fixated on the gesture. Say what?
We resist changing our minds; essentially we resist thinking. We listen to and tune in to what is easiest to accept without question or using the word “Why?” We accept half-truths or nonsense blindly and blithely. This is why Glenn beck has an audience that nods in agreement when he (stupidly) calls Obama a racist or Limbaugh says the same about Sotomoyor. Or how”birthers” gain an audience on a topic that is without substance or merit or grounding. Or Lou Dobbs calls Rachel Maddow a “tea-bagger queen” and gets away with the total absurdity of it all. Say what?
Having said all of this (so far), I am looking for a book, called, Idiot America, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. It should fit in nicely with the talk about “anti-intellectualism” that is flying around, these days. “Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s anti-intellectualism!”
And speaking of half-truths and nonsense, I heard a local minister, on the radio this morning, say this (with regard to the role of churches and religion in hard economic times): “We need to teach and embody hope because that is the realization that God intends”. Say what?
Which brings me back to “Why?”, and Schlesinger’s book. She reminds us that we don’t ask why often enough because we have settled for easy “answers” (you can find out anything from Google) and instant gratification. We think we can keep the world afloat by buying more stuff, when the simpler fact is that nothing which breaks which is not essential to life does not need to be replaced immediately. Wal-Mart is not the savior of the world. There are things and stuff and items in life we can and should learn to live without, despite what the TV commercials tell us. Did I just hear someone ask, “Say what?”
Let me leave you with one remarkably realistic conclusion (about life) and one unbiased and very realistic appraisal (about what we are facing in life right now ). One is more sobering than the other, but both may help you ask “Why?”
The first is by Derrick Jensen, in Endgame:
The truth is that I am going to die someday, whether or not I stock up on pills. That’s life. And if I die in the population reduction that takes place as a corrective to our having overshot carrying capacity, well, that’s life, too. Finally, if my death comes as part of something that serves the larger community, that helps stabilize and enrich the landbase of which I’m part, so much the better. [quoted via Carolyn Baker: Sacred Demise]
The second is from the economist, Paul Krugman, in the NYT:
Medicare versus insurers
“I notice from comments that a fair number of readers think that Medicare has had runaway costs. What you need to ask is, runaway compared to what?
Here’s the raw fact, from the National Health Expenditure data: since 1970 Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen at an annual rate of 8.8% — but insurance premiums have risen at an annual rate of 9.9%. The rise in Medicare costs is just part of the overall rise in health care spending. And in fact Medicare spending has lagged private spending: if insurance premiums had risen “only” as much as Medicare spending, they’d be 1/3 lower than they are.
We don’t have a Medicare problem — we have a health care problem.”
Now, after both of these, you may be saying, “Say what?”...which I must remind you is dangerously close to saying “Why?” But whatever you do, do not say, “So what?”
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
RushBeckDobbsLimbaughism
Is it any wonder that matters are amiss with the House and its' attempted health care reform legislation? They have given it over to the Energy and Commerce Committee. This is a group undoubtedly well-qualified to discuss the merits of health care and to remove it from the commodity sphere of commerce. Lovely.
I suppose that over in the Senate, they have given the task over to the committee for Playdough and Tonka Toys.
Meanwhile, FOX NATION is running a narrative that claims that the health reforms urged by Obama are a backdoor plot to offer slavery reparations for blacks, and that the plans ultimately will cause the deaths of white people. If you put this all together, does it spell "birther"?
None of the above should be considered a viable form of "public option".
Not only does this disgusting quagmire indicate that we have forgotten why we got into the health care reform game in the first place, but it clearly shows that we have lost the friggin' football!
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 3:11 PM
Subject: NYTimes.com: The Caucus: House Panel Restarts Health Talks
This page was sent to you by: ihentschel@austin.rr.com U.S. July 29, 2009 The Caucus: House Panel Restarts Health Talks By David M. Herszenhorn The House Energy and Commerce Committee will resume work on major health care legislation, after House leaders and a faction of fiscally conservative Democrats who had stalled the bill apparently reached a compromise after days of fitful negotiations.
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I suppose that over in the Senate, they have given the task over to the committee for Playdough and Tonka Toys.
Meanwhile, FOX NATION is running a narrative that claims that the health reforms urged by Obama are a backdoor plot to offer slavery reparations for blacks, and that the plans ultimately will cause the deaths of white people. If you put this all together, does it spell "birther"?
None of the above should be considered a viable form of "public option".
Not only does this disgusting quagmire indicate that we have forgotten why we got into the health care reform game in the first place, but it clearly shows that we have lost the friggin' football!
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 3:11 PM
Subject: NYTimes.com: The Caucus: House Panel Restarts Health Talks
This page was sent to you by: ihentschel@austin.rr.com U.S. July 29, 2009 The Caucus: House Panel Restarts Health Talks By David M. Herszenhorn The House Energy and Commerce Committee will resume work on major health care legislation, after House leaders and a faction of fiscally conservative Democrats who had stalled the bill apparently reached a compromise after days of fitful negotiations.
1. Op-Ed Columnist: 59 Is the New 30 2. Op-Ed Columnist: Sarah Grabs the Grievance Grab Bag From Hillary 3. Film Food, Ready for Its 'Bon Appetit' 4. The Minimalist: 101 Simple Salads for the Season 5. Brain Power: In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable » Go to Complete List
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Monday, July 27, 2009
Unhealthy care
As the "reform process" continues to wither, while all these blue dog guys dither, and the Republicans throw large spitballs, paid for by the health insurance and big pharma companies, I must admire Krugman's patience, calm and rationality. I simply want to strangle all these incoherent bastards. But even if we did that, we won't get single-payer. In fact we will be lucky to get anything at all which i s not a watered down version of the ugly, ineffective, expensive and largely useless programs we have now.
The United States will become a subservient third-world country, run by a coalition of healthy Canadians, Swedes, Brits and Germans (financed by China) because we will all be too sick to protest or offer resistance.
Our inabiity to conceive of, create, and institute real humanitarian,non-profit healthcare will be our own self-imposed disease of consumption, eating us alive, from the inside out.
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 8:03 AM
Subject: NYTimes.com: An Incoherent Truth
This page was sent to you by: ihentschel@austin.rr.com OPINION July 27, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist: An Incoherent Truth By PAUL KRUGMAN On health care, the Blue Dogs aren't making sense. The conservative Democrats can't extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project.
1. The Minimalist: 101 Simple Salads for the Season 2. Op-Ed Columnist: Bite Your Tongue 3. Corner Office Carol Smith: No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers 4. Editorial: Health Care Reform and You 5. Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man » Go to Complete List
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Adam The story of two strangers, one a little stranger than the other. Starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne. In theaters this summer. Click here to view trailer
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy
The United States will become a subservient third-world country, run by a coalition of healthy Canadians, Swedes, Brits and Germans (financed by China) because we will all be too sick to protest or offer resistance.
Our inabiity to conceive of, create, and institute real humanitarian,non-profit healthcare will be our own self-imposed disease of consumption, eating us alive, from the inside out.
----- Original Message -----
From: ihentschel@austin.rr.com
To: ihentschel149@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 8:03 AM
Subject: NYTimes.com: An Incoherent Truth
This page was sent to you by: ihentschel@austin.rr.com OPINION July 27, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist: An Incoherent Truth By PAUL KRUGMAN On health care, the Blue Dogs aren't making sense. The conservative Democrats can't extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project.
1. The Minimalist: 101 Simple Salads for the Season 2. Op-Ed Columnist: Bite Your Tongue 3. Corner Office Carol Smith: No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers 4. Editorial: Health Care Reform and You 5. Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man » Go to Complete List
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Adam The story of two strangers, one a little stranger than the other. Starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne. In theaters this summer. Click here to view trailer
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy
Sunday, July 26, 2009
The New Old is the Old New
OPINION July 23, 2009 Schott's Vocab: Stealth Starbucks By Ben Schott A Starbucks coffee shop in disguise.
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/stealth-starbucks/
The end of this article raises an interesting question. If, as the James Taylor song reminds us, that "one thing leads to another", and we start to see such 21rst century anomolies as the "local" hardware store re-appear, run By Home Depot, or a "local" neighborhood pharmacy, surreptitiously run by Walgreens or CVS, or a "local neighborhood" anything (how about a five and dime, run by Wal-Mart?), would that signal a re-birth of the neigborhood, the beginning of the end for big box stores and a corporate acknowledgement that neighborhoods and community are actually a good idea? After they have spent the last 25+ years working to destroy them both?
This is a wonderful and tantalizing notion, but my guess is that it is just a case of Starbucks just attempting to spin it's own spin, fighting a culturally induced entropy. This is moreover just the most recent reguritation of greed and avarice, a consumptive old wolf in sheepishly donned used clothing, pretending humility (Not so very long ago, this Schott's column ran a story about Wall St. workers who now wear "blue jeans" to work, and shirts with patched elbows. This is a self-serving and mocking attempt to convince observers to feel sorry for them, after the financial meltdown. In truth, the jeans cost $300./pr. and it is all a ruse: they still drive Porche's to work).
Starbucks is under attack from its own whorish self and finally realizing that it is commiting a kind of suicide by over-extension of sameness, and if nothing else, brought on by virture of its pervasive sterility and utterly humongous character. They are the coffee shop adaptation of Kruschev, pounding his coffee mug on the lectern, yelling, "We will bury you!" (which is, of course,the mantra of Wal-Mart). If the article is accurate, in stating that this "makeover of innocence" is occuring in a retail space of 16,000 sq. ft., then it is very clear as to how out of touch Starbucks really is with itself. How cozy and customer/user friendly can you be in a 16,000 sq.ft. space? And if all else fails, sell alcohol. Perhaps no one is immune to prostitution of some sort.
Like the now nearly-extinct 300 lb. bakery shop owner, perhaps Starbucks has consumed too much of its own product? Downtown Seattle may not be the greatest place for highly caffeinated hallucinating, but we should not forget that, only in America can you take a over-worn, unsaleable piece of anything, re-name, re-badge, re-brand and re-package it and some fool will buy it. It's the economy, stupid.
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/stealth-starbucks/
The end of this article raises an interesting question. If, as the James Taylor song reminds us, that "one thing leads to another", and we start to see such 21rst century anomolies as the "local" hardware store re-appear, run By Home Depot, or a "local" neighborhood pharmacy, surreptitiously run by Walgreens or CVS, or a "local neighborhood" anything (how about a five and dime, run by Wal-Mart?), would that signal a re-birth of the neigborhood, the beginning of the end for big box stores and a corporate acknowledgement that neighborhoods and community are actually a good idea? After they have spent the last 25+ years working to destroy them both?
This is a wonderful and tantalizing notion, but my guess is that it is just a case of Starbucks just attempting to spin it's own spin, fighting a culturally induced entropy. This is moreover just the most recent reguritation of greed and avarice, a consumptive old wolf in sheepishly donned used clothing, pretending humility (Not so very long ago, this Schott's column ran a story about Wall St. workers who now wear "blue jeans" to work, and shirts with patched elbows. This is a self-serving and mocking attempt to convince observers to feel sorry for them, after the financial meltdown. In truth, the jeans cost $300./pr. and it is all a ruse: they still drive Porche's to work).
Starbucks is under attack from its own whorish self and finally realizing that it is commiting a kind of suicide by over-extension of sameness, and if nothing else, brought on by virture of its pervasive sterility and utterly humongous character. They are the coffee shop adaptation of Kruschev, pounding his coffee mug on the lectern, yelling, "We will bury you!" (which is, of course,the mantra of Wal-Mart). If the article is accurate, in stating that this "makeover of innocence" is occuring in a retail space of 16,000 sq. ft., then it is very clear as to how out of touch Starbucks really is with itself. How cozy and customer/user friendly can you be in a 16,000 sq.ft. space? And if all else fails, sell alcohol. Perhaps no one is immune to prostitution of some sort.
Like the now nearly-extinct 300 lb. bakery shop owner, perhaps Starbucks has consumed too much of its own product? Downtown Seattle may not be the greatest place for highly caffeinated hallucinating, but we should not forget that, only in America can you take a over-worn, unsaleable piece of anything, re-name, re-badge, re-brand and re-package it and some fool will buy it. It's the economy, stupid.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Curious
This past week, my friend and co-conspirator in writing about political and cultural issues, Deb, put up a new post on a web site that she and I a few others contribute to. She was motivated, in this instance, by the dismissal of Lt. Dan Choi, for openly defying the terms of the DADT policy in our military. You can read it here: http://turn-left.hypocrisy.com/2009/07/01/the-injustice-continues-under-obama/.
As you might guess, the article expresses Deb’s displeasure with the military’s decision concerning Lt. Choi, as well as the general direction of affairs relative to the country in general, President Obama’s inactions and the LGBT community. She makes a very good case (as usual) and concludes by saying that the President is a “political coward”, and that “is not what the country needed”.
Now you should know that Deb is a very vociferous member of the LGBT community so it is not difficult to understand her basic position. And I was very much in general agreement with her, but I did not feel her statement went far enough. So I wrote this:
Before this post becomes the source of vitriol that swirls around solely LGBT/homo-angstian rhetoric, and some of the readers here climb all over Deb for per position, I must say that I think she is both right and wrong. Her outrage and indignation over the handling of Dan Choi( and DADT in general) is apt and well placed. But she is wrong in overlooking its' symbolic value, as regards the actions (or inactions) of the Obama administration on the whole.
Injustice is probably not the best word we could use here, and I'll tell you why. The outcome of the Choi hearing, as well as the President's comment to a retired Air Force officer, that this was a "generational issue" smack of the same position of mediocrity, appeasement, glad handing and moral molly-coddling that is evidenced by his stance on every major issue confronting us today: the financial debacle, the economy in general, LGBT rights, foreign policy issues (Israel/Palestine, Honduras), government secrecy and the biggest elephant in the room, health care. And Deb's conclusion that this stance is political cowardice may not be the more appropriate word , either.
What we do have a a betrayal of promised leadership and a strange and curious sudden lack of courage.Five to six months in or no, we were promised change. But, alas the world is of full of promise keepers/breakers: Ensign, Sanford, Pelosi (who lead her legislative body), Reid (who would lead his party), Bush who promised to be a uniter and a decider and was neither.
Obama appears to lack the courage to do the extraordinary so that the ordinary and necessary and morally correct may occur. He is languishing in a sea of mediocrity and half-baked actions.
If you want something worthwhile to occur, the required action must have some spectacular and extraordinary transformations accompanying it so that there will be a valuable and lasting effect. If you want to burn down a building, you have to start a fire and be prepared for the heat.
If you want to bake leavened bread, you must scald then milk befor you add it to the mixture or else the the microbes in the milk will kill the bacteria in the yeast and the bread will not rise. You will still get bread, but if you don't scald the milk first, but the bread will be flat, hard and disappointing. If you use only tepid water to make tea, instead of boiling water, you will still get tea but it will be weak and unappealing.
Obama needs to stop walking down the middle of the road, stop trying to appease and accomodate everyone, stop not trying not ruffle feathers , incorporating every side on every issue, take a firm stand, piss off a few people on the outer edges, stop pretending to be Solomon and make some strong tea and some substatial, chewable bread.
Injustice and cowardice? I think not. But mediocre fence-straddling and a lack of conviction to cause the extraordinary may be more like it, and Dan Choi is only one example of convictional terpitude.
A postscript:
Almost without fail, Deb’s posts get lambasted and attacked by a select group of right-wingnut, conservative, nearly illiterate, unabashed homophobes who attack her comments almost solely because of her sexual orientation. I posted my comments almost immediately and several days have passed. There has been no rhetorical firestorm or rebuttal from any front. I wonder why that is?
As you might guess, the article expresses Deb’s displeasure with the military’s decision concerning Lt. Choi, as well as the general direction of affairs relative to the country in general, President Obama’s inactions and the LGBT community. She makes a very good case (as usual) and concludes by saying that the President is a “political coward”, and that “is not what the country needed”.
Now you should know that Deb is a very vociferous member of the LGBT community so it is not difficult to understand her basic position. And I was very much in general agreement with her, but I did not feel her statement went far enough. So I wrote this:
Before this post becomes the source of vitriol that swirls around solely LGBT/homo-angstian rhetoric, and some of the readers here climb all over Deb for per position, I must say that I think she is both right and wrong. Her outrage and indignation over the handling of Dan Choi( and DADT in general) is apt and well placed. But she is wrong in overlooking its' symbolic value, as regards the actions (or inactions) of the Obama administration on the whole.
Injustice is probably not the best word we could use here, and I'll tell you why. The outcome of the Choi hearing, as well as the President's comment to a retired Air Force officer, that this was a "generational issue" smack of the same position of mediocrity, appeasement, glad handing and moral molly-coddling that is evidenced by his stance on every major issue confronting us today: the financial debacle, the economy in general, LGBT rights, foreign policy issues (Israel/Palestine, Honduras), government secrecy and the biggest elephant in the room, health care. And Deb's conclusion that this stance is political cowardice may not be the more appropriate word , either.
What we do have a a betrayal of promised leadership and a strange and curious sudden lack of courage.Five to six months in or no, we were promised change. But, alas the world is of full of promise keepers/breakers: Ensign, Sanford, Pelosi (who lead her legislative body), Reid (who would lead his party), Bush who promised to be a uniter and a decider and was neither.
Obama appears to lack the courage to do the extraordinary so that the ordinary and necessary and morally correct may occur. He is languishing in a sea of mediocrity and half-baked actions.
If you want something worthwhile to occur, the required action must have some spectacular and extraordinary transformations accompanying it so that there will be a valuable and lasting effect. If you want to burn down a building, you have to start a fire and be prepared for the heat.
If you want to bake leavened bread, you must scald then milk befor you add it to the mixture or else the the microbes in the milk will kill the bacteria in the yeast and the bread will not rise. You will still get bread, but if you don't scald the milk first, but the bread will be flat, hard and disappointing. If you use only tepid water to make tea, instead of boiling water, you will still get tea but it will be weak and unappealing.
Obama needs to stop walking down the middle of the road, stop trying to appease and accomodate everyone, stop not trying not ruffle feathers , incorporating every side on every issue, take a firm stand, piss off a few people on the outer edges, stop pretending to be Solomon and make some strong tea and some substatial, chewable bread.
Injustice and cowardice? I think not. But mediocre fence-straddling and a lack of conviction to cause the extraordinary may be more like it, and Dan Choi is only one example of convictional terpitude.
A postscript:
Almost without fail, Deb’s posts get lambasted and attacked by a select group of right-wingnut, conservative, nearly illiterate, unabashed homophobes who attack her comments almost solely because of her sexual orientation. I posted my comments almost immediately and several days have passed. There has been no rhetorical firestorm or rebuttal from any front. I wonder why that is?
Friday, July 3, 2009
July Fourth Special
Here are some holiday suggestions for ways to utilize the summer’s unfolding events and organize your priorities, so far. As you set off your firecrackers and bottle rockets, and 500 G military artillery shells (like we do here in Texas), and grill your steaks and hot dogs, and munch on watermelon, try a few of these observations on for size.
If you have watched the television at all, lately, you have probably noticed advertising for:
-Independent trade schools urging people to go back to school to learn new skills in law enforcement (municipalities have no money to fund these jobs), electrical/construction trades (the housing construction industry has crashed, nationwide), long-haul truck driving and drafting. There are no jobs to be had in these fields, but we are encouraged to take out student loans and go deeper into debt, anyway. And be sure to eat at McDonald’s every day, between classes. Then you can spend what you have left on an expensive weight-loss program. Google Dan Merino.
-Learning to use tools like PC-based stock trading programs to play the stock market or else run right down to the local office of your friendly neighborhood broker, to discuss re-managing your empty portfolio (on July 3, the DOW closed down about 225+ points…again). All we have to play with is monopoly money: we may as well have fun with it. Paper re-cycling bins are full of shredded 401k statements.
-A rash of new extended warranty companies who want to you pay large amounts of money to protect you from financial ruin if your “older” car breaks down. They know you can’t afford a new car, but want you to believe that a monthly payment to them (about the size of a small car payment) will protect you from the financial ruin roughly equal to not having adequate health insurance. If not that, then run out and take advantage of low-cost 60 month financing on a new vehicle that will no longer be manufactured by Genera l Motors. Or get guaranteed payments on a new car from Korea if you lose your job in the next few weeks or months.
-Immediately changing your auto insurance policy from company A to company B, because company A is surely charging you too much and company B has a much better payment plan. The combined monies that Progressive, Geico, State Farm, et.al. are spending on TV ads could finance the war in Iraq. And their rates go up, daily.
So let’s change gears. Before you get caught up in worrying about Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Honduras, un-health care, North Korea, the imminent crises concerning world food supplies and water or the fact that the Obama presidency has the remarkable look of being the mirror opposite of the Obama campaign, kick around a few of these entertaining activities:
Stay mesmerized by the meaning less and irrelevant death of Michael Jackson. He has does nothing but represent the bizarre, financially irresponsible and macabre and molest children for the last decade or so. Maybe we can spend more time talking about it and maybe you can contribute to the already bankrupt city of Los Angeles to help pay for his “memorial service”. Are we that stupid?
Keep your imagination titillated by speculating on the real reasons behind why Sarah Palin is resigning. This is, in all likelihood, a preemptive strike to get her out of the line of fire before some Inuit Eskimo Exxon baby seal scandal erupts or that we find out that her hubby is not Trig’s father. Or John Ensign is. Or that she got an STD from Mark Sanford in Argentina. Which she can see from her front porch. And she has done nothing but produce and intellectually molest children for the last decade or so, either. Are we that bored? Gullible?
And if you are still without enough diversionary fluff to keep you busy, run on down to Wal-Mart and buy a new HD flat-panel TV(on credit) and jump into the fray about whether or not to get Direct TV, Dish Network or Cable( I receive junk mail from all three of these four out of seven days a week. What tye spend on this marketing could pay my mortgage without batting an eye and they want rate increases) Then you can decide at the same time if you should bundle your telephone land line with the charges that you are about to be hit with by TimeWarner to surf the net and buy more stuff from the Home Shopping Network… or sell your old TV at a profit through ebay (after you buy the computer training program from the guy on TV who says he won’t make you rich but wants your money for some CD training disks). It’s fun. Really.
And don’t forget to take your gun to Church when you go the day after the fireworks and be sure to watch Fox News , so that you can ineffectively discuss DADT and DOMA and Officer Choi. And Michael Jackson is still dead. Really.
If you have watched the television at all, lately, you have probably noticed advertising for:
-Independent trade schools urging people to go back to school to learn new skills in law enforcement (municipalities have no money to fund these jobs), electrical/construction trades (the housing construction industry has crashed, nationwide), long-haul truck driving and drafting. There are no jobs to be had in these fields, but we are encouraged to take out student loans and go deeper into debt, anyway. And be sure to eat at McDonald’s every day, between classes. Then you can spend what you have left on an expensive weight-loss program. Google Dan Merino.
-Learning to use tools like PC-based stock trading programs to play the stock market or else run right down to the local office of your friendly neighborhood broker, to discuss re-managing your empty portfolio (on July 3, the DOW closed down about 225+ points…again). All we have to play with is monopoly money: we may as well have fun with it. Paper re-cycling bins are full of shredded 401k statements.
-A rash of new extended warranty companies who want to you pay large amounts of money to protect you from financial ruin if your “older” car breaks down. They know you can’t afford a new car, but want you to believe that a monthly payment to them (about the size of a small car payment) will protect you from the financial ruin roughly equal to not having adequate health insurance. If not that, then run out and take advantage of low-cost 60 month financing on a new vehicle that will no longer be manufactured by Genera l Motors. Or get guaranteed payments on a new car from Korea if you lose your job in the next few weeks or months.
-Immediately changing your auto insurance policy from company A to company B, because company A is surely charging you too much and company B has a much better payment plan. The combined monies that Progressive, Geico, State Farm, et.al. are spending on TV ads could finance the war in Iraq. And their rates go up, daily.
So let’s change gears. Before you get caught up in worrying about Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Honduras, un-health care, North Korea, the imminent crises concerning world food supplies and water or the fact that the Obama presidency has the remarkable look of being the mirror opposite of the Obama campaign, kick around a few of these entertaining activities:
Stay mesmerized by the meaning less and irrelevant death of Michael Jackson. He has does nothing but represent the bizarre, financially irresponsible and macabre and molest children for the last decade or so. Maybe we can spend more time talking about it and maybe you can contribute to the already bankrupt city of Los Angeles to help pay for his “memorial service”. Are we that stupid?
Keep your imagination titillated by speculating on the real reasons behind why Sarah Palin is resigning. This is, in all likelihood, a preemptive strike to get her out of the line of fire before some Inuit Eskimo Exxon baby seal scandal erupts or that we find out that her hubby is not Trig’s father. Or John Ensign is. Or that she got an STD from Mark Sanford in Argentina. Which she can see from her front porch. And she has done nothing but produce and intellectually molest children for the last decade or so, either. Are we that bored? Gullible?
And if you are still without enough diversionary fluff to keep you busy, run on down to Wal-Mart and buy a new HD flat-panel TV(on credit) and jump into the fray about whether or not to get Direct TV, Dish Network or Cable( I receive junk mail from all three of these four out of seven days a week. What tye spend on this marketing could pay my mortgage without batting an eye and they want rate increases) Then you can decide at the same time if you should bundle your telephone land line with the charges that you are about to be hit with by TimeWarner to surf the net and buy more stuff from the Home Shopping Network… or sell your old TV at a profit through ebay (after you buy the computer training program from the guy on TV who says he won’t make you rich but wants your money for some CD training disks). It’s fun. Really.
And don’t forget to take your gun to Church when you go the day after the fireworks and be sure to watch Fox News , so that you can ineffectively discuss DADT and DOMA and Officer Choi. And Michael Jackson is still dead. Really.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Follow up
A few days ago I wrote a blog entry called "Inharmonious". In it, I sent along some remarks from Mssrs. Krugman and Reich about the shortcomings of Obama's response to the financial debacle we have on-going. I said that I wondered what Galbraith and Grieder might have to say. Well, here is Mr Grieder, weighing in.
He says, essentially, if we settle for weak solutions too soon, because the severity of the crisis seems over, it will be a terrible mistake. Seems awfully hard with which to argue. It is time to dig in our heels, not go out for ice cream.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090706/greider2?rel=emailNation
He says, essentially, if we settle for weak solutions too soon, because the severity of the crisis seems over, it will be a terrible mistake. Seems awfully hard with which to argue. It is time to dig in our heels, not go out for ice cream.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090706/greider2?rel=emailNation
Reverse Psychosis
A few months ago, a new feature, “Schott’s Vocabulary”, appeared as daily insertion on the Op-Ed page of the NYT. You can also access it directly on the web , here: http://www.benschott.com/.
As a “word guy”, I have been getting a lot of enjoyment from this effort on a daily basis. The column works well as social commentary, cultural analysis and very often provides a balanced view of the contrasts in contemporary international behavior. In short, if you can be honest enough with yourself, what Mr. Schott offers can help you see yourself much more clearly, against the backdrop of today’s larger humanitarian canvass( which is increasingly convoluted ,or a “convass”?).
Today’s entry is especially revealing , given the ongoing, cyclical and embarrassing debacle on Wall St., the current discussions about potential bonuses at Goldman Sachs and the state of bailouts for failing giants like General Motors:
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/poorgeoisie/?emc=eta1.
The “Poorgeoisie” seem to be out latest segment of self-delusionary, narcissistic and neurotic ne’er do wells, fooling only themselves. I first began thinking of these folks as using “reverse psychology”, practicing a mode of appearance designed to deceive the rest of the American public about their imagined “plight”, but then I settled on the word “psychosis” instead: they are practicing on themselves. These titans/giants/worker bees of the our financial system are, frighteningly and given the reins they hold, acting in a fashion which might be best described as mentally ill. They might be thought of as dangerous. They are perhaps psychotic. Thinking inversely.
Spending untold amounts of money in order to appear “poor” and/or “downtrodden” is apparently Wall St.’s version of credit card splurge: ignore reality, re-package absurdity and live in a personal never-never land that avoids the ugliness which constitutes what has become the essence of daily life for most Americans. If you sing, ”Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” loud enough, while wearing $300.00,pre-frayed jeans, as you exit your sadly two year-old Porsche, perhaps no one will suspect you had caviar for breakfast, on the rooftop patio of your $2M Manhattan condo. Life for them is still a “cabaret,my friends”. Is it any wonder that, given this sort of disparity in the perception of “real life”, we are having trouble getting back on our feet? Or even finding out feet?
I tried to get an appointment to see my therapist about this, but he was booked. He is getting new patches sewn onto the elbows of his linen shirts and getting his Gucci loafers pre-scuffed.
As a “word guy”, I have been getting a lot of enjoyment from this effort on a daily basis. The column works well as social commentary, cultural analysis and very often provides a balanced view of the contrasts in contemporary international behavior. In short, if you can be honest enough with yourself, what Mr. Schott offers can help you see yourself much more clearly, against the backdrop of today’s larger humanitarian canvass( which is increasingly convoluted ,or a “convass”?).
Today’s entry is especially revealing , given the ongoing, cyclical and embarrassing debacle on Wall St., the current discussions about potential bonuses at Goldman Sachs and the state of bailouts for failing giants like General Motors:
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/poorgeoisie/?emc=eta1.
The “Poorgeoisie” seem to be out latest segment of self-delusionary, narcissistic and neurotic ne’er do wells, fooling only themselves. I first began thinking of these folks as using “reverse psychology”, practicing a mode of appearance designed to deceive the rest of the American public about their imagined “plight”, but then I settled on the word “psychosis” instead: they are practicing on themselves. These titans/giants/worker bees of the our financial system are, frighteningly and given the reins they hold, acting in a fashion which might be best described as mentally ill. They might be thought of as dangerous. They are perhaps psychotic. Thinking inversely.
Spending untold amounts of money in order to appear “poor” and/or “downtrodden” is apparently Wall St.’s version of credit card splurge: ignore reality, re-package absurdity and live in a personal never-never land that avoids the ugliness which constitutes what has become the essence of daily life for most Americans. If you sing, ”Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” loud enough, while wearing $300.00,pre-frayed jeans, as you exit your sadly two year-old Porsche, perhaps no one will suspect you had caviar for breakfast, on the rooftop patio of your $2M Manhattan condo. Life for them is still a “cabaret,my friends”. Is it any wonder that, given this sort of disparity in the perception of “real life”, we are having trouble getting back on our feet? Or even finding out feet?
I tried to get an appointment to see my therapist about this, but he was booked. He is getting new patches sewn onto the elbows of his linen shirts and getting his Gucci loafers pre-scuffed.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Acronymns
Due in large part (I understand) to the nearly illiterate communications skills of Paris Hilton (someone called her "Perez" Hilton in an email to me the other day...as in Simon Perez? Scarey), many young people, on the MySpace, Facebook and Twitter sites call many people their "BFF"s. This ostensibly means "Best Friend Forever". While an endearing term (in the moment, anyway), logically speaking, this condition is both probably and literally impossible.
By now I am certain that everyone knows the embarrassing and scandalous plight of Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), a now-disgraced member of congress who was, while for sometime being separated from his wife, had an long running affair with an employee, who was the wife of another employee... and also during that same time employeed the woman's 19 year-old son as a policy "consultant", all of this done with public funds and while he was an elected representative of the people of Nevada. The Senator can truly multi-task.
Senator Ensign is a member of the extremely conservative Four Square pentecostal church, a sworn member of Promise Keepers ("marriage is sacred and sancrosanct")and has (as we now can know) loudly and hypocritically protested the "immoral" and "despicable" behaviors of Bill Clinton and Sens. Craig and Vitter (Bill Maher has pointed out that during his campaign, the Senator refused to be alone in a car with another woman [not his wife], for appearance sakes, but apparently being "in" another woman without a car was acceptable behavior. Go figure) . He "came out" only after the husband of the "in flagrante" woman in question threatened both public exposure and extortion. The Senator has betrayed himself, his church, his matrimonial fraternity, his wife and his constituents.
In my book (Face,Place, Space or otherwise) this makes Sen. Ensign a "MMF", or "Miserable MotherFu@#er", of which he is quite literally both.
Vindications of the Senator are no doubt about to be forthcoming from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, and "MMF" works well in the abbreviated text of Twitter.
Have a nice day... with your neighbor's wife.
By now I am certain that everyone knows the embarrassing and scandalous plight of Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), a now-disgraced member of congress who was, while for sometime being separated from his wife, had an long running affair with an employee, who was the wife of another employee... and also during that same time employeed the woman's 19 year-old son as a policy "consultant", all of this done with public funds and while he was an elected representative of the people of Nevada. The Senator can truly multi-task.
Senator Ensign is a member of the extremely conservative Four Square pentecostal church, a sworn member of Promise Keepers ("marriage is sacred and sancrosanct")and has (as we now can know) loudly and hypocritically protested the "immoral" and "despicable" behaviors of Bill Clinton and Sens. Craig and Vitter (Bill Maher has pointed out that during his campaign, the Senator refused to be alone in a car with another woman [not his wife], for appearance sakes, but apparently being "in" another woman without a car was acceptable behavior. Go figure) . He "came out" only after the husband of the "in flagrante" woman in question threatened both public exposure and extortion. The Senator has betrayed himself, his church, his matrimonial fraternity, his wife and his constituents.
In my book (Face,Place, Space or otherwise) this makes Sen. Ensign a "MMF", or "Miserable MotherFu@#er", of which he is quite literally both.
Vindications of the Senator are no doubt about to be forthcoming from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, and "MMF" works well in the abbreviated text of Twitter.
Have a nice day... with your neighbor's wife.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Inharmonious
Both Paul Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19krugman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th)
this morning in the NYT, and Robert Reich (http://robertreich.blogspot.com/)
in his blog posted on 6/18, indicate that they are not happy with the compromise and short-sighted nature of Obama’s proposals for over-hauling the economy and our financial policies. They both indicate that the proposal is not real reform or even anything like it. The news reports on NPR (npr.org) and other articles in the NYT and the WaPo would seem to express the same disappointment. I would like to hear what both Galbraith and Greider have to say, but I have not found anything yet this morning. My first guess is that they would both concur with Krugman and Reich, and that Grieder will be much more pessimistic and critical. And I am willing to bet that Bill Maher (Real Time, HBO, Fri. nite, 10:00 P.M.EST) will have grand time with this debacle tonight.
David Sirota has a piece in Truthdig this morning (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090618_daring_to_dream/) and I have entered a long comment there, about governmental small thinking, semantics ( you cannot literally “re-invent” anything) and the fact that if we do not come up with some new ideas, new solutions and new approaches to the challenges of the modern world, we will be constrained to remain Neanderthals, waiting for the return of the ice age of human ideological survival. That age will be financed, of course, by Lehman Bros. and have really piss poor health care.
Happy Juneteenth.
this morning in the NYT, and Robert Reich (http://robertreich.blogspot.com/)
in his blog posted on 6/18, indicate that they are not happy with the compromise and short-sighted nature of Obama’s proposals for over-hauling the economy and our financial policies. They both indicate that the proposal is not real reform or even anything like it. The news reports on NPR (npr.org) and other articles in the NYT and the WaPo would seem to express the same disappointment. I would like to hear what both Galbraith and Greider have to say, but I have not found anything yet this morning. My first guess is that they would both concur with Krugman and Reich, and that Grieder will be much more pessimistic and critical. And I am willing to bet that Bill Maher (Real Time, HBO, Fri. nite, 10:00 P.M.EST) will have grand time with this debacle tonight.
David Sirota has a piece in Truthdig this morning (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090618_daring_to_dream/) and I have entered a long comment there, about governmental small thinking, semantics ( you cannot literally “re-invent” anything) and the fact that if we do not come up with some new ideas, new solutions and new approaches to the challenges of the modern world, we will be constrained to remain Neanderthals, waiting for the return of the ice age of human ideological survival. That age will be financed, of course, by Lehman Bros. and have really piss poor health care.
Happy Juneteenth.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Man Who Isn't Here
There may well be some terrible and urgent truth to the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. The word ‘change” stings harshly this morning. The President is not here: he is in France, or Cairo or Buchenwald or Canton or Green Bay. Or on a date night. In reality he has been thrown into a toy store. Like W was, he has so many toys to play with, that he appears overwhelmed. He plays with each economic or military toy just enough to leave is fingerprints on them but not enough to learn to use any effectively enough to bring about change. I had hoped for better.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/yes-i-can/?ref=opinion. I was just thinking a few days ago, the President keeps talking about “my” Secretary of State, “my “ Secretary of Defense and “my” financial advisors. Funny: I thought they were “our” government officials and employees. I don’t much care to see Obama’s birth certificate, but I would like to see the bill of sale that shows that we sold him the whole country. His ego (like W’s) suddenly runneth over, he has appears to have forgotten he got hired for this job (not annointed) and works for us. He did not buy the United States like he bought General Motors. I hope he does not sell us to the Italians.
http://progressive.org/wx060909.html. Emanuel does not only appear undisciplined, but seems like the reincarnation of Karl Rove, the junkyard dog. He is unpredictably brash and his behavior betrays bias, brusqueness and angry aggression. He is as reassuring and comforting as falling into a prickly pear. As a right hand man for change, he belies a left-handed skullduggery-business-as- usual. He is a brutal reaffirmation of the politics-as-usual status quo. He is very much here, the President is not.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21632. This is just one essay that describes why the POTUS is all “all hat and no cattle”. His speeches, though eloquent and carefully crafted, lack substance and follow-though. We just spent eight years receiving the same disinformation from W, except it came in the form of sentence fragments and poor grammar. “Walking the walk” is very hard to do when you are not even in the room.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31232667/
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/140570/stop_being_distracted_by_loudmouths_like_limbaugh%3A_the_real_problem_is_lousy_democrats_like_evan_bayh_and_ben_nelson/.
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/140489/we%27re_screwed_on_everything_from_health_care_to_the_economy_if_the_dems_don%27t_shape_up/
http://www.alternet.org/world/140526/bill_moyers%3A_the_rise_of_private_armies_--_mercenaries%2C_murder_and_corruption_in_iraq_and_afghanistan/
I know this is more material than you want to read (or attempt to) in one sitting. But the sum and substance is roughly this: Show business, glitz, glamour and razzle-dazzle are alive and well with this Presidency, as in the last. The promised change, transparency and grit are totally absent, glossed over and hidden by flowery speeches and dog and pony shows. The President goes today to Green Bay, WI, to talk up health care reform. Why? To what end? This will help this cause as much as his trip to Elkhart, IN helped to re-vitalize the RV industry. Someone should remind him that he promised to actually listen to the citizenry and not stage-manage a diversionary tactic that tries to hide the nasty ambitions of big health and big pharma. He is not here. He is out to lunch while the legislators have lunch with the AMA, Eli Lilly and Pfizer.
The real problem is lousy democrats. Well, doh. The president exerts none of the sway of his office over his own party members, who are still wedded to big industry and finance. Did he learn nothing from Ronald Reagan? He welcomes the traitor-like likes of Arlen Specter, does nothing to limit the incoherencies of Nancy and Harry and Louise and offers no resistance to the Blue Dogs, who are more cur dogs than blue. And he should pull Lieberman and Graham into the Oval Office and read them the disciplinary riot act that is so long over-due. We are screwed…if the democrats don’t shape up. Same story, new page. The President fails repeatedly to listen to wise observers like Grieder and Richard Wolff and Krugman, who might make a difference and enable real change, and instead surrounds himself with old-line defenders of the “way things used to be”, like Biden, Geithner, and Jaba the Summers and uses Hillary Clinton as a lightning rod and innocuous pacifier.
Private armies and mercenaries: The wars and rumors of wars rage on and continue international carnage and promote ill-will, no matter what vagaries the President spouts from a pulpit in Cairo. At the current rate of the loss of hope and procrastination of change, Guantanamo will still be open for business in two years, new black-ops detention/torture centers will be open in other locales and we will soon own a second billion dollar embassy/fortress/stronghold in Afghanistan. Think what you will about the Taliban, Pakistan and nuclear weapons proliferation.
The youngish rising star of Midwestern politics strode onto the scene and emailed and twittered and sweet-talked his way into the hearts and minds of the younger voting populace. Then, through his promises and spell-binding “speechifyin’” ( stunning in contrast to his predecessor I see now in retrospect), he made the boomers stand at the window in the maternity ward and gloat over the newborn in the crib, up front and center. He was there for that.
The economic slide is still sliding, the foreclosures are closing in on human habitation, and, in a fashion no less blatant in its use of distractions, fanfare and hoopla than that of the previous administration, there is no evidence of new thinking and new solutions to new problems which have outgrown and overwhelmed the old approaches. As this possible” new way forward” is ignored, any real opportunity for that once super-hyped hope and change will rapidly fade. Where is that guy?
Obama is the man who is not here. I know that many people hate to hear me say this, but I have to agree with Mr. Greider: if Mr. Obama does not get on the stick, if he does not start singing from the songbook he sang from to get elected, and dancing with the girls who brung him, we are screwed.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/yes-i-can/?ref=opinion. I was just thinking a few days ago, the President keeps talking about “my” Secretary of State, “my “ Secretary of Defense and “my” financial advisors. Funny: I thought they were “our” government officials and employees. I don’t much care to see Obama’s birth certificate, but I would like to see the bill of sale that shows that we sold him the whole country. His ego (like W’s) suddenly runneth over, he has appears to have forgotten he got hired for this job (not annointed) and works for us. He did not buy the United States like he bought General Motors. I hope he does not sell us to the Italians.
http://progressive.org/wx060909.html. Emanuel does not only appear undisciplined, but seems like the reincarnation of Karl Rove, the junkyard dog. He is unpredictably brash and his behavior betrays bias, brusqueness and angry aggression. He is as reassuring and comforting as falling into a prickly pear. As a right hand man for change, he belies a left-handed skullduggery-business-as- usual. He is a brutal reaffirmation of the politics-as-usual status quo. He is very much here, the President is not.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21632. This is just one essay that describes why the POTUS is all “all hat and no cattle”. His speeches, though eloquent and carefully crafted, lack substance and follow-though. We just spent eight years receiving the same disinformation from W, except it came in the form of sentence fragments and poor grammar. “Walking the walk” is very hard to do when you are not even in the room.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31232667/
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/140570/stop_being_distracted_by_loudmouths_like_limbaugh%3A_the_real_problem_is_lousy_democrats_like_evan_bayh_and_ben_nelson/.
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/140489/we%27re_screwed_on_everything_from_health_care_to_the_economy_if_the_dems_don%27t_shape_up/
http://www.alternet.org/world/140526/bill_moyers%3A_the_rise_of_private_armies_--_mercenaries%2C_murder_and_corruption_in_iraq_and_afghanistan/
I know this is more material than you want to read (or attempt to) in one sitting. But the sum and substance is roughly this: Show business, glitz, glamour and razzle-dazzle are alive and well with this Presidency, as in the last. The promised change, transparency and grit are totally absent, glossed over and hidden by flowery speeches and dog and pony shows. The President goes today to Green Bay, WI, to talk up health care reform. Why? To what end? This will help this cause as much as his trip to Elkhart, IN helped to re-vitalize the RV industry. Someone should remind him that he promised to actually listen to the citizenry and not stage-manage a diversionary tactic that tries to hide the nasty ambitions of big health and big pharma. He is not here. He is out to lunch while the legislators have lunch with the AMA, Eli Lilly and Pfizer.
The real problem is lousy democrats. Well, doh. The president exerts none of the sway of his office over his own party members, who are still wedded to big industry and finance. Did he learn nothing from Ronald Reagan? He welcomes the traitor-like likes of Arlen Specter, does nothing to limit the incoherencies of Nancy and Harry and Louise and offers no resistance to the Blue Dogs, who are more cur dogs than blue. And he should pull Lieberman and Graham into the Oval Office and read them the disciplinary riot act that is so long over-due. We are screwed…if the democrats don’t shape up. Same story, new page. The President fails repeatedly to listen to wise observers like Grieder and Richard Wolff and Krugman, who might make a difference and enable real change, and instead surrounds himself with old-line defenders of the “way things used to be”, like Biden, Geithner, and Jaba the Summers and uses Hillary Clinton as a lightning rod and innocuous pacifier.
Private armies and mercenaries: The wars and rumors of wars rage on and continue international carnage and promote ill-will, no matter what vagaries the President spouts from a pulpit in Cairo. At the current rate of the loss of hope and procrastination of change, Guantanamo will still be open for business in two years, new black-ops detention/torture centers will be open in other locales and we will soon own a second billion dollar embassy/fortress/stronghold in Afghanistan. Think what you will about the Taliban, Pakistan and nuclear weapons proliferation.
The youngish rising star of Midwestern politics strode onto the scene and emailed and twittered and sweet-talked his way into the hearts and minds of the younger voting populace. Then, through his promises and spell-binding “speechifyin’” ( stunning in contrast to his predecessor I see now in retrospect), he made the boomers stand at the window in the maternity ward and gloat over the newborn in the crib, up front and center. He was there for that.
The economic slide is still sliding, the foreclosures are closing in on human habitation, and, in a fashion no less blatant in its use of distractions, fanfare and hoopla than that of the previous administration, there is no evidence of new thinking and new solutions to new problems which have outgrown and overwhelmed the old approaches. As this possible” new way forward” is ignored, any real opportunity for that once super-hyped hope and change will rapidly fade. Where is that guy?
Obama is the man who is not here. I know that many people hate to hear me say this, but I have to agree with Mr. Greider: if Mr. Obama does not get on the stick, if he does not start singing from the songbook he sang from to get elected, and dancing with the girls who brung him, we are screwed.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Nobody Likes The Truth
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090608_hold_your_applause/
Many people do not like Mr. Hedges, because of his stance on religion, but when he tells the truth and explains ugliness and indefensible cruelty for what it is, you must give him some space. I concur with this, almost without reservation.
There is no excuse for torture and even less for continued wars that decimate civilian populations with robot bombs (check the cartoon by Mr. Fish…how appropriate). One commenter cautions that the President moves “slowly and thought fully”. I think not. He hardly moves at all and is, as we say in Texas, “All hat and no cattle”. Eloquent speeches save no lives and he does not move slowly: in fact he does not move at all. He ensures that the status will remain very, very quo. He continues to offer the hot air-euphoria of hope while short-changing reality.
Our foreign and humanitarian policies are duplicitous, xenophobic, prejudiced and myopic. Speaking out of both sides of our mouth, in Bush-like protected environments of suppression and repression, will become a venomous snake that will come around to bite us on the backside. Anti-American sentiment will continue to grow and tensions will rise to a boiling point, at which time the tide will turn against and overrun our smug arrogance and feigned innocence, the ugliness will turn against us and everyone will be scratching their heads (and their asses), and be asking, “Hey what happened?” Well, what happened was that we abandoned liberty and freedom and justice for all. And we called it democracy.
Many people do not like Mr. Hedges, because of his stance on religion, but when he tells the truth and explains ugliness and indefensible cruelty for what it is, you must give him some space. I concur with this, almost without reservation.
There is no excuse for torture and even less for continued wars that decimate civilian populations with robot bombs (check the cartoon by Mr. Fish…how appropriate). One commenter cautions that the President moves “slowly and thought fully”. I think not. He hardly moves at all and is, as we say in Texas, “All hat and no cattle”. Eloquent speeches save no lives and he does not move slowly: in fact he does not move at all. He ensures that the status will remain very, very quo. He continues to offer the hot air-euphoria of hope while short-changing reality.
Our foreign and humanitarian policies are duplicitous, xenophobic, prejudiced and myopic. Speaking out of both sides of our mouth, in Bush-like protected environments of suppression and repression, will become a venomous snake that will come around to bite us on the backside. Anti-American sentiment will continue to grow and tensions will rise to a boiling point, at which time the tide will turn against and overrun our smug arrogance and feigned innocence, the ugliness will turn against us and everyone will be scratching their heads (and their asses), and be asking, “Hey what happened?” Well, what happened was that we abandoned liberty and freedom and justice for all. And we called it democracy.
Monday, June 8, 2009
A Metaphor?
Air France flight 447 is a metapohor for the U.S. economy. It has crashed in a huge sea of debt and we have sent out an armada of financial rescue vehicles. Sadly, Capt. Geithner and First Officer Summers are in charge, and all they have managed to do is find dead bodies and the wreckage of the old ship of state. And they have blamed the crash on the Greenspan/Paulson air speed sensors. You might draw parallels between the number of bodies recovered (16?), the total number still missing and the job loss rates. Dog paddling lessons are recommended
Saturday, June 6, 2009
The New American Mythology: Boy. Are We In Trouble
The citizens of the United States, in this, the first part of the 21rst century, are living in a land of make-believe. We are making our way through every day, pretending to have our lives dependent upon, and grounded in, two myth-guided (sorry), retrograde and faulty suppositions. The first one revolves around the once-sacred notion of “democracy”; the second hinges on the modern misconception of “progress”. Boy. Are we in trouble.
For most of the last century, and most especially during the last decade, we were all sent to bed with visions of terrorists and catastrophe dancing in our heads. We have been told, taught, propagandized into believing and cajoled into maintaining a trance-like mental state that stated that democracy was the answer to everything. Well, it’s not. This is 2009, and panaceas are as dead as Kelsey’s nuts (Ask Bill Maher). The predominant notion has been that any nation in the world which did not already have a democratic form of government should be made to have one, whether it wanted one or not. If a nation did not seem willing to accept democracy as way of life and government, it would have democracy imposed upon it, bribed to accept it or bullied into it through the imposition of a titular administrator (Iran) who could be paid enough to abide by the general norms of democratic life in America(think Egypt). Of course there was also the technique of employing a totalitarian military onslaught, designed to end in “democratic” submission (This oftentimes failed: I give you Viet Nam and Iraq). This particular form of retrograde thinking is our continued salute to the British Empire. I thought we were done with them? But gosh: look at how well all that worked out for them in India.)
There are many rationales for this sort of thinking. First of all, if every nation in the world was democratic, it was supposed to mean that we would not have any enemies. This would be enhanced by the fact since we had “converted” them to democracy, they would be forever thankful and love us unconditionally. This thankfulness and eternal affection would come about, we believed, for one reason: everyone knows (or is supposed to) that democracy works. This “given” is precisely the fly in the ointment, the wrench in the works, and the shoe in the machinery. This idea is its own sabotage. Contrary to popular mythology, democracy does not automatically guarantee bliss, equal wealth and happiness. All too often it works just the other way around: bliss, contentment and happiness only come well after you have worked hard enough to establish real democracy.
And incidentally, democracy and Christianity were not born as conjoined twins. In fact, they are not even kissing cousins. That is just one thread in the fabric of the new American mythology, and one which has proven disruptive, dangerous and toxic in the culture wars (see below). So don’t try to hit me with your Bible.
Why any population, governmental body or group of sane individuals would actually want democracy because it works, is beyond me. The prime example of why this set of beliefs is fallacious is the current, sad state of democracy in the United States. Nearly every day, democracy in this country is failing us. There are many causes for this continual failure, but it all boils down to just two.
The first is that democracy in America is now governed by very weak ideas or ideas that have already died (read The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller. “Taxes will go down”: not). Nearly every day, people in decision making positions at every level of every government make decisions based upon old, stale, faulty, worn-out and ineffective and grossly inappropriate ideas. They prolong sloth and waste. They perpetuate bad habits and injustice. They foster and breed misery and injustice. Democracy in the United States is broken, in large part because it relies upon out-moded ideas, problem solving without adequate forethought and ideas which no longer “fit” our needs and realities. Our thinking tries to apply the solutions of ages past to the new age of the internet, global warming, international mercantilism and financial terrorism. Our ideas are no longer appropriate to the age in which we live. We seem to keep forgetting that learning from history also means that simply repeating it is most often a mistake. (These decision makers are almost invariably the reason we have those little signs that say, “Plan ahead”, and the last letters are jammed together because the sign space is too short.)
Put somewhat differently: information travels 50 times faster than it did five years ago; we are outstripping our planet’s resources and/or polluting them at a rate which may leave the succeeding populations dying of hunger, thirst and heat in just a few decades; the world’s goods are no longer produced “locally” anywhere on the planet, which has caused massive shifts in work force locales and wealth distribution; the titans of industry are still acting like this is 1925 in America; bankers still manage money and capital like it is still 1850..and all the while, our democratic government ( which many say is “too big”) is using thinking which is “too small”. Instead of governing by thinking in bigger, new and healthy ideas, which are in turn big enough to embrace, regulate, manage, coordinate and respond to all the changes evident in the 21rst century, it thinks only in ways that accommodate all of the strategically inappropriate, and outmoded cultural behaviors just outlined. We are dying from an overdose of status quo. Instead of being Darwinian, and evolving to keep pace with contemporary cultural and economic developments, the government is remaining a carnivorous dinosaur and hatching the same old eggs, day after day. And if you continue to reproduce the same old same old, and ignore the incoming asteroids…well, you get the idea. Boy. Are we in trouble?
A side note: when the overriding government practices and prolongation of this mythology are pervasive and unavoidable, the population tends to drink deeply the toxic wine of nostalgia. They long for today to be yesterday, this month to be last month, or this year to be last year: those were the times they (we) understood and could cope with, without extra thinking, configuring, concentration or devoting time to problem solving or adaptation. But that is another essay.
However, this national pastime of drinking the old wine generally tends to lead to the election and (sadly) re-election of politicians who have learned to benefit from the hangover effect of nostalgia: Politicians who can continuously reinvigorate the vision of the happiness of what was once (thought and remembered) to be “good”, can manage to live long and prosper in this environment, as long as no one discovers the dinosaur eggs. And because everything is relative, i.e., everything is connected to everything else, when you link up that political marketing-prolongation strategy with the antiquated financial institutions, heavily laden themselves with motives of self-preservation and irrepressible greed, you get the main component of broken democracy: politicians who are bought and sold and no longer represent the very people whom they can thank for their office. As such, they become the main catalysts and perpetuators of stale and dead ideas and keep the dinosaur eggs warm. And they keep telling us that taxes will go down. Boy. Are we in trouble.
Another side note or two: If the notion that making, causing or insisting that every nation be democratic will make everyone love us were to be true at all, it would seem to follow that we would need less military might. In reality, one enormous proof of our stale and inappropriate ideas, and the influence of the financial communities, is the existence of the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world. And the United States has the largest military budget in the world, which is wildly disproportionate to the GDP. The Navy, for example (a huge component of the military) is today largely irrelevant. It consists in the main (on the main?) of floating city/state airports and skulking, stealthy black atomic powered and armed submarines which carry enough firepower to scorch the face of the earth many times over. And just recently the Secretary of Defense “defended” (how ironic) his re-allocation of military weapons funding by explaining to the American people (you and me) that now funding would be distributed more “appropriately” amongst conventional weaponry, unconventional weaponry and weapons of “future conventionality”(or some crap like that). This political hot-air and antiquated thinking is all stale and wrong-headed. It is buried in the past. It is lethal nostalgia. Nuclear armed submarines, robot drone airpower and laser guided missiles fired from another continent still do the “same old, same old”: they kill lots of people indiscriminately and without feeling or emotion or responsibility. And our “bought and paid for”, not-fairly-elected politicians perpetuate this not-any-longer-here world of non-thinking. This is not the democracy envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Their democracy, especially as viewed by Jefferson, periodically revised, refreshed and re-invented itself through the infusion of new ideas. By breaking with England, they were declaring war on the regurgitation of old ideas and ways of life. Where did that get to? Boy. Are we in trouble.
Which brings us to the second tear in the fabric of the new mythology: the fallacy of the idea of “progress”? You might be led to think (there is a very funny book by Texas author Kinky Friedman, called, You Can Lead a Politician To Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think), that what with the speed of electronic communication, the daily exponential advances and discoveries in health and science and the increasingly sophisticated developments in manufacturing, that we would be moving forward, making progress, as a civilization. Not so. For several reasons, we are, as far the economy, the culture, race and healthcare, running backwards. The United States is in retrograde. We are suffering from self-imposed entropy. Boy. We are in trouble.
In large part, precisely because politicians can zero in on the power of the elixir of nostalgia, moving (in fact very nearly rushing) backwards has been promoted and disguised as moving forward: only skillful politicians can turn wine onto water and make you pay extra for it. After we rolled out of the conflicted legal ideas and moral concepts of the Nixon years, and muddled through the doldrums of Jimmy Carter, we strode into the Reagan years, the first Bush era and later on to Bush II, wherein the operative word was “fear”. (I have not forgotten Bill Clinton. His administration capitalized on the unrealistic giddiness of not being gripped by fear. Please read on). The Reagan gang sought to make us afraid of “big govmint” (yet another example of small thinking). As such, they went about demolishing government structures, union organizations and regulations that kept affairs in order, financially. The Reagan crowd made the term “general welfare” obsolete. The first Bush was still fighting the cold war, telling us to fear oil shortages, threats to democracy, fear losing the Saudis (his bankers), middle-eastern madmen and lack of military might (all old, stale and moribund ideas). The second Bush took all this much farther, urging us to fear (post 9/11) Arab/Muslim terrorists, even more oil loss, WMD’s, loss of jobs, unknown threats to democracy and the potential failure of fundamental Christianity to save the western world (interestingly, we were told to trust his ‘gut” instead of his faith. Oops). We were also told we were too stupid to defend ourselves, and that we needed wars and a larger military industrial complex to protect us and that Dick Cheney should supervise that from an undisclosed location, while W cleared brush on the ranch and fed his pet goat. The only lasting and tangible net result of all of this is that you cannot board an airplane without taking your shoes off. Yes. Trouble. Us.
Naomi Klein, in her book, The Shock Doctrine, explains this nicely. To loosely paraphrase, the mentality throughout these years was this: as long as the population was kept in a state of “shock”, kept constantly on edge and worried, driven by a non-descript fear of anything and everything that moved, it would approve of, support, fund and be complicit in almost anything (like torture?). These would include bigger military budgets, increased laxity in and inattention to financial affairs, more deregulation, distorted human rights and a decrease in both social services and concern for the environment. Deplorable, politicized and inept Ashcroft/Gonzo judicial malfeasance did not help. The net result of all of this was that we have moved backwards. Our social and financial institutions have gone retrograde.
If your neck hurts, it is from looking backward over your shoulder, too much.
(Many will argue these following points, but… during the Clinton years, the smiling, happy mantra of the big guy in the White House were that “Happy Days are here again”. FDR and the cigar had returned and we largely ignored the failure of the movement to make any progress on the biggest “old-thinking” gorilla-in-the-room we had (and still have), which was health care. In the years that followed, health care has gone retrograde even more, but we were too busy being in shock to pay attention. Fast forward to 2008-2009: We were told that we could rescue ourselves from fear and escape from the tendrils of shock by embracing “hope and change”. The electorate chose that and now there is a not-quite-as-big big guy in the White House who smokes cigarettes instead of cigars and hope is fading as change seems to be more and more elusive every day: military strategies and spending appear unchanged, financial woes grow more woeful every day (it is too early to tell yet whether Obama is bought and paid for, but he hired Larry Summers and is moving along the same path from normal beginnings to millionaire, just like Bill and Hillary Clinton) , unemployment grows by leaps and bounds, health care becomes more expensive and less available all the time, and the much-vaulted “progress” (change) has yet to make an appearance. Perhaps what occurred is that “Happy Days Are Here Again” was merely replaced by ,”Happy Days Will Return Again”, which, of course, they never will. Tomorrow will never be yesterday and such thinking is deceptive and retrograde.
Consider this: another old, stale and obsolete idea is that you should “keep your enemies closer”. That is bullshit. You should keep your enemies (and the enemies of the people) at bay by pummeling them with honesty and strong doses of reality. Instead, Obama retained a Secretary of Defense who has prehistoric thinking, has brought the health care industry to the table (so?), appointed banker-foxes to oversee banker-foxes who are living n the chicken coops rent-free, placed Neolithic-reasoning conservatives in positions of national and international influence. Then he placed Hillary, the wife of our last unrealistic master of Make Believe and mythology (President Clinton), who is his unabashed and outspoken arch-rival, in charge of international foreign policy. This is all small thinking. It is nothing new. It is not change. It is com-promise without the promise. So far, no good. Boy. In trouble we are.
To go into retrograde mode means that you are moving backwards and deteriorating. But few seem to be noticing. Experiencing entropy is the same phenomenon only worse: energy and essence disappear without any hope of being renewed, ever. The United States is in clearly in retrograde, as can be clearly observed in several key areas: the military posture, the economy, race relations and cultural “dumbing down”: it is all an entropy of our collective consciousness.
The military budget and stance are either static or growing. The recent military budgets have increased rather than decreased (more backwards disguised as frontwards), we still have two major wars in progress and we are building more aircraft carriers and submarines. We still have Blackwater in our employ. We have a billion dollar embassy of dubious value and usefulness in Baghdad and are building another in Islamabad…for another billion dollars. Our military efforts are moving backwards in terms of real-life usefulness while claiming progress. And we have 50,000 troops stationed in Germany? The less we are supposed to need the military, the more we feed it. This is regress, not progress. We are being snookered. Boy. Are we in trouble.
The economy is upside down and running in reverse. We continue to used borrowed money and increase future debt loads by giving money to bankers (whose old thinking, combined with deregulation, failed) to ensure that they can continue doing what they have always been doing ( the definition, according to Einstein, of course, of “insanity”). This will guarantee that nothing will change; the bankers will not be required to embrace any new ideas and can remain comfortably ensconced in their old thinking. (Read anything by Paul Krugman). The banking and auto industry bail-out programs have been sold as life support systems, to be used to keep the patient alive until it can breathe on its own. Instead the money is flowing upward, padding banker’s coffers, rewarding them for thinking in antiquated fashion, instead of flowing (trickling?) downward, into the economy at large. Some of it is even going out of the country altogether (GM will build its next “profitable” car in China?). This is retrograde, entropic disintegration at its best. Boy. Are we in trouble.
Racism, bigotry, ethno-centrism and xenophobia are at their worst and getting worse than that. Black men are blamed for everything and universally labeled as drug dealers; people of (any) color are held in suspicion, arrested for almost no reason and routinely jailed for practically nothing: the United States has the highest per capita rate of incarceration of any country in the civilized world. Our fear of immigrants has never been more heightened and we have been conditioned to believe that any Muslim is a terrorist and an infidel (Contrary to current rumors, the Quran is no more a “how-to” manual for killing people than is the Bible: read them both). The membership rolls of racist, ultra-right wing hate organizations have exploded and the Reagan-era defamatory slurs about “welfare mothers driving Cadillacs” are everywhere again. I receive at least one cartoon or joke on my computer each week, equivocating the POTUS with a monkey. This is retrograde human relations. Anyone who thinks this is progress needs to seek professional help. Boy. Are we in trouble.
But beneath nearly all of this is our cultural retrograde. What many call the “culture wars”, it is an expression of the right-wing, left-wing bifurcation that expresses itself in poorly thought-through positions on guns, abortion, the immorality of war, the justification for greed and religion , all run amok. Pick one. Charles Pierce has written book called, Idiot America, subtitled, “The culture wars are over and the idiots have won”. I have not read it yet, but if what he said while being interviewed on television is any indicator, I had better read it soon. Pierce’s observations go hand in hand with the now-long standing trend in the U.S. identified as “anti-intellectualism”. As daily life becomes ever more difficult, we are admonished to, for heavens’ sake, whatever you do, DON”T THINK! To do so might mean you might learn something, your head might hurt, you might have to forego or give up a prejudice and might have to face the reality that tomorrow can and never will be yesterday. Idiots employ that faulty reasoning and huge cross-sections of the population follow that course (It cannot be called a train of thought, because the boiler in the engine is cold). The O’Reillys, the Limbaughs, Inhofes, Steeles, McConnels and Boehners live for, in and of this misconstrued vision of reality and misunderstanding of the basic constructs of our cultural milieu. And they all believe that taxes will go down, as well. And before you get all excited, there are many questions about Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (and other liberals), as well. Curiously, but hardly surprising, the Democrats have found the very same night deposit box at the bank that the Republicans use.
In the past several months, after the TARP intervention, the banking industry has reportedly spent more millions on lobbyists and legislative contributions than has been spent for welfare and food stamps in most major U.S. cities. Google let me down here: I can’t find the source.
When you think in retrograde, you get retrograde, backwards, non-progressive and entropic results. Such non-thinking turns in on itself and becomes hugely counter-productive. Retrograde thinking and behavior allows you to continue to believe that being a white, Anglo-Saxon male who suppresses female, gender and minority rights is “OK”. It’s not. In the whole of the world, in the “big picture”, being that white Anglo just described increasingly means you are increasingly becoming a minority. And Jesus did not have blonde hair and blue eyes, did not handle snakes, was probably a progressive Jew who may have been black and “Aryan” is the derivative form of the word “Iranian”, which means your great, great, great grandfather may have been a camel-riding “towelhead”. Get over it. Get over all of it. But yes, I know: if the idiots have won, this has all been a big waste of time.
Our democracy is a broken mythology (largely because of money) and its failure to function has joined forces with anti-intellectualism and idiots to impede and deny what is now mythological progress. Boy. Are we in trouble?
This just in (compliments of Clint): http://www.openleft.com/diary/13658/the-human-development-indexa-better-measure-of-where-we-stand. Yes. Are we in trouble.
For most of the last century, and most especially during the last decade, we were all sent to bed with visions of terrorists and catastrophe dancing in our heads. We have been told, taught, propagandized into believing and cajoled into maintaining a trance-like mental state that stated that democracy was the answer to everything. Well, it’s not. This is 2009, and panaceas are as dead as Kelsey’s nuts (Ask Bill Maher). The predominant notion has been that any nation in the world which did not already have a democratic form of government should be made to have one, whether it wanted one or not. If a nation did not seem willing to accept democracy as way of life and government, it would have democracy imposed upon it, bribed to accept it or bullied into it through the imposition of a titular administrator (Iran) who could be paid enough to abide by the general norms of democratic life in America(think Egypt). Of course there was also the technique of employing a totalitarian military onslaught, designed to end in “democratic” submission (This oftentimes failed: I give you Viet Nam and Iraq). This particular form of retrograde thinking is our continued salute to the British Empire. I thought we were done with them? But gosh: look at how well all that worked out for them in India.)
There are many rationales for this sort of thinking. First of all, if every nation in the world was democratic, it was supposed to mean that we would not have any enemies. This would be enhanced by the fact since we had “converted” them to democracy, they would be forever thankful and love us unconditionally. This thankfulness and eternal affection would come about, we believed, for one reason: everyone knows (or is supposed to) that democracy works. This “given” is precisely the fly in the ointment, the wrench in the works, and the shoe in the machinery. This idea is its own sabotage. Contrary to popular mythology, democracy does not automatically guarantee bliss, equal wealth and happiness. All too often it works just the other way around: bliss, contentment and happiness only come well after you have worked hard enough to establish real democracy.
And incidentally, democracy and Christianity were not born as conjoined twins. In fact, they are not even kissing cousins. That is just one thread in the fabric of the new American mythology, and one which has proven disruptive, dangerous and toxic in the culture wars (see below). So don’t try to hit me with your Bible.
Why any population, governmental body or group of sane individuals would actually want democracy because it works, is beyond me. The prime example of why this set of beliefs is fallacious is the current, sad state of democracy in the United States. Nearly every day, democracy in this country is failing us. There are many causes for this continual failure, but it all boils down to just two.
The first is that democracy in America is now governed by very weak ideas or ideas that have already died (read The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller. “Taxes will go down”: not). Nearly every day, people in decision making positions at every level of every government make decisions based upon old, stale, faulty, worn-out and ineffective and grossly inappropriate ideas. They prolong sloth and waste. They perpetuate bad habits and injustice. They foster and breed misery and injustice. Democracy in the United States is broken, in large part because it relies upon out-moded ideas, problem solving without adequate forethought and ideas which no longer “fit” our needs and realities. Our thinking tries to apply the solutions of ages past to the new age of the internet, global warming, international mercantilism and financial terrorism. Our ideas are no longer appropriate to the age in which we live. We seem to keep forgetting that learning from history also means that simply repeating it is most often a mistake. (These decision makers are almost invariably the reason we have those little signs that say, “Plan ahead”, and the last letters are jammed together because the sign space is too short.)
Put somewhat differently: information travels 50 times faster than it did five years ago; we are outstripping our planet’s resources and/or polluting them at a rate which may leave the succeeding populations dying of hunger, thirst and heat in just a few decades; the world’s goods are no longer produced “locally” anywhere on the planet, which has caused massive shifts in work force locales and wealth distribution; the titans of industry are still acting like this is 1925 in America; bankers still manage money and capital like it is still 1850..and all the while, our democratic government ( which many say is “too big”) is using thinking which is “too small”. Instead of governing by thinking in bigger, new and healthy ideas, which are in turn big enough to embrace, regulate, manage, coordinate and respond to all the changes evident in the 21rst century, it thinks only in ways that accommodate all of the strategically inappropriate, and outmoded cultural behaviors just outlined. We are dying from an overdose of status quo. Instead of being Darwinian, and evolving to keep pace with contemporary cultural and economic developments, the government is remaining a carnivorous dinosaur and hatching the same old eggs, day after day. And if you continue to reproduce the same old same old, and ignore the incoming asteroids…well, you get the idea. Boy. Are we in trouble?
A side note: when the overriding government practices and prolongation of this mythology are pervasive and unavoidable, the population tends to drink deeply the toxic wine of nostalgia. They long for today to be yesterday, this month to be last month, or this year to be last year: those were the times they (we) understood and could cope with, without extra thinking, configuring, concentration or devoting time to problem solving or adaptation. But that is another essay.
However, this national pastime of drinking the old wine generally tends to lead to the election and (sadly) re-election of politicians who have learned to benefit from the hangover effect of nostalgia: Politicians who can continuously reinvigorate the vision of the happiness of what was once (thought and remembered) to be “good”, can manage to live long and prosper in this environment, as long as no one discovers the dinosaur eggs. And because everything is relative, i.e., everything is connected to everything else, when you link up that political marketing-prolongation strategy with the antiquated financial institutions, heavily laden themselves with motives of self-preservation and irrepressible greed, you get the main component of broken democracy: politicians who are bought and sold and no longer represent the very people whom they can thank for their office. As such, they become the main catalysts and perpetuators of stale and dead ideas and keep the dinosaur eggs warm. And they keep telling us that taxes will go down. Boy. Are we in trouble.
Another side note or two: If the notion that making, causing or insisting that every nation be democratic will make everyone love us were to be true at all, it would seem to follow that we would need less military might. In reality, one enormous proof of our stale and inappropriate ideas, and the influence of the financial communities, is the existence of the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world. And the United States has the largest military budget in the world, which is wildly disproportionate to the GDP. The Navy, for example (a huge component of the military) is today largely irrelevant. It consists in the main (on the main?) of floating city/state airports and skulking, stealthy black atomic powered and armed submarines which carry enough firepower to scorch the face of the earth many times over. And just recently the Secretary of Defense “defended” (how ironic) his re-allocation of military weapons funding by explaining to the American people (you and me) that now funding would be distributed more “appropriately” amongst conventional weaponry, unconventional weaponry and weapons of “future conventionality”(or some crap like that). This political hot-air and antiquated thinking is all stale and wrong-headed. It is buried in the past. It is lethal nostalgia. Nuclear armed submarines, robot drone airpower and laser guided missiles fired from another continent still do the “same old, same old”: they kill lots of people indiscriminately and without feeling or emotion or responsibility. And our “bought and paid for”, not-fairly-elected politicians perpetuate this not-any-longer-here world of non-thinking. This is not the democracy envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Their democracy, especially as viewed by Jefferson, periodically revised, refreshed and re-invented itself through the infusion of new ideas. By breaking with England, they were declaring war on the regurgitation of old ideas and ways of life. Where did that get to? Boy. Are we in trouble.
Which brings us to the second tear in the fabric of the new mythology: the fallacy of the idea of “progress”? You might be led to think (there is a very funny book by Texas author Kinky Friedman, called, You Can Lead a Politician To Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think), that what with the speed of electronic communication, the daily exponential advances and discoveries in health and science and the increasingly sophisticated developments in manufacturing, that we would be moving forward, making progress, as a civilization. Not so. For several reasons, we are, as far the economy, the culture, race and healthcare, running backwards. The United States is in retrograde. We are suffering from self-imposed entropy. Boy. We are in trouble.
In large part, precisely because politicians can zero in on the power of the elixir of nostalgia, moving (in fact very nearly rushing) backwards has been promoted and disguised as moving forward: only skillful politicians can turn wine onto water and make you pay extra for it. After we rolled out of the conflicted legal ideas and moral concepts of the Nixon years, and muddled through the doldrums of Jimmy Carter, we strode into the Reagan years, the first Bush era and later on to Bush II, wherein the operative word was “fear”. (I have not forgotten Bill Clinton. His administration capitalized on the unrealistic giddiness of not being gripped by fear. Please read on). The Reagan gang sought to make us afraid of “big govmint” (yet another example of small thinking). As such, they went about demolishing government structures, union organizations and regulations that kept affairs in order, financially. The Reagan crowd made the term “general welfare” obsolete. The first Bush was still fighting the cold war, telling us to fear oil shortages, threats to democracy, fear losing the Saudis (his bankers), middle-eastern madmen and lack of military might (all old, stale and moribund ideas). The second Bush took all this much farther, urging us to fear (post 9/11) Arab/Muslim terrorists, even more oil loss, WMD’s, loss of jobs, unknown threats to democracy and the potential failure of fundamental Christianity to save the western world (interestingly, we were told to trust his ‘gut” instead of his faith. Oops). We were also told we were too stupid to defend ourselves, and that we needed wars and a larger military industrial complex to protect us and that Dick Cheney should supervise that from an undisclosed location, while W cleared brush on the ranch and fed his pet goat. The only lasting and tangible net result of all of this is that you cannot board an airplane without taking your shoes off. Yes. Trouble. Us.
Naomi Klein, in her book, The Shock Doctrine, explains this nicely. To loosely paraphrase, the mentality throughout these years was this: as long as the population was kept in a state of “shock”, kept constantly on edge and worried, driven by a non-descript fear of anything and everything that moved, it would approve of, support, fund and be complicit in almost anything (like torture?). These would include bigger military budgets, increased laxity in and inattention to financial affairs, more deregulation, distorted human rights and a decrease in both social services and concern for the environment. Deplorable, politicized and inept Ashcroft/Gonzo judicial malfeasance did not help. The net result of all of this was that we have moved backwards. Our social and financial institutions have gone retrograde.
If your neck hurts, it is from looking backward over your shoulder, too much.
(Many will argue these following points, but… during the Clinton years, the smiling, happy mantra of the big guy in the White House were that “Happy Days are here again”. FDR and the cigar had returned and we largely ignored the failure of the movement to make any progress on the biggest “old-thinking” gorilla-in-the-room we had (and still have), which was health care. In the years that followed, health care has gone retrograde even more, but we were too busy being in shock to pay attention. Fast forward to 2008-2009: We were told that we could rescue ourselves from fear and escape from the tendrils of shock by embracing “hope and change”. The electorate chose that and now there is a not-quite-as-big big guy in the White House who smokes cigarettes instead of cigars and hope is fading as change seems to be more and more elusive every day: military strategies and spending appear unchanged, financial woes grow more woeful every day (it is too early to tell yet whether Obama is bought and paid for, but he hired Larry Summers and is moving along the same path from normal beginnings to millionaire, just like Bill and Hillary Clinton) , unemployment grows by leaps and bounds, health care becomes more expensive and less available all the time, and the much-vaulted “progress” (change) has yet to make an appearance. Perhaps what occurred is that “Happy Days Are Here Again” was merely replaced by ,”Happy Days Will Return Again”, which, of course, they never will. Tomorrow will never be yesterday and such thinking is deceptive and retrograde.
Consider this: another old, stale and obsolete idea is that you should “keep your enemies closer”. That is bullshit. You should keep your enemies (and the enemies of the people) at bay by pummeling them with honesty and strong doses of reality. Instead, Obama retained a Secretary of Defense who has prehistoric thinking, has brought the health care industry to the table (so?), appointed banker-foxes to oversee banker-foxes who are living n the chicken coops rent-free, placed Neolithic-reasoning conservatives in positions of national and international influence. Then he placed Hillary, the wife of our last unrealistic master of Make Believe and mythology (President Clinton), who is his unabashed and outspoken arch-rival, in charge of international foreign policy. This is all small thinking. It is nothing new. It is not change. It is com-promise without the promise. So far, no good. Boy. In trouble we are.
To go into retrograde mode means that you are moving backwards and deteriorating. But few seem to be noticing. Experiencing entropy is the same phenomenon only worse: energy and essence disappear without any hope of being renewed, ever. The United States is in clearly in retrograde, as can be clearly observed in several key areas: the military posture, the economy, race relations and cultural “dumbing down”: it is all an entropy of our collective consciousness.
The military budget and stance are either static or growing. The recent military budgets have increased rather than decreased (more backwards disguised as frontwards), we still have two major wars in progress and we are building more aircraft carriers and submarines. We still have Blackwater in our employ. We have a billion dollar embassy of dubious value and usefulness in Baghdad and are building another in Islamabad…for another billion dollars. Our military efforts are moving backwards in terms of real-life usefulness while claiming progress. And we have 50,000 troops stationed in Germany? The less we are supposed to need the military, the more we feed it. This is regress, not progress. We are being snookered. Boy. Are we in trouble.
The economy is upside down and running in reverse. We continue to used borrowed money and increase future debt loads by giving money to bankers (whose old thinking, combined with deregulation, failed) to ensure that they can continue doing what they have always been doing ( the definition, according to Einstein, of course, of “insanity”). This will guarantee that nothing will change; the bankers will not be required to embrace any new ideas and can remain comfortably ensconced in their old thinking. (Read anything by Paul Krugman). The banking and auto industry bail-out programs have been sold as life support systems, to be used to keep the patient alive until it can breathe on its own. Instead the money is flowing upward, padding banker’s coffers, rewarding them for thinking in antiquated fashion, instead of flowing (trickling?) downward, into the economy at large. Some of it is even going out of the country altogether (GM will build its next “profitable” car in China?). This is retrograde, entropic disintegration at its best. Boy. Are we in trouble.
Racism, bigotry, ethno-centrism and xenophobia are at their worst and getting worse than that. Black men are blamed for everything and universally labeled as drug dealers; people of (any) color are held in suspicion, arrested for almost no reason and routinely jailed for practically nothing: the United States has the highest per capita rate of incarceration of any country in the civilized world. Our fear of immigrants has never been more heightened and we have been conditioned to believe that any Muslim is a terrorist and an infidel (Contrary to current rumors, the Quran is no more a “how-to” manual for killing people than is the Bible: read them both). The membership rolls of racist, ultra-right wing hate organizations have exploded and the Reagan-era defamatory slurs about “welfare mothers driving Cadillacs” are everywhere again. I receive at least one cartoon or joke on my computer each week, equivocating the POTUS with a monkey. This is retrograde human relations. Anyone who thinks this is progress needs to seek professional help. Boy. Are we in trouble.
But beneath nearly all of this is our cultural retrograde. What many call the “culture wars”, it is an expression of the right-wing, left-wing bifurcation that expresses itself in poorly thought-through positions on guns, abortion, the immorality of war, the justification for greed and religion , all run amok. Pick one. Charles Pierce has written book called, Idiot America, subtitled, “The culture wars are over and the idiots have won”. I have not read it yet, but if what he said while being interviewed on television is any indicator, I had better read it soon. Pierce’s observations go hand in hand with the now-long standing trend in the U.S. identified as “anti-intellectualism”. As daily life becomes ever more difficult, we are admonished to, for heavens’ sake, whatever you do, DON”T THINK! To do so might mean you might learn something, your head might hurt, you might have to forego or give up a prejudice and might have to face the reality that tomorrow can and never will be yesterday. Idiots employ that faulty reasoning and huge cross-sections of the population follow that course (It cannot be called a train of thought, because the boiler in the engine is cold). The O’Reillys, the Limbaughs, Inhofes, Steeles, McConnels and Boehners live for, in and of this misconstrued vision of reality and misunderstanding of the basic constructs of our cultural milieu. And they all believe that taxes will go down, as well. And before you get all excited, there are many questions about Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (and other liberals), as well. Curiously, but hardly surprising, the Democrats have found the very same night deposit box at the bank that the Republicans use.
In the past several months, after the TARP intervention, the banking industry has reportedly spent more millions on lobbyists and legislative contributions than has been spent for welfare and food stamps in most major U.S. cities. Google let me down here: I can’t find the source.
When you think in retrograde, you get retrograde, backwards, non-progressive and entropic results. Such non-thinking turns in on itself and becomes hugely counter-productive. Retrograde thinking and behavior allows you to continue to believe that being a white, Anglo-Saxon male who suppresses female, gender and minority rights is “OK”. It’s not. In the whole of the world, in the “big picture”, being that white Anglo just described increasingly means you are increasingly becoming a minority. And Jesus did not have blonde hair and blue eyes, did not handle snakes, was probably a progressive Jew who may have been black and “Aryan” is the derivative form of the word “Iranian”, which means your great, great, great grandfather may have been a camel-riding “towelhead”. Get over it. Get over all of it. But yes, I know: if the idiots have won, this has all been a big waste of time.
Our democracy is a broken mythology (largely because of money) and its failure to function has joined forces with anti-intellectualism and idiots to impede and deny what is now mythological progress. Boy. Are we in trouble?
This just in (compliments of Clint): http://www.openleft.com/diary/13658/the-human-development-indexa-better-measure-of-where-we-stand. Yes. Are we in trouble.
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