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Goodnight, Irene … Or Should I Say, ‘Please Leave’?

Posted in Math & Science, News, Politics, Self Absorbed Ramblings, Society, tagged , , , , on August 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

My wife and I have been provisioning all day for the monstrous Hurricane Irene. How temperamental is she? She keeps changing her category! This storm is such a raging bitch that not only have 370,000 New Yorkers been ordered evacuated, but the New York Times has momentarily given away free storm stories on its Web site. This evil hurricane is already messing with our Web business models!

This has been a summer of firsts for me. Not only have I had my first baby, but three days ago I experienced my first earthquake, and this weekend, I’ll face down my first hurricane, and all at an age where you stop having firsts. It probably also bears mentioning that you shouldn’t be dealing with any of these things in New York City, perhaps even the baby part.

My wife and I are thankfully not in one of the flood zones, but we have big windows on a high floor and are wondering if we will have to be spending the weekend bodily shielding our baby Xander against flying tempered glass.  New York supposedly upgraded its building codes in 2008 to stiffen them against hurricane winds, but in a city where pragmatism must be mixed into politics like milk into chocolate, many existing buildings didn’t have to meet these codes. At the height my wife and I live, there’s a danger of glass, gravel, and other items flying off adjacent roofs (even those of shorter buildings) and creating a debris field. We hear different pieces of advice about how risky it is to stay where we are, but at this point, we have few choices. I’ll let you know if things start flying through our living room.

I’ve spent most of the day stocking up. It’s strange how people predicting the end of the world recently (Glenn Beck comes to mind) have been admonishing you to invest in gold. But after spending the day looking for larder items, I’d say the smarter money is on peanut butter. That and bread seem to be the two items my neighbors can’t live without, and every store I’ve been to today has been robbed of its creamy spreads and whole wheat breads. Where other nonperishable items like beans and soup and Chips Ahoy remained, peanut butter seems to be the rock star staple food of the nascent storm survivalist. How you gonna eat gold, after all, when the flood comes?

When you are provisioning, I’ve found it helps to be counter-intuitive. Most stores I went to had run out of flashlights and D batteries by 2 p.m. today. But if you were willing to walk into one of the tiny newsstands, you found lots of D batteries. And my wife said there were tons of flashlights at Gracious Home. I found it better to look for each prized survival item at the place where it was most novel. Water at the health and beauty store. Batteries at the bodega. Cereal at Bed, Bath & Beyond. If anything, however, today’s shopping lesson was a bog standard lesson in supply and demand. Items that are unremarkable one day become as valuable as silver the next.

Another lesson for you disaster watchers is to listen to the voices in the street for the stirrings of public skepticism. There are a few lone voices out there who insist Mike Bloomberg, our billionaire mayor, is fear mongering and exaggerating the threat of the storm. The city has launched New York’s first mandatory evacuation ever from the flood zones in all five boroughs and mass transit will shut down at noon on Saturday. In a mordant moment at a press conference Thursday, Bloomberg said that he’s asking residents of those areas to leave so as they do not, you know, die. But skepticism of his motives has already risen among those who feel he’s making up for a botched response to last winter’s Snowmageddon.There’s a lot of dismissive sneers by those who say we’re having our chains pulled. New York hasn’t seen a major hurricane in decades.

It makes you think briefly about politics. To doubt something that’s factual (indeed, to ignore myriad satellite pictures and weatherman showing you exactly how Hurricane Irene is going to hand your ass to you) is something damn near instinctual among us. Perhaps political parties grow from these abundant small disagreements more organically than we think. I wrote earlier this year after the Japan earthquake about the need to politicize acts of God, comparing the event to Hurricane Katrina. Is there something good about doubting people who would take you out of harm’s way? Does it help us to constantly question and be skeptical of things insight tells us are true, in hopes of constantly making insight better? Is it better to have a foil political party or group always saying “Nay,” no matter what the question? Is this what actually makes democracy work?

Perhaps we don’t choose the dialectic. Perhaps it chooses us.

I’ll leave with that thought and hope Hurricane Irene does not choose me or my family this weekend. If you don’t hear much from me in the next couple of days (and hate seeing egregious spelling errors sitting uncorrected in the post) it’s because my power is likely down or because my son won’t let me type for two seconds. In fact, I’m amazed I wrote this much.

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Gingrich A Go Go

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

You’ve got to give Newt Gingrich credit. He manages to carry the torch of leading intellectual light of the Republican party, even as he says nonsensical things to boobs. It’s admirable because despite the fallibility of the man on paper, his celebrity is unshakable reality, the same way Kim Kardashian’s is. Just as she is now “a singer,” a fact true enough to resist critique since she indeed sings, Gingrich is now the Republican party’s thinker, because he indeed appears to be breathing and thus his thinking must be taken for granted.

His latest caveat to the faithful is that America within his grandchildren’s time will become socialist and secular but also Islamist. Work that out. He said it to a bunch of evangelicals. Not as a theologian, he reminded them, but as a historian, one who had nothing historical to point out except that everything the Christians believed was true. We might ask, if indeed the evangelicals are right, what need is there for history? What must a historian say to evangelicals? Why even wave those credentials? All we can find in history are strange peculiarities like the fact that our “Christian founding fathers” had several closet atheists among them, including chief framer Thomas Jefferson, who is mainly a Christian by default, since he held no beliefs recognizable to modern Christian ears. Gingrich is shocked that the courts of our country have grown “steadily more secular.” Yes, we should finds it indeed blood-chilling that secular courts should be the progeny of a manifestly secular document, the U.S. Constitution.

It’s chilling that a historian might not challenge a few people who might need a history lesson. Instead, he has done what historians ought not be in the business of doing: predicting the future. FYI: It’s Muslims everywhere. In our halls, streams and sink traps.

I once met a German filmmaker who was visiting our country during the thick of the Iraq War. He was shocked and disgusted by what he found. The generations of Germans who followed the Nazis had been, in the long process of de-Nazification, warned repeatedly about the misuses of propaganda, taught how to resist it when it was used by malefactors and mountebanks. And what had my German friend found when he got here: It appeared to him that the United States had not yet purged its own attraction to brazenly chauvinist, nationalist appeals by narrow minded politicians seeking short-term gain. Our country had seemingly vanquished his, but in the end we actually lost on the ideals. Sorry krauts, guess we owe you for that one.

Gingrich might still have a chance at becoming the presidential candidate in 2012, one whose past infidelities and marriage butchering (the kind of antics that make still-married Bill Clinton look positively saintly) will be a turn off to the one group he’s trying most desperately to court: the Bible thumpers.

The man is a tragic political figure in many ways. Even skeptics admit he’s always loved big ideas–he was a friend of the Internet early and seemed less a reactionary than a cold-blooded futurist, one whose clarity in a post-New Deal world might be necessary or even helpful (maybe even disinfected, we hoped, of racism). But in his other lung, he has always loved him the filthy smelly swill of partisan politics and been willing to roll in it like a pig in shit, loved it enough to compromise all his ideals for small political gains, been willing to lead a plurality of shitheads to minority political death. You might accuse Clinton of the same impulsive emotionalism, except that Clinton continued to pursue his big ideas and still manage to win elections (and remain married to his wife–as of 2011, anyway).

Gingrich, unlike Clinton, has always showed the unerring stupidity to win battles and lose wars. Now he would solve the problem of our political divisiveness by imposing a rigid Christianity throughout the land, something that independents, Obama skeptics that they are, will not tolerate.

The desperation and hind-titty playing is obvious almost daily as Gingrich tries to position himself as anointed 2012 white hope following Sarah Palin’s post-Tucson meltdown. Within a two-week period, Gingrich chastised Barack Obama both for going to Libya and for not going to Libya fast enough. He blasted an anti-authoritarian revolution in Egypt as being somehow corrupted by its occurrence in an Islamic country. He told Obama to act more like Reagan and less like Jimmy Carter. For those of you who trust “historian” Gingrich on this,  a bit of digging into a fifth grade history book will remind you that Jimmy Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel and Ronald Reagan led an air strike on Libya that failed to remove its president. There is a good reason to criticize Barack Obama’s approach to a troubled Libya. If Gingrich had gone for the analytical tack rather than the soundbytes, he might have ended up looking less like an idiot every time events changed within the day. Instead, he looks like he’s willing to say anything. He looks small.

I liken him to the conservative mirror image of Charles Foster Kane. The great man who might be lurking in there is too much a slave to his compulsions, even it seems to his libido. He cannot seem to get beyond the concept of “us” and “them,” and yet doesn’t seem to realize that his “us” is getting smaller and his “them” is increasingly including the rest of us.

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Liberal Wars

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on March 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

As we watch the crisis unfold in Libya, here’s a reminder to you liberals about what happens in liberal wars. Because liberals spend so much time building consensus, they never clearly define objectives the way a strongman would. Inadvertently, they cause more bloodshed. By contrast, more successful wars (by conservatives, we assume) tend to limit violence by creating strict guidelines, rules of engagement and precise military goals.

So what Ross Douthat is saying, I guess, is that conservative wars like those waged in Iraq go off without a hitch. Meanwhile, the U.S. intervention by liberals in places like Yugoslavia are nightmares. After all, the Yugoslavian War continues to drag on to this day while Iraq finished nicely. Rwanda is another good example. Thanks to our restraint there, Rwanda took care of itself. Just as certainly as Libya will.

I often read Douthat’s column only because it’s a fascinating character study of Ross Douthat himself. The guy is often reasonable, but he suffers from a personality crisis. People ought to define themselves politically by dealing with facts on their face. When they start to interpret, that’s when they figure out whether they are on the liberal or conservative side, generally. But Douthat is one of those sad creatures who does it backwards–like too many conservatives I know. Their identity as conservatives becomes more important to them over time than any particular beliefs. They seem to value mostly their membership in a team. If they are reasonable and consider their philosophies against the realities of the world (and that’s a big if), then like Douthat they must constantly draw and redraw the stencil lines of their political identity and then see  how the world fits into it.

Doesn’t work, kid.

Should I go the ultimate course, help Ross out and remind him what the “liberal” and “conservative” labels are–meaningless fictions? Changing styles that ought not to be defined so much as alluded to in generalities, as green phosphenes that disappear on the back of your eyes? Is being liberal or conservative really going to help you put the Libyan upheaval into a perspective? No. I think Ross would be a better writer if he realized this. Yes, I know, his being a young, idealistic conservative is the only thing that got him his job at the New York Times. But there are hordes of better (more experienced?) conservative columnists around. And his presence there sometimes seems to serve the same purpose that Alan Colmes’ did on Fox News–to look weak-chinned and not-so-bright next to the real stars.  Is it because he’s dumb or a bad writer? No. But he is a chalk artist of sorts–a man trying to constantly clarify for us skeptics what conservatism is in a changing world and who ends up trying to draw a figure in a rain storm. Yes, we know you all think Ronald Reagan saved the world. Doesn’t help us or you at this point.

At best, Douthat ends up looking like the kid in the choir trying to show how well he reads the book of hymns to the faithful. At worst, he ends up writing nonsensical articles like this one that needlessly insult the foreign policy victories of the Clinton era and especially insult those who took on wars for humanitarian issues alone, as if without a revenge factor, a war is a waste of time. Insulting humanitarian issues for one war (like Kosovo or Libya) and then hiding behind them for a war of aggression (like the one in Iraq) makes you simply an asshole.

The fact is, no war is good, even those that are sadly necessary. All of them begin to end political chaos and yet all of them ironically increase political complexity once they are started (even morally defensible ones like World War II). You often get to a point you never intended to be, and end up fighting for things you never started fighting for. You can’t control a war’s outcome, not if you’re a high-minded humanitarian trying to stop a massacre or if you’re a bullying empire trying to get more land. All you can do is try to control the variables. A good political leader might have tried, for example, to control American revenge lust in 2003 rather than exploiting it.

So there’s no need to pollute our arguments with ridiculous paradigms like conservative and liberal. When I explain to a person that the estate tax repeal was an abomination that was engineered by a few and served even fewer, I should not have to deal with the counterpoint, “You’re a liberal.” Ross Douthat is not as dumb as that, and yet he and the dummy who says it are thinkers of the same kidney. If you had just stuck with the facts, kid, “Maybe only a ground war could take Qaddafi out,” then I would have taken your article seriously and said you had a point. Instead, you want to make every article about Ronald Reagan and hometown values and a lot of other insipid garbage. It gets obnoxious and irritating to watch you grow up in public.

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A Less Perfect Union

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on February 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Here’s an interesting story: Union members at private companies in Wisconsin share sentiments with the governor there that employees with state unions get too many benefits and something has to be done. It’s not fair, say private company employees, that they are suffering when public union members aren’t.

In other words, everybody ought to be equally harmed in a free market. Thank you for volunteering us to all go down together, guys!

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Co., Egypt, Wisconsin and Hollywood

Posted in Global Affairs, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , on February 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

[Update, September 30, 2011: I recently updated this piece with some rigorous copy editing. I apologize to my readers. I have rarely been so proud of a piece I’ve written, only to see that pride eroded by copy errors that sometimes hid or sank my points.]

Have you ever thought of how great it would be if we could just get rid of unions altogether? Why, without collective bargaining rights, the real work of capitalism could be done–a mechanism for unlocking wealth that would make that wealth work far more efficiently, especially by paying workers what they’re really worth: at best, $3.50 an hour.  Such unlocked greatness would make America strong and proud in the way it was back when we had kids working 12 hour days and our food was full of extra human thumbs, earlobes and gizzards.

I’m sorry, does this sound stupid to you? Then I’m not sure why it’s even a debate in the state of Wisconsin, where a new Republican governor completely in the back pocket of a couple of anti-union billionaire industrialists, is working to curtail collective bargaining rights. As long as we’re throwing union people out the window, we ought to at least remember a time when the defenestration was much more literal: The 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is coming up in March. In 1911, 146 employees of the Greenwich Village company were killed in a fire when their bosses had locked them inside to keep them from leaving early. Many had to jump to their deaths from the eighth, ninth and tenth stories. The fire galvanized the union movement and helped usher in modern building codes, labor practices and even the New Deal, depending on whom you ask.

This is when a lot of red staters start to nod that this series of events was just one more in a long line of progressive mistakes going all the way back to our nation’s founding. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to mark the anniversary than by going back with a red marker and erasing all of the “progressive” nonsense that has come about since then.

A lot of people’s antipathy toward unions comes from a complete misunderstanding of their function. If you’re a conservative, you likely buy the argument that stronger unions have given Americans a sense of entitlement, pushed us toward decreased productivity, made our labor too expensive, and thus made American industry less nimble and less able to respond to crises. That’s an awful lot of big words, red staters! And yet, it’s a compelling and simple argument if you only look at one side of the ledger–and trust me conservatives are awfully good at both simple narratives and reading only one side of the ledger. What you won’t find when you blame unions for hobbling business is the increasing sham that corporate governance has become–how executive pay is far out of control compared with those of the lowest-paying salaries, and that executives often game the system. How? By withholding dividends–an increasingly popular corporate gambit since Reagan’s times; by creating excessive stock options, which dilute shares and funnel money away from shareholders; and by simply overpaying CEOs. (Does anybody remember Dick Grasso?) Meanwhile, it’s only the cruel market that decides what you’re worth if you’re a laborer. Unless you’ve got collective bargaining.

Here’s an argument for you conservatives, since you hate Hollywood: Imagine an Eddie Murphy movie that costs $50 million to make. As part of his deal, Eddie gets $40 million gross. The movie makes $90 million. How much did this movie make? Zero. After everyone grosses out (both financially and literally) on two hours of fart jokes, the studio can actually say they have a money loser. The people with net points in the movie get nothing. It was in this way that another film, the phenomenally popular Forrest Gump, was actually a money loser because Tom Hanks and the director got so much gross.

So now imagine, America, that you are getting net points and the richest 1% are getting the gross points. Meanwhile, the price of your labor, with your union bulwark weakening nearby, has been pushed down by the flood of flat earth labor into the market–the freed hordes of Chinese, Indian, Eastern European and South American labor.

And so now we come back to the standard conservative argument about Laffer curves and the idea fixe of Reaganism–which is that Reagan cut taxes and the economy took off for 30 years and that’s all there was to it. Listening to this bullshit after a while is a bit like hearing a schizophrenic compulsively repeat single lines of “Old Mother Leary.” Fire is a wonderful thing, conservatives, but it doesn’t mean you throw it on your roof. Likewise, tax breaks are nice quick incentives for a monetary system but keeping taxes low forever does not make your society or even your economy better. But most people who are insecure about their economics knowledge hold up the Laffer curve as if it’s the college degree they never had, and as if Glenn Beck were the Civics 101 course they slept through.

Speaking of Beck, onto the “Egypt” part of my story–which is exhibit 587 in an exhaustive case, “Glenn Beck Vs. Linear Thinking.”

If you can stomach this video, you’ll see Beck squaring off not only against Bill O’Reilly (Beck is perhaps the only person in the world who can make O’Reilly look like a genius) but against a purely democratic uprising in Egypt. The first thing I thought when the dominoes started to fall in the Arab world was that conservatives might claim a victory of sorts–and make a specious argument that the Iraq War fomented these pro-Democracy movements. So you can imagine my utter horror when a bunch of self-described individual liberties champions like Beck began knocking the Egyptian revolution. Beck’s argument is that it’s not a democracy movement since it could end up in the hands of Islamic extremists. What’s most galling about this video is two American conservatives arguing whether democracy is something America ought to confer on the Egyptians rather than something the Egyptians’ have a natural right to. In other words, Glenn, Egyptian liberty is not yours to give, and the fact that you would say so proves you’re no libertarian but another paleo-con American imperialist. It would be hard to explain to Beck or his spongie followers how even a revolution that was thoroughly Muslim in character is none of his fucking business, but instead the natural inclination of a people who ought to make their own decisions about when to be liberated (unlike the Iraqis whose liberation was forced on them, and so can only be called “liberated” by a morally bankrupt few). In a bizarre turn perhaps lost on everybody but the legions of hard-of-hearing people who listen to Beck, Glenn actually says (around minute 2:23) that American progressives (I would suppose that’s the people responsible for securing fire exits for the Triangle Shirtwaist Co.) are somehow responsible for both Hosni Mubarak and the Shah of Iran. Yes, friends, liberal imperialism has built up Hosni Mubarak. Our support of him has nothing to do with conservatives and capitulation to the needs of Israel for a regional friend.

Even worse is the utterly loathsome former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who here makes the disgusting suggestion that Hosni Mubarak was an ally (read: Israeli ally) and therefore was owed our allegiance no matter what. His argument: we didn’t support an Iranian revolution with force, so we shouldn’t support an Egyptian one even with words–even if the two movements are based in the same democratic ideals. Again, of those of you conservatives unable to read between the lines: We cannot support even a Democratic movement that was anti-Israel. (I shudder to think that there’s a person left on this planet to listens to this homophobic, science-bashing, war fan, hate monger–a man who said that poor New Orleans Hurricane Katrina victims should simply have gotten out of town and who seems to be the only person on the planet to have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).

This was a lot of stray comments, but I impress upon you, long-suffering Beauty is Imperfection reader, that they are motivated by the same idea–the democratic impulse rises naturally in nature, whether it be against union busters in Wisconsin or strongmen in Libya. But just as easily as it is created, it is confused, used, abused, assimilated and exploited by medicine salesmen, tiny generals, wee-brained Fox News employees and even by would-be rapists (my heart goes out to CBS news reporter Lara Logan, a woman so brave she makes me ashamed to call myself a journalist*). Democracy is harder than it looks, and it is vulnerable not only money like the Koches’ and brute power like George W. Bush’s but most often simply to lots of lies, lies, lies.

*I note in August 2023 that Lara Logan is no longer an admirable journalist, but a conspiracy theorist who has degraded my profession. That doesn’t make what happened to her in Egypt any less sad, but the last 10 years have degraded many once admirable people.

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Keith, Don’t Go

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , on January 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I love Keith Olbermann, but I don’t have to work with him. As of last night, neither do the staff at MSNBC, who abruptly cut the tether with their basso profundo heir to Edward R. Murrow. Olbermann reminded us in his closing program notes of “Network” and Peter Finch’s famous “Mad as hell” catch phrase as he signed off for the last time and contemplated his departure, using the spare elegant Occam’s Razor-worthy prose for which he’s known. His life would have been easier if he used that trombone-like voice to sell commemorative plates and soap sculptures and gold coins. Instead he used it to civilize us.

So goes the man who finally carved out a space for liberalism in the liberal media. When I think of Olbermann and the way he situated himself in the nightly pundit game, I think of a Josef Albers painting in which shades of whites are contrasted with other whites or a greens with greens. If the media is really so “liberal,” shouldn’t liberal Olbermann have gotten lost in the green screen background like so many Costa Rican macaws in their almendro trees? He didn’t. Instead, he came about as a trenchant and refreshing rhetorical answer to CNN, at a time when that supposedly liberal network was regularly offering up Iraq War coverage under the rubric “War on Terror”–reinforcing the central fiction of the war for less astute viewers and playing right into the hands of the folksy Mr. Haney who operated our country at the time.

Liberals in this country are a bit like Canadians–we’re always apologizing for something we didn’t do wrong. (Sorry, Canadian friends, but I’m quoting one of your fellow Canucks here.) Perhaps libs don’t like to win, as some introspective pundits like to say. Or perhaps we see more sides of an issue, and thus seem ready to yield to people who take pride in knowing one thing so well. Perhaps we’re just all impressed by ruddy faced conviction. Red-staters are so, so, so emotional about the wrong things they believe. That’s why we lie down when the debate turns silly. Anybody who would seriously debate the question “Is America going socialist” is already being suckered and making medicine with quacks. America has been “socialist,” as the right defines it, since long before 99% of Americans were born (and before we were, children worked 12 hours a day in indentured servitude and many workers were locked into their offices). The real question is why is America going down the road of plutocracy. You might see meretricious rules of rhetoric in that, but that’s because the game has been defined by the crazy people in the tricorn hats and those selling gold on late night television to poor conservative suckers. Are they, we ought to ask, plutocrats or anarchists or have they managed to find a horrifying nexus of both as they finally get around to learning only half what they couldn’t bother with in high school civics?”

Across the discursive gap strode Mr. Olbermann eight years ago, with his arrogant “Yes, I’m liberal and I know what I’m talking about so fuck you,” right into prime time television. It’s like what happens when a great new restaurant opens on a block that used to be full of closed-down warehouses. The block has now been spruced up a bit for newcomers, and I doubt Keith Olbermann’s termination will make that much difference. Salon even suggested that his colleague Rachel Maddow, with her cool Vulcan nerve pinches on stupidity, has stolen the march on her pal in liberal popularity. Nobody seems to be worried about a chill in political dissent so much as speculating about how much of an ungrateful and arrogant prick Olbermann was to his bosses. I guess we could roast him for that, but then you might also have to agree that a lot of polite people are ineffective hypocrites who run you down behind your back. Keith is dealing with you in front, where you cause all the trouble.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if Olbermann went to Fox News?” That’s what I thought at first, and it seemed stupid, but now I hear other people saying the same thing. Roger Ailes seems to have a soft spot for house lefties. He gets to co-opt them and further shield his franchise from its image as being more insulated, weepy-eyed, deluded and prima donna-ish than the cast of Glee. And at Fox there seems to be no real problem with “reporters” contributing a bit to politicians, the activity that got Olbermann in trouble at MSNBC a few months ago. Maybe that would be attractive, maybe not. Maybe Keith Olbermann can just start to enjoy his celebrity and sell out at Fox News. Others have done it.

When Olbermann referenced Network and “I’m mad as hell …” , he dropped the reference with such winning self-deprecation I think people missed the satiric undercurrent in that too-much-abused movie reference. Because Keith Olbermann is better compared to Shane, and it’s Glenn Beck who is actually the Peter Finch character, Howard Beale, a man who capably finds an audience that doesn’t know the difference between discourse and showmanship, snake oil and antibiotics. Even when Beck gets around to coming up with an actual fact, he’s usually quick to move beyond it to the real attraction–exorcism. He’s giving his viewers the nightly purging they need when they feel alienated from the political process, powerless to stop forces beyond their control like money and power and recession and unemployment and foreclosure and failure. When there’s blood in the streets, people need a crazy man like Beck to reflect the perversity of their spirit. Maybe Keith Olbermann hates a bit too much too. He even said as much after Gabrielle Giffords was shot and he asked for a tone of civility.

It’s awfully hard to keep calling for civility, of course, when you’ve just been unceremoniously shit-canned. But Keith Olbermann somehow did it with his elegance and basso profundo. Maybe that’s good for an exorcism too.

Come back, Shane. Come back.

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Americans Honor Martin Luther King By Using Him Against Each Other

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , on January 17, 2011| 1 Comment »

As Americans stopped today to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and ponder his message of freedom for all regardless of race or creed, they soon afterward began using him to score cheap points against each other on all sorts of matters Dr. King likely had no opinions about.

“Americans have to move on from a spirit of racism, which is why I want to end the alternative minimum tax,” said Jesse Stamford of Columbia, S.C. “I know that’s what Dr. King would have thought of as equality.”

“Dr. King fought for the rights of common people, which means the protection of unions and that’s why we at United Auto Workers will not budge in our upcoming talks with Ford,” said union leader Ray Johnstone.

African-American leaders led the way in arguing over the legacy of this great civil rights leader. Al Sharpton said that Dr. King would have found today’s Tea Party a travesty, while others said Dr. King would have certainly agreed with them that no matter what you think of the Tea Party, Al Sharpton is “a showboating political fringe dweller and an embarrassment to all of us,” in the words of Washington, D.C. resident Kim Watkins.

President Barack Obama, weeks after political violence erupted in Arizona, tried to use the occasion to strike a conciliatory tone.

“Dr. Martin Luther King showed what this nation could be if it had more community organizers,” said Obama. “Like me.”

But it wasn’t only politicians piling on. Democrats were quick to say Dr. King would have wanted better health care, while others said Dr. King would want “absolutely no government health care whatsoever.” Gays pointed out King’s history of tolerance while Jesse Jackson said King would have wanted him to be president.

“Also, he showed it’s not that big a deal having a girlfriend on the side,” said Jackson.

Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush said that Dr. King would likely want to give to their charity, while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahjadinejad said that Dr. King would have wanted Iran to have nuclear power.

Dr. King’s message was one of using civil disobedience to achieve the goals of equality and peace. Americans said that message was needed now more than ever as they raised fresh petty political arguments and showed the dissent and discord that is evidently part of human nature.

“I want ice cream!” screamed 8-year-old Beth Marshton of Bryn Mawr, Pa. in the back seat of her parents’ Lexus. “Dr. King would have given me ice cream!”

Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 by a limited, brutish man with some sort of personal agenda of his own.

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House Republicans, To Show Unity with Dems, Introduce “Kill Health Care” Act

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 14, 2011| 2 Comments »

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, having postponed legislation for a few days to observe a more civil tone after a weekend of violence, has returned to work in a spirit of compromise and unity with the Democrats across the aisle, introducing a new piece of legislation showing the shared convictions of a nation coping with loss.

It is known by its unifying title, the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.”

“Hey, wait a minute …” said Democrats. “That’s not very nice.”

A largely symbolic piece of legislation, since the Democrats still control the Senate, Republicans tweaked it a bit so it read instead, “Shooting Down the Health Care Act Act.” In lieu of that, they suggested the “Cutting Life Support on the Health Care Act Act,” and “Killing Health Care Reform In A Bathtub,” and the “Returning to a Belligerent Posture Following A Weekend of Mock Civility Act.”

“After the tragic events of last weekend, we have hopefully returned to a new era of friendship, noblesse oblige and tact,” said majority leader Eric Cantor as he introduced the “Terminating the Health Care Bill With Extreme Prejudice Act.”

Were those bills to stall, Republicans say they would introduce the “Euthanizing the Health Care Reform Act With An Overdose of Morphine and Digitalis,” and the  “Guns Don’t Kill People, The Health Care Reform Act Kills People Act.” Like the others, these bills aim to remove last year’s main Democrat achievement, a law aimed of insuring 95% of all Americans by offering subsidies to small businesses and increasing the age at which children can no longer remain on their parents’ insurance plants. If that bill fails, Republicans say, they will continue to pursue a spirit of concordance and compromise by floating a bill, again largely symbolic, called the  “I Fuck Your Health Care Bill in the Eye Socket Reconciliation Act,” and if not that, they’ll try the “You Talking To Me? Health Care Reform Assassination Act.”

Other titles for future legislation, should these not pass, are the “Beheading the Democrats’ Stupid Health Care Legislation,” the “Snuffing Out the Health Care Reform with a Pillow Act,” the “Throwing Lit Matches At Democratic Faces Act,” the “Sowing Discord For Cheap Political Points Act” and “The Patriot Act.”

Again, all mostly time-wasting, symbolic titles that won’t go to Senate and really don’t do anything other than promote the new spirit of harmony.

“Americans after this weekend are showing a new unity,” said John Boehner as he introduced the “Screw Unity and Screw U Act.” We cannot let a few deranged individuals upset our Democracy and spread dissension, and that’s why we support this new bill, subtitled ‘The Democratic Criminals Are Assaulting Your Liberties Act.'”

After those bills die predictable deaths, having served absolutely no purpose at all, Republicans say they may simply call it the “Supporting Gabrielle Giffords By Repealing Legislation that Gabrielle Giffords Supported Act.”

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Sarah Palin Edits Her Arizona Speech After Reading Wikipedia

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on January 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

http://player.vimeo.com/video/18698532

Sarah Palin: “America’s Enduring Strength” from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

Sarah Palin released a video today in which she talked about the shootings in Arizona. She would like to go back and edit some of her language now that she realizes what some phrases actually mean.

“Like millions of Americans, I was learned of the tragic events that unfolded in Arizona on Saturday. I could not understand why a deranged man would try to attack those showing their peaceful right to assemble and to exchange ideas in our vibrant country. But how sadly ironic it was to see later that people were trying to apportion blame to those other than the law breaker. Dare we call this kind of talk a blood libel dirty smear?

Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own and we should not stand still while journalists and pundits manufacture a pogrom backlash against those who debate passionately. Why, the attitude among the media to patriotic right wing talk radio hosts this week was  a Holocaust an outrage. A real genocide. Real dirty pool. As Americans rallied to express their opinions in a beautiful moment of inspiring debate that so defines our country, a mad man let loose with a mindless rampage. But rather than unite together in a time of common humanity, we let the media create a Shoah horrible controversy.

It is important for us to respect our differences with each other and strive for a better country. And for us instead to point fingers at each other is a horrible final solution mistake. Ronald Reagan said that blame for monstrous acts should stop with the monster. I agree with that. Let not the vibrant debate in our country be muffled by those who would seek to tear us apart.We cannot abide by these volkisch partisan sentiments. It will end in a real Dreyfus Affair moral travesty. Or a Farhud war of words.

Sometimes political parties win and sometimes they lose, and we do no favor to the political process by acting like antisemitic silly Nazis schoolchildren prosecuting a kristallnacht pitching hissy fits. The only thing we have to fear is Judeophobia fear itself.

Thank you, and God bless America”

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Blame, Blame, Blame

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , , on January 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the death of six bystanders in yesterday’s mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona have sparked a debate about how toxic our national discourse has become. That discourse barely had time to neutralize before it turned toxic again a few hours later. Before suspect Jared Lee Loughner was even named as the suspect, left wingers took aim at the Tea Party and Sarah Palin for the gun imagery she has brought to bear (and bears) in our national debates, and her targeting of Giffords in particular. This, they say, wasn’t an isolated incident by a crazy person but the spawn of a right-wing firmament that breeds crazy in crazy nurseries.

A couple of years ago, for instance, Fox pundit Bill O’Reilly repeatedly called Kansas abortion provider George Tiller a baby killer and mentioned him some 28 times on his show. Tiller was later murdered by Scott Roeder, shot in the eye while he was inside his church. The right has since Barack Obama’s election become more ominous in its rhetoric, more martial in its imagery and apocalyptic in its pronouncements. A disempowered group of Americans in 2008 turned to millenarian fury (a sign of their fear). Thus Giffords and others had gotten threats for their support of the health care bill. People were showing up at protests during those debates brandishing guns.

And so there was an anticipation building up among liberals that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, perhaps even a dark wish that it happen to reveal the true animal spirits on the right.

So once there was news of a shooting, it seemed like a good time to immediately assail Palin’s bulls eye imagery, and the crosshairs she trained on Arizona’s Eight District in a 2010 political poster, which Giffords herself called an implied threat. Or for that matter it was worth remembering that Ann Coulter once called Bill Clinton assassination worthy. Or that Glenn Beck has joked about killing opponents and that his whole ideology is based around conspiracy theories that appeal to our country’s many lunatics.

At some point, rhetoric does indeed turn into threat, as I think it did in O’Reilly’s case. The First Amendment doesn’t cover threats. You can’t draw a line through a person’s name and smear it in blood on a poster. But it’s not like the right doesn’t know this. Instead its more clever exponents play with the contradictions. Palin and Glenn Beck do it with an edge of satire that their audience is likely aware of on some level, as obnoxious and destructive as it is to progress, as anathema as it is to people with brains. Yes it’s sad that some dummies do take it seriously (not realizing that Palin is less about policy than media whoredom or not recognizing that Beck is little more than a snake oil salesman/pitch man for gold investments). But the left uses imagery just as often, and with the arrogant vouchsafe that it’s OK for us because we’re right after all. A lot of us called George Bush a war criminal because we thought he had left at least a hundred thousand people dead in Iraq by lying about the reasons for going to war. Are there ramifications of using that language? Could it be used by a crazy person who thinks George Bush is literally a wanted criminal and who might in a deranged state somehow take action on that notion?

This is one reason I can’t blame Palin and Beck for Giffords. And that has made me a very lonely lefty this week.

Call it First Amendment fundamentalism or just sadness about how quickly the situation was exploited. Nobody on the left had the sense to wait a few hours to see who opened fire at that Safeway, and when it turned out to be a moonstruck college dropout/armed forces reject with paranoias about mind control, libs had to spin like mad when they realized they had literally jumped the gun. All of my heroes are now doing the mushy blogs about how toxic our political climate has become and trying with limp avail and flimsy proof to lay it at the feet of Palin.

Yes, Loughner used some right wing symbols about the Constitution being under attack and about the integrity of gold-backed currency. But he was mainly weaving that into a dark, solipsistic ideology all his own, barely recognizable to even NRA members. Who in the hell on the right wing has ever argued about government control of your “grammar structure”?

My heroes Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman have taken this story with the dutiful drudgery of football players taking their positions at shirts and skins scrimmage. Krugman did not offer his usual elegant hard numbers to back up his weak contention that this was an invariable outcome of right wing hate-mongering–but just swiped at Palin in a pro forma rant,  trying to convince us she’s more to blame than people who used to call George Bush Hitler. Before 5 p.m. yesterday, conservatives already had been roused to defensive anger and were in pretty good stead to bat away the arguments that Jared Loughner’s  insanity in any way resembled their own behavior. The anti-bodies had kicked in, and there would be no reason, if I were a right-winger, to listen to the criticism. The left made a prima facie judgment and showed the right it will blame Sarah Palin for anything, even small pox, car wrecks or dog mange.

That makes her stronger, folks.

I’m a leftist, and do believe the Tea Party has created a toxic environment of anti-government panic and often destroyed sensible discourse with meaningless sloganeering. My late mother once told me that in her job as a tax preparer, she came across people who wanted to cash out of all their stock holdings at unattractive bases, take big tax hits or do other forms of financial violence to themselves just because Fox News has told them America had gone socialist. My mother’s prescription: “Fox News should be banned.” And this was a woman who had voted for Bush.

Just another example that conservative thinking is going to do real harm to many disadvantaged people (a lot of them conservatives) in the long run. They will slash necessary programs, push an anti-government agenda that forces more out-of-pocket expenses on poor people, destroy the middle class, accelerate wealth disparity, put us more in debt to the Chinese and force depressions on us if they have to. But it’s hard to prove or see that kind of insidious violence, and that makes lefties want to pin something more tangible on right wing leaders. How about a murder?

The fact is that there are lots of ways to slice the orange on this story. The most horrible is the one none of us dare bring up: We could point to the tragic irony that Giffords is a gun rights advocate and maybe ask if this is a good time to bring up the issue again in our national discourse. We could have taken aim (note the harmless metaphor) at Sarah Palin’s gun stances rather than Palin herself. Instead, we played into her hands and won her more sympathy.

Or we could have noted the irony that Giffords has not been easy to pigeonhole and she’s a good example of our less doctrinaire politicians. The sad thing is that maybe we need more of her, not one less. Our all-too-necessary political center is being attacked when it ought to be protected.

Instead, we liberals painted ourselves into a corner and made this contradictory statement: “The political atmosphere has become too toxic … and it’s the other side’s bloody fault.”

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