A World of Their Own

For several days I’ve been intending to write a little piece about right (and left) wing vocabulary.  But today I thought, “nah.”  It’s just a symptom of a larger illness, after all, since both sides tend to stretch word meanings to their limit, albeit in opposite directions.

In my view, any extreme is an extreme.  Big deal.  And so, instead of dissecting language, I’ve decided instead to build a fantasy world in which Sarah Palin and her minions have their dream country (to get the “left wing” view on this one, just turn almost everything in the opposite direction).

And so, here is Paradise:

The “civics test” is reinstated in the voting process.  For sure, nobody who doesn’t speak English can pass it.  But neither can most Teabaggers….which brings us to the issue of the Electoral College.

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.

–Alexander Hamilton (taken from http://www.historycentral.com/elections/Electoralcollgewhy.html)

Yes, sports fans, that’s why the Electoral College was created — to keep a President from being elected solely by a bunch of buffoons who can’t speak English…kind of like the Teabaggers.

The Electoral College was also created to give smaller states a somewhat equal voice in national elections to larger, more populated states, but this bit of creative math is lost on me.

So anyway, back to that civics test…why?  I’ll take a guess: because Teabaggers are programmed to support ideas that are bad for them.

Which brings us to many other aspects of Paradise, starting with a total ban on even thinking about abortion, so complete and ubiquitous that even some women who have had innocuous D&C’s insist that the word “abortion” get whited out on their medical records, not that it should have been there in the first place.  (While D&C is a term that, prior to the legalization of abortion, was used by respectable doctors and women to keep illegality out of their medical records, a D&C is not necessarily for the purpose of abortion…and whiteout on medical records is, by the way, not allowed.  Period.  I know; I used to be a medical transcriptionist.)

HIPAA does not apply to women.

Viagra is available OTC, but contraception is unobtainable.

Rape is always the woman’s fault.

Because of an increase in incest births, there are a lot more mentally-challenged babies than there were.  But these are not covered by private health insurance, which almost no one can afford except through their employer.  And more and more employers are dropping health insurance, or charging huge premiums for it.

Jobs are shipped to China and elsewhere so Americans can sit home not doing the work they don’t want to do, and trying to pay for others to do it even though they have no income.

News is true only if it comes from Fox.  Because of this, most Americans don’t even know where the Middle East is, let alone anywhere else in the world.

It is mandated that everyone own a gun.  This is to make them free.

Houses cost approximately 50 times the average annual income and there is either too much credit or none at all.  All of this is based on nonexistent money.  This is okay because the banks are happy and award their executives millions of dollars in bonuses.

American schools teach Creationism, setting us a couple of centuries behind in science and making us the laughingstock of the developed world.  Children are instructed in the use of prayer instead of test tubes.  Use of even adult stem cells ceases because…well, you know, they’re called STEM CELLS and nobody really knows who they came from.  Could be a laboratory where they dissect babies.  But DNA is okay if it convicts an Islamic terrorist.  Otherwise they use it to implant tracking devices in your head.

Are you sitting there saying, “huh?” at the last paragraph?  You’re not alone.  But I know people who think like that, and they are both right and left wing.

Any reference to mentally-challenged people as “retarded” is okay as long as the Fat Man, Weiner, the Pit Bull and a few others are the ones doing the name-calling.  Anyone else has to apologize repeatedly and then resign from their job.  If they have one.

Radio and TV are totally owned by huge multinational corporations that choose what they want us to hear and see.

There are no taxes, and no services either.  You take care of others after natural disasters, provide your own electricity and drinking water and transportation, etc.

There are no food-safety standards.

Immigrants are imported by the millions to “do jobs Americans won’t do,” then are treated like slaves.

There is no Social Security or Medicare.

Women are barred from the workforce and owning property.  Except for Phyllis Schlafly, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and a precious few others.

You don’t dare offend any woman mentioned above, let alone Limbaugh, Weiner, Fox News.  (For instance you don’t dare mention that in early 2010, Sarah Palin looks only vaguely like she did when she was running for Vice President in 2008.  In fact, one might think she were someone else except that the gibberish coming out of her mouth sounds strangely familiar.)

Americans live in small towns.  Big cities are abandoned except by all those damn immigrants.

Americans are free to….what?  You aren’t allowed to speak.  You can’t work.  There’s no information available.  There is no government to do anything but fight wars.

Ah, Paradise.

A brief note to Palin: HUH?

Just read this on the Immoral Minority; it is taken from a Fox News interview with Mrs. Palin just before her Teabagger speech:

Q: You really want to get involved in the primary process?

PALIN: Absolutely, because I do want competition to allow the cream of the crop to rise.

ME: What the hell does that mean?  Doesn’t cream rise by itself anymore?

There are a lot of statements in the rest of the interview that I honestly can’t even read.  Who could possibly believe in this woman?  Oh yeah…the same people who want to believe that the Constitution and the Ten Commandments are the same, and who apparently haven’t read either.

I’d say that based on the events of this past week, Mrs. Palin should be finished.  But alas, it’s Rahm Emmanuel whose future is being discussed.

We must already be living in Wingnut Paradise (see previous post).

(P.S. No Stupid of the Day Award here.  Mrs. Palin already has the Lifetime Achievement Award in that category.)

The New Vocabulary for the Whachmacallit Wing

Here are some definitions for those of us lurking in-between the extremes.  I found this project a bit daunting; may be adding more to it as I think of more things.

death panel
Right Wing — something about Obamacare, it doesn’t have to be real
Left Wing — something about Obamacare that isn’t real
Whachmacallit Wing — something that Palin did in Alaska and health insurance companies do every day

retarded (also “retard”)
Right Wing — satire (if spoken by Limbaugh or Palin), blasphemy (if spoken by anyone who is not a card-carrying teabagger)
Left Wing — WTF
Whachmacallit Wing — WTF

gotcha
Right Wing — what you call it if Palin gets asked a mean question she can’t answer
Left Wing — a source of constant amusement
Whachmacallit Wing — proof that Sarah is a retard

you betcha
Right Wing — an endearing Palinism
Left Wing — an enduring irritation
Whachmacallit Wing — crap is it that woman again?

hope and change
Right wing — you better hope things don’t change, you Nazi Socialist Communist liberal progressive baby-killer!
Left wing — continue to support the concept of hope and change over the no-idea of no-hope and no-change
Whachmacallit Wing — love the slogan; wish it meant something

teabagger
Right Wing — Patriot!  True American!
Left Wing — a threat to all we hold dear
Whachmacallit Wing — moron

Constitution
Right Wing — was written by Jesus just like the Ten Commandments
Left Wing — studies it at university
Whachmacallit Wing — wonders if anyone has actually read it..or the Ten Commandments, for that matter

healthcare reform
Right Wing — a threat to our freedom; a political football
Left Wing — a threat to our freedom if it becomes a mere political football and is not enacted
Whachmacallit Wing — at this point, WTF

pro-life
Right Wing — life is a cherished right that stops at the moment of birth
Left Wing — a threat to women
Whachmacallit Wing — “keep your Bible off my uterus”

separation of church and state
Right Wing — not clear on the concept
Left Wing — if not maintained, our way of life is threatened
Whachmacallit Wing — see?  we told you so

Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Fox News, Limbaugh and the right-wing radio brigade
Right Wing — a meeting of the minds of tremendous import
Left Wing — proof that there is no god
Whachmacallit Wing — “Send in the clowns…don’t bother, they’re here”

recession
Right Wing — Obama caused it, and/or Clinton caused it
Left Wing — where was George Bush?
Whachmacallit Wing — on vacation

bail out
Right Wing — Obama did it!
Left Wing — Bush did it!
Whachmacallit Wing — where’s mine?

Giving it all for nothing

I am, of course, deeply saddened and troubled by a sense of meaninglessness in the death of young man in a luge practice-run crash just before the opening of the Vancouver Olympics.  The loss of a young life is always double the tragedy.  Any loss that meaningless makes it almost unbearable to think about.

And yes, I believe it is all meaningless.  The Olympics are nothing more than a corporate picnic nowadays, at the expense of the taxpayer.

Because of this, the fact that Chicago lost the Olympics in the first round of voting is something I consider a blessing.  We are already struggling to make ends meet in this area; the Olympics would have sent us over the edge into bankruptcy.  Plus, we would have lost the public use of our lakefront — perhaps permanently — and would have had to pay taxes for that dubious privilege.

Which is to say that a lot of people around here didn’t want the games, just like many folks in Vancouver didn’t want this Winter Olympics, but we were being railroaded by an arrogant bunch of politicians and their corporate buddies.  It was tyranny and oligarchy at its best, until the IOC put an abrupt halt to it.  Not that I love the IOC so much, but for this small favor I thank them.

I believe that the Olympics have become an extravagant burden not only on the general public, but also on the sports that are represented there.  Figure skating comes to mind.

Why figure skating?  Because it’s a niche sport.  That’s a shame because those of us who have actually been skaters in the past know that it’s also an extremely difficult and worthwhile sport.  (I was an adult figure skater, but am no longer because of back problems that were not caused by skating, but by my job.)  The Olympics do this sport no favors whatsoever.  They pick on its fluffiest aspects and use those for the public to see.  The end result is that the Olympics make figure skating seem dumber and funnier and even easier than most people probably think it is already.  And that is a disservice.

As an example, Johnny Weird…no wait, is it Weir…comes to mind.  He’s a U.S. men’s skater who is no gold-medal contender, but was sent to the Olympics probably only for the publicity the USFSA knew would follow (yes, they had a choice in this matter even though he did well at USFSA Nationals).  And so it has.  Right now the Lady Gaga of figure skating is receiving death threats because he has real fox fur on his skating costume.  What?  No pearls glued to his face?

And oh, he’s rooming with the pretty ice dancer Tanith Belbin.  Nothing to see here; I’m sure almost everyone knows that there is no chance of a Winter-Olympics romance, although I’m equally sure that eventually Weir will face something like a paternity suit from some gay-blind fan who insists she was once his girlfriend.

Johnny got the part of the suite with the bathtub, mind you.  Oh, the FLUFF!

Before we go further, get off your high horse.  I am not criticizing Weir because he is gay.  If that were true, I’d be mad at half the athletes in the world of sports — and anyway, “gay” does not equal excessive personal ornamentation any more than “straight” excludes it.  No, what I am protesting here is the effect of excessive froufrou — and the type of publicity it generates — on figure skating.

I say put the skaters in team uniforms and the judges in straitjackets.  This attacks a basic problem with figure skating’s image in the last 25 years or so: the costumes have been getting worse and worse as the judging has been clearly shown to be outright corrupt.

Weir’s fox-fur contraption is just the far end of horrible — it makes him look like he’s in a Mardi Gras parade, for crying out loud, and not performing an Olympic sport where one’s athleticism is what is on display first and foremost (supposedly).  Team uniforms would take away the opportunity for a monumental in-your-face mistake like that.  They would make figure skating look like the actual sport it is, as would fair judging (although I don’t have an answer for that one).

Obviously figure skating isn’t the only sport with image problems, although it likely has the worst.  The Olympics have done damage to countless other niche sports as well, most recently showing the sports’ injury problems up close and personal to the whole world without an answer as to why anyone would subject him or herself to such danger for a dinky little medal.  Or in the case of figure skating, why would anyone get a medal for looking so stupid.

No, I don’t get it.  What I do get is that we have nothing here but a monumental waste of money at a time when the world is short of it.  The Olympics accomplish nothing.  And I haven’t heard any excuse for that at all, let alone a good one.

Everything old is new again…

…at least, that seems to be true in elite womens’ figure skating.

I’m in the same general age group as Dorothy Hamill.  I guess that’s why this jumped out at me: Olympic medalists Yu-na Kim (age 19) and Joannie Rochette (age 24 and competing under extremely tragic and trying circumstances) are being lauded for their “maturity” and “sophistication” while the younger Marai Nagasu, who finished in 4th, is noted for her potential only.  Currently her skating lacks refinement and emotional depth because she is, at age 16, just too young.

I remember a similar comment being made about a very young skater in the 1976 Olympics, where 19-year-old Dorothy Hamill had won the gold.  As I just mentioned, 34 years later, the same is being said about Nagasu.  This is remarkable.

Why?  Because for many of the the years in between, ladies’ skaters over the age of 18 were considered “old.”  Nobody ever said anything about immaturity when Oksana Baiul, Tara Lipinski, and Sarah Hughes won gold medals for their jumps at the Olympics.  In fact, back in those days everyone was quite busy discussing how elderly the true phenom Michelle Kwan was (actually she is, I believe, just a little bit older than Lipinski).

The howling fact was that Lipinski and Hughes weren’t very good skaters.  They weren’t just immature — goodness knows that very young skaters had won Olympic gold before — they were unskilled.  That was so obvious that it was a common topic of discussion in the local skating community; in fact, I remember overhearing a coach telling one of her promising youngsters, just after Hughes had won gold, “She (Hughes) is not a very good skater, is she?  So you see, you have to work on all parts of your skating, not just the jumps.”

That’s how far skating had fallen as of 2002.  This was just after the pair controversy erupted when two teams presented almost evenly-matched programs in the 2002 Olympics, but one was awarded gold and the other silver, much to the loud displeasure of the crowd, and media, the skaters, and it seemed just about everyone else in the world.  The clamor was so loud that the silver medal was discarded and two golds were awarded.  This invalidated the ancient 6.0 scoring system, which had finally suffered a complete meltdown at the hands of an idiot judge, and if she is to be believed, some Russian spies who were threatening to kill her.  It was this bald-faced corruption that finally forced change on the world of figure skating.

As previously mentioned, discontent with the state of skating, (mainly with the fact that in 2 of the 3 disciplines, the jumps were taking over) had been simmering locally for years.  It finally bubbled to the surface and the shortcomings of the mini-kid ladies’ Olympic champions were at last being discussed out loud.  At the time a lot of the blame was being placed on training, with many people believing that figure skating had begun its decline a decade before, when school figures were taken out of the competitive arena.  That has since turned out not to be true, although it is true that because of having to practice figures, skaters of long ago could routinely manage footwork maneuvers that many skaters of today probably don’t know and possibly couldn’t even do very well if at all.  After all, with the pressure of having to master triple and quad jumps, today’s skaters can’t afford to devote time to the minutiae of school figures.  Instead, they skate in broad strokes.

The new scoring system (heavily flawed as it may be) is what forced modern skaters to become a bit more accomplished in their overall skating in spite of the jumping pressures.  It did that by taking a tiny bit of the spotlight off the jumps — not much, enough to affect who gets a gold medal and who has to be happy with a silver.  These days, the silver seems to go to those who jump more than skate.

As I discussed a few days ago, not everyone has kept up with the changes; Evgeni Plushenko apparently failed to notice that things were slipping away from him even as the ancient (20 year old) Shizuka Arakawa won the ladies’ gold medal in the 2006 Olympics and he won the men’s.  Not that Arakawa couldn’t jump, because she definitely could.  But she was not a jumper to the exclusion of everything else.  She had that maturity and sophistication that is suddenly so valued once again these days.

And now comes Kim, who is an equally elderly 19.  But nobody has said anything about her being old.  Nobody has said anything about the 16 year old Nagasu possibly upsetting the coronation with the iron nerves of youth and a triple-triple combination.  Heck, Mao Asada couldn’t even do it with 3 triple axels.

As of right now, prime time for Olympic-eligible figure skaters is back in the old-fashioned age range: late teens to early twenties for women; early to mid-twenties for men.

As I’ve been yammering for days now, this is inconvenient news for a skater like Plushenko, who is a throwback to the bad old days.  But to me it’s refreshing.  Figure skating has now given back something for kids to strive for, instead of lauding the last 5 minutes of their prepubescent lives (in the ladies’ field) allowing them to make amazing if technically flawed jumps, or the sheer strength of youth aiding in producing 4 aerial revolutions (in the men’s field).

Long live figure skating if this continues to be the case.  It could not continue the other way.

Missing in Plain Sight

3/6/10 UPDATE: Just heard that Blase will not actually enter prison until sometime in April 2010 due to a lack of bed space.  Kinda like a hospital, eh?  When’s the last time you heard that one?

(written 3/1/10) Today’s the day Nicholas Blase, the former mayor of the little Chicago suburb of Niles, Illinois, goes off to a white-collar jail somewhere in Wisconsin, or  maybe Indiana, or maybe Minnesota, or maybe Michigan.  Whatever.  You get it, though — he won’t be sharing a cell with someone who is wearing his prison uniform sagging below his backside and itching to pick a fistfight just for the hell of it.

What Blase leaves behind is a village government now run by a longtime friend who refuses to utter a single condemning word about him, the village office allegedly crawling with FBI agents because Blase was, in fact, so worthy of condemnation — and a population of 30,000 or so, most of whom are barely aware of what has happened, if at all.

How did an entire community become so disengaged?  Well, it happened over a period of 50 years, during which dissenters were hunted and harassed, and those outside of the village-hall clique were treated as…well…outsiders.  I remember hearing years ago that someone outside the clique who was running for a position on the Park Board suddenly found himself to be the recipient of bomb threats.  More commonly anyone who ran for mayor against Nicky Blase was either ignored or skewered with barbs tipped in vicious, Sarah Palin-type venom.  You know, that sort of thing.

Public disengagement is the offspring of long-lived and intense political corruption.  That’s what Niles has now.  I’ll wager if you walked up to ten locals today and asked them (1) what Nicky Blase was charged with, and (2) was he convicted, and (3) when was he going to jail, eight of them would never get beyond a dropped-jaw reaction at the first question.  “What is Nicky Blase and who the hell are you?” they would ask.

On that note, I recall the Send in the Clowns story: a few years ago, during the annual 4th of July parade, Blase (who I believe had just been arrested quite recently), walked with a group clowns rather than sit in his usual ceremonial seat on a dais on someone’s front lawn.  I don’t think anyone noticed that one of the clowns was plain-faced, nor guessed who it was, nor the reason he was walking with the clowns.  Answer: it was Blase and he probably thought the clowns would shield him from any rude laughter from the crowd.  He needn’t have worried.

Of course the Republicans in the area would be fully aware of the situation only through their own low-powered microscope, and would be blaming Blase’s faults on the fact that he was a Democrat.  And so they are.  Nice try — except that Blase distanced the town’s Democratic party from the national party years ago, claiming that the national party was…are you sitting down…not only too liberal, but out of touch with the people. The area Republicans can put that in their pipes and smoke it along with whatever else it is they have apparently been smoking for years now.

Anyway, today’s the day Blase goes to jail.  But today’s also the day where the people of Niles should notice that nothing has changed, and that at long last there is an opportunity for something to change.

Why does this concern me?  I grew up in Niles.  I still have friends and relatives there.  And having moved beyond the town, I am well aware that Niles has a reputation as something little better than a well-hidden festering zit on the butt of the glittery North Shore.

Granted it is not a vacation spot, but it doesn’t deserve an assessment like that.  The thing is, the people currently in office in Niles aren’t the ones who are going to save it, since they represent little or no change over who was there before.  Only the people outside the doors can do that, and that’s only if they can emerge from their 50 year sleep.

People of Niles, wake up and do so soon.

My Generation is Different…NOT

First I must mention that if one insists on dividing up the population by “generations” and attributing to those generations titles and unique characteristics, then I am without a generation.  I was born between the Boom and the Bust, and well before the alphabet soup.  My group has been called Boomers (incorrectly), Bust-ers (also incorrectly, as one year of the “bust” included the largest number of births recorded up to that time), the Envelope generation, the Cuspers, and Generation Jones.

As both Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden are/were of Generation Jones, it’s hard to assign a set of characteristics to my bunch.  Like every other generation, we are as varied as the sun and moon.  If anything we do tend to be slightly more spiritual than our predecessors the Boomers, and slightly less materialistic than whatever part of the alphabet soup it was that followed us.  But again, I said those differences are slight if they exist at all.

Now let’s go back a bit, to the anti-war protests of the 1960′s and early 1970′s.  Yes, we have to go here, because Fox News is trying to paint the Occupy movement as consisting of the same sort of people.  You will see why it does not.  You will also see why it is not a generational thing, and why embracing that notion is stupid and dangerous.

It’s hard to conduct a survey 40 years after the fact (particularly difficult when the media coverage at the time was as almost, but not quite as skewed as it is today), but the anti-war “peace and free love” movement of the 60′s/70′s seems to have consisted largely of college students.  I may be wrong, but I believe that at the beginning of the Vietnam war college men were exempt from the draft, and at some point that exemption was ended and that’s when the campus protests started.  Before that, Vietnam had been a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” much as all wars had been to that point (in fact, I believe that quote may be from the time of the U.S. Civil War).

In short, it was easy to paint all the protesters in one large brushstroke with the words “spoiled brats,” and the media did just that.  The protesters ended up hated and marginalized (although their fashion sense made some marketers a lot of money and that continues to this day), and the sharp divisions caused by this newfangled generational ghetto persist even now.  In fact, to hear some people talk, you’d think that actual hippies from the 1960′s have somehow been magically resurrected, their youth intact, and are out on the streets protesting again.  Damn hippies!

Much as today, college was far from a universal experience, and it was expensive.  Quite different from today, and largely because of the unions, one didn’t need to be a banker, lawyer or doctor to make enough money to buy a house and a car and raise a family, often on one salary alone.  The middle class was alive and well.

And so the protests of that era were confined largely to college boys who did not want to go to war, rebellious middle-class kids who hated suburbia, and a few of the actual poor people who got stuck fighting the war.  As I said, it was a protest defined by generational divides that were heavily promoted in the media and swallowed whole by the protesters themselves in the conceited belief that yes, the Baby Boomers were different.

It was also, keep in mind, something that pitted the young protesters against the unions, who were very conservative at the time, jealously guarding that middle class they had created — that middle class that some of the kids were rebelling against.

Then the war ended and so did the protests, and the next thing you knew, Generation Jones was being labeled as the most conservative generation in history.  I wasn’t that way before the label and have never been since.  I do know that a lot of my friends, both young and old, have become brainlessly conservative out of fear of losing their middle-class status (which most have, anyway).   But it’s not all of us by far.

Some of the protesting Boomers and a few of my generation went on to become bankers, lawyers, politicians and marketers, and they strove to stamp out the unions and the middle class.  From the marketers we got an endless alphabet soup of newly-created and supposedly unique generations, all in the effort to sell stuff.  And as time went by, I couldn’t help noticing that all these new generations were as indistinguishable from one another as the Joneses had been from the Boomers and probably all the generations before.

Why?  Because human beings are divided by types of experience (and the ability to clearly recall experience), not by some mythical generational gizmo that, every 5 years or so, magically creates brand new, shiny, sparkly beings to sell things to.

This brings us to the Occupy movement.

As I understand it, the Occupy movement represents the 99%.  The 99% are not all of one generation unless there was some huge, unnoticed baby boom about 20 years ago accompanied by an equally massive and unnoticed die-off of elders.

Fox News and others are trying to paint the Occupy movement as identical to the anti-war movement of 40 years ago, with some success among those of us old enough to remember the protests, but not the details.  Unfortunately,there are a fair number of those.

And lately, some of the Occupy folks are now only playing right into the stereotype, but supporting it.

I’ve noticed this twice on Facebook recently.  With the first incident (blaming all people of my generation for the economic condition of their generation), I managed to argue back successfully.  With the second incident, where someone who runs a Facebook group called something like “organization for educating misinformed Tea Party patriots” posted an almost INCREDIBLY ageist slogan and then was pretty awful to the people who protested, I threw up my hands and quietly un-subbed.

I have some questions for people like this: why is it so chic to rage against those who bully gays, minorities, etc., and then turn around and be an ageist twit?  And do you have one shred of proof that EVERYONE born more than 20 years before you is in the hated 1%?  If you do, I’d like to see it.  And I’d like to see the money, because I have never had much.

And I have another question: what guarantee do you have that your “generation” won’t turn around in another 20 years and plunge the world into yet another economic crisis with their selfishness?  There is no guarantee.

Remember, people are not divided by some mythical generational calendar invented in a marketing department.  People are divided by experience.  It’s harder to sell to experience (which is why marketers hate experience and hate older people who have it).  But it’s easy to learn from it, even if the experience is not your own, if you will only try.

The biggest lesson to remember is NOT to let Fox News and others make the definitions.  The hated 1960′s hippie protester stereotype does not apply here.  Don’t fall for any attempt to make it stick.

Life in La-La-Land

Of course Michele Bachman isn’t going to win the Republican Presidential nomination, but every day I am more and more convinced that even after getting soundly bounced out of the race in the primaries, she’ll show up for work at the Capitol on January 20, 2013 — and not in the audience, either.  She shows no signs of realizing that she’s not only out of touch with the vast majority in the U.S., but even those crazy enough to support her are mostly supporting things like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul instead.

Then again, I must applaud her consistency.  It’s apparent that she doesn’t know the truth from a lie, and this is extending to her Presidential campaign.

Not to be forgotten is the unintentionally humorous undertone of her entire campaign, which only starts with her husband announcing his plans to stamp out homosexuals and women’s rights when he becomes First Lady.  The material is endless.  Of course, she hasn’t quite gone to the insane extent of Gingrich yet (let’s stamp out the judiciary!) but that’s probably only because she has no grasp of the structure of government to begin with.

So again, I await January 20, 2013 with some eagerness.  I wonder what she’ll wear to “her” inauguration.

The Requisite “War on Christmas” Post

First I must give credit to Fox News for creating an issue out of nothing.  I do this just before wishing them all the rotten karma in the world.  Because they created this problem, now commentators like myself have to comment on it.  F*$) you Fox News.

But seriously…

As I’ve said frequently in the past, I work with the pubic.  I haven’t mentioned that I work with a very DIVERSE public.  The company is in a wealthy, white-bread neighborhood, but the clientele is extremely diverse (and divided) in terms of religion.  This colors my view on this faux “War on Christmas” outrage.

You see, a large portion of the clientele is Jewish.  A sizable minority are Muslim.  Even among the Christians, there are all sorts of denominations.

Some Jews are not happy about what they view as Christmas decor in our establishment, and several times a season I have to deal with their barely-concealed rage.  In one remarkable incident, I had to deal with a  kid (who had clearly been coached) demanding to know why we didn’t have any Hanukkah decorations.  Much more commonly these folks protest by marching through the place saying the word “Hanukkah” as often and as loudly as they can.

On the other side of the issue, and with much  bigger mouths, are people (almost always elderly males), who find the decor offensive because it’s not religious, and that awful holiday music intolerable because it doesn’t mention the baby Jesus.  I hear from one of them almost every friggin’ day during this season.

Thank you, Fox News, for this latter group.  I wouldn’t know if I still had my hearing intact without them yammering in my ears.

Mostly they become upset over the non-issue of being addressed with “Happy Holidays,” instead of the very risky “Merry Christmas.”  I’ve got news for them that I’m sure Fox News hasn’t delivered: “HAPPY HOLIDAYS” MEANS “HAPPY HOLY DAYS.”  It’s only (possibly) an insult if you are NOT RELIGIOUS.

Here are some other inconvenient facts: It is unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25.  However, as it happens, December 25 coincides with various Pagan observances (which are usually focused on the winter solstice), so it’s quite likely that Christmas was INVENTED to distract newly-converted Pagans from their old solstice celebrations.

The other day on a social site, a friend posted one of those “war on Christmas” diatribes that get passed around this time of year, with the usual coda: “if you want to keep Christ in Christmas, share this on your wall!”  To my surprise, she was immediately and sharply corrected by another friend of hers about the authenticity of Christmas.  But she didn’t back down entirely.  ”I just am so unhappy that so many people are forgetting about God,” she countered.

And I thought, “Yes dear…just look at Walmart on Black Friday.”

The fact is that Christmas is NOT a religious holiday for Christians.  Never was.  Even the sainted Pilgrims outlawed Christmas celebrations because they felt so strongly about this.

It is, however, a holiday in the more light-hearted sense of the word.  It may nowadays be about little more than mass consumption, but it is a holiday.  And so in my mind, especially while working in a very diverse neighborhood, “Happy Holidays” will suffice.  It provides a safe haven during a time of the year when it seems more and more people are looking for excuses to feel sorry for themselves. “O, tidings of comfort and joy,” indeed.

And to Fox News I dedicate that very well-known song by C.lo Green.  The original version, that is.

Let’s get a few things straight

A few things have happened recently, the gist of which went right over the heads of most of my neocon friends and all of my liberal friends.

That is to say that this post will piss everyone off.  Just thought I’d warn you in advance.  You also may like to have your epithets ready to fling at me: racist, Islamophobic, godless libberal; whatever.

The first thing that happened was that some reality show about a Muslim family was first sponsored by a national hardware store chain, among others, then un-sponsored after pressure from a neocon group, and now is being pressured from more liberal sources to go back and sponsor the show again.

The second thing that happened is that some automobile manufacturers (or maybe just one) threatened to remove themselves from Alabama because they found themselves running foul of Alabama’s new anti-illegal alien laws.  The governor of Alabama is now panicking and backtracking on his laws.

Is you’re a neocon,you’re chortling that the sponsor of the show did the right thing by withdrawing and that the governor of Alabama is a godless money whore for panicking.

If you’re a liberal you’re screaming racist, racist, racist at everyone involved in both situations, except for the corporations who were employing illegal aliens and the reality TV show’s producers.

Am I alone in catching a few problems here?

First, the reality show: why would anyone want to be on one?  Well, anyway, yes…this one was about Muslims in the U.S., or rather about a Muslim family in the U.S.

That doesn’t automatically make it right or holy, and please don’t go into all that crap about hard-working immigrants building America just before you get the goddamn Koch Brothers tissues out and start sniffling.  It’s getting old, already.  Yes, the neocons are screaming about seeing this on TV because they want to implement their own Christian version of Sharia law in the U.S. and the imagined competition just makes them nuts.  (NO I AM NO SAYING THIS MUSLIM FAMILY WAS LIVING BY SHARIA LAW THANK YOU.)  And so they yelled and screamed and got the show unsponsored.

Of course it’s racism, but it’s deeper than that: it’s a clash of cultures.  Not defending the neocons, but they are correct in guessing that many immigrants — even those that seem just like the rest of us — don’t like our culture and want to impose their own.  I shrug at that sort of thing because it is a war that all immigrants fight to some degree, and ultimately lose.

In the U.S., the greatest threat to our culture is from within.  Reference my remark about Christians a few paragraphs back.  Further, I myself was part of a drive to get Glenn Beck off of Fox News — a drive which pressured his sponsors to drop the show — so I can’t say much.

Okay, on to Alabama.  Re-read what I wrote in the automobile manufacturer paragraph.  See a problem there?

If you don’t, here it is: FOREIGN COMPANIES ARE GETTING TAX BREAKS TO PUT FACTORIES ON U.S. SOIL THAT EMPLOY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS.  Big problem there.

No! you say?  Well, do you support the 99% movement?  Part of what they’re out in the streets about is kids with college degrees being forced to work at Starbuck’s because the good jobs are going elsewhere.  But the truth is even in the U.S., we are not employing U.S. citizens.  Leave alone the fact that we are allowing foreign companies to stamp a “Made in USA” label on their products when, while their plants may be physically here, they are not really employing people from this country.

Trouble is,when I point this out, inevitably I hear from both sides about how LOUSY U.S. citizens are…usually thrown in with a charge of racism from the left and some version of “Oligarchy is Good” from the right.

Again..the danger to us is from within.  Until we take a hard look at ourselves and realize that we are continually primping with the very chains that bind us, nothing in this country is going to get any better.

And that, my friends, is the unvarnished truth.

A Note About Reality

I’ve just read some of the links on my blog for the first time in a few months and found that many (not all) of the Palin-related blogs have retired.  Oh, they’re still there to read, but as there is no new news about everyone’s favorite shrill shrew, there are no new posts.

Such is as it has become with this blog.  At one time, not terribly long ago, I was continually wondering out loud when the rest of the world was going to catch up to me in terms of some of the stuff I was writing about — mostly economic injustice, but other things as well.  Nowadays all I need to is look in the streets and I see thousands who were probably thinking the same things all along, but have just now found their voices in unison, shouting for all the world to hear even though most of the “liberal media” are turning a deliberate deaf ear.

Also, in the past year and a half, and the past few months in particular, I’ve been finding words taken out of my mouth by much better and louder voices.

I am not retiring this blog, but as I believe I’ve said several times this year, I haven’t been and won’t be writing very much.  Certainly this blog may lose some of its political edge in the near future, at least, in favor of posts of a more personal kind.

And yes, a small part of this decision has to do with the implosion of Sarah Palin.  What will I do without stupid?  Stupid has been a major subject in this blog.  Of course, there are still the GOP candidates, pundits, and an endless array of teabagging Congressmen to target, but no one is quite as much fun as ol’ Sarah.

I admit I did enjoy all the flying cats and monkeys for a long time there.  But I was as horrified as anyone at her response to the Arizona shootings and I feel that it was that response that ultimately did her in.  It was not the “liberal media” (which, as I’ve frequently noted, does not really exist), nor was it the anti-Palin blogs I loved so much.  No.  In the end, nothing did her in but her own mouth.  She made that speech and it was like magic.  All of a sudden, after 8 years of George Bush and almost 3 years of Sarah Palin, it was actually possible to be just plain too stupid again — and being too stupid was at last neither a good thing nor excusable.

We saw this demonstrated in Palin’s subsequent disappearance from the front pages (even though it actually took her own inevitable decision not to run for President to finalize that disappearance*) and we’re seeing it still with just about every GOP Presidential candidate.  And it is indeed something to be thankful for.

And it is ironic as well.  Think of it: Ronald Reagan made it okay to be stupid; during his Presidency he covered the office in a sort of Technicolor non-stick coating.  At the time, however, that protective coating only extended to Reagan himself.  With George W. Bush, stupidity gained an even thicker and all-encompassing coat of non-stick.  Yes, he could land his helicopter on the Queen’s rose garden or refuse to learn to pronounce “nuclear” correctly (not to mention start a few meaningless wars, trash the economy, etc.), but no matter how dimwitted he got, no one seemed to care.   Stupid grew in prestige to the point where few people in the mainstream media even blinked very hard then Sarah Palin was added to John McCain’s Presidential ticket.

And then, in the course of one speech, Sarah Palin herself unwittingly scraped it all away.**

That said, I will miss those blogs.  I don’t think many people will miss this one, but perhaps other subjects are ahead that I will yammer about endlessly, who knows — so they’ll have to put up with me anyway.  In the meantime I’ll write now and then, whenever something strikes my fancy.  And as always, I thank you for dropping by.

*I’ve read that Palin’s decision not to run for President did not displease the head of  Fox News Manufacturing; however, it was her really harebrained decision to announce it on an outlet other than Fox News that riled her bosses.  Apparently she is in such poor standing at Fox that at one point they were considering putting her on permanent leave until the end of her contract.

**For my point of view on  Palin’s infamous Arizona speech, posted near the time she made it, see this.  I note that my crystal ball was too cloudy to tell me that Palin had just taken herself out with no one’s assistance at all.  

Ain’t No Black Friday

In the last few days I’ve stumbled on a Faux-News right-winger sore spot: Black Friday.

I never would have guessed it, but I suppose I should have: these people become enraged when one criticizes Black Friday — almost as enraged as when you say there is no real “war on Christmas.”

I suppose next someone will say Black Friday is in the Bible and we should worship it.  Before that happens, however, I’d like just a moment to point a few things out to these people.

Yes, over the years marketers have noted that the day after Thanksgiving is one of the, if not the heaviest-sales day of the year for any kind of unnecessary junk you can imagine.   This was back in the days when nearly everyone got the day after U.S. Thanksgiving off.  Note that a large part of the previous sentence is in italics.  This is for emphasis.

Yes, Black Friday still is breaking records for sales.  But there are a number of things at work here, and none of them is in the Bible: (1) credit cards, (2) large numbers of people being out of work, which is the only reason they are free on Black Friday, since many businesses (retail among them) now ignore the formerly expected 4-day Thanksgiving holiday, and (3) retailers often give extreme discounts on made-in-China junk on that day, meaning that all that plastic money that doesn’t go into pockets of people like the Kochs goes out of the country.  Which is to say that if one is shopping that day because of a sense of patriotism, that patriotism is misguided or at least mislabeled.  What it really is, is extreme foolishness in the name of today’s conservatism which struggles to keep things as they never were.

Why do I hate Black Friday?  Because I know people whose Thanksgivings are ruined by it.  These are people who work in retail, who are only free to enjoy the holiday until, say, 5:00 p.m. because their employer, determined to make a mint the next day, has ordered them to be at work at midnight Friday.  Why do they do it? you ask.  Because they are afraid of losing their jobs, dummy.  That’s because the economy is so freaking WONDERFUL, you know.

Why do I hate Black Friday?  Because it detracts from Thanksgiving, which was a gift to us from Abraham Lincoln.  It was to be a day of thanking whatever deity you prefer for the harvest.  Just think: we who are so religious have trashed this faintly-religious holiday in favor of a false consumerism holiday leading up to another faux-Christian holiday that was usurped from the Pagans, who were the last ones to observe it seriously.

To put it another way, let’s just call Black Friday the real war on Christmas, because it exposes Christmas as what it really is: fake.  No deity ever asked anyone to go into massive credit card debt in the name of a solstice observance, okay?

Again, why do I hate Black Friday?  Because it creates a false sense of security that the economy is just fine, thank you.  To people who insist that Black Friday means all is well with the world, I have only one thing so say: what kind of economy is it that is only healthy one day a year, or only maintains health because of sales gained on one day a year?

Why do I hate Black Friday?  Because of the Jerry-Springer crowd who camp out in front of, say, Walmart and then trample, claw, scratch, maim, and even shoot each other while trying to grab the latest plastic junk first.  You know, all in the name of peace and love and Jesus.

One friend cited Christmas season hiring in retail as a sign of economic health, saying they “help people put food on the table.”  No.  All a temporary, minimum wage job does is give one enough money to buy gas to go stand in the unemployment line after Christmas.  You cannot feed a family on a Christmas-job wage.

This morning another friend cited attacks on Black Friday as attacks on Christmas.   In a way, she’s right.  But if you are determined to take this seriously and without too much thought, all I can say is this: if her Jesus were alive, he’d die all over again at that reasoning.

Here is all Black Friday is: corporate money-grubbing enabled by easy credit.  Take either of those factors away, my dears, and there ain’t no Black Friday.

And wonder of wonders, your churches are still standing anyway.

P.S. — to find out about and/or support the anti-Black Friday movement, see Buy Nothing Day.

Miscalculations

Imagine living in such a blinkered world that you have no idea what’s going on right in front of your face.  Okay, so you answered, “yeah, all you need to do is look at the nearest Republican.”  Smartass

It’s true.  But it still is astounding, isn’t it?

Just think of the recent Republican miscalculations: the Tea Party, Palin, Bachmann, Santorum, Perry, the economy, the environment, the right-wing assessment of the 99%ers, etc.

The teabagger movement, such as it is/was, can be counted as a backfire big enough to launch someone into space.  At its height, it was being touted as “concerned citizens getting involved,” and “patriots,” and blah, blah, blah.  Even with all the gun-toting, threats, and misspellings, no one in the mainline media had many bad things to say about them.  Even when it became apparent that the group was largely composed of astroturf, it didn’t seem to bother anyone enough to comment on it much.  The worst criticism was coming from comedians and bloggers.

At its height, the movement was tiny.  This was another thing that got distorted without much comment.

And then, like any corporate-bred fad, it started to fade.  But this fact was ignored.  The teabaggers were still considered so influential that a Republican Presidential candidate debate was held in the Tea Party’s name.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, the 99%ers started occupying Wall Street and other financial centers across the country.  Instantly there was a stark contrast that went largely ignored: the contrast between a “created” movement that simply existed to give the impression of massive hatred of Obama, and a natural-born protest movement born of years of economic outrages.

The reaction from the mainline media and the Faux News clowns?  OUTRAGE!  Hippies!  Communists!  Divisive!  Violent!  Losers without jobs who want a handout! Never mind that some 70% of the 99%ers are employed!

Which brings me to my next point: the economy.  Wow.  That was and is beyond a giant miscalculation.  But still, 3 years into the biggest economic failure in modern history, Republicans are still touting the very failed policies that landed us where we are now, and no bankers have gone to jail even though, as I’ve heard it, their outrages continue to the extent that  the U.S. taxpayer could end up paying for bank failures in Europe any day now.  That’s not paying for European WELFARE, mind you, it’s paying for their failing banks, which our banks have been bailing out, and now via some loophole are about to transfer the liability for that to US…meaning you and me.

So let’s look back 30 years, to the Reagan administration (with which most of this current crisis began), and ask, “how the hell was this supposed to work?”  And we will conclude that it didn’t and hasn’t and won’t.

Okay, so here we go:

Start by demonizing the unions.  Then erode the middle class.  Label the wealthy “job creators” and then reduce their taxes so they can “create more jobs.”  Demonize women, blacks, hispanics, and Muslims.  Jews are problematic, so we’ll loudly worship Israel at the same time we quietly hope all the Jews “go home.”  (This is a HUGE dilemma for right-wingers, who are actually quite anti-Semitic, and it is something that they are currently trying to project onto the 99%ers — thankfully without much luck so far.  Projection is a big thing with the right wing; whatever they accuse others of, you can be positive they themselves are guilty of.)

Meantime, ship millions of factory jobs to other countries.  Then demand that everything from janitorial work to CEO requires a college degree — or two or three — and then charge up to hundreds to thousands of dollars for each degree. Never forgive the gigantic loans most students have to have to get through school.  Then declare the degrees aren’t good enough and/or Americans are too expensive to hire (never mind that the biggest expense with most U.S. employees is HEALTH CARE COVERAGE which could be eliminated by that awful SOCIALIZED MEDICINE), and ship as many of the rest of the jobs overseas as we can, and to whatever extent is possible, hire immigrants at subsistence wages  to do what’s left.  Tell Americans that these immigrants are “Doing jobs (you) don’t want to do.”  Make it harder and harder to apply for a job, let alone get one.  Label those without jobs “losers” and condone efforts to keep them out of the job market, even as the government takes away their benefits.  Oh yes…meantime, exponentially increase the cost of housing wildly beyond inflation, even as you populate the builders’ payrolls with low-paid immigrants who are non-union.  Saddle homeowners with huge mortgages, then take away their jobs IF they have jobs.  Then foreclose on homes and call their former owners “losers.”

And oh yes…deregulate.  Promote the myth that regulation is a job killer.

While we’re at it, why don’t we talk about abortion to the exclusion of everything else?  Never mention the word “regulation” even as you are touting policies that would make women’s reproductive organs the most regulated things in the U.S.

Okay, tell me…how was this supposed to work?  And yet yesterday I read in the Chicago Sun-Times — in two columns, no less — that all this crap is still a good idea and we only need to keep making the same mistakes to make them work.  One even said that deregulation is the answer.  I mean, really.

I once heard a saying: if you keep doing the same thing, you’ll keep getting the same result.  And so it may be with the Republicans.  Right now they are rolling on bloated ambition born of their “success” in 2010.  But it’s another miscalculation, because what happened in 2010 was much like what happened in 1994.  I suppose it is only delusions of grandeur that are keeping the Republicans from seeing this.

So I say to them, go ahead, continue your war on women, your war on the middle class, your war on the environment.  Just keep thinking you have the majority on your side when in fact your support amounts to a fraction of a percentage of a minority. Dismiss the 99% out in the streets as hooligans and don’t think for a minute about what their collective  name actually means, or even a second about the set of circumstances that brought them there.

Great.  The more miscalculations, the better.  It may be the way to finally get rid of you all.

P.S. — Watch Old Fart’s take on abortion.  It’s priceless:

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The Sandwich Cookie Syndrome

Herman Cain.  Michele Bachmann.  (and even) Sarah Palin.

What do they have in common?  They’re all sandwich cookies.  I’d say the brand name but I don’t want some giant corporate conglomerate on my ass.  They aren’t worth the trouble.  Suffice it to say that the most popular sandwich cookie through the years has had vanilla frosting on the inside and chocolate cookies on the outside.  Other such cookies have different outsides and insides, but usually (not always), the basic scheme is the same: the outside is very different from the inside.

Many years ago I started to notice what I am now calling the Sandwich Cookie Syndrome.  No surprise that the first raging example to come to light was Phyllis Schlafly, that good old-fashioned white-bread “lady lawyer” who just HATES anything smacking of women’s rights, leave alone the fact that without women’s rights, she’d never have entered college let alone law school.

The primary symptom of the Sandwich Cookie Syndrome is that you label everything, but when the labels become inconvenient, then you put “oh, but s/he’s a GOOD *label*,” and the shortcoming of having a bad label is instantly overcome.

To put it simply, if you hate blacks, you support the “good” black Herman Cain.  If you hate women, you support things like Bachmann and Palin — “good” misogynous women.

And how are they “good?”  Well that’s easy.  They just take the conservative view on everything — the more extreme, the better.  Never mind the ironies, conflicts, cruelties, untruths, and outright lies; if you are “good,” they are forgiven because your presence is very comforting to the blinkered set.  Doubt it?  Then explain Cain, who seems to be too thick to accept any truth, Palin, to whom the truth is merely a vague inconvenience, and Bachmann, who is a complete stranger to the truth.  And that’s not even touching the issue of Stupid, which is equally present in all three of them.  But none of this seems to bother conservatives much — at least, not now.

Sandwich cookie-ism an easy ticket for the fame-hungry.  That is, it is an easy ticket until election day.  Then they find out the truth: a black is still black, and a woman is still a woman, and conservatives want neither for President.

And so in the end you are left with media pundits — you know, sorta like Sarah Palin *wink*.

Freaking Brilliant

Scorn in the U.S.A.