I think no. The Chief of Police should be fired, and several officers too. There is a chain of command at fault for the indefensible violence against citizens there. I hope the mayor will do the right thing and serve justice.
Category Archives: politics
A Post About Nothing
I haven’t been watching the Republican debates, and I’ll tell you why.
As a poet, I have walked out beyond the farthest city light and looked into the darkness gathered there. I have stared long into the abyss, and the abyss stared back at me. I was nonplussed, and the abyss was wholly unimpressed.
The void is hard to avoid as it is. So I’ve had all the nothing I care to contemplate.
Liberal and Conservative
Liberal and conservative are not mutually exclusive. They are not opposites. Ford is not the opposite of Chevy, Coke is not fundamentally different than Pepsi. It’s all an illusion, a myth perpetrated by people who make a very good living getting other people to buy their brand – their product or their thinking.
Mac and PC are both computers. But didn’t Apple do a great job with it’s “I’m a Mac” ad campaign? Conflate the product with the buyer’s personal identity, and away you go.
Conservative and liberal are impulses, not states of Being. Two sides of the same pancake, no matter how thin you make it; two points on the same continuum of social thought, two knots on the same string. In fact, they work very well together, in any brain capable of holding two apparently contradictory thoughts at the same time, and admitting that both might be valid. But that doesn’t work if the brain’s thinking is being done by someone else.
Pelosi is not the opposite of Boehner, Obama is not the opposite of Romney, Bachman or Cain. These are all politicians trying to get hired or keep their jobs. Funny that some of them can’t relate to millions of their fellow Americans who are trying to do the same thing.
In the end, somebody has to be hired to do the job, and it’s up to us to decide. Let’s hope we shake off this deep hypnotic state and learn to choose wisely.
So if Liberal is not the opposite of Conservative, what is? The opposite of each is the same: it’s indifference.
Separate Is Not Equal
This video really surprised me. I thought the question of separate schools for black and white children in the United States was resolved with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
But here we have the Koch Brothers, through their racist front group, Americans for Prosperity, trying to buy a board of education in NC. Why? So they can force black students to stay in their own “neighborhood schools.”
The Koch brothers also own a very bad political theatre company called the Tea Party.
I recommend watching the entire 11 minutes. You won’t get the story if you don’t. And it’s worth it.
Full screen version: http://www.youtube.com/v/2mbJhjCbwo8
final authority
What we should do about the tea party: Call their mothers. They weren’t raised this way.
The Last Word
I admired Keith Olbermann when he was calling George W. Bush on his evil ways. I have to say I admire him even more now. I don’t think there’s another commentator in America who could have pulled this off. And it’s one of the most worthwhile – and sobering – videos I’ve seen in a while.
Guess I’ll see you all at the barricades.
Illigitimatis non carborundum.
Reality Break
This speaks for itself.
click to enlarge
Move On Already!
I posted to Facebook early today, “Somebody tell me we’ll look back at this someday and laugh.” There’s been no response. I don’t think anybody out there feels that way. We feel used and betrayed, sold out. This debt ceiling business just isn’t any fun anymore.
So I signed a petition today on Moveon.org.
"No cuts. No deals. End this madness now and pass a clean debt ceiling increase so America doesn’t default."
On the petition, which you can access by clicking here if you choose, there is a space for personal comments. I’m always hesitant to sign some things that should really be directed to members of congress other than those who personally represent my part of the country. Living where I do, I am represented entirely by liberal Democrats. They send these petitions to the elected reps of the signer, based on zip code I suppose. And I want to say No! Send it to the asshats who are causing the problem!
But today I’m pissed off at the Legislature in general, both houses, both parties. And I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy about the other 2 branches of government either. Accordingly, with the temperature between my ears being what it is, here is what I wrote.
I know my Representative and Senators are not directly to blame, but I’m so mad right now I can’t stand it. We gave Congress our credit card and you went on a spending spree for wars we didn’t need or want and can’t afford to pay for. That’s why we’re in this mess: huge pork for the military-industrial complex. Knock it off! And make good on what we borrowed! Or it is your job.
No swear words. I was a good Boy Scout, considering. I mean, how much more of this unremitting anxiety can we tolerate from people who work for us?
I share this as a reminder to my readers that, although my blog is hopefully mostly a literary one, it started out in opposition to George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq, in the days leading up to Shock and Awe.
I remain forever and entirely opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have seen their effects on the innocents of those countries, on our troops and their families, on our culture and civil liberties, and now on our economy.
I guess my point is basically I told you so.
Here are a few links to share.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech on the Military Industrial Complex. He warned us.
Squelch – an obscure, anonymous, spleen-venting political blog. I like it – it’s a little like scratching a psychic itch.
Politico – a very good high-end site for political news of the day.
The Nation – venerable, comprehensive, and a favorite news and insight source of mine for about 30 years now. Not surprising, since they’ve been publishing since the Civil War.
Captain’s Blog Stardate 20110727
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."*
As a little kid I imagined future technology: cars without steering wheels, computers that spoke with us out of thin air. Humans would be different, all the same basic size and shape, carrying little communicators and wearing comfortable clothes.
Well, I was partly right. We’re getting the communicator thing down so well that I even the Sci-Fi writers of my youth didn’t imagine their power and ubiquity. And I don’t think the touchless, voice-controlled computer is very far off. (Our cell phones have voice commands, but they’re more reactive than interactive. Like the government.) We still have to steer the car, though Google is working on a Driverless Car right now; in fact, it already works for their engineers. I don’t think clothes have really changed very much.
I got one thing about future tech very wrong: I imagined that future being farther away that it turned out to be. I imagined the new world without me or you still in it. I thought the world of my childhood – in terms of our tools and toys – would be basically the same in my middle age, that technology would advance more slowly. I – we – would be long gone before cars looked like this.
That’s a 2012 Cadillac. Click to enlarge.
They say that one sign of intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory concepts in the mind at one type time, and accept them both as possibly valid. So I give you a couple of concepts to ponder: A typewriter and an Apple iPad. (The latter, you’ll notice is just a screen with keys, no keyboard at all.)
Click to enlarge.
Who would have thought that in a short time we would type without buttons or keys, and publish without paper? But if you sent out today to buy either a 1937 Royal desk typewriter or an Apple iPad, which would be easier to find? And easier to use? I’ve used a Royal typewriter and it was hard to make it work! People who did it for a living were called typists. It was a hard job for low pay and it no longer exists in the world, as far as I know.
Do any companies still have people who do word processing – transcribing dictation? I don’t know. That was common in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Guys like me would dictate memos, letters, etc., with recorders, then take the little tapes to be transcribed. Then we got our work back printed on thinly pressed slices of tree.
Which reminds me of one Fail in the future tech that’s here so far: The paperless office we were promised 15 or 20 years ago. I’ve been trying to accomplish it for years but I can’t get other people to cooperate. I guess that can be a rant for another day.
I guess one of the most compelling ways in which computer technology has changed our lives so far is that anyone who wants to do it can be a writer and a publisher. For example, you’re looking at a page of a digital periodical, an occasional publication for which I do the writing and publish using a free medium. And over the years, Metaphor has been read over 20,000 times. That’s right, over twenty thousand deliveries. Not too shabby for a little blog with one frequently complacent writer, no paper, no costs, no charges, no advertising, and a very passive delivery system. And anyone can do it.
What do you suppose would have been required for Benjamin Franklin to put his Poor Richard’s Almanac into the hands of 20,000 citizens? A lot of money, time and effort. A lot of trees, too.
So here we are, the same bunch of primates who thought push button phones, the TV remote and the CB radio were pretty cool. And we’re blogging and using VOIP and feeling thankful that the VCR went the way of the Dodo before we had to take an adult ed class to program that sunofabitch.
It occurs to me, though, that it’s all teetering on a house of cards. I have a copy of Leaves of Grass that was printed before the Great Depression, and it survived on shelf somewhere because no special system was required to sustain its existence there. Not so with the Great Terra of Infinite Terabytes of human thought that we now have suspended around the planet in vast server farms and countless hard drives. All of that requires an economy to keep it going. What would it take to make all the stuff we know as modern life online just go blip and disappear? Not much.
If Congress and the President fail to keep the lights of our tenuous, practically fictional economy burning next week, how far is it from default of the US to all the whirring drives of the Internet falling silent and blank? I mean we’re talking chain reaction, global economic meltdown, am I wrong?
I worry more about things like that, than whether Google+ is better than Facebook; more about America without Social Security and Medicare than about keyboards without keys.
New prime directive: the cloud must be sustained.
*Quote: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
What would the founders say?
I’ve been working on taking a large part of my novel in process and rewriting it in the voice and point of view of my subject family’s patriarch. I mean the grandfather of the family. His point of view, the history of suffering and God-mandated hard work and the planting of trees so that others might benefit from shade, is the most interesting of the voices in my head lately.
I’ll give you a sample in a moment. First, to the subject line of this post. I don’t mean the founders of America. I mean the founders of our families. Our grandparents and parents; our tree of the knowledge of love and sacrifice.
An hour ago, I turned on The Daily Show and watched John Stewart begin his nightly diatribe on the topic of impending national doom. I saw the president speak in a way that could only serve to feed our unremitting anxiety. I turned it off. It was making me sad and sick at heart. And I thought to myself it is a merciful God who has given so many Americans full and productive lives of building a nation of dreams, but took them to Himself before they saw such a day of purblind governmental stupidity. It’s too bad that so many more – who’ve worked just as hard – are forced to see it now.
I believe my grandparents would be outraged and ashamed that Washington has driven us to this point. And that our leaders are willing to leap from behind the wheel and watch the whole thing just go rolling over a cliff. For nothing but asinine and petty politics. I believe they would feel their sacrifices – those of their generation including the dead and bereaved of many wars – have been entirely betrayed.
What the hell happened to Yes We Can? How did We The People so completely screw up the simple yet desperately difficult task of voting for responsible people that now we have no one in government with the sense God gave a block of wood? There is nobody in the capital city able to stand up and say We are going to make this right, do the next right thing, at the very least the job we were hired to do. Don’t worry, we are competent and the system works. Nope, every last one of them regardless of party are determined to prove the opposite, that they are worthless and unworthy, corrupt and incompetent.
I am reminded of a line from the series Deadwood, in which the character Wolcott says:
I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness, but I am not a government official.
Anyway, here’s some Grandpa. From two different sections of text. He’s not my Grandpa or yours, but maybe we can find some truth in him.
I brought my family west in 1942. We dragged up and rolled out of Joplin following a trail of postcards sent by a cousin on my wife’s side, a witless unwashed little bastard who had come ahead in search of work. I tried to talk her out of it, said we had friends and kin and possibilities and the Lord seemed pleased to see us grow where we were planted, but she would not be diverted. Those postcards were full of promises and hope. California was a land of unlimited harvest, he said, where for practically nothing a man could claim a piece of land as wide and rich as his dreams, and have no one to argue with but the bees.
I remember how that long damn road across New Mexico went on and on like the devil himself had laid it with a taut line leading west out of Texas into hell. We had a pickup truck, a 1937 Chevrolet with no air in it and not much air outside either. We dragged a little two wheel trailer behind us for our possibles, making six wheels in all and between there and here every tire blew out or ran flat more than once.
…
When I came out of the bank they were waiting for me in the little park across the street and up the block. The sun had filled the day with shining. I had my old leather valise in my hand and the papers were in it. I put it against my chest and gave it a pat for good luck because it held the instrument of all our hopes. Standing on the corner, I could see them up the street, my family. They were waiting in the little plaza. John was hanging like a monkey on the muzzle of the antique Army gun, swinging like it was made to be a toy and not a relic of death from the Mexican war. Lillian was sitting on a bench watching him play, holding our baby. I saw how small they looked compared to the buildings, the trees and the California sky. But I felt pretty small myself, in relation to the contract I had signed. Small against the work we’d have to do to pay the note, to coax good fruit from serious and stoic trees. But the grass was green in the little park and the flag on the pole next to the canon was earnest, and the sky was very blue. The little town of Cortina – our new home – sat around us faintly humming with the engine of people in an early summer afternoon. We were strangers here entirely, but with many friends we just hadn’t met yet. And a loan had been made to me in good faith. So in my mind – to very young Jim Geister, far from home and his people – anything was probable and everything was good.
Leave the Wolves in Peace
Sometimes I get emails from environmental groups, asking for petition action. I usually like to add a little something to their boilerplate text, just to personalize it. Here’s one that came through today, with my addition in bold.
As a supporter of Defenders of Wildlife and someone who cares about wildlife, I strongly urge you to practice sensible, science-based management of the wolves in your state.
European settlers and their descendants have been obsessively slaughtering the wildlife on this continent for 400 years. It can’t possibly be that much fun anymore. If those of you in authority can’t support the animals and their environment, at least do something to see that they’re left in peace.
The benefits of wolves are well documented. They bring tourist dollars (millions near Yellowstone) and improve ecosystems by preventing overgrazing by elk, deer and caribou.
I know, right? 🙂
Hunting isn’t a sport, it’s just murder. Just one guy’s humble opinion.
You Tell ‘Em, Ladies
I’m glad the government shutdown last night was turned out be no worse than yet still again another government clusterf—k narrowly averted. But we the people should not forget – because we have to vote again – just what the issues boiled down to.
Metaphor 