If the only sort of “oppression” I face is Giant asking me to check my bag, which was only a bad stop-loss plan perpetuated by some supermarket manager, or even that McDonald’s lackey 20 years earlier with a fixation for guys in hair-nets, I’m pretty lucky. Not like it’s a matter of national policy or tradition which some forms of racism and sexism certainly are. The irony hasn’t escaped me that the same guy forced to carry out this bag check has probably been followed around retail stores on a regular basis, and this sort of “surveillance for being black” behavior has been reported enough times as to transcend just being one person’s personal anecdote.
Of course this whole tale I’m telling is completely subjective. I’m assuming my being asked to check my bag was a function of my gender or appearance. It’s not as though I stuck around and surveyed the situation to see if various people of different type or similar bag were asked to check their’s in. So although the story is sort of amusing from the “look at me being oppressed” slant, it really doesn’t mean a thing.
The incident however seemed to mean something, if only as a convincing personal anecdote of oppression, because I had scratched my head over this post by Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon:
While cruising around the website Stuff Nobody Likes, I have to admit that this post about members of the doucheoisie who walk around talking on their Bluetooth earpieces cracked me up. I have, on more than one occasion, mistaken some dude talking on his earpiece for a dude doing what some creepy dudes all too often unfortunately do, which is start talking to random women for no real reason and to the benefit of no one. When dudes start to talk to me in public like this, I usually pointedly ignore them, which is a different thing than just plain ignoring someone. Which means that if I’ve been standing around or walking along and a dude with a Bluetooth earpiece starts talking in it behind me, and I found myself pointedly ignoring someone who actually took no notice of me in the first place. Then I feel bad, like I insulted this dude whose major crime was low level phone douchebaggery, instead of the higher level douchebaggery of treating women like we’re public property. At what point I feel I should return to just plain ignoring him instead of pointedly ignoring him, but that’s actually a much harder trick to pull off than it seems. I’d suggest that the solution is that people who are talking on phones in public should actually talk on phones so we know what they’re doing, but then that seems awfully close to blaming the victim of pointed ignoring behavior. Not sure what the solution is, because being open to any asshole talking to me is also not a solution.
Amanda is herself involved neck-deep in a shit-storm of perceived racism, which I’ve been tempted to write about provided I could find an angle where I had any standing. The blow up over charges that she plagiarized from a fellow blogger (a charge so damaging to any writer’s reputation that it should be minutely documented, which it hasn’t been to my satisfaction) who was, not incidentally, a prominent Woman of Color (WoC) in the blogosphere (adding even more damaging racist overtones to simple appropriation) gave way to even more subjective and damaging accusations that some of the chapter illustrations in her recent book,It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments contain images that you don’t have to squint at too hard for them to seem, at best, thoughtless if not outright racist. You can dive head-first into the bottomless discussion of this in the Feministe post, I Guess It’s a Jungle in Here Too, Huh?
I’d link to the aggrieved blogger in question, but since she deleted her site and a related WoC blogger has also quit, rendering her blog “invite only”, there really isn’t much of a point.
Considering all that, it doesn’t surprise me that Marcotte is eager to re-affirm her victimhood status, at the hands of…well, it isn’t exactly The Patriarchy, is it? It’s simply random creepy guys. I’m not sure if “creepy” has a race or class component to it, or simply means someone who isn’t inherently attractive enough, or maybe it’s just a characteristic related to the mutant “Y” chromosome. The only thing Marcotte finds more distasteful than “creepy dudes” is “nice guys” which, although she fudges the definition of what a “nice guy” is by adding a component of male sexual entitlement I haven’t read anything to suggest that she doesn’t consider the two terms to cover the range of men. At least either is more specific than some women’s free-floating and self-serving definition of what makes a “real man”, which is often tied to the expediency of the moment, subject to change without notice, and embodying two dozen characteristics, half of which are contradictory and impossible for any one human being to have.
This is, incidentally, why “good men”, much less “real” ones, are so hard to find, in much the same way you don’t often trip over square circles and balls that are red and green all over, especially if you have some polemical interest in complaining about their absence.
I admit to being annoyed myself by “nice guys” like that, if only for their being excessively naive for not realizing that they can’t slide by merely through being “nice”. They have to be tall, wealthy, high-status and, paradoxically, infinitely spineless and malleable too. Otherwise they might be mistaken for being “creepy”. If only someone could make an educational film that explains the difference.
Ticket to Hell punched. All aboard.
When the “creepy” aren’t actually displaying the effrontery to walk right up and talk to her, she imagines guys talking on their Bluetooth are doing exactly that, leading to all sorts of effort to pointedly ignore someone who didn’t need ignoring in the first place.
I assume it’s good practice, though.
How long does it take to pointedly ignore someone whose conversation has nothing to do with you? Perhaps if one isn’t used to actually listening to people, particularly if those people happen to be male, it can take longer than expected. I don’t know if there’s a clinical term for someone who thinks anyone talking near them are necessarily talking to them. But then, it isn’t just anybody, is it? I find it pretty damn fascinating that this phenomena doesn’t seem to occur to Marcotte when nearby women are using their Bluetooths. I’ve had women look me right in the eye, seem to ask something in the most accusatory fashion, and then when I almost dive over a potted plant, give me the most screwed up look because I didn’t notice the Bluetooth they had concealed under their hair. At least with most men you have a fair chance of noticing that they are wearing the fucking thing in the first place.
Not all the shit being heaped on Marcotte is at all justified. Which, considering the stuff she writes about, just contributes to the feeling of gleeful, skipping schadenfreude in some people. Still, I can’t blame Amanda Marcotte for needing to do a post where she’s obviously gone to her happy place. A place, oddly enough, where the term-of-abuse “douchebag” — a device for sluicing out a woman’s vagina — is used.
I think the non-sexist term “enema bulb” should be employed instead, because it works on assholes regardless of gender.
The problem with this game — and perhaps this is where I do have standing to comment as an arch-skeptic, evangelical Atheist and general buzz-kill — is that combining ideology and subjectivity, essentially treating the world like one-big Rorschach test for one’s revealed truth, is ridiculously easy. I wouldn’t have fixated on that one silly Bluetooth post except that it demonstrates a level of self-serving subjectivity that is truly stunning. I would never put Identity Politics and Feminism in the same category as various pseudosciences, but at the low level of the “blogosphere”, they can easy become a game of seeing what you want to see and hearing what you want to hear, taking on the qualities of pareidolia and Electronic Voice Phenomena.
Some might argue that’s the way it’s sometimes played at the higher levels too.
I really doubted that men just walking up to women and engaging in conversation is that common, but I’m probably wrong about that. Maybe I was just raised extra polite. More likely, the kind of guy that does this is probably also has the sort of low animal cunning to not to act out around some other people who might take offense. Hence my haven’t witnessed this much myself.
I have to admit, a recent email sent by a female e-friend concerning a drunken male acquaintance’s attempts at arranging a “booty call” make me wonder if I really have no idea what’s going on in the heads of some men. Obviously, in any given population there are just a number of dysfunctional individuals. Although I’d be interested (and personally horrified) if this turns into a trend. To be fair though, I’ve had my own experiences with women who should have their heads cryogenically frozen on the off-chance that future generations can figure out what their malfunction is, provided there’s a “Do Not Resuscitate” sticker involved.
Ah, segue: The sick irony of Amanda Marcotte walking right into charges of not only being racist, but a Feminist of the entitled white woman variety, is obvious, as the above is exactly the sort of subjective, “the personal is political”, game that she seems to love playing.
You just don’t see wingnuts ritually sacrificing each other like this.
Then again, it’s not as if various people getting pissed off at Amanda Marcotte for being thick represents a major schism. However, to the extent this represents another skirmish and a widening rift between Feminists (disgruntled Women of Color variety), and Feminists (whiny entitled white women variety), it might. Considering how people like James Dobson are going to get off on such a fight, it might as well be fought in a sports bar with a wading pool of canola oil as a ring.
Everyone playing this gotcha game is potentially lining up for their own shit-kicking. People who start to impose purity tests, like the most eager justice trolls in The Reign of Terror, eventually fall victim to the same instrument themselves. From one of the initial posts on Marcotte’s fall from grace, aided by a lot of hands willing to give a good push:
If you go look at some of the other postscropping up about this incident, there’s a theme of investigating “the facts.” Who was where on which date, when did this or that get written, who had prior knowledge of what other writing? And so forth.
I understand the desire to try to establish individual wrongdoing or innocence — to try and prevent the same thing from happening again, whatever position you’re taking. But as I have tried to say at length before, I think the discussion of individual guilt often distracts from the bigger picture of racial injustice.
Uh, what? The facts don’t matter when there’s a “bigger picture”? Interesting. If this bigger picture isn’t based on facts, what exactly is it composed of? I suspect it’s made of the same stuff that paves the road to Hell, and has nothing to do with good intentions. That kind of nonsense reminds me of Edmund Cohen’s observation in The Mind of the Bible Believer, which also works for many forms of Eric Hoffer’s True Believers, that people like this are less concerned with finding the truth as using The Truth, which is synonymous with their dogma, to construct a “…form of social relations…set up so as to dig a psychological moat around the believers.”
Sad.
Haven’t we had more than enough of the “psychological moats” of people who have bankrupted the United States, shaved away at the Bill of Rights, continue to attempt to impose theocracy and outright murdered tens of thousands of people and endangered a good part of the rest of the world, simply because they are very powerful, very wealthy, very, very crazy people who think they construct their own reality?
Imagine all the sexism and racism that they carry in their wake. Not questionable racism and sexism subject to interpretation, but the real, unequivocal kind born of a deep irrationalism and carried like a sledgehammer. They aren’t unintentionally and apologetically racist and sexist, it’s a policy. People like them don’t even resort to discredited 19th century ideas of anthropometry and “hysteria” to justify their bias: They’ve got Genesis, man’s dominion over animals, ribs and the Children of Ham. And when that doesn’t work, or contradicts what they were going to do anyway, they are more than happy to just make shit up.
Although I fully appreciate the concerns of Women of Color, Feminists and those not necessarily related people who really like to raise shit-storms on the Internet, I think it might be far better for everyone concerned, if they don’t actually join the Reality-Based Community, at least pay it a visit once in a while.
A passage from The God Delusion leaps out at me. In it Richard Dawkins discusses “group selection” of populations, a concept which he himself doesn’t buy into. Still, consider the quote from Darwin:
When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into
competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe
included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful
members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid
and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the
other….Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without
coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities
would spread and be victorious over other tribes: but in the course of
time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by
some other tribe still more highly endowed.
Incidentally, it’s probably significant that we now cringe at Darwin’s use of the term “man” as all-inclusive, when today we would probably use the term “people”. Darwin similarly uses the term “race” in the sub-title of The Origin of Species (”the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”) in a way that should also make us cringe until we realize that Darwin wasn’t using the word “race” as we currently do. The cringing shows how consciousness-raising over gender and race has some success.
In any case, the tribe we should be warring with have lots of guns, money and resources instead of spears, although the ways of the witch doctor, even if he calls himself Christian and broadcasts from a mega-church, remains the same. “We” being rational progressive sort of folks. Males — nice, creepy or otherwise — included. I would hate to start thinking of some people who I would like to include in that camp, ostensibly fellow progressives, as more and more “they”.
Yes, it’s still a jungle: Act accordingly and once you’ve figured out who your group is, consider what’s best for that group’s survival.
Being a Saturday, I didn’t intend to do much of anything except clean up my apartment and do laundry. I had also tried to work in the possibility of a nice long bike ride along the Mount Vernon Trail, which skirts the Potomac River all the way down to George Washington’s old place, hence the origin of the name. However, from past experience I know that last bit never happens: Tasks like cleaning up and doing laundry always expand to fill and exceed the time alloted to them. Which is just as well, because today I had to call my ex-wife and wish her a happy birthday, one of those uncomfortable, painful sort of obligations considering the circumstances, one of which is her chemotherapy, besides which giving the toilet a good Pine-Sol clean pales in comparison.
I’ve accepted a sort of inductive probability about the weekends: Saturday I do the things I need to do and so leave Sunday open for what I want to do. Which means the weather on Sunday is invariably abysmal. It’s been rainy and miserable the past few Sundays. You’d think it would make me switch the order, but really, it’s hard for me to do what I want to do before doing what I have to do. That is, when I don’t procrastinate entirely.
You have no idea how many times I came this close to solving all the world’s problems, describing a workable Grand Unified Theory and figuring out, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, how the world could be made a good and happy place without anyone having to get nailed to a tree. Except, there were those damned dishes in the sink that needed to be done first.
There’s a laundry room in my building, but they have a half dozen washing machines of dubious reliability and only three dryers. Which means someone usually does a couple loads of laundry and splits their drying among the three machines, following a general principle of solipsism that not everyone follows, but enough do to be notable. Few things are as boring and irritating as sitting around a laundry room with a heap of just washed clothes in a wet heap, feeling lint suffocated and getting vertigo watching someone’s handful of underwear doing cartwheels in the dryer. Of course, once the cycle is done there’s the additional half hour or so wait for the person to come back to retrieve their stuff. Yes, I know I can take other people’s stuff out of the dryer after a reasonable time, but I figure that handling some woman’s undies in even the most clinical way, simply because I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day stuck in a laundry room, is enough to get a listing on the sex offender registry.
So this afternoon after some dusting and mopping, I loaded up my laundry into a big duffel bag to stagger off a couple blocks to the laundromat where I could toss everything into a big commercial washer and dryer. It actually saves time that way. I also brought along my sling backpack so during the wash cycle I could nip off to the Giant supermarket across the street and pick up some milk and coffee.
I walk through the automatic doors at Giant, grabbing a plastic basket as I enter, and am not three steps off the rubber mat when some guy who just radiates “trainee assistant manager” steps in my path and announces “You can’t come in here with that”.
With what? I almost looked behind me to see if I was being followed by a stray dog.
“Your bag. You can’t come in here with that.” he says.
I point to a woman a little ways up the produce aisle and indicate her bag, “What about her?”
“That’s not a bag, that’s a pocketbook,” he corrects me.
“Oh, and that?” I ask, pointing to a woman at the checkout carrying an enormous bag that at least met, if not exceeded, the capacity of my sling bag.
The woman in line was carrying one of those bags that must have contained everything she ever thought she might have needed in the past six months. Recently there was a news story about a woman who tried to board a plane with a pistol in her bag. She was summarily arrested, but the judge bought her explanation that she didn’t intend to bring the gun with her, she just forgot it was in the bag. I tend to believe her too. Although it’s not just women who do this, apparently singer Harry Connick Jr. once managed the same sort of handgun-in-bag brain fart:
Officials say there is no typical profile of those who try to board an airplane with a gun. Violators run the gamut of occupations and ages, although 54 percent are between the ages of 21 and 39. Security officials also say an increasing number of violators are women.
Of course, this guy wasn’t worried about me bringing contraband into his Giant. Rather, he was telling me that by virtue of my gender or general appearance, he thought I was exactly the sort of person who would be loading up my knapsack with steak and Moonpies and happily skipping out.
Yes, he’s black. And he’s profiling me. Some days I just don’t get the full benefits of being a member of the white male hegemony of control and oppression. I’ll have to speak to the union about this.
“That’s a pocketbook too,” he says. I was half tempted to open up a dialog on the teleological difference between a knapsack and a pocketbook, taking the side that there really isn’t a difference, but realized that, to his way of thinking, if it is carried by a woman, everything up to and including a body bag with an actual corpse in it would be considered a pocketbook.
I put on my best “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” face and asked what I was supposed to do with my bag.
“I put it behind the counter,” he said, referring to the small, completely open and accessible to anyone, Customer Service counter behind me, “That’s what the manager wants.”
The manager? Well, that’s alright then, guy. If it’s coming from that high a level rather than just being your own fucked up little whim-of-the-day, who am I to question it?
“Do you check it in?” I asked.
Now he’s just getting irritated. Obviously whatever plan the manager on duty was implementing, he hadn’t thought everything through, or worse, didn’t feel like he needed to.
“No you just put it behind the counter, I’ll be right here,” he explains.
For some reason, that wasn’t particularly reassuring.
“Do you have a release?” I ask.
“A what?” he shakes his head. This conversation has lasted some fifteen seconds and already I’m tagged as an arch-troublemaker.
“Something you sign to assume responsibility for the value of the bag and its contents.” I say. Sure, this isn’t necessary, but at any place like a hat check or rental lockers (if such a thing still exists) they clearly post the limits of their liability. Something Giant failed to do.
Although my bag was mostly empty, save for my reading glasses and a copy of Dawkin’s The God Delusion, should watching clothes dry not be intellectually stimulating enough, I could very easily have had a couple grand worth of camera equipment in it, or even something as small with little intrinsic value, albeit priceless, as a thumb drive with recent work on it. See “without anyone having to get nailed to a tree” above.
“Wait, let me get someone…” he says, scurrying off. Get who? The manager? A goon? The Department of Homeland Security? In any case, it was the universal signal for escalation, which I tend to avoid. No, really. I love a good argument, but there is such a thing as picking one’s battles and this one was shaping up to be worse than irritating by becoming boring fast. Probably what was going to happen was some actual assistant manager who was mentoring this guy was about to to come over and tell me exactly the same thing, forcing me to rewind and replay the whole incident a second time, ending with some ultimatum about me making a choice whether or not I really wanted to keep my property on my person, or shop at Giant.
I was only there to pick up some odds and ends. Cutting losses is easy. Mine, anyway.
This particular strip mall, which has been undergoing a gutting in the name of development for the past couple years, only contains that Giant supermarket and a Giant Pharmacy. There used to be in that strip of stores a barber shop, a beauty supply place, a dollar store and the much missed Cowboy Cafe, which had greasy food and warm beer, but compensated with pool tables and live music . All of this semi-ghost town is part of Arlington, Virginia’s abortive Columbia Pike Initiative, which I assume will initiate nothing so much as driving a stake through the heart of local businesses in favor of high-end franchises. That monopoly, coupled with the closing and tearing down of an adjacent Safeway supermarket that had been there at least 40 years, has apparently given Giant an attitude, if not brain damage.
So I walked to the Giant Pharmacy on the other side of this L-shaped strip mall, which stocks milk and coffee, and picked up what I needed. And no, I didn’t have to check in my bag there, meaning what was going on at that Giant supermarket was all one manager’s initiative. I got the number for Giant corporate from the pharmacy, but won’t bother following this up until I go back in a couple days to see if that store is still bashing away with this capricious bag-check policy.
Walking out of the Giant Pharmacy I remembered a time some twenty years ago when, in college and in a fit of financial desperation, I actually put in a job application at McDonalds, just as a fall-back plan in case some other part-time job didn’t pan out. My hair has always been longish, except when I cut it all off to donate to Locks of Love (which I did before my ex wife even got cancer). McDonald’s informed me right out in what passed for their interview, that I either had to cut my hair or wear a hair net. I looked behind the counter and noticed women with long hair who weren’t wearing hair nets and pointed it out to that assistant manager type.
Yes, the Creationists march on or, rather, they keep trying to get themselves through the school yard gates and into impressionable young minds using their Trojan Horse of Scientific Creationism/Intelligent Design with the rather disingenuous emphasis on “equal time” for “competing theories”.
TALLAHASSEE, FL — Teachers are one step closer being able to openly criticize the theory of evolution in the classroom.
As if they couldn’t before? The issue was never whether a teacher could criticize evolution. That happens all the time, even in the scientific community, something which Creationists with their “God of the Gaps” thinking are more than happy to exploit. The issue is whether teachers can teach non-scientific nonsense, specifically ones with a religious foundation, in science classrooms.
In a vote of 21 to 17, Florida’s State Senators adopted the evolution education bill, also known as the “Academic Freedom Act.”
Sort of like the “Clear Skies Initiative” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, for that matter. Coming soon from the Department of Obvious Euphamism: The “Happy Puppy Program” where, of course, strays are fed anti-freeze and beaten with ball-peen hammers.
Math and Science experts submitted a new set of education standards earlier this year, standards that were adopted by Florida’s State Board of Education. Now, teachers will teach fewer topics but in greater depth.
In other words, they cut down the curriculum to make room for Creationism. Cute.
One subject facing scrutiny is the in-depth teaching of evolution.
Actually, the real “scrutiny” will come, as it always does, ever since Scopes, when this sort of “science by legislative fiat” is challenged in the courts. Last time around, in Kitzmiller v. Dover, (or, if you have the time, watch an interesting Nova program on the case) Judge Jones found for the plaintiff challenging the teaching of Intelligent Design in science classrooms and accused the Dover school board of “breathtaking inanity”.
Legislation like this, although irritatingly stupid and disingenuous, shows how Creationism is losing over time. Used to be the law tried to outright ban the teaching of Evolution. Then the demand was for “equal time” followed by Creationism repackaged in various ways that still didn’t pass the laugh test. Now they are down to “criticizing Evolution”, perhaps as a tacit admission that, what ever Creationism is, it has no theory itself that can be taught.
State Senator Ronda Storms sponsored the legislation that would allow teachers to teach theories that contradict the theory of evolution.
Wait a minute. Did you catch that slight-of-hand? The legislation was supposed to support “criticizing Evolution”, but somewhere, through the back door, obviously, we also get allowing “teachers to teach theories”.
Interesting. What “theories”, I wonder?
For some strange reason, I suspect that “theories that contradict the theory of evolution” won’t include 101 different multi-cultural, inter-faith creation myths, including this one:
I wonder if the same religious people so concerned with “equal time” and “competing theories” would allow someone to teach, say, something equally fictional in their Sunday schools–compared to both Creationism and the Bible — like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.
Fair is fair.
Children should be exposed to all “theories” concerning Jesus, including the one where he knocks up Mary Magdalene.
Odd: It’s been two years since I’ve posted anything of substance on this site and really, even squinting a little harder at the news lately doesn’t reveal to me that much of anything has changed. Or rather, if there is a change, it’s for the worse. Yes, our eight-year nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over. Not peace and prosperity in the past eight years, the eight years before that.
I’m no doubt going to be biting off a big chunk of current events in passing here, but as you may have noticed during this past eight years, the economy is tanked, Iraq is still spiraling down into a singularity of pure, crushing Hell that makes every post-apocalyptic scenario Americans have always feared, usually in the form of movie entertainment, look positively PG-rated by comparison. But since this a Hell is mostly happening to the Iraqis, and only shared with America proper through the troops we’ve placed there, it’s hard to get a blip on most American’s give-a-shit-o-meter. And that’s the Americans who don’t think all Iraqis past the zygote stage are potential terrorists, a variation on the “nits make lice” argument that was so popular during Manifest Destiny. And as if that kind of thinking hasn’t made us enough enemies, the recession seems to have turned the decades long game of “let’s make a buck with China” into, and I couldn’t believe it even as I watched, Lou Dobbs on TV the other night warning people about the growing threat of cheap coat hangers from China.
Thanks Lou. See that big building over there? That’s a Wal-Mart. Apparently there’s a whole lot of that going on in there. You’ll go in there fighting, and you’ll come out with golf clubs.
Pissing off the Chinese is a bad idea not only because there’s 1.3 billion of them, but because ever since we exported our entire infrastructure over there, the thing they’re clutching in their hands is our short hairs.
Incidentally, even with my ex-wife (whose is Chinese) sick from chemotherapy, I have little doubt she’d be one of the first in the People’s Liberation Army version of Stukkas dive-bombing Tibet if she could. I am, of course, exaggerating. But not by much. Those Chinese can be just like that. “That” meaning like the dreaded flag-waving, patriotism as thinly-disguised sociopathology, all-American asshole.
And even with all that, in a recent Democratic presidential debate, two hacks with hairdos from ABC — one having been a professional hack for the Clinton administration, the other just playing one on TV — asked Obama about his not wearing an American flag lapel pin, as if this hasn’t been endlessly obsessed over by bastions of the “liberal media” like CNN.
See, there’s a learning curve. And some people, not just people who work for Fox News, mind you, make a living acting like circus clowns sliding down the left-hand side of the curve. Simple distraction is fine, but if they can grab someone’s ankle and take them along into the double-digit IQ range, all the better.
As far as I can make out, whatever Obama stands for, it’s mostly good things. What’s probably more important is that John McCain stands for more of the same. And some people love more of the same.
You know that failed, inhumane, built-on-lies, once a mere debacle, now an epic Wagnerian cluster-fuck going on in Iraq? Yeah, whatever else McCain believes in, he believes in doing more of that. John Kerry almost won the last election, despite running an anemic campaign, simply on the basis of his tepid opposition to the Iraq War. So McCain’s self-consciously Reaganesque “stay the course” intractability should make him ineligible for the presidency.
Unfortunately, a being a block-head never stopped anyone from being president. And then there’s my opinion that anyone who actually professes a desire to be president should be given a CT-scan instead.
McCain should be ineligible on the basis of not enough people voting for him. Then again, coming up short in elections hasn’t exactly been an insurmountable problem for the Republican party, what with people like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell on board. Honestly, you tell the American voting public some of the shenanigans those two pulled and no one will believe you. Although these days holding up a copy of Greg Palast’s work is grounds enough for a good tasering. Admittedly, Andrew Meyer was asking dumb-assed questions about Skull and Bones, but the mere fact that so many people support the police jolting someone to the ground, then telling him to get up, then jolting him some more when he can’t, simply because he was being a dick, tells you all you need to know about the state of discourse in this country: Lots of people don’t like it. Questions. They bother some people. A lot.
Some of the people bothered have guns, others have microphones. Or have media conglomerates. Others, it seems, stick their fingers in their ears and hum.
Anyway, consider the additional years of pure fail in Iraq since 2004 that McCain’s obviously not learned from. Even Hillary Clinton has learned a thing or two, but her initial support the Bush policy of pre-emptive war, using evidence that people knew at the time was a load of rubbish and too thin to provide even laughable plausible deniability after the fact, makes her ineligible to be President. That and the CT-Scan.
Happily, like the Creationist Intelligent Design people creepily hanging around a school board near you, the people with the worst ideas are very often able to repackage them, slick marketing and all, for another try at making a sale. Once they get entrenched, the salesmen may change, but the super-sized sack of crap they’re selling remains the same. Of course, with some institutions we’re not supposed to point out it’s crap. The only problem in America is that pointing it out just isn’t done. The major engine of our dysfunction, unfortunately, continues to get a pass. Religion may be nonsense, but it also goes a long way to explain why all manner of nonsense gets dressed up in a religious guise.
It’s obvious where someone like John McCain comes in: To resell the Iraq War. Problem is he’s not that slick, especially by fundamentalist huckster standards. After all, without substance, all they have to sell is style. That and fear. The fact that America is such a religious nation, and a proud, smug, self-righteously religious nation at that, seems to go hand in hand with Americans being susceptible to liars, snake-oil salesmen and people selling poison in pretty packages. I sense a connection there.
Unfortunately recalcitrance and willful stupidity is often a highly successful strategy in America. Because some people think it’s a virtue for people to stand up for what they believe in, regardless of how many times what these people believe in is demonstrated to be tragically wrong.
To give the Creationists credit, I don’t believe for a minute they buy into half the nonsense they spew. Although, I have to admit that a Nixon apologist like Ben Stein, appearing in the film “Expelled” at an unwitting theater near you, may be just that thick. Stein seems to think Evolution (or “Darwinism” if you want to talk like a fundamentalist propagandist) is bad because of what the Nazis did. The being thick part comes in when Stein, after The Flying Spaghetti Monster only knows how long he spent on this project, never seems to realize, by sheer will or sensory grating or some irreducible stupidity, that Eugenics and “Social Darwinism” is the exact opposite of differential reproductive success by means of Natural Selection or, in a word, “Darwinism”.
Although these Intelligent Design whack jobs use of bastardized quotes seems to tip the scales away from their merely being thick in favor of the theory that they are following the tried and true wing-nut tactic of just making shit up. Apparently their ends justify their means when it comes to promoting a quasi anti-Darwinist agenda. “Quasi” because they’d have to get Darwinism right before they can actually be against it. Fighting straw men over how we teach biology is annoying enough, doing it in Iraq when the not so straw men have real guns, has proven to be deadly. Although, it might help if the Creationists/Intelligent Design proponents (which can be shortened to IDiots) actually got around to having a theory themselves. What IDiots are against is a straw man they’ve constructed as the thin edge of the wedge in a fight against The Enlightenment, if not Rationalism itself, with an eye to establishing an eventual de jure theocracy to supplant the lame de facto theocracy they are frustrated to live in.
Poor things. They can’t get it their way all the time. Just most of the time.
That’s what happened since religious people can’t use stoning as a persuasive tool. And once you accept the Biblical literalism –and Creationism is a poor cover for that — not only in place of science and reason, by legal fiat or otherwise, as science and reason isn’t the other stuff, like the stoning and laying waste to God’s enemies, soon to follow?
The political value of just such a strategy is immediately apparent, especially if you haven’t been in a coma since inspectors in Iraq were given the bum’s rush so the current administration could usher in Shock and Awe. If people either can’t or won’t accept what’s really a perfectly simple idea supported by irrefutable evidence like Evolution (denial doesn’t count as refutation), then what hope is there of people comprehending the complexities of foreign policy or, more to the point, extricated themselves from a foreign policy that’s failed a dozen times over? Coupled with that, the tendency for these people to talk about the War on Terror in the medieval language of the Crusades, is especially chilling.
Well, you see some people have faith. Used to be that faith was something that the people who had it were willing to die for: Burned at the stake, fed to wild beasts, crucified upside-down, that sort of thing. Conveniently for the modern American faithful, however, their kind of faith is more often than not the sort of faith that other people die for. Although no one has been crucified upside-down. Yet.
I’m willing to give McCain the same benefit of the doubt: That he doesn’t believe half the nonsense that comes out of his mouth about Iraq. He just finds it politically expedient to mouth it. Not only is believing it/mouthing it only necessary should he become president, but necessary in order for him to become president in the first place. Like IDiots, it would help if he had a plan. Unfortunately “same old shit” isn’t exactly a plan. Even more unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter. At least not leading up to the election.
You see, McCain represents those people who fucked things up in this country and over in Iraq so badly, that unfucking it will be like untying the Gordion Knot with wrist stumps. And yet, ABC and CNN and still treat them with enormous deference and respect, giving people the false impression that these people they are deferring to and respecting have a clue what they are doing. Maybe it’s the lapel pins.
And yes, there are standards for determining who is and isn’t wrong. In the case of IDiots, “wrong” is synonymous with “not having a freaking bit of evidence”. By contrast for the people who supported the pre-emptive Iraq war on the basis of Weapons of Mass Destruction, or Iraq being a pit-stop for Al Qaeda, or something Iran did in an alternate time-line, “wrong” is synonymous with “not having a freaking bit of evidence”. Note the difference. One are IDiots, the other are just plain IDIOTS.
I can’t be bothered to think up a good “backronym” for IDIOTS. Contest in the comments: I’ll email the winner a dollar. In quarters.
Still, the fact that Very Powerful People were able to lie and bullshit their way to the deaths of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not to mention over 4,000 US soldiers who certainly didn’t volunteer for multiple tours of dutyin Satan’s Own Asshole (most of which we exported), and not have the same VPPs end up Plastinated and put on display for the edification of future generations, perhaps cleverly posed playing with little green plastic army men, is simply appalling.
It’s obvious that IDIOTS never takes a hiatus. In fact, not only do IDIOTS never sleep, but their kind of idiocy is not even sleepy. Perhaps it’s even idiocy on two pots of coffee, if not a snootful of meth. Although that form of tooth-gnashing idiocy, unlike Charlie Gibson, is usually found in the other Gibson.
Perhaps with the now inevitable pairing of Barack Obama against John McCain in the upcoming presidential election things will be different. As if Obama can sweep in like Peter the Great and pass reforms against IDiots, much less IDIOTS.
Remember Eisenhower’s speech about the Military Industrial Complex? The real problem is not that the buddy-buddy relationship between goverment and military contractors is so entrenched, so much so that it turns out there’s even a butt-buddy relationship between the Pentagon and media analysts. The problem is that Eisenhower, back then, assumed he was talking to rational people will the will and power to do something about it. These days he’d be preaching not to the choir, but to the stockholders of General Electric and Kellogg, Brown and Root.
Although those people may not use religious terms directly, they do tend to toss around terms like “freedom”, as a rationale for fighting or what the people we’re fighting hate, in such vague terms that it might as well be a word used in religious canon.
Sometimes the difference is whether someone is comically wrong, which is the often case with the Creationists. It’s very entertaining to watch them smacked around by Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion, which I’ve just gotten around to reading, lays like a paperback bludgeon on my coffee table. The IDiot/IDIOT mode of thinking begins with a conclusion, is buttressed with premises cherry picked to support it, and then whatever ad hoc nonsense is deemed necessary after the fact, up to and including simple bald-faced lying.
Incidentally, doesn’t that sound familiar?
And then they have the shear balls to invoke some form of the Argument from Ignorance. There, from the safety of fact-proofed skulls, they dare critics to prove them wrong. Prove God didn’t make the Earth with fossils stowed in the rock to test one’s faith. Prove that Iraq didn’t bury their WMDs, or move them to another country, or stow them in a teapot in orbit. When the same technique is applied to, say, whether or not to attack Iraq or to keep plugging away there despite the inductive probability that, since everything has been a complete cock up for the past five years, another five, or one-hundred, isn’t going to constitute an improvement, it’s just not that funny anymore. Applying it to Iran guarantees even less mirth, the laughter and fapping sounds coming from beyond Dick Cheney’s closed and locked office door notwithstanding.
At worst, with IDiots they’re just making our kids a little stupider, not killing children outright like the long arm of IDIOTS extended into other’s borders can. But to Dawkin’s credit, or perhaps to the detriment of people otherwise rational people who like to play Neville Chamberlain in the face of the fundamentalist’s Blitzkrieg (Michael Ruse is often singled out for deserved abuse in this regard), who can’t grasp something so obvious as it all being different fronts in the same fight against irrationality. Creationism and the War in Iraq are just different running sores, manifestations of the same underlying infection. It’s the sickness of believing absurdities by the not-so-paradoxical conjunction of intellectual laziness or cowardice and sheer force of will. It’s not like the assault on reason will stop with Evolution, or have to go through Cosmology or Chemistry first. The Creationist assault on the teaching of Evolution is a scientific movement only to the extent that the attempts to make kids say “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance has something to do with poetry or “In God We Trust” has something to do with engraving.
Or the Iraq War has with keeping us safe.
Dawkins isn’t just smacking around IDiots, he’s doing his best to disarm IDIOTS, some of whom already have their hands on lots of heavy artillery, the least of which is military, when they are also bristling with money and political power. Ruse is of the opinion that Evolutionists and Atheists (which are not synonymous, incidentally) shouldn’t get on the nerve of more moderate Christians in the same way, I guess, we are not supposed to irritate “moderates” whose attitude towards the Iraq is to maintain only a reasonable level of death, destruction, random mayhem and continue, cautiously, I imagine, the same ill-thought and failed policy. That is, until they can hand off that hot potato like Bush running out the clock until his administration ends and it all becomes somebody else’s problem. That’s conveniently assuming future historians don’t so much dust off his legacy as take it outside and beat it like a rug.
The problem with appealing to moderates, when it comes to people who are moderately irrational, is just how irreducibly irrational are they? Take a “moderate” Christian. Once you parse out that they believe — or at least profess to believe — the entire plan of the assumed creator of the universe, who seems oddly fixated on Earth for some reason, was to make a man and a woman (out of dust and ribs, none of that primordial ooze for their God), stick them in a garden, tell them not to touch a tree (ignore the obvious problem of assumed omniscience here) and then leap out all pissed off when they do. Then He tosses them out of paradise and makes up for it generations later by having His own son — or Himself, or both, or what ever the Fuck the Trinity means — get nailed to a post as a form of atonement. Does that make a bit of sense? If a supposed moderate Christian believes that, what exactly won’t they believe?
Of course, many professed religious people don’t believe all that. They just hold onto a vague enough conception of the deity to hold onto the idea of life after death and enough delusion so, perhaps, they can occasionally ask God for a favor or two when He’s not so busy.
Now, I know a number of people who would immediately claim that McCain is doing something different and some of them that make the claim don’t immediately fall into the category of congenital IDIOT. Mostly these types are idiots by sheer force of will. Which is exactly the problem with McCain: I reject that simply because McCain may not be a True Believer on a number of conservative issues, but as he’s gotten in the habit of pretending to be one out of political expediency, he gets saddled with all that baggage. Besides, I’ve seen nothing from McCain to suggest that he thinks more of the same in Iraq isn’t just a spiffy idea. So, when it comes to Iraq he may really be a freaking IDIOT, or just pretending to be one, and I leave it to you to decide which option is worse.
Partly this isn’t McCain’s fault. Even during the last mid-year elections almost no Republicans wanted to have their picture taken with President Bush, much less be thought as his political successor, but McCain took his pounding at the hands of the right-wing pundits for not being Right of the Living Dead enough for some. Leading the charge was that perennial IDIOT Rush Limbaugh. In all fairness to McCain, he’s got to take ideology and make it work in Congress, if not exactly out in the the real world. All someone like Limbaugh, who frequently almost makes it too the mooring mast before he bursts into flames, has to do — quite like a Creationist, in fact — is bloviate and if reality doesn’t fall in line, well that’s just tough for reality.
I have one problem with Barack Obama. And don’t get me wrong, he is by far and away the lesser of evils enough to make the phrase itself inapplicable.
The problem is his minister.
It’s not that Rev. Jeremiah Wright said stupid things, because how stupid what he actually said is a matter of debate. It’s just that no one seems to notice that ministers are in the business of saying stupid things all the time. Saying IDiot or just plain IDIOT things is, in fact, their job. When the stupidity is collected and codified we call it Theology. The recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI was a veritable circus of religious rock star stupidity over an old guy in a dress.
Which is the question about any Pope. It’s not that Benedict never had an original thought in his life, but you’ve got to bet at some point he had to stop having them. And that goes for the fifteen Benedicts who came before him, not to mention the Johns, the Pauls, the John-Pauls, a couple of Sixtus and St. Sylvester I, patron saint of the desthpicable.
Even the “moderates” that one is supposed to be making common cause with believe, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, six impossible things before breakfast. To his credit, Obama’s response to the manufactured crisis over Wright’s remarks was a masterful turn of lucidity, but why does Obama need a minister in the first place?
Well, because he needs a minister. Because he’s not allowed not to have one. That is, although the Noise Machine did their best to fix it so that Obama can’t get elected with that minister, the truth is that he couldn’t get elected without one. No one can get elected to political office in the United States in the 21st century without a minister, or a rabbi, or some tea leaf reading, knuckle-bone rolling, chicken gut reading, sacred scroll quoting shaman from a recognized religion talking complete crap with utter conviction.
Unless things change. Really change. It’s a sad commentary on God-boggled America that we practically have to import fearless skepticism in the person of Richard Dawkins. More likely, Dawkins is tolerated on Fox News because he’s not American and so the standard digs at a skeptic’s patriotism doesn’t apply. Still, rational, unbelieving, and yes, patriotic Americans better start digging our feet in and refuse to give a free pass to people who spout religious nonsense, or quasi-religious nonsense such the canard that anyone “over there” is fighting for “our freedom”™ when their orders have them doing nothing of the sort. Whether they are “moderate” or not, all our leaders will be forever filtered on the basis of having some acceptable form of irrationality in the form of either religious belief, or at least the need to pay lip service to it.
Yeah, not much of a first (as distinguished from a “test post” or a “what the fuck does this thing do?”) post: A cloudy, wet and miserable morning in Arlington, VA. One of the best ways to kill time on such a morning is to film it. Which I did from my 7th floor balcony. In case you have something better to do than watch that in real time, it’s a hour and a half compressed into about a minute. My time spent editing and uploading is a chunk of my life I’ll never get back. However, it was a good enough excuse to work out the WordPress video embed plug-in. Which pretty much taps out my ongoing “I have to learn this before I can post” rationale. Although, there’s always the blogroll to populate.
The view is looking East towards the Potomac River. If there wasn’t a big apartment building in the way to the left, and behind that several more buildings and the Sheraton Hotel, you would be able to see Nationals Stadium in the far distance and even the Washington Monument.
Now the gloom has given way to a full-on downpour.
I’ll have something text-based and rant-worthy for this evening. Because I may have been away, but, as you know, stupid never takes a hiatus.
