Must Watch Videos
November 15th, 2008 MykeruNo comment. Just watch it, relive it, believe it:
Weekend Video: This Is/Was My Life
November 15th, 2008 MykeruOne of the constant irritations with posting media on the web is the capricious nature of the various service providers. I was finally booted off YouTube in 2006 for creating a video “Inappropriate Content” that, as you can imagine, contained no actual inappropriate content:
Look at the old graphics.
Yeah, I know you miss the Mykeru.Com cow skull guy (hear it enough), but he had to be put out to (heh) pasture.
I was, admittedly, gleefully sticking my tongue out at YouTube, expecting to get my account deleted. Sometimes you just have to fly your Zero into the flight deck of the enemy (an image that appears in a following video). By then I was completely sick and appalled at not only the way they removed my videos, but other videos, notably ones critical of the Church of Scientology.
I myself was greeted with a lovely cease and desist strike two from YouTube, apparently instigated by the lawyers for Wendy Carlos , whose version of Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary I used in a homage to her work. I later re-did the thing using someone else’s version of Purcell. I wouldn’t post it because, with the altered music, it simply isn’t as good, which is the real tribute to Wendy Carlos.
Yeah, I know what you’re saying: Wendy Carlos? Is that the daughter of the poet William Carlos Williams?
No, she’s not. She was a pioneering musician fading into obscurity behind a screen of lawyers.
What it comes down to is that anyone can have media removed from YouTube, for virtually any reason, even if it’s complimentary and would only serve to increase an artist’s profile.
Even worse is when that reason is a transparent attempt at harassment and suppressing criticism.
Do we really need that?
Frankly, if YouTube wanted to grow a pair, which they most certainly do not, they could take a page from Attrition.Org, specifically, The Wrath of the Impotent, where the bogus copyright claims and half-assed threats go to die. Attrition.Org, unlike many a lawyer writing to them, are aware of the Copyright Act of 1976 and the “Fair Use” provisions. It’s that feigned ignorance of the law, which outfits like YouTube never fail to bend over and grab their ankles for, is simply fouling free expression on the intenet.
To his credit, the acerbic and unfailingly on-target British television critic and professional couch potato Charlie Brooker seems to be aware that the videos of his program Screenwipe appear on YouTube in their entirety and hasn’t sent lawyers after anyone, apparently appreciating a wider audience than he can get on BBC4 alone.
Another choice is Photobucket. The problem is, for all their speed and reliability, — here’s where shallow aesthetics kick in – their interface is, well, a little cartoonish and clashes with the look and feel of this site.
The most unfortunate thing is that I’ve completely given up on OurMedia, an extension of Archive.Org. I haven’t been able to upload a video there in months and even when I was able to, it took multiple attempts using one of the most irritating content management systems I’ve ever seen. Basically, they make one fill out all sorts of user information, copyright and collective commons information, descriptions and the like. Then when the video fails to upload after the status window sits there all fat, dumb and happy for a half hour or so, which it invariably does, I’ve got to go back, try again and fill all that information in again. It can become, quite literally, an all-day affair that leaves one feeling like an ether-soaked pillow was jammed against your face. I mean, really, it sucks the creativity right out of you. Several time, in the middle of doing a video I actually thought “Yeah, but I’ve got to try to upload this to OurMedia…” Not only that, with the few videos I’ve been able to upload a few years ago, I find I can’t update, alter or delete any of them.
That, I don’t need. Especially since, mercifully in the receding past, I’ve had a “person of interest” give me endless grief because she appeared in the background, silhouetted, no less, of one video. OurMedia simply won’t allow me to delete that video upload this edited version:
Just you wait. I’m going to get an e-mail from the estate of Beethoven.
The only other option is Google video, even though they have the annoying standard of pulling a preview image of the video from some arbitrary point. Unfortunately, for all their extraordinary services such as G-Mail and Google Documents, by buying out YouTube they might have infected themselves with the same capricious and cowardly Terms of Use.
So, here’s another one, mostly done in the summer of 2007, which is a montage of still photo animation and stock footage, done to the tune of the Dust Brother’s music from the film Fight Club. It was updated this year to include, after the credits, a CT-scan of my very own sinuses, which are a freaking mess.
So it remains to be seen if Google Video will screw me over the same way YouTube has.
Plotting the Arc of the Wingnut Meltdown.
November 14th, 2008 MykeruFollowing a trauma or a life-altering event (loss, grief, Sarah Palin’s Katie Couric interview) it’s said that people go through distinct stages: Denial, bargaining and acceptance.
The Republican party, especially for the most block-headed true-believers who have a vested interest in keeping the shit perpetually stirred, have suffered an enormous shock to their system.
As hard as they tried, closed their eyes, clicked their heels and really believed, they just couldn’t create that darn pesky reality out of thin air. Or hot air, for that matter.
Barack Obama, a man who “pals around with terrorists”, wants to “spread the wealth” and is obviously the semi-Kenyan version of the Manchurian Candidate who will usher in a new Third Reich, just without the cool blond-haired Aryan types and kinky outfits the average wing-nut blogger likes to prance around in when their mom is out shopping, has been elected President of the United States.
At the same time, as a result of this, and the 2006 mid-term elections, the Republicans have lost control of Congress. Adding insult to injury, the often-cited but rarely before seen “Liberal Media” has actually made inroads through blogs and MSNBC flagship shows such as Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show. Countdown regularly beats out that other show on Fox News, with the exception of the 65 year-old to Andean mummy demographic. You know, that show with the guy who likes to phone sex his assistants and confuses falafels with loofahs in the heat of his self-induced phone passion. And, maybe, just maybe, certain members of the right-wing radio echo chamber may not be getting enough of their “medication” to keep their cool and the hordes of imaginary spiders at bay.
The election of George W. Bush ended the American right’s long national nightmare of peace and prosperity (as The Onion put it) and it looks like, now that they are almost completely out of power, that nightmare may be revisiting the right’s draped-in-the-flag all-American sleep, where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, salt is rubbed in the open wounds of the afflicted and people in foreign countries get bombed for reasons only accessible within the loose logic of war-blogger wet dreams.
I have a prediction to make. The right-wing nuts are going to skip the denial, because what has happened is undeniable, leap right over bargaining, which they aren’t constitutionally suited for, give acceptance a complete miss and go directly to bat-shit crazy.
You can see it starting already, with their insisting, endlessly, that this is a “center-right” country after they ran it for the past eight years like a right, righter, and even more right-wing Central American country whose major export is bananas, cocaine and black velvet paintings of Elvis. Not to mention the obstructionist coming attractions provided by the “Republican Revolution” of the 1990s. That isn’t bargaining. Nor is the old saw of pleading for “non-partisan” politics every time these conservatives are unable to impose their will on others. Nor is holding their breath, turning blue and falling over in a spreading puddle when people, based on past experience, laugh at the aforementioned worn-out ploys.
I like a good train wreck as much as the next person, yet I’m still glad I’m not, say, Ryan of Malkin(s) Watch, because that job is going to be like watching Renfield in the nuthatch after you take away his stash of nice, juicy flies. I mean, there’s expecting bat-shit and then there’s waiting for the truck convoy of stinking guano that is inevitably enroute.
I don’t envy the job of anyone who keeps tabs on the right-wing nutjobs.
Whoever is keeping tabs on Glenn Reynolds or The Free Republic (and no, no links for you, punks) may not have a drinking problem, but they’d better get one fast.
Of course, there’s a double-whammy in all this, something that will make right wing nuts jobs even nuttier, and that’s what happens when the world, as predicted, doesn’t actually end.
They only thing holding the right-wing ideologues together is waiting for the Obama-induced apocalypse and, like all millennial cults, they’re going to be sadly disappointed, especially since the sky falling is all they have left to look forward too. This will drive some to moderation, and drive others to be even battier, if, in some cases, that’s at all possible.
Think of actual apocalyptic cults. Their leadership sets a date when the world will end, the flying saucers will come or the hand of God himself will come down to start bitch-slapping the unrighteous. They’ve calculated it, they’re looking forward to it and stand on the mountaintop with Mountain Dew and Cheetos in hand waiting to watch the world burn.
Then nothing.
The birds sing, the crickets chirp and someone clears their throat and checks their watch.
Bummer.
A group of normal sane human beings, who wouldn’t be there in the first place, might give it a good five minutes and then walk off like they’re in a Monty Python sketch where the punchline is that there’s no actual punchline.
That doesn’t happen either.
Sure, some people walk off, find a hobby, attach themselves to some other nutty idea, but there’s always a group of people who realize, hey, they’ve left out a word of the sacred texts, misplaced a decimal point or, gosh darn it, looked at chicken entrails from the wrong angle. The world is still going to end, but next week, next month or, even better, another couple of years from now. Lather, rinse, repeat.
What happens is that such groups, through this process of attrition by reality, are left with only the most hard-core lunatics, the really flaky ones, those that are impervious to logic, reason and the basic self-preservation displayed by swarming lemmings. The sort of people who tend to dent sheet-rock with their skulls. Those people who think Saddam Husein’s nail clippers constitute a weapon of mass destruction. The people who look up when it’s raining and drown. The sort of people who are going to fork over a $700 billion bail-out of the banking industry that was so deregulated that it wasn’t a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop, but Wile E. Coyote with an Acme adding machine perched on a powder-keg, yet still think Milton Friedman was on to something.
In a phrase, complete and utter fucking wing-nut lunatics.
For the right-wingers, especially the right-wing bloggers who never have to do anything but play one-up for the most extreme position, there will be a brief period of adjustment and then, when things don’t go completely to hell or even get better which is, to their way of thinking, far, far worse, that’s when the real bat-shit crazy will start to kick in.
Have your nets and tranquilizer darts at the ready.
Randians Are So Cute
November 14th, 2008 MykeruFollowing the link from Dumpendebat, on my previous post, we obviously know Pamela Geller of the self-consciously Randian Atlas Shrugs, where she argues Obama is the new National Socialism (ZOMG! Godwin PWND!) , just got her book of the month:
(Image shamelessly hotlinked from the goodness that is Bartcop)
Followers of Rand are so cute, because they actually think reading Rand’s non sequitur-laden, equivocation-driven, hypocritical nonsense makes them intellectuals when, in fact, they are just members of a self-help cult for assholes.
In fact, Rand is a supposed philosopher that never published a single scholarly paper, with the exception, perhaps, of the laughable The Virtue of Selfishness. Instead she wrote novels. It’s easy to make your case when, in the finest conservative tradition, you get to make up reality as you go, essentially engaging in long-form Begging the Question.
“Who is John Galt?” He’s a figment of the imagination of a writer who was, to philosophy, what L. Ron Hubbard was to psychology.
Occasionally I’m tempted to write at length about Rand, but her intellectual vacuity doesn’t permit it. Basically, Rand’s philosophy is a collection of egregious logical fallacies, such as redefining words, like “altruism” as she sees fit. In one case equating it with self-destruction.
I could argue that an elephant is a small, furry mammal that likes cheese and gets chased by cats, but that doesn’t make it so. That would be, well, simply stupid. Stupid like the people you see nose-deep in The Fountainhead, obviously under the impression they look profound.
The Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.
-Ayn Rand
Well, they are big on not sacrificing themselves to others, but I’m still waiting for them to finish the clause and stop sacrificing others to themselves. Yes, I know they will claim they don’t. But this is a little something we like to call reality, not a novel. Objectivists, like conservatives, never have any moral qualms about other suffering for their principles.
Anytime you half-bright cultist assholes want to head off to Galt’s Gulch, be my guest.
We won’t notice you’re gone.
Who Are the “Fringe People”?
November 13th, 2008 Mykeru
Dave Zirin is the Nation’s sports correspondent and writes a sports blog, Edge of Sports. Had he stuck to just that he never would have attracted the attention of “the authorities.” I’ve got that phrase stuck in irony quotes because, as you will see, the only thing these people in authority should be in charge of is deep cover operations within their own rectums.
In this country, like most places, sports are a perfectly acceptable subject of interest, even allowed to extend into fanaticism. If sports are the modern circus of “bread and circuses” fame, I assume the “bread” would be a big bag of Cheetos.
For readers in the United Kingdom, who are so behind the curve that they were just introduced to Oreos, let me explain what Cheetos are: They are orange cheese-powder covered junk food with the rough appearance and nutritional value of Styrofoam packing peanuts. They are significant only as a dietary staple of members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders — identifiable by their orange-tainted fingers and, by direct and obsessive association, their carroty pudendas — fighting the War on Terror from their mother’s basement.
Like George W. Bush himself, they are all for taking up arms against foes real and imagined, provided someone else does it.
Like George W. Bush towards Iraq, these people are notorious for their dead aim on precisely the wrong target.
Like George W. Bush they enjoyed torturing small animals as children, lighting fires and probably still wet the bed.
In America it’s perfectly acceptable to, say, drive down the highway whooping and hollering, your car festooned with the stickers and flags of some inconsequential sports team. In Washington DC it’s a common sight to see cars outfitted like some general’s staff car, except instead of the number of stars of the important person inside, people fly Redskins flags from special mounts on their windows.
Incidentally, the Washington Redskins? I hope some day the Native Americans pool their casino dollars and start their own sports team, say, the Republic of Lakotah Pasty-Ass White Men. Their mascot can be some beer-gutted dough-hued douchebag with Chingachgook’s sky-blue war club stuck in his head.
Anyway, high-profile cruising around, ostentatious as all hell, a mobile advertisement for one’s local chapter of Men in Spandex is approved of, even encouraged by “the authorities”. It’s that relatively low-key “no blood for oil” or “end capital punishment” bumper sticker that will get one special attention from the people who wrap themselves in the flag, but are still sort of iffy on that whole “Constitution” thing. Which is to say that some people are firm supporters of free speech, even loud and obnoxious speech, provided the speech is in service of something that is ultimately irrelevant.
Zirin didn’t stick to sports, though. He’s also a member of a group the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. That not only got him, and the group, on the “anti-terrorist” radar, it made him a bona fide “fringe person”. Appearing on the Rachel Maddow Show, Zirin explained how the Maryland State Police infiltrated his group, even returning to continue monitoring their meetings even after it was clear there was no illegal activity occurring, or being planned and, in fact, the group was engaging in constitutionally protected advocacy, specifically the bit in the First Amendment about free speech and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
“Why were they spying on us?” Zirin continued. “Because the governor at the time, Bob Ehrlich — a right-wing Republican who makes Sarah Palin look like Emma Goldman — I mean, he’s somebody who saw us as political opponents. He was for the death penalty, we were against the death penalty, therefore in his mind we deserved to be spied upon.”
“We were entered into a database the heading of which was ‘Terrorists/Anti-Government,’” Zirin noted angrily. “The person who organized all of this, the head of the Maryland State Police … called us ‘fringe people’ in the hearings. He said we deserved it because we were fringe people.’”
This is exactly what Bush has tried to do in America as a whole.
Don’t agree with the failed right-wing nut-job agenda that’s dug us into the biggest hole since Floyd Collins got his foot caught? Then you’re a “fringe person”.
Man, they really put the fun in dysfunctional, don’t they?
An old ploy of authoritarians and demagogues, is to speak as though their ideology is inextricably linked to the deepest values of the nation and, if they can possibly get away with it, with truth, justice and good personal hygiene. If they can toss in the all-powerful and perpetually pissed-off creator of the universe, they’ll do that too. It’s one thing when they do this as a polemical trick, to endow their opinions with rightness by fiat, so they don’t have to actually support their position in the market of ideas. It’s another thing entirely when people begin to internalize the canard of equivalency between their position and decency, and actually come to believe that any way of thinking apart from theirs is not only wrong, but suspect and probably criminal. It’s the difference, in fact, between being a lying sack of shit and a genuine nut case.
Talk about taking aim at the wrong target.
Bad enough when some loudmouth in a sports bar thinks like this. When there’s real government or police power behind them, the Bill of Rights is in danger of being just a piece of paper held by the willfully illiterate.
Not content with the abomination of a legacy he will already leave behind, George W. Bush seems hell-bent on taking the bad and making it worse, trying to push through 90 new regulations before November 22, in effect vacating the Oval Office leaving a hot, steaming turd on the carpet. One of the regulations Bush wants to push through, and make permanent would, according to Maddow, “allow state and local law enforcement agencies to collect intelligence on individuals and organizations even if the information is unrelated to any criminal matter.”
George, see that large rectangular thing on the wall of the Oval Office? That’s the door. Use it.
Government agencies could infiltrate and monitor such potentially dangerous groups as the Unitarians-Universalist church, the Joy Luck Club (hey, if you’re going to fight imaginary terrorists, might as well infiltrate imaginary organizations), and determine what nefarious plans are being hatched at local Tupperware parties. While we are supposedly engaged in a War on Terror, supposed to be tightening our borders and locking down rogue nukes, and making sure someone doesn’t ship us a dirty bomb via cargo container, this seems to be an egregiously wasteful use of resources.
The only purpose of this sort of monitoring is raw partisan political expediency.
Honestly, with lives at stake we’re still going to expend limited resources on making sure a group against the death penalty doesn’t, um, well, do something or other?
Are you kidding me?
A government engaging on this sort of policy, something right out of Stalinist Russia, isn’t doing so for a War on Terror. They’re doing so so they can be part of The War Against Terror, i.e., a bunch of TWATs.
All isn’t lost, though, according to Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley in an appearance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, as well as the website Politico, as reported on The Raw Story, a law was enacted in the 90s to address exactly this sort of lame duck taint imposed on an incoming administration:
However, as Politico pointed out on Wednesday, the “little-known” Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996 was passed to address just such a situation and will allow Congress to undo these last-minute regulations “with a joint resolution that can’t be filibustered in the Senate.”
“It creates something of a fiction,” Turley said of the CRA. “It says if you push it through in the final days of your administration, it won’t be considered final until the new Congress comes in. … Congress gave itself extra time to reverse it.”
“The key here, however, is time,” Turley continued. “We’re not going to have a lot of time, and we’re talking about a lot of regulations and a lot of executive orders. And that’s why Obama reportedly has a team of dozens of people who are trying to unravel this very complex web of executive orders and regulations.”
So what is the point? There is none. You’d think Bush would be busy enough taping boxes, putting the contents of his presidential library in a plain brown wrapper, as well as working on important last-minute outrages like the pardoning of Scooter Libby. This is simply the last act of an arrogant man.
More to the point, these are all arrogant men. And any governmental agency that not only spies on and infiltrates perfectly legal, Constitutionally protected groups, but puts their members names in a database under the heading “Terrorists/Anti-Government” has put itself outside the realm of common decency and common sense.The great shame in all this is that the very first thing the Obama administration is going to have to do is undo everything the Bush administration has done, including this 11th hour well-poisoning nonsense.
Meanwhile, there are real dangers and real problems to be solved.
Yeah, we know who the “fringe people” are, and they’re just diddling around with our rights a little longer before they get to packing.
Update. This news article, FBI joins investigation of Klan initiation death, is significant for this revelation:
The FBI’s top agent in New Orleans, Louisiana, said the agency usually doesn’t monitor specific groups, but will look into whether any federal laws were violated.
Gee, you think the Maryland State Police can spare a few guys monitoring evil Vegan terrorist cells so we can keep an eye on the Ku Klux Fucking Klan?
The Ballot and the Bullet
November 12th, 2008 Mykeru
The rifle in this photo is an Italian-made World War II Carcano M91/38 bolt-action (often referred to as a “Mannlicher-Carcano”), which fires full-metal jacketed 6.5 x 52 mm ammunition from an 6-round clip-style magazine with a devastating muzzle velocity approaching 2400 feet per second.
More significantly, this isn’t just a Carcano rifle. It’s the Carcano rifle purchased by Lee Harvey Oswald and used to assassinate President John F. Kennedy on the morning of November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.
Oswald bought the rifle mail-order from Klein’s Sporting Goods Co. for $12.78 (not including shipping and handling, I assume), plus another $7.17 for the 4x telescopic sight.
Many people believe that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and, consequently, frame Oswald. I spent a good part of the 90s arguing with these people on the Usenet groups alt. assassination.jfk and alt.conspiracy.jfk. To those people I refer them to Gerald Posner’s excellent book Case Closed or, on the web, John McAdam’s extensive and meticulously researched Kennedy Assassination pages.
The need to believe in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy has many motives and methods, but I presume that underlying them all is the same thought:
Absolute disbelief that John F. Kennedy, the most powerful man on earth, the leader of the United States, a person of such promise and accomplishments could be taken from us by some crazy little asshole with a $12 mail-order rifle.
But he was. They can. And they have.
Consider the modern success rate of crazy little assholes: James Earl Ray succeeded in robbing us of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while Sirhan Sirhan deprived us of the leadership of Robert Kennedy. Mark David Chapman succeeded in stealing John Lennon from us. John Hinkley, only by a hair-breadth (and the valor of the Secret Service), failed to assassinate Ronald Reagan.
Of course, I was never a fan of Reagan’s. But, by far, I’m even less of a fan of some lunatic with a gun trying to override the will of the people. And I’ve always been impressed by Reagan’s stamina and resilience following the assassination attempt. For whatever political differences one may have with him, he was a man of extraordinary bravery and fortitude.
Obviously killing public figures differ in their difficulty. Lennon, for one, allowed himself to be exposed in a way that is almost inconceivable today for any public figure, especially one that was the focus of such adulation and controversy. In a film on Lennon, and perhaps to his credit, he is shown in the early 1970s talking to an obviously disturbed young man who was camping out on his property, finally inviting him in for a sandwich.
It’s far more difficult, especially these days, to kill a President. But perhaps not as much as we may think. Abraham Lincoln himself, albeit living in a different time, has been quoted (perhaps apocryphally, as I believe it’s also been attributed to Kennedy) as saying that all an assassin needs to do to be successful is trade his life for the President’s.
The list of assassination attempts on U.S. Presidents include Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Or, quite simply, in the modern era there’s been an assassination attempt, with varying degrees of commitment and competence, on every President.
You can imagine the current object of my concern.
Before he even left Chicago Barack Obama had a bit of a scare. According to P.J. Huffstutter of the LA Times:
Some of the Windy City’s motorists, it became clear, did not seem to understand that A) the Chicago Police Department car that trails the president-elect’s motorcade is serious about having traffic pull over when the officers inside flash the lights and hit the sirens, and B) it’s not a great idea to cut in front of a black SUV filled with heavily armed Secret Service agents.
When the motorcade pulled off a highway and onto city streets, a couple in a tan sedan tried to drive around the motorcade.
The Secret Service agents cut the car off immediately and aimed their weapons at its occupants. The driver slammed on the brakes, and he and his stunned passenger threw their hands into the air. Then, the driver appeared to understand what was happening. (”Your pool reporter could see him mouth ‘Obama.’ “)
The Secret Service is taking this sort of thing seriously. As they should. Because it’s in the air.
First, the residual tension, racism aside, is the fault of the McCain campain. McCain, Palin and/or their surrogates demonized “Barack Hussein Obama” as a radical, a Socialist, if not an outright Communist. As someone who hates America and, infamously, “pals around with terrorists” for his passing association with William Ayers in Chicago. I don’t even have to cite sources for any and all of that nonsense because, leading up to the election, the McCain camp repeated it again and again and again, impervious to reason and refutation and the accusations still hang in the air like a bad smell.
Really. Just for shits and giggles, Google the normally uncommon phrase “pals around with terrorists”. As of this writing, I got a stunning number of results. 74,700, to be specific. And as for Palin, rather than just going away with her new $150,000 wardrobe, she’s still at it.
It’s in the air. Recently the administration of a school diciplined children for even mentioning the name of Obama. Consider this: Idaho students chant ‘assassinate Obama’ on school bus. Are these kids simply parroting what they’ve heard at home? Or what they’ve heard from teachers at school?
“One of the teacher’s aides … said that Obama was going to be shot and killed,” Mara Gilligan told KDKA News. “And that our flag is going to be the KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken] flag and that the new national anthem will be ‘Moving On Up’ — and that all my daughter’s beliefs were wrong and her children’s lives were going to be ruined because Obama was elected.”
When some idiot at a McCain rally was spotted holding a plush monkey doll sporting an Obama sticker, it was almost cute:
Almost cute (Actually, I’m being cute myself. The guy looks like a complete fuckwit). Still, the depth of ignorance and anger of others is even less cute:
What isn’t cute is considering what happens when these people — most of whom look stupid, drunk or on meth — who think Obama is a “one-man terror cell” with “terrorist bloodlines”, wake up to the new reality. Although Obama is a Christian, his father was a Muslim and, as they know, “Muslim” = “Terrorist”. Honestly, in what pod-patch are these people spawned? What happens when these disappointed, misinformed and angry lunatics realize that their version of “truth and good Americans” hasn’t won out? What happens when some aggrieved loner, some latter-day Lee Harvey Oswald, decides it’s his sacred duty to save the fundamentalist wing-nut’s twisted vision of America?
Will he start flipping through sporting goods mail-order catalogs?
No. He won’t. Because knowing these people, he already has the means at hand.
We can only hope that the Secret Service will see this coming a mile away. Real threats. Not just androgynous shit-talking little Nazi wanna-bes.
I can only hope. I’ve been stopped a couple of times for public photography at or near the White House and the Secret Service members, usually the bicycle division, has always been courteous, professional and give off an air of confidence that only comes from tested competence. I like to imagine that the one’s guarding the President himself are even more so. But I don’t have to imagine after seeing footage of the attempted assassination of President Reagan and seeing Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy throw himself in the path of the shooter, absorbing a bullet meant for the president in his own chest. Anyone can talk the talk, these people don’t even just walk the walk: They do the job. The job is, if necessary, of taking a bullet.
The Secret Service will be tested. Yet, I know they are up to the task.
They have to be: I have absolutely no doubt this next crazy little asshole is on his way.
Proposition 8 and the American Tradition of Mean and Stupid
November 11th, 2008 MykeruKeith Olbermann reminds us that in the midst of our national self-congratulatory back slapping over the election of Barack Obama, when it comes to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, sometimes “We, the people”, give it with one hand and take it away with the other.
I’ll explain.
At the same time that I’m relieved by the results of this Presidential election, I suspect some Americans not only have far too much time on their hands, but are also far too interested in other people’s business. If some Americans are so damned interested in who is marrying who, then obviously some Americans need their shit kicked a little more.
For that reason I still maintain that maybe, just maybe, some Americans just haven’t suffered enough. Especially considering the sheer horror of what we’ve managed to accomplish in the past eight years.
Seriously: Some of the same people who put Barack Obama over the top in the election were also responsible for re-electing George W. Bush four years ago, even after the revelations of Bush’s dozen running scandals: Abu Ghraib. Gitmo. Haliburton. Giving the Geneva Conventions The Finger. That “mandate” paved the way for the continuation of Habeas Corpus being nothing but something “quaint” at Gitmo, the FEMA disaster on top of Hurricane Katrina, and the the laughable attempt to make Harriet Meyers a Supreme Court plant (potted or otherwise), all in the following year. Space and time doesn’t permit listing all the abuses. In fact, trying to do so is almost like being the political version of Edwin Hubble, trying to observe the galaxies as the universe of corruption expands.
The sheer audacity of it all shows that Bush never treated corruption and cronyism as something done shamefully in the shadows, but as an in-your-face act of exhibitionism that, coupled with the smirk of his, seemed to be a gleeful personal perversion. Honestly, at some point I half-expected to see the guy on the Truman Balcony with his pants around his ankles, a can of Crisco rolling at his feet, a sheep by the neck with one hand, that big sex offender smirk plastered all over his face while he bangs away laughing maniacally and pointing out at the public with the other hand because, well, what a bunch of suckers.
The only reason that never happened, I imagine, is that the average actual sheep would never believe his bullshit for a minute. Which is more than one can say for the American voting public. Not all sheep, apparently, are created equal. It was clear on November 4th, 2004 that Bush fucked us and he sure as hell wasn’t going to respect us in the morning. Unfortunately, every now and then some sheep can still be be trotted out to the polls to make sure that inequality persists.
Ultimately, the legacy of the Bush administration, what the public validated, is his lying the United States into a needless, pointless, inhumane war in Iraq.
Think of the Iraq war as a litmus test for the American capacity for practicing mean and stupid. It’s not an opinion but a fact that Bush lied in order to have this war. He wasn’t mistaken. He didn’t have “bad intelligence”. It wasn’t the little Bush with devil horns sitting on his shoulder whispering in his ear that mislead him. The man lied. You can dress it up in any euphemism you like, say he and Cheney “cherry picked” information, or invented it outright, but it still comes down to pure mendacity. His motive is mostly irrelevant because his methods are and were transparently obvious. By the 2004 presidential elections all this was known. That lie cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers and — unforgivably treated as little more than an afterthought — the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
The American people, knowing all this, didn’t demand Bush, Cheney and his chorus of knowing spear-carriers be frog-marched in shackles across the South Lawn of the White House. Instead, he got another four years to perfect his trifecta of lies, death and sheer deadly incompetence. The 2000 election is forgivable, if one assumes the thing was stolen. The second time around a significant percentage of the American people have to bear the full brunt of the tragedy Bush created and they enabled.
You can almost hear the echo of Joseph Stalin, recalling his remark that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” In this case his math is a little off, but the point remains. As governor of Texas Bush never met an order of execution he didn’t want to sign, punishing people for, in most cases, causing a single death whether by pulling the trigger themselves or, in other cases, acting as an accessory. Bush has never, to my knowledge, pulled a trigger himself, and when given a chance to he opted out of the whole Vietnam War thing by recusing himself in the Texas Air National Guard. However, one can assume Bush would do a little trigger pulling himself, and enjoy it, provided he was spared the possibility of someone shooting back. Still, through the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 Bush made himself, through his own volition and force of will, a mass murderer of innocents.
By 2004 everyone who voted with him and for him made themselves accessories after the fact.
What made the difference this election was pure self interest. It bears repeating, and I’ll repeat it a lot: Over the course of the years, when the American people had to make moral decisions where lives were at stake, it seems 100k dead over there doesn’t matter so much as a 401k over here.
A single election, some sort of promise that we’ll be good from now on, in no way begins to make up for this.
But even self interest can’t explain California’s vote on Proposition 8. The only thing that explains it is good, old-fashioned red-meat American meanness and stupidity.
In May of this year the California Supreme Court ruled that prohibitions on same-sex marriage violates the Equal Protection clause of the California Constitution. So far, so good. Not good enough, apparently, because some people were bothered enough by the very thought to raise $37.6 million in order to ensure the passage of Prop. 8 which redefined marriage in the state of California so that “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” For people with short attention spans who don’t read the language of amendments, the ballot says, right up front in the title itself that it “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.”
And the good people of California trooped up to the polls and voted for the thing.
One question: Why?
Yes, I know there’s religious reasons, homophobia and fringe nuts who think like Rick Santorum that fear that same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to “man on dog action”. Santorum infamously said during an interview with an AP reporter,
“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.”
Note how Santorum tried to haul in the big, prize-winning Red Herring by tying together consensual acts between adults with criminal behavior involving children and animals, behavior that is criminal because children and animals can’t give consent. Santorum’s way of thinking has, unfortunately, become the de facto position on this issue for fucking idiots everywhere. Even if said fucking idiots aren’t as stupid as Santorum by saying it out loud.
The problem is that the whole issue of same-sex marriage should be a great non-issue.
Regardless of religious affiliation, whatever obsession with homosexuality one might have and fear for the virtue of dogs, there’s only one proper opinion that anyone who is not gay can have towards same-sex marriage: Not to have one.
That’s right. If you’re not gay then same-sex marriage doesn’t affect you. Therefore the entire point of Proposition 8 was to give people an opportunity to vote on something they had no right to have an opinion about in the first place.
Am I in favor of same-sex marriage? No. Am I against it? No. Why? Because it’s none of my business. What is my business is when people take the time and expense to ensure that other people don’t have the same rights as they do. And that’s exactly what Proposition 8 is all about.
I was married to a non-white woman. And I did so in a state that, within my lifetime, had Anti-miscegenation laws which were only overturned by Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Before that happened, of course, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile rule that
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Just try reading that without getting a little whiff of hot, frothy Santorum.
The 1967 ruling in favor of Loving states:
Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
Is it so hard to read that and substitute the phrase “racial discrimination” with yet another form of discrimination intended to cause, as “invidious” means, discontent, animosity, or envy?
I miss my ex-wife every day. Or rather, miss the memory of marriage, tinted with nostalgia. I think back on what I could have done, within the limits of my flawed personality, differently. The only thing worse than would be to denial of the chance to be married in the first place. In the same place and a different time that would have been the case. And I am sure, certain, that many members of gay couples are not only better people than I am, but better people than the people that voted against their right to marry. To deny them the chance at marriage, with all the commitment and legal recognition that goes with it, is simply an act of pointless cruelty.
The essence of Loving is that two people, consenting adults, have the right to do as they will. It’s no one else’s business. The essence of Proposition 8 is exactly the opposite: That some people think they have the right to force other people to do as they will, without allowing them to do as they do, even when it’s none of their business. Also note that in both the old miscegenation laws and its bastard step-child of opposition to same-sex marriage today there’s that cloak of religiosity which is always available to give support to bias, dress up irrationality with undeserved gravitas and put a serene face on pure mean-spirited fear and loathing.
There’s a reason why this country was founded as a secular nation with intentional limitations on the ability of religion to impose its will on others. There’s a reason this country was founded as a representative democracy with checks and balances in order to curb abuses of power and, more importantly, mitigate the effects of mean, stupid people in large groups to impose their will on smaller, politically weaker or otherwise marginalized groups. All of that was created to prevent something like Proposition 8 from happening. To prevent, quite literally, people voting away the rights of other people.
To put it even more succinctly: “The People” shouldn’t get to vote on any Bill of Rights, state or federal. Those rights are non-negotiable. What those rights do and don’t mean is a matter for the courts to decide, for good reason.
For this reason.
That’s the horror of Proposition 8: It gave people the right to decide who the Bill of Rights applies to, who Equal Protection applies to when it should be clear to all that unless it applies to everyone, regardless of race, religion and, yes, gender preference, then it applies to no one. Whatever “Equal Protection” has meant in California in the past, the people of that state have rendered their own Bill of Rights meaningless.
Way to go, people. If history has taught us anything, then this kind of action is always the thin edge of the wedge. When the Fourth Amendment against illegal search and seizure was diluted for the so-called War on Drugs, the abuses started. Whenever the First Amendment has been curtailed in the interest of public safety and security, very soon most every unpopular pronouncement begins to fall under that rubric. The Bill of Rights, state and federal, has been so under attack since the Red Scare, the “War on Whatever” and following September 11, 2001, that the act of further curtailing anyone’s rights is an act of self-destruction. The people of California may think as they will what they’ve accomplished, but the truth is that they’ve made everyone, including themselves, that much less free.
The initial California Supreme Court decision invoking Equal Protection was correct. Proposition 8 is wrong because, and allow me to propose my own “man on dog action” here, it raises the specter of people going to the polls to vote away other people rights. As ridiculous as it is to imagine people voting on other supposedly inalienable rights, say, removing Fourth Amendment protections for Italian-Americans or limiting the First Amendment rights for the left-handed, in a real sense that is exactly what Proposition 8 accomplished.
And all it took was appealing to that particularly American tradition of mean and stupid. The same sort of mean and stupid that allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish in the South for a century. The same mean and stupid that still threatens the right of a woman, even after being raped or if her life is endangered by pregnancy, to rid herself not of a baby, but in most cases an embryo, if not a zygote. It’s the mean and stupid that has left a whole pile of dead people in Iraq.
It’s the same mean and stupid that lead to scenes like this, which is fun for the whole family, depending on your kind of family:
Keith Olbermann of the MSNBC flagship program Countdown recently gave one of his special comments on Proposition 8 which, as usual, is well worth watching in full
What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don’t you, as human beings, have to embrace… that love? The world is barren enough.
It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.
And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?
With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I won’t disagree with a word Olbermann says, because there’s nothing to criticize in his rhetorical style. Olbermann is fully aware that he’s making an rational argument to the irrational, that he’s pleading for love from people who hate, he’s asking for reciprocity from people who feel they are entitled to take full rights for themselves as human beings and deny them to others. These people, in a word, exemplify the history of racism and discrimination in this country. A long time ago, in the 1980s, the state of Arizona balked at approving a holiday for the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Until suddenly groups decided they can take their conventions, take their business, take their dollars elsewhere. One can only hope that California can begin to feel the same sting.
This is the mean and stupid America. This is the America which, for whatever reason, revel in unfairness, death and misery. Make no mistake. Like Iraq this cannot be soon forgiven. The people of California who voted in favor of Proposition 8 have betrayed their fellow citizens by denying them rights that they have no right to deny. Of course, that hypocrisy will be lost on most of them. In his book The Mind of the Bible Believer Edmund Cohen makes the case that fundamentalists speak a different language. I assume the same can be said for bigots of all stripes. In the case of Biblical literalists and religious bigots, when they speak of “Truth” (with a capital “T”, of course) what they really mean is religious dogma. When they speak of “love” it’s the love of an angry, vengeful and psychopathic God that expresses itself in what oddly looks like hate. And when they speak of “values”, especially “family values” I’m sure it’s equally twisted. Like their conception of America itself.
I’m not claiming that the passing of Proposition 8 in California was entirely a “fundamentalist” or even “religious” act. Only that the patterns of thought, of people caught in totalizing systems that, in a word, can’t leave the other guy (or girl) the fuck alone, are very similar.
The hope is that meanness and stupidity is a “God of the gaps” for these people who went to the polls to deny happiness and stability and love for others. The space they live in is becoming smaller and smaller. Once the KKK could hold enormous rallies and walk a dozen abreast down Pennsylvania Avenue and hold lynching presided over by local police. Now they get mocked by clowns. Some day we can relegate these mean and stupid people to being a historical aberration like Bush and the neoconservative movement itself. These mean and stupid people exist, more and more, in the dark recesses of the American psyche.
It’s just unfortunate that one of the last dark recesses is behind the curtain in a voting booth.
“Speedy” Kicks Ass
November 9th, 2008 MykeruOK, I’ve got to admit, I love this comment by “Speedy”:
“The good news is that the Republicans have been rewarded for their stewardship by getting beaten to a gibbering , bloody pulp , reduced to controlling nothing , not even their bowels.”
That is, in a word or two, simply fucking brilliant. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to feel this, in fact, walking the streets of DC and overhearing conversation, a lot of of feel this: This is the rebirth of America. This isn’t a victory for black people. Not by a long shot, the fact is, and I read this in USA Today, of all places, that this is the first time in history, ever, that a country with a white majority has elected a non-white as president. That’s not to say “It can only happen in America”. More to the point, it has only ever happened in America. And all the pundit crap about the”Brady Effect”, that whites would say one thing in public and another in the voting booth, has been blown to hell. The fact is, Barack Obama was elected by the “white majority”. Yes, the media has shown you images of Jesse Jackson in tears, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church where Dr, King spoke. But most of the images is of white youth, or whites standing side-by-side with blacks, laughing and crying at this moment in history. This belongs to all of us. Barack Obama isn’t the “black president”. He’s our president and more importantly, he’s my president.
Forget race. The whole idea of race fell away early in this campaign. This isn’t a victory of a “black candidate”. The fact Barack Obama is black is incidental, as it should be. This is a victory for everything he is: Calm, rational, intelligent and strong. In a country where we talk so much about character, finally we have heeded Dr. King’s words and judged a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
The rest of the world will respond to this. America didn’t elect the “black guy”, we elected the smart guy. Barack Obama is a Constitutional Scholar. He’s someone who really believes the U.S. Constitution is something to be revered, not an impediment to power. Actually, that’s that’s the point of the Constitution: To impede power. And now it seems the first thing he will do is restore balance to our government, undoing the excesses of the Bush administration.
Obama is a transitional figure. And by that I mean he’s a transition to a new American republic. At the same time he is deeply conservative. Not in the sense of the cafeteria conservatism that has failed for the past few years. He’s a conservative in the sense that he will actually follow the guidelines established by our Founding Fathers as delineated by the Constitution. Patriotism? Well, there’s talking the talk. Obama is going to walk the walk. Personally, I’ve never thought people who worship the Stars and Stripes and piss on the founding principles of our country as “patriots”. Regardless of what they call themselves. At best they are nationalists. and, like people have assholes, every country’s got them. All the “conservatives” that have allowed 8 years of extra-constitutional abuses of power should just shut the fuck up. We are on to them. Hey, Hannity and Rush and all you talking shit-heads: Do damage control and shut the hell up now.
But it’s more than the election of Obama. When I write something, anything for the first time in months, and get a response, it means a lot to me. During my hey-day, I wasn’t that comfortable having a “following”. Others were less comfortable. It’s as if they were vying for attention with the anonymous Internet public. Of course it’s you anonymous Internet public that have listened to me in a way that neither of them did.
But it’s a matter of what I have left. My wife is gone, so have others moved on. This election, and the promise of the future has driven out the country’s demons and mine.
The people who check back and congratulate me for writing again, well, who knows who you are. But the very thought that anyone would follow me after a three year hiatus, that gives me hope.
It’s a new America. I have a new life. Let’s run with it.
Now I Can Write (Breathe) Again
November 5th, 2008 MykeruYes, there were things going on. The dissolution of my marriage, and the thought of what, exactly, that five years was all about.
But mostly, it was nonsense fatigue. Honestly, how can anyone spend their time charting the scandals of the Bush administration? The cronyism, the lies, the death, destruction war and sheer mind-numbing horror of the whole enterprise. For those who remember the “Iraq Body Count Visual Aid”, where I put up a little 16 x 16 pixel skull for every American soldier killed and every Iraqi dead from direct military action, I died a little inside. Yes, it really is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel.
And I felt. A lot.
In one fell swoop the American people (whatever the motivation) did the right thing. The nightmare is over. Now Barack Obama, a man of rare intelligence, insight and calm, can go to work with the unenviable job of undoing the past eight years.
Think of it. A man who is the son of a Kenyan herder and anthropologist mother, with no background, no backing, no pedigree, has risen to the job of the most powerful man on Earth. And in this case he is not the lesser of evils. Obama is a self-made man, a man who did the right thing all his life and, in answer to that, America did the right thing.
Keith Olbermann recently referenced a sportscaster who would go on, in offense, about “his America”. How this didn’t happen in “his America”. Invariably “this” was some progressive thing. Well, to turn it all around, this is now “my America”.
And Obama didn’t squeak by. There’s no way the trolls of the status quo can claim he doesn’t have a mandate. His victory was overwelming, crushing. He took Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina and Florida, for fuck’s sake.
On the eve of the election I got a call from my mother. I already knew that she was voting for Obama. But I asked how my dad, a 72 year-old Italian-American from the streets of Brooklyn, voted. “For Obama,” my mother said. Why? I asked. “Because he said McCain was too old and he wasn’t smart enough“.
There you go: It’s not that Barack Obama is black, some sort of token. It’s not that he squeaked by on some perverse affirmative action program. In fact, very early the whole issue of race dropped out. Barack Obama is president because, in these times, America finally recognized that we don’t need a president that we want to have a beer with. We need on bright enough to solve the problems of the presidents we’ve been having a beer with. America finally recognized that you don’t choose a doctor or a lawyer based on his drinking buddy potential. You choose one exactly because he is the elite. He’s the smart guy. No one ever, ever wants to avoid an “elitist” brain surgeon when they need one. In fact, people tend to seek them out.
America has a disease. And we decided we needed a doctor up to the task of curing us.
Pure self-interest, of course, but when a bigot with a brain tumor finds out the best doctor happens to be a smart black guy, let’s cut him a little slack for the hypocrisy of wanting to live.
Also, I want to write because, after months being idle. I post something and, obviously, people are still interested in what I say. I owe you people something. A lot.
Nov 4th 2008. Welcome to the New America.
November 4th, 2008 MykeruI’m walking around my apartment, this post-marriage bachelor shithole I live in alternately laughing and crying, switching between MSNBC and BBC America.
Obama took Pennsylvania. Then he took Ohio.
On BBC America they interviewed a stick broker who asked why he voted for Obama if he would have to pay more taxes. He answered, with nobility, that he would rather pay more to live in a better America.
It’s over. This freaking 8 year national nightmare is over.
Yes. I know that 8 years of insanity, cronyism, war, death and sheer stupidity didn’t motivate the American people. The financial crisis did. Thousands of dead Iraqis only were important to (5 of the public. The hit on their pocketbook, 62%. In a way, I’m sure America hasn’t suffered enough. So much so America deserves a third Bush term.
Still, thank you. Tomorrow is a new day.
Tomorrow, it’s a new America.
I’m going to grab my Radio Shack megaphone, hang off my balcony, and regale the neigborhood with a heartfelt “Thank fucking God”
And I’m an atheist.
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Serenity Through Viciousness
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