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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Saying Goodbye...Again 

...as I sit here ruminating on the fact that in mere hours I will be starting my 51st journey around the sun, a trip that holds both the promise and threat of being as vexing, wild, unforgettable, and - perversely, in some respects - pleasurable as way too many of the last fifty have been, one particular point, brought to the forefront by today's news, seems to loom out of all the mind-talk swirling in my head. It's something that the twenty- and thirty-something denizens of blogtopia (y!sctp!) haven't really experienced yet, although their time is coming, and it is the sort of thing that makes a body feel suddenly old, even though the brain looking out through these eyes at this laptop screen doesn't feel any different now that it did a quarter century ago. That point: the people who contributed to making me what I am are dying...

...today was a double whammy, but for entirely different reasons:

Richard Pryor was a cultural icon, a man who made his mark in our minds not because of the movies that he was in (because that wasn't really him) but because of the way that his standup comedy gigs made come to a better understandings of our failures as a society and actually laugh at them. We could, under Prior's obscene (for the day) and not too gentle ministrations, come to an understanding, for at least a few hours if not for the rest of the week, or the month, or our lives. For those of us who sat giggling to his comedy albums behind locked bedroom doors (so our parents couldn't hear the filth we were absorbing) or in Greek house study rooms or dorm rooms in the early '70's, Pryor was our Lenny Bruce a decade late; he was a powerful, yet entertaining furtherance of the development of a social conscience that has powered so many of us liberal lefties to this very day. His leaving wasn't tumultuous or a surprise, because multiple sclerosis had already pretty much taken him away from us, but it bears an ineffable sadness anyway...

...Eugene McCarthy was an entirely different matter for folks around my disturbingly advancing age and a bit older. While being an agent of change just as much as Pryor would be a handful of years later, McCarthy set off an explosion in the Democratic party that is still echoing down the headquarters hallways to this very day. His impact as a war opponent was immediate at the time, forcing a sitting president out of the nomination race after the first primary and creating a sudden crazed frenzy in the party as it searched for a candidate to address what was - fairly or not - the Democrats' war in Vietnam. His anti-war stance and the recruitment of legions of young long-hairs in the "Clean for Gene" movement was enough in that wild time to make LBJ say "oh, the hell with it" and opened the door for candidates of differing views who had more backing and star-power, such as Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy. The hopes for a change in war policy died with Bobby Kennedy on that hallway floor in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, barely two months after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, and the dissolution of the Democratic party was on. The hopes for a unified Democratic party died two months later during the 'Counter-Convention' and the resulting police riots on the streets of Chicago, and the party has never really recovered from that particular seven month span, at least as far as presidential politics is concerned. Eugene McCarthy was a primary agent of this change; he didn't intend it to be thus, but his righteous objection to the Vietnam War, coupled with a degree of societal upheaval that no sane person could have predicted in those cold late winter days in all those tight, cozy New Hampshire living rooms, set the Democratic party on the course that has fetched it up on the shoal-festered shoreline that progressives find themselves today. McCarthy gave voice to a generation that couldn't otherwise break through the party machine noise that had come to control Democratic politics prior to 1968, and his anti-war message buried a seed in the hearts of people of my era whose germination explains a lot of the grey-haired, balding objection to the current Grand Iraqi Adventure that bears, for those of us of a certain age, a remarkable resemblence to the Vietnam of our vital, robust healthy-kneed youth...

...the passing, on the same day, of both Pryor and McCarthy is a bit of a jolt for some of us folks. It isn't just a set of interesting news notes; this is one more permanent goodbye to a couple of actors from our personal stage. These were people that we grew up with and who - in one way or another - contributed to the "me" that we ended up being...

...so thank you, Richard and Eugene, and rest in peace. You were profoundly different people, the sort who didn't hang out in each other's circles, but you had a cumulative effect on the children of the '60's and'70's that will not pass away until we, those children, do. It's not much, sad to say, but our remembrance is the only meaningful honor we can bestow on the efforts of your lives...

...cross-posted at Ruminate This...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:01 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Robbing Peter to Pay...Gee Dub's Pals 

...as promised, the House of Representatives voted to extend a bag full of tax breaks for the rich today after having whacked funding for lower middle class and poor families just a few days ago. While they threw a few bones to the rest of us to make it look like they actually care about the little people, the focus of the effort was the continuation of cuts on the taxation of investment and dividend income for some fraction of the top one percent of taxpayers and which represents the majority of the dollar value of the cuts. It's certainly not a surprising outcome; the neocon/winger element of the Republican party has made no secret of their desire to cut off anything resembling the sort of social services that any decent society would provide for it's less well-off members. At the same time, it provides a marvelous display of the total lack of seriousness that the folks in charge have about the whole subject of budget deficits and the lengths to which they will go to punish the 'lower classes' and the expense of the well-to-do gentry...

...this is something to get pissed off about, if you can't find anything else (which seems profoundly ulikely, on its face). Taken as a whole, the budgetary votes over the last couple of weeks are an embarrasment. They are not the moves of any nation that wants to style itself as the leader of the free world and the greatest nation on earth. They are not the moves of a nation whose controlling party wants to insist on being considered a Christion nation. They are the moves of an elite controlling class that feels no threat accruing from its actions, and it's what we better get used to if Democrats can't get their act together...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:38 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Playing the Fear Card One More Time 

...like the rise of the sun or the changing of the seasons, you can always count of Dick Cheney to speak in the most darkly dire of terms about our nation's prospects if we leave Iraq "before the job is done", whatever the hell that means. He was at it again today, saying that any sort of quick bugout would directly imperil the safety of the United States. It's become the sort of one-note song that we have come to expect, devoid of any proof or rationale that can stand up to even the most casual scrutiny. It is, however, the only game left for Gee Dub and the Bush Monkeys to play, since nothing else they have ever told us about why we needed to invade Iraq or how it would go has had the faintest whiff of truth. He even found time to slam down onto the table that old worn, completely discredited linkage to September 11, 2001. In fact, this particular effort was so completely lame and disjointed that even the most casual observer would have to stop in one of those "huh?" kind of moments:
“Some have suggested by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein we simply stirred up a hornet’s nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq in September 2001 and the terrorists hit us anyway.”


...sweet weeping Jesus, who voted for these people? Did a lack of critical thinking skills somehow become a requirement for higher office and I didn't get the memo? If we weren't in Iraq in 2001 and "the terrorists hit us anyway", how would invading Iraq make us safer? Or put another way, given this interesting observation, how does the invasion of Iraq and the resultant stirred up hornet's nest that we now have to combat in order to - in Big Dick's own words - snatch away a "victory for terrorists" make us safer, given that they hit us anyway when we weren't in Iraq? The simple fact is that we were attacked without being in Iraq, being in Iraq hasn't fixed the fundamental danger, and there neither was nor is any meaningful connection between Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Adventure and the security of the United States. But the opportunity for fear is still there to matter, regardless the fact that the basis for that fear is entirely of our own creation. That it's all about fear as a political ploy rather than about trying to make us more safe is more than abundantly displayed in the most recent findings of the members of the 9/11 Commission, which in a traitorous and terrorist-loving move revealed that we have made relatively little progress in fixing all those 9/11-related problems...

...we will probably never be free in our lifetimes of this fear ploy; it has worked well for Bushco in the past and they apparently don't see any particular reason to change their operating plan...yet. We are still facing another three full years of Big Dick's famous angry gruff uncle gambit, touting a party line that bears so little resemblance to reality that only the most severely twisted observer could even pretend that it works. None of it works when they actually get around to trying to make all the proper connections, but it's apparently what we are going to have to put up with until some gift of Providence or common sense comes to our rescue...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:05 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 05, 2005

Renditioning the Truth 

...one of the most fascinating twists in the building saga of those secret European CIA gulags is the sudden careful parsing of statements by certain members of the Bush Administration. On the heels of this exceptionally explicit WaPo report about the mistaken kidnapping and torture of a German citizen, Condi Rice is no longer issuing the sorts of noncommmittal statements on the subject that were the party line just a couple of days ago. Now she has decided to drag European countries in as co-conspirators by saying that unspecified 'efforts' have resulting in deterring attacks on Europe as well as America. Of course, if you're buying this sort of story line, you also need to understand that anything that is being done in our name is strictly legal and above board. After all, we're a nation of laws, we have an obligation as the leader of the free world in the War on Terra to obey the law, and the White House has long ago determined that we do not commit acts of torture because hardly any person under our control has actually, you know, suffered organ failure or anything like that...

...more on the backside...

...it's almost amusing to see our erstwhile "allies" get a taste of the no-holds-barred hardball politics that Condi's bitchslap represents:
“It is up to those governments and their citizens to decide if they wish to work with us,” she said, “and decide how much sensitive information they can make public.”

“They have a sovereign right to make that choice,” she said.


Excellent. Nice touch. I mean, we're used to seeing this kind of action by this gang, but to see them turn their own nasty little version of power politics lose on foreign countries is instructive, most specifically because it seems to be an affirmation of everything that has been written about the whole CIA gulag system that they have steadfastly refused to confirm or deny. Veiled threats to acheive cooperative silence from European nations at the risk of being seen as having been willing co-conspirators isn't really anything different than attempting to silence opposition to the Iraq war by labelling as a coward or a traitor anyone who disagrees...

It's pretty clear that there is no longer any question that our tax dollars have been paying for the abduction of foreign nationals on foreign soil on the flimsiest of evidence and removing them to secret locations on other foreign soil to torture them to see if they actually have any pertinent knowledge about terrorist activities. And it shouldn’t even come as a surprise anymore. The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and all the identical-looking reports that followed should have been sufficiently instructive that the casual abuse of human beings was well within the grasp of these nitwits; it was only when they got caught that they had to round up the low-ranked usual suspects for a public beat-down and hope that in our outrage over specific photo’s we wouldn’t happen to notice all those suspicious connecting threads running from Guantanamo through Baghdad to outlying reaches of Iraq and Afghanistan. Anybody expressing shock at the suggestion that the CIA is acting like some global version of Saddam’s regime of the Soviets of yore is either doing so just for show or hasn’t been paying sufficient attention. It is an outrage, and in an otherwise perfect world a sufficiently independent Congress would be peaking under every rock with a good sturdy club to get the necessary answers…
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:37 AM 0 comments

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