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

Thursday, March 08, 2007

The Tone-Deaf Yanqui Rides Again 

...49 years ago, in May of 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon went on a 'good will' tour (down the page a ways) of South America that was supposed to be a simple, quiet sort of "Show The Flag" big-white-brother-in-D.C.-loves-you feel good tour of South America. Sadly for the future Tricky Dick and whatever braindead minions cooked up this idea, the citizens of the various stops on his intinerary didn't have the sort of warm, fuzzy feelings about the American government that they apparently thought, and the trip was a grim series of protests, complaints, and a couple of episodes of up-close-and-personal violent public attacks on Nixon's entourage that resulted in his boss, Dwight Eisenhower, sending a naval battle group to the coast of Venezula for the purpose of rescuing him by force if the need were to arise...

While the reasoning behind the unending episodes of protests was attributed at the time to those dirty farking communists (and isn't it interesting how the writing in that magazine hasn't changed much in 50 years), the reality was - as is usually the case - a different animal altogether. The fundamental problem was the perception held by Latin Americans about the patronizing attitude of the United States government about their needs, desires, and even their very existence. Attitudes are not created in a vacuum that can be somehow filled by a particular political philosophy; the philosophy must, in order to germinate and survive, latch onto some nurturing kernal of truth. The protests of the so-called 'Latin American people' was not so much a product of evil communist agitation as it was a product of the perception that the U.S. held little respect for or interest in the issues that they lived every day. The lack of anticipation of the protests was in large part a failure of administration fixers to understand the curcumstances and feelings of the citizens of the nations that would be visited...

Just shy of 49 years later, we are about to see the same act play itself out again. There are some differences: in 1958, the American representative was a subsidiary to the national leader who would only in time grow into being one of the most dangerous people ever to live in the White House, while this time the tour-boy is the actual full-blown hazard his own self. One difference in circumstances this time is that there isn't going to be any surprise about the feelings of the citizens of various South American countries that are on Gee Dub's Feel-Good Tour. Police and troops in Brazil, Columbia, and Mexico are already getting opportunities to have real live-fire exercises in riot control in advance of Gee Dub's visit, and the reasons for the various venues of unrest are little different than they were for Dick Nixon nearly half a century ago...

Our relationship with everything south of our border have always been problematic at best, and almost blatantly racist on the average day. While American bigwigs actually sit in contemplative silence while Bill "Damn, I'm Rich" Gates prattles on about the obviously self-serving "need" for cheap workers under the H-1B program (discussed by Bryan at Why Now here), and while politicians are falling all over themselves to ingratiate themselves with illegal Irist immigrants, people from south of our border with Mexico are more familiar with an attitude that is at best paternal (in less than the best sense of the word) and at worst xenophobic when it comes time to deal with either politicians or Customs officials. It is a simple, unavoidable fact is that Ruling America (that would be us white folk) is more capivated by people who look like us, have this great tradition of green beer, and talk with a charming Celtic accent than they are with brown people of little means who sound dumb because their second language accent when speaking English is tinged with an Hispanic lilt. It is also an unavoidable fact that the United States, having latched onto the Monroe Doctrine like shipwreck surviver grabbing at a life preserve, has paid little more attention to South America than a plantation owner would pay to the fallow fields at the far extents of his domain...

From bananas to rubber to oil and coffee, from vegetables to beef, our history South of the border from Juarez to Tierra del Fuego has been one that looked like some cross between a classic landlord-tenant relationship and some mutant variant of the French Colonial/Southern Slave Owner Plantation model. Under these terms, it isn't necessary for some communist agitator to tell the subjects of this system that the lives they or their extended relatives are living is somehow wrong or misguided. The connections are relatively easy to make, and the world is a much different place than it was half a century ago. The visuals, though, have a remarkable similarity. Rioters and protesters are aflame in the streets throughout what we so casually and imprecisely call "Latin America" even though Gee Dub is days away from actually gracing their individual countries. Once again, we are looking at a failure of understanding by an adminstration that has had little obvious concern for Latin America except for the occasional saber-rattling directed toward Venezula's Hugo Chavez, who has decided to cash in some of his personality chips to stage a shadow tour following Gee Dub. We won't see angry crowds pelting Chicken George's vehicle with rocks or any of the other unpleasantness that followed Dick Nixon all those years ago because all the king's men have - if nothing else - learned how to elevate crowd control to some evil science that will guarantee - if not photo's full of happy Latino campers - SD cards full of handshake-gripping photo's featuring Gee Dub and the Leader-du jour in some bomb-proof bunker...

The "people" not only will speak; they are already speaking, and this particular speech exercise is a reflection of both the upset of the "Latin American People" regarding our attitude toward their relatives who have tried to come to this country to make better lives for themselves and their objection to being some fourth-quarter last-minute photo-op for an administration that hasn't cared a whit one way or another for their circumstances over the last six years. It is also an objection to a pattern of foreign trips that have little more reason than the simple desire to try to change the subject from the failures of the misguided invasion of Iraq, the mismanaged occupation of Afghanistan, and the mishandling of the national economy and the failings of Fast-Track Authority that has resulted in a rather impressive loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. over the last several years...

The reality of the day is that this adminstration is as tone-deaf to the realities of life in "Latin America" as was the lame brain trust that decided to send Dick Nixon on his wild, ill-fated trip south of the border back in the day. The difference this time is that there isn't any particular excuse for the sort of brain-dead understanding about the mood of "the Latin American"; that demo doesn't like us, and it doesn't like us primarily because of that plantation-owner mindset of Bushco that has been so sympathetic to corporate overseers at the expense of the real people who live there. People were burning effigies today in places that won't see the real deal for days, which doesn't spell well for the balance of Gee Dub's tour. The sad thing for the rest of us is that Gee Dub and the White House gang probably don't even really understand why all those dirty hippy rabble-rousers are carrying on the way they are...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:42 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Lost In The D.C. Noise: The Dirt On Big Pharma 

...with all the hot Washington news going on right now that must just be making the whole D.C. area physically vibrate with tension and passion, it is not surprising that a story like this one can slip through the cracks. Simple facts are the easiest to understand, though, and there is a simple fact with regard to the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan: Americans are being taken to the cleaners by Big Pharma courtesy of Republican insistence that negotiation of drug prices not be a part of the plan...

There simply isn’t any reason for a mainstream drug like Ambien to have experienced the increase in price that seniors on Medicare Pt. D have seen. This, in fact, is outside the mainstream of complaints about the inability to negotiate prices. The whole point of that discussion was about making sure that Big Pharma didn’t unnecessarily maintain high prices for drugs that they claimed needed a profit margin to capture the cost of development. You have been watching commercials about the wonders of Ambien for over a year; it is an established drug that has no need to endure cost increases to recover development costs. This is little different from some drug maker insisting that my son’s insulin needs to be more expensive because... well, just because. The true nature of the dirty little incestuous relationship between Republicans and Big Pharma that makes big money for both parties at the expense of real people who have a real need for the medications in question is laid bare with today's report, but it's a sufficiently arcane tale that getting lost in bigger news is not a surprising fate and certainly one that Republicans desperately desire to be lost. They have enough problems on their plate right now, after all...

One more time, this is a perfect example of your government at work, and the sick, sad part of this vicioius little story is that it will be lost in all the noise about Libby, Walter Reed, and fired District Attorney’s that are capturing all the oxygen right now. That's a damned shame, because this matters more to a lot of people than any of the stories that are being carried as the lead all across the vast media wasteland...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:00 PM 0 comments

Irresponsible Speculation? 

...with all of the action in the House and Senate today regarding the US District Attorney’s relieved of their jobs “at the pleasure of the President”, it is interesting that speculation hasn’t begun to build at any visible level about the status of Patrick Fitzgerald. He is, after all, a US District Attorney (Northern District of Illinois, which includes Chicago). It’s interesting to speculate: how big a pair of balls are the boys in the Bush administration packin’ around in their jeans? Would they dare to make the move to order Fitzgerald to resign?

Is it irresponsible to speculate?

It would be irresponsible not to...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:58 PM 0 comments

Monday, March 05, 2007

Bruce Willis Can't Help You Now 

...it's almost an article of faith, thanks to Hollywood, that an asteroid or comet threatening to strike the surface of our little blue marble will be somehow deflected or destroyed by the stark final sacrifice of some brave, photogenic heroes who nobly sacrifice their own lives for the greater good of mankind. Sadly, NASA, the entity that would fling these tragic figures into space to save the rest of us, says "Ain't Gonna Happen"...

NASA reports that it would cost A BILLION DOLLARS to even develop a system that was sufficiently sophisticated to give us any opportunity to say much more than say "Hey, what was that?" in the instant before we were consigned to the fate of the dinosaurs. The average person might say "Holey Cow! A Billion Dollars is a bunch of money to ensure our security!" That average person would be, of course, stupid, because we have spent over 200 times that much money in Iraq in a so-far failed effort to make us safe enough to be appropriately shocked when a heretofore undetected piece of cosmic debris reintroduces us to the Ice Age...

In the strange governmental world that Gee Dub and his minions have created, funding is not a fungible thing. Two hundred billion dollars wasted in Iraq is "protecting the Homeland"; one billion to just track those celestial objects that would put even the most rabidly anti-American Islamofascist evil-doer terrorist scumbag in a deep dark shade is an expense we simply can't afford. The calculations are classically part of the sort of 'end-times' metric that Gee Dub's Pharisee Right supporters can really get off on, but they don't do anyone else any good. The bottom line is simple in this case: Congress said "Come up with a plan to track killer space objects"; NASA said "We can't; it would cost too much". That is the true measure of what you are worth...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:08 PM 0 comments

The Ugly American LIVES!!! 

...so, as it turns out, all those cautionary tales you've heard about investing in a wardrobe rich with maple-leaf t-shirts and Edmonton Oilers hockey sweaters (what we non-hockey types call jerseys) if you are planning an overseas trip turn out to be true. The BBC, in a recent survey of 1000 people in each of 27 countries, found that Canada was the most positively viewed of 12 major countries. The United States was rated the third least favorably...

Why we rank only 10th out of 12 in terms of positive, happy, sunny thoughts shouldn't be any surprise to anyone outside of the spare 30% of Americans who still support George W. Bush. The current administration has taken a shocking terrorist attack on our nation - one that united most of the world behind the United States in those aftermath moments of shock and horror - and made a hash of the aftermath, spoiling the original righteous takedown of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and launching a 'preventative' war in Iraq that wiser heads from across the political spectrum argued against and which only seems to have actually prevented Saddam Hussein and a few of his cronies from dying of natural causes in their own beds. We are not only NOT safer for our engagement in Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation Building Adventure, we have probably created a laboratory for the development of terrorist tactics that those who actually do have a gripe against us couldn't have wished for in their wildest dreams...

Israel's ranking as the least positive image of the 12 countries will probably come as some surprise to AIPAC and those who are - for whatever reason - staunch American supporters, but in the understanding of the sensibilities of the greater world it really shouldn't be. Much of the world has a longer view of history that do Americans, and that rest of the world has a deeper understanding of the ramifications of the efforts to carve a Jewish homeland out of what was once called Palestine than do most Americans. You can start a good fight by offering to debate whether Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are violations of United Nations resolutions and certain of the Geneva Conventions, but the bottom line is that recent efforts of the Nation of Israel to secure its borders and assure the safety of its citizens have caused a lot of people in a diverse array of countries to view it as more an aggressor than a victim...

But none of that matters so much, at least not as much as your need to learn to pass what I call "The Canada Test" if you can't pass for Japanese: learning to pronounce the words "again" and "been" with the long vowel sound and punctuating the end of most sentences with the questioning "eh?" qualifier. That and a working knowledge of Tim Horton's donuts and the history of the Canadiens Stanley Cup efforts - along with the proper wardrobe - should keep you safe. Just leave that Yankee's hat at home...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:00 PM 0 comments

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