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

Saturday, March 17, 2007

The Strange World of Words 

...words are a funny thing. They can sit there on a page in a dictionary, minding their own business, when all of a sudden...WHANG!!! POW!!!.... somebody sneaks up and slaps a definition on them that hadn't been there before and now they have meanings that cast an entirely new context or turn them into a pejorative term leading to the need for some sort of abject public apology. "Gay" is such a term; in my lifetime it has changed from a description of attitude to one of sexuality. A fellow can, in today's hyper-homophobic climate, silence coffee-hour after church or create a huge personal space in the locker room by describing his lightness of heart as being "gay". "Niggardly" is another, but for a different reason; because it sounds so much like the ugly "N-word" descriptor for a black person, the very use of this fine old term that has no relationship whatever to that insult can result in a public figure being harassed into an apology or out of office simply because opponents understand the basic bovine-level illiteracy of the general public...

Yesterday, John McCain became the most recent public figure to run up on the treacherous shoals of the term "tar baby". By sundown his handlers had freaked out sufficiently that he was expressing open regret for having used to the term. Now, call me simple, sheltered, or hopelessly unaware, but for the life of me I never knew until the recent trend where this turn of phrase was treated objectionably (Mitt Romney, for example) I honestly had no idea that it was an insult. I had never in my life heard or heard of a small black child being referred to as a "tar baby"...

My grandmother used to read me bedtime stories when we were visiting, and some of my favorite were the Br'er Rabbit stories. I grew up understanding that the Tar Baby represented a difficult or sticky situation; even though I grew up in a situation where racial epithets were relatively uncommon, I never heard the term "tar baby" used in such a context. I have over the years used the term myself to mean a difficult or sticky situation. As with McCain, Romney, and others in the last several months, my context was 'sticky situation'. Clearly, McCain is learning, as I have, that this is a term that can no longer be part of my personal dictionary. It is clearly a phrase that lives on treacherous ground, even though describing a difficult, sticky situation as "a small black child" would seem bound to create some confusing contextual issues. Obviously, unless I feeling mulish or curmudgeonly and looking for a fight, I'm going to need to refer to difficult, sticky situations as being all huggly-muggly from now on...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:08 AM 0 comments

Friday, March 16, 2007

Fighting Bushzilla 

...there are central tenets to good old fashioned monster movies that the true aficionado completely understands. One is that the monster - Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, the Alien, big friggin' ants - is able to absorb unbelievable brutal punishment without dying (or at least running away). Another is that this doesn't much matter anyway because the human forces arrayed against it are at best inadequate and at worst hopelessly incompetent. And then there's Raymond Burr or some C-rated facsimile, stumbling around in a concerned fog, trying to come up with a solution to defeat the monster while it is eating or stomping its way through Tokyo or New York or the whole wide world...

It's as though we are seeing this same phenomenon playing itself out today on our political stage. The Monster of Pennsylvania Avenue has been flailing around wildly, crushing the streets and buildings of our constitutional, democratic culture that Americans have fought and bled and died to construct over the last 230 years. The failure that has been the Iraq war has been pounding and pounding on the epidermis of this monster we know as the Bush White House, as it becomes more and more clear to Main Street folks that we were lied into Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure and that unspeakable atrocities have been committed on defenseless prisoners and innocent residents of far-off lands in our name. At the same time, other blows have been coming at the rate of heavy mortar fire over the last few weeks. First it was the Scooter Libby trial and conviction - itself gaining a human face with today's testimony by Valerie Plame, which was quickly swept off the stage by the revelations about the abusive treatment that our own soldiers - the very people for which we opponents of the Iraq Invasion have been accused of being traitors for not supporting - have been subjected to by the very administration that holds their broken bodies up like some medicine man's talisman to defend itself against charges of its own incompetence. Now that obscenity has been supplanted by the rapidly unravelling fairy tale Bushco tried to spin about how and why eight competent US attorneys were fired late last year. All these things have been exploding against the ugly slimy hide of this hideous Rovian-bred monster like so many howitzer shells, missiles, and various other ordnance, but while the horrible monster has apparently been staggered, it has refused to die. Part of the problem is the incapability/incompetence of the troops normally charged to defend us against such an attack: the viewable and readable media. A combination of either timidity or of being bought on the part of the main stream media and the contrarian efforts of a segment that actually supports the efforts of the monster to stomp downtown Tokyo into splinters has conspired to hide the actual damage being visited on the city...

The individual voices of dissent, coming from either bloggers, individual mainstream media comm enters, or the smaller singular voices of letter-writers or Congress-callers are the desperate Burr-emulators of this particular movie. The bottom line in this movie in which we are living is that we don't have any evidence that the monster is actually going to die, much less dive back into the ocean until it's time for the next sequel. The question for now is "What will it take to Kill this Monster". What magic weapon, what silver bullet will finally call this monster to go away? There is a feel of the "Last Days of Nixon" to this movie we are living right now, but it isn't really very authentic because it took a sufficient constant landslide of outrages and malfeasance to finally get to the place where Republicans were willing to vote on articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives and pose the threat of sufficient votes in the United States Senate to make the charges stick. Sadly for thinking, concerned Americans, we're not to that point yet, so Bushzilla is still able to wreak its havoc on our society while the forces who should be arrayed against it fiddle around. The question that Mrs. Jack K asked today as we motored across the High Desert of Eastern Oregon listening to further revelations of White House involvement in the USA firings as we were on our way to another of those four-times-a-year endocrinologist appointments for our son Diabetes Boy is the Question Of The Day for all of us: What is it going to take to kill this monster?
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Linkless Musings on Reality 

...OK, so what I’m watching tonight on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" had a pretty funny bit by Stewart about the mysterious continued clout of Big Dick Cheney, but it raises - as Stewart no doubt intended - some very serious questions. They aren’t questions about Cheney himself; he has been a jerk in public dating back to his days as a Congressman and probably was one in private for far longer than that (tigers changing their stripes and all that). The questions hover fundamentally around the proposition "What the F@*K is up with the media?". There is no better, more stark example of the venality of the so-called Main Stream Media than the coddling treatment that has been accorded to the Big Dick over the last six years. As demonstrated by Jon Stewart - and readily available to any person with functioning memory banks - Richard Cheney has been right about something exactly three times in his adult life: once when he said he had ‘different ‘ priorities that prevented him offering his ripe young body up for the draft during the Vietnam War; once when he mentioned sometime in the last six years that he was the Vice President (and this one gets an assist thanks to the US Supreme Court); and once when he mentioned without really apologizing that he nailed some old guy in the face with a shotgun. That’s pretty much it....

There is virtually nothing that Cheney has said about the greater War on Terra or the ginned-up Iraq invasion that he so hungered for that has been true. Time after time after time, Big Dick has been out there spinning the bizarre sorts of fantasies that get most people sent into treatment by caring loved ones. And yet....and yet, oh sweet Jesus, there we have the Sunday talking head shows and virtually all of cable news enticing him out of his undisclosed location somewhere high on the slopes of the Big Rock Candy Mountain to dispense more of his own special brand of twisted, misguided wisdom without a hint of actual of journalistic rigor being applied to his laughably absurd statements or his history of throwing out similar wild imaginings of the sort that would make Walt Disney and his original band of ‘Imagineers’ weep with shame. We can forget the Tim Russert’s of the world, or the Chris Matthews’, or all of the others who come to positions of punditry for reasons having nothing to do with journalistic skills. The big question is where have gone all those so-called fourth columnists - defenders of a free press and the people’s right to know - who have failed so miserably in critically examining Cheney’s statements with respect to the truth?

There’s nothing new about this little whining fit of mine; these issues have been hashed over on liberal blogs over and over again. Jon Stewart’s comments shine another light on the subject, however. This marks one of the first times that we have heard a condemnation of the basically evil spirit of Big Dick on our televisions. Lots of People Who Matter and who watch TDSWJS have been rolling happily along, feeling no disconnect at all between their obsession in 2000 with Al Gore’s wardrobe statement or John Kerry’s 2004 fumbling with outright lies about his Vietnam service and the blithe, gentle treatment that they have accorded to Gee Dub’s amazing grab for the supremacy of power by a "unitary" executive or the continued divisive and discordant notes spewing out of Dick Cheney’s pie hole. The facts are simple: George W. Bush has, through his actions, repudiated almost everything he said not related to abortion during the 2000 election campaign and many of his public pronouncements since then, and Richard Cheney hasn’t made one public statement that is within hailing distance of the truth from then to now. It is to the eternal shame of the world of journalism that they have been willing parties to this sham....

I am a product of the Watergate generation. I was recently graduated from high school and working at a north Idaho sawmill as a summer job during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. Through a series of unfortunate scheduling switches, I ended up working night shift most of that summer and had the opportunity to spend many days during that summer watching those hearings, and I followed the reportage of two young Washington Post reporters with a particular passion. The experience, along with my past history in high school journalism class and a blood-taste for the subject, fired me up to initially take a stab at journalism as a major when I went to college. While I later settled on a more prosaic science-based major in my other passion of natural resource management, that coppery blood taste in my mouth never left me, and my appreciation for the art and science of pure bone-deep honest journalistic endeavor has led to a strange world where the people who are supposed to be letting us citizens know what bad things the people in power are doing have given up or sold their souls or walked away from the only reason that a free unfettered media exists in the first place. It is a sad world where dirty friggin’ hippie bloggers or Jon Stewart on the Comedy Channel or Keith Olbermann on a sadly underviewed cable news program are the only voices who actually represent the values that journalism of 30 years ago purported to hold dear...

John Dean is going to be on my late-night version of Countdown in a moment and he is going to perturb my night’s sleep with insistences that what we are living now is worse than Watergate. That’s fine, I suppose; George Washington University professor Jonathon Turley has been whipping me into a personal frenzy for several months now with his insistence on Olbermann’s show that we are facing little less than the reincarnation of Hitler’s Germany itself, if not a visitation to Stalinism. Sadly, neither of them has been or is now exagerating the terms of the issue, but the imperative nature of that fact hasn’t penetrated the D.C. coctail-soaked imbred brains of Big-Time Media. It’s probably too late to start projecting "Mr. Deeds Goes To Washington" on swanky party-room walls in the better D.C. suburbs to give these morons a clue about what’s going down around them, but a guy has to finally ask whether it’s too much to ask that they redeem their inherited and hard-earned responsibilty to an independent media. They only seem to strongly treasure it when federal prosecutors start asking them about just how often and in how many ways they sacrificed their rights and privileges by becoming enablers and fellow travelers to the most dangerous presidency that this country has ever faced. The jail system is overcrowded, but there is room to accomodate those "journalists" who can’t figure it out....
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:29 PM 0 comments

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