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

Saturday, April 28, 2007

It Is As It Was 

...once in a great long while, my contributions to the future success of this nation ask me those sorts of "what did you do in the war, daddy" questions that send me off on the sort of journey down memory lane that both helps to refresh my sense of the vigor of my youth and teach them not to ask such questions for a few weeks. The theme that I have been harping on the last few weeks is - I believe - simple yet powerful, if only these Ipod-bejeweled teenagers will listen and understand between their plantive cries that we simply must move to some actually civilized area where people have and enjoy high-speed internet so they can actually enjoy Youtube and illegal music downloads: We are living 1973 all over again...

Here we are, as we were once not that long before for those of us who fall into the fifty-something category. We have an unpopular president enveloped in a host of scandals while he attempts to prosecute an unpopular war that has brought our military to the eve of destruction while at the same time causing the average working man and woman to begin to question if he is the right man for the job. At his right hand, we have a vice president who seems to serve no useful purpose except to wander out of his lair on occasion to growl invective at anyone who isn't good enough or smart enough or brave enough to get behind the president all the way. This vice president doesn't have any particular background that validates his position, although he has connections to private contractors who are or have been sucking at various government teats for a goodly period of time thanks to his influence. On the other side, you have angry, fed-up Congressional Democrats and Republicans who are reading polls with the sort of fear-sweating desperation that a bookie feels when all those "sure bets" go all the way wrong at the same cruel time. The Senate and House Judiciary Committees look alot like the sort of thing that we watched on network television back in the day while hair-curlered housewives churned out angry letters to the networks about just where the hell did the regular daily soap opera fare go...

We're not all that terribly close yet, mostly because we haven't adequately traced all the current badness back to the inner circles of the White House, even though a more competent press would have jumped all over some of the stories that have come to light. It is probably important to remember that the Washinington press of the early '70's wasn't all that much different than what we have now until a couple of young Washington Post reporters started looking into the particulars of Watergate and what it really meant. Everybody else ended up playing catch-up, and the same thing could happen again...but only if the ratings suggested that the comfortable cocktail relationships be cast aside in the effort...

But that's almost a sidestory out here in the real world. There is a certain heft and taste to the ongoing civic story that almost causes flashbacks. We've seen all of this scenery before, and not all that long ago. The War in Iraq isn't even a pretender to the crown sported by the Vietnam War, and Bushco hasn't been photographed with it's lily-white priveleged uppercrust hand in all of the cookie jars that it has dipped into to provide the perfect truth. Still, when I'm talking to the teens in my house, it's impossible to keep from telling them that this is the end of the Nixon Administration all over again, minus a courageous press and the sorts of investigation and oversight that we saw back then. Then I remind them of the Chinese curse about 'interesting times' and they growl at me the way the new generation always does at the older ruling generation. It's so cute watching them grow this way...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:09 PM 0 comments

The Strange Saga of Republican Morality 

...it's been a quiet week here at Grumpy Forester Central, and - just sayin' - I would willingly commit any number of heinous crimes with a smile on my face and a song in my heart if those savage acts would free me of 26.4 kbps dial-up, random anti-virus downloads that take for-friggin'-ever and render my laptop almost comatose, and a dial-up ISP with an accelator utility that makes a cruel mockery of the whole concept of 'acceleration'...

...just sayin'...

...but one can't help, now that one has actually fought last-century technology to a stalemate, commenting at least briefly on the strange taste that Republicans, particularly the segment that draws it's strength from the fundamental, almost but not quite Christian rightwing segment of the party, have for misunderstanding what a scandal actually looks like. Late yesterday we came face to face with one of those famous Friday night "events" that this administration has made famous where something that it would rather not have to spend the next day talking about gets tossed across the security fence into Pennsylvania Avenue for the feral dogs of the press to sniff out. This time it was Randall L. Tobias, the Deputy Secretary of State responsible for U.S. foreign aid, who's desire for a really good masseuse at a reasonable price apparently led him to the services of an escort service of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who does not actually feature massage therapy as one of the specialities of that particular service...

The interesting thing about this whole little episode is that, while Tobias was defenestrating himself to the benefit of the Bush Administration over an issue where he apparently insisted that nothing approaching the Big Nasty ever happened, Alberto Gonzalez still sat at his finely crafted expensive desk in the big corner office at the Justice Department. Still employed, still carrying the presidential Seal of Approval, Al Gonzalez was initialing documents and searching for new ways to legalize torture or spying on unsuspecting Americans or otherwise turning the Constitution of The United States into the most valuable and fragile piece of toilet paper ever created, resting up from a day of testimony that provided anyone who didn't fall out of a high chair as an infant all the evidence necessary to conclude that he is either a less than brilliant liar comforted by a document-heavy knowledge of where some particuarly odious bodies are buried, a deluded half-witted minion hanging on by a slender thread of loyalty from his long-time benefactor, or the shield deployed by the Rovian Phalanx to absorb all the arrows and spears that an outraged political and civil society can launch to protect the truly valuable targets from the growing list of scandals that are beginning to make the good ship George W. Bush leak at seams that they didn't even know existed...

As it is always said, Sex Sells, at least with the base. Lying under oath about an apparent effort to bring a degree of politics into the supposedly sacrosanct world of U.S. Attorneys not seen since the Nixon era doesn't so much. Despite the growing insistence of frantic Republican leaders who see that whole sad storyline about a permanent Republican majority slipping like water through their fingers, Abu Al sits strong and tall in his office, even as evidence grows that Republican leaders, both elected and unelected, engaged in a serious effort to turn the Justice Department into a wholely owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee at the expense of any common understanding of what the word "democracy" actually means. Meanwhile, some sad moke who spent his work days encouraging abstinence and discounting the value of condoms but who understandably had trouble getting dates gets the heave-ho because of behavior that, while clearly a tad inconsistent with his official pronouncements, didn't harm nearly as many people as the things that Gonzalez has cooked up over the last seven years as the president's right hand man...

Thus we have the calculus of the current crop of Republicans that are infesting our political life: Sex is bad if it isn't within narrow prescribed standards; ripping the guts out of the civil and human rights and liberties that so many have defended and fought for and died for is a good thing...

...or at least it is until the majority of Americans object, at which point those Republicans involved in getting Republicans elected to office begin to mutter nervously. That's the bottom line for this crew. Sex is bad; Abu Grhaib, Enron, Halliburton, waterboarding, National Security letters, and political interference into federal investigations of Republican corruption are good - until we find out about all that stuff, and then it's bad...sort of. But not as bad as sex...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 PM 0 comments

Sunday, April 22, 2007

The Handgun Phallacy 

...after Timothy McVey blew the front off of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, outrage and horror was generated by the sight of a rescuer carrying the small broken body of a toddler victim from the wreckage. This served as the fuel that powered changes in the way security was managed in public buildings and increased efforts to put taggants in and restricting access to the anfo nitrate fertilizer that served as the primary component of the weapon, as well as other explosive agents. Regardless of the hassles or inconveniences, it was difficult to find anyone who would even attempt to argue that we shouldn’t do these things to keep someone else from using barrels of diesel-soaked fertilizer or bags of black powder against our citizens...except for one particular group...

The effort was defeated by the National Rifle Association...

In the aftermath of one unbalanced person shooting thirty-two Virginia Tech students and professors to death and wounding another score, there are very few noises being uttered about the accessibility of the weapons used against our citizens, at least at the official governmental level. Thus is manifested once again the power of the National Rifle Association. Thus it has been, and thus it shall be, until such time as the American people decide that having their sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and wives and husbands and friends and neighbors killed either singularly or in bunches with handguns. The flavor of some comments I have seen and read suggest that we aren’t even close to being to that point yet...

I have read and heard people, some of them actually appearing to otherwise be reasonably sentinent beings, that this sort of thing wouldn’t be happening if more people were allowed to carry handguns legally. Now there is neither evidence or any sort of empirical test that supports this case, and - as in the VT episode - I can’t imagine that a bunch of people rushing out into a hallway waving guns at the shout “Hey! There’s a guy with a gun out here!” is a situation that is going to turn out all that well. Nor would I envy SWAT team members or rescue personnel who have been tasked with entering a room where a bunch of amped-up gunowners are huddled behind overturned desks with a piece in their hands and a fight to the death in the front of their minds. Starsky and Hutch and Tubbs and Crocket and Jack Bauer and God knows how many others, however, have convinced a sizable segment of Americans that they would be able to drop a nice tight three-shot pattern on the correct bad guys chest at an instant’s notice with bullets cracking past their heads, after which they would have wild animal sex with a suitably appreciative and attractive woman and knock back a few beers with other manly men who are in awe of their prowess in love and war...

This is what the NRA wants them to think. It is vital to support that lie, in the same way that the anti-choice folks lie about ‘states rights’ in the abortion debate. As long as none of their supporters ever really game out the truth, which is that the first two or three heroes to reach for that big iron on their hip when presented with a bad guy who already has a weapon drawn are going to be on the wrong side of the flowers at the memorial service, everything will be fine. So far, so good, as far as they’re concerned. Even though the larger society has said “what the Hell” as they’ve fought to the bitter end to support bullets that easily penetrate body armor or that shatter into razor-sharp shrapnel inside the body or semi-automatic rifles that aren’t much for hunting but sure can empty out a fast food joint in a hurry, their core supporters are always right there for them, the core supporters have been behind the NRA with all the fervor that manly men can bring to bear. They don’t mean much in pure numbers, but the money that they provide gives the NRA an arsenal that can make the difference in Congressional and presidential races, and the people who engage in those contests are usually in it for the win rather than for some self-fulfilling discussion about policy. Thirty-two sets of grieving family and friends are small numbers having little influence in that equation; the heartbroken loved ones of those gunned down in convenience stores, liquor stores, parking lots, in drive-by shootings, or any of the other places where nearly ten times the number of Americans that have died in four years of war in Iraq come to their end every year by gun violence don’t have any more influence and may actually have less because of the relatively anonymous nature of individual localized acts of voilence...

So we can shake our fists and rage against the failure of the people who are in a positions to do something to actually, you know, do something, but it is a wasted gesture until we can get to the point where the money and support for doing something is as muscular as what the NRA brings to the table now. Even all those people like me who own a variety of firearms but object to the prospect of every Tom, Dick, and self-styled Dirty Harry packin’ on the streets just because they nurture some hero-fantasy will be lost voices until the weight of public opinion, and more importantly that monetary and political support, overcome the current inertia. Until then, the existing political factors in that big equation presented by the NRA’s money will be more important than who’s dying or why...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:29 PM 0 comments

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