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

Friday, June 08, 2007

The Overwhelming Noise Of Another White Blonde Chick 

...let's just agree to the stipulation that I know something about the penalties associated with the crime of Driving While Intoxicated. We don't need to delve deeply into my knowledge, except to note that people who have been important in my life no longer are because of that particular practice, mostly because they no longer are around to be important in my life. Fact of the matter is, there are perfectly good reasons why I am so pissed off tonight that I am wasting a small portion of my life being angry about some of the commentary that I am seeing on cable news about the "horrendous", "supremely unfair" treatment being slammed down on the head of one of the most useless wastes of natural resources that has rolled down the turnpike in quite some time...

Paris Hilton was arrested and convicted for DWI. She was placed on probation and her license was suspended. She subsequently was stopped twice for TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS and discovered to be driving with a suspended license. Forget about all the "yeah, but if she was black" B.S.; as a white twenty-something chick, she would have done 30 days or so in jail anywhere I've lived in the Pacific Northwest, if for no other reason that someone this stupid probably shouldn't be allowed to roam freely. Even the most messed-up Central Orgygonian meth-head knows that you need to keep it cool if you are driving under the wrong circumstances, but apparently that simple fact doesn't rule in Los Angeles, judging from the outraged Hilton defenders who are all over cable news tonight. None of this is hard to work through, despite the noise being offered by both the Los Angeles County sheriff and a host of "lawyers to the Stars". She was caught driving while intoxicated; she was subsequently caught driving while her license was suspended and had a remarkable wrist-slapping sit-down with the authorities wherein they explained - presumably in simple words - that she shouldn't be doing that; she was once again stopped for a traffic violation and found to be driving with a suspended license after having been told that to do so would be a no-no. Hilton's behavior would probably earn her 6 months as a guest of the county here in Oregon Middle Earth, but apparently things are different for the rich and powerful in L.A. County when it comes to the rich and famous being caught twice driving with a suspended license...

It would be nice to think that the personal misbehavior of some blonde bimbo who's only real claim to fame is to have allowed herself to be filmed for all the internets to see engaging in sex acts at an age where she should have been at home studying for an llth grade US History final exam would occupy a few moments of a single day's news cycle. But, as was said, the rich are not like us, so today it's all Paris all the time. To hell with all the rest that actually matters....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:40 PM 0 comments

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Losing The Thread Over Immigration 

...it's been a hectic week, what with the elder of my contribution to the future of our country graduating from high school, but the moment can't pass without paying heartfelt tribute to the astounding success by the wingnut branch of conservatism, otherwise pummeled into a serious state of dazed confusion on almost every other issue, has reached in its effort to demonize the whole debate on 'illegal' immigration. Tonight, those Senators who may have hung their election prospects on the line by working with George W. Bush to hammer an immigration reform bill out of confused unmatching pieces had their heads handed to them by the rest of the Senate when they couldn't get more than 45 votes on a cloture motion to cut off debate and actually vote on the mishmash that their effort at bipartisanship had created...

The politics of immigration reform are stiff with all sorts of partisanship. The right-wing memes that have been shining a bright beam on white, middle class objection to short brown men jabbering in some strange foreign language in the grocery store ("is he talking about me?") coupled with the fear that waves of brown people from south of the border are sweeping across the land to snatch up all the good jobs building your next garage has sunk deep roots in America's brainstem. Couple that with the cheap, silly idea that any "guest worker" living in the sort of poverty that they used to make Public Service VISTA commercials about if they were white folk in the West Virginia hill country is going to pony up 5 big ones for the opportunity to get shipped back home to wait for years for permission to come back (like they never heard of the whole 'overstaying your visa' thing), and you have that hackneyed phrase "perfect storm" to describe both Democrats and Republicans who aren't going to go along with the desires of a failed president to hack out some sort of desperate legacy that doesn't include car bombs, IED's, and flagpoles all across this great nation of ours in desperate need of replacement because the ropes and pulleys have been worn out from the constant lowering of the American Flag to half-staff at the death of our troops in Iraq...

'Immigration reform' is the new 'abortion', a wedge issue that puts 'embryonic stem cell research' in a deep shade because of the perceived immediacy of the matter. The left and right both oppose the current "bipartisan" bill, for entirely different reasons having little to do with the actual subject, and that's why Harry Reid is probably right in saying "the hell with this" and moving on to other issues. When the President is from the other party and can't deliver the votes to make this thing happen, there's no real reason to expose Democrats to the sorts of Rovian attacks that have characterized past efforts to operate in some imaginary 'bipartisan' workspace....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:19 PM 0 comments

Requiem For The End Of A Childhood 

...eighteen years, three months, and a number of days ago, a handsome full-bearded man in his early thirties and his beautiful and very pregnant late twenty-something wife presented themselves to the staff of a hospital in the southern Willamette Valley of western Orygun at 0700 hrs on a Saturday morning for - of all things - the scheduled birth of their first child. Said child had displayed the poor taste of failing to arrive - by a couple of weeks - on the date that the grizzled old Ob-Gyn pro had pronounced several months earlier as the Official Date Of Birth, so a massive IV stew of birth-inducing hormones was in order. It’s the earliest lesson a child can learn, even in the soothing fluid warmth of the uterus: challenging authority has consequences....

The day was long; the birth was hard - especially on the Mom-to-be. It so happens that Lamaz breathing techniques, studied so diligently over months of Tuesday evening classes, are not just a useless exercise during an induced birth but also present a potential route to the production of fatherless children if only the birthing mother could get up off of the birthing couch after one too many exhortations to “breath, dear, breath; HEE -HU-HU HEE-HU-HU” and grab some sharp surgical instrument to - in order - cut off the male organ that brought her to this low state, cut out said dismembered sex fiend’s throbbing heart, and carve the name of the coming child into the aforementioned miscreant’s cooling corpse. ...

At the end of it all, late in that brutal day, I found myself holding an apparently angry, hollering, blood-streaked, slimy little newborn human blob, allegedly a girl child (‘fingers and toes, Doc. Let’s worry about boy or girl later’). For reasons that I fail utterly at explaining to this day, I felt the overwhelming need to declare an oath to myself: this new life was my personal responsibility to raise, teach, and protect, and I would be more than happy to kill the person who tried to bring harm to this child. There was no way of knowing on that cold wet late-winter morning what sort of wild corkscrew path our joined lives would take, but the path has become clearer, mostly because we are able to look over our shoulders to see where we’ve been. There were those first diaper changes, with the marvel of “where the hell did that come from”; early baths that got everybody in the house wet one way or another; the aggressive 2-year-old refusal to wear pants; the subsequent aggressive refusal to wear dresses that lasted into the early teen years; the first signs of chicken pox the day after Daddy (who had no recollection of ever having had that disease) shared utensils and food (apparently Daddy had been exposed in the past, because he didn’t get them, although there are - 16 years later - massive supplies of products to respond to onset of that particular disease); broken bones; broken friendships and the associated broken heart. There have been bad report cards, late-night last-minute thrashings to finish school projects, weekends spent on Girl Scout projects when there were other things needing to be done, evenings spent sitting in school parking lots waiting for some bus to show up, trips as a chaperone to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland where the only 7th grader I didn’t see through most of the adventure was my own daughter, trips beyond number to school and back on all those many, many nights when editor responsibilities required my first-borne to stay at school to get the student newspaper or the yearbook out on deadline. There was that first time I approved by signature for my daughter to travel for a week to San Francisco for a journalism conference without someone I knew being in charge, that first time I gave the ok to her spending the weekend with her friends in a town 70 miles away that one of them had moved to, that first time I agreed to let her and two classmates drive 250 miles across the state to a weekend music jam/concert. Parenting, I have discovered, has a lot of really scary firsts...

There is, however, a last. Yesterday evening, my first-born, my little girl, the first child over whom I ever swore a personal oath to protect unto death, walked up onto a temporary stage at the west end of the local high school gym and changed both of our lives completely. It may well be that you can’t really appreciate the momentous nature of high school graduation until you are a parent. It is clearly a big moment, a right of passage, and a reprieve from the Governor when you are experiencing it as a high school senior. It is a whole different creature when you are a parent in the crowd....

Letting go can be hard for a parent, given the emotional investment you have made to even get to this point. Graduation is a brutal master, though, that has no problem letting you know that - for better or worse - it’s time to get on with things. It’s time to accept, once and for all, that the time has arrived or is rapidly approaching where you aren’t The Boss any more. Even if the next step is college, and even if you are going to be footing part or all of the bill, all you can really do is watch this vessel you launched sail out of sight around that last river bend that you can see downstream. All those chats about boys, classes, teachers, life in general, all those moments that film can’t capture, all of those instances of laughter and pain and the angst of growing up, all of that and all the rest are gone. You will still talk and live and experience each other, but it will be at a psychic and physical distance once that new life and all its differences of independence begin....

Goodbye, my little blonde-haired girl. Safe journey, sweety. I’ve tried to do my best to teach you how to live. Its' up to you now...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:44 PM 0 comments

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