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

Saturday, April 05, 2008

On Keeping 'Mavericks' Out Of The Oval Office 

...one of the popular Democratic themes regarding the candidacy of the apparent Republican standard-bearer St. John of McCain is that he is just another four years of George W. Bush. This is a nice bit of convenient short hand, which in itself would be a surprising departure from the past Democratic tendency of wanting to be earnest and detailed instead of engaging in the well-developed Republican habit of grabbing onto short snappy bullet statements that are easily digestible, but it misses a fundamental and crucial point: John McCain actually believes things that, depending on the subject, varying but definitive majorities of Americans don't...

George W. Bush was willing to say a lot of things that might calm the unwashed masses, but there isn't any sort of evidence that he believed either the things he said or the opposite sorts of things that have actually come out of his administration. Gee Dub has not throughout his political life demonstrated much interest in anything that didn't either A) financially support him or those he considered his friends or B) involve the killing of people that he saw some political value of killing. He has primarily been an empty vessel that others have given some ugly sort of meaning by filling him to the mark with their own misguided hopes and dreams. McCain isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, the same sort of person. He is passionate, by his own admission, about a number of subjects - or at least about his own sense of rightness about those subjects, and that is a far more dangerous thing...

More than anything else, St. John is staunchly conservative and not nearly the sort of iconoclastic later-years Goldwater-style curmudgeon that he would like you to believe he has become. More to the point, he has a remarkable lack of informed curiosity about a whole host of issues that the average American might hope he would understand, were he to end up sitting in the Oval Office:

On economic issues, he has more than once, including in an interview for this Wall Street Journal article, admitted that he doesn't know as much as he should about such things, but it's all good because he will rely on Phil Gramm and Arthur Laffer for advice, which should send any survivor of the horrors of Reagonomics in a screaming panic toward the nearest fire escape.

On social issues, St. John doesn't fall very fall from the tree that James Dobson thinks he planted. McCain is opposed to the right of a woman to exercise control over her own reproductive options (he coyly refers to the "right of the states" to decide this issue). His view on the subject of embryonic stem cell research is unnecessarily nuanced, involving all sorts of stipulations about "cloning" that are mostly right-wing talking points intended to deflect attention from the actual issue. He supported Bill "Cat Killer" Frist's politically motivated and professionally unethical drive to intervene in deeply personal end of life decisions in the Terry Schiavo case back in the day when Frist looked to be running the hot laps in the Republican presidential candidate race. While he looks all mavericky on the issue of same-sex marriage because of his objection to a Constitutional amendment, he was more than happy to vote for the original "Defense of Marriage Act" that offers the very same language that the amendment would offer. We are at the same time expected, in regard to this issue, to ignore McCain's own personal interpretation of that whole "traditional marriage" thing as it regards to his own marital history...

On foreign policy, one only need to know that St. John was an early, strong advocate for invading Iraq; all the chittering about his opposition to Bush's War has been focused solely on the failure to pour enough troops into that particular violation of long-established international law and treaty to make the streets run red with other people's blood soon enough and to a sufficient depth to make us all Winners far sooner than we might have otherwise been...if this had all been a good idea to begin with. He has repeatedly shown that he doesn't really understand - or perhaps is too blinded by personal ambition and a hunger to expunge the pain of Vietnam - the actual issues gripping the other side of the globe. My own 15-year-old son may not be the best example of an informed American, despite the aggressive political proclivities of his parents, but he at least knows that only meth-heads and idiots would be the sort of people who might buy off on the idea that Sunni-centered al Quada terrorists would be able to find safe haven in the Shi'ite-majority nation of Iran. St. John, on the other hand, either doesn't know this or is lying for political 'scare the natives' gain...

On the personal level, there are also the concerns of some people who have known him for a long time...

And then there's the 'temperment' issue. McCain isn't the sort of quaintly cute iconoclast who's occasional moments of pique are endearing. He is a person of towering personal self-certainty with a marrow-deep inability to countenance opposing viewpoints. This is a failing that was discussed on the margins way back in 1999 during his first run for the White House, and is a well-understood behavior dating back to his earliest days. McCain is variously described by those survivors who will only speak to journalists under ironclad assurances of anonymity as being some strange cross between a rabid wombat and an enraged alligator in the face of subordinates who dare to suggest that his beliefs or opinions or positions may somehow be wrong. This, perhaps more than all of his deeply held conservative beliefs, is the strongest disqualifying factor in John McCain's quest for the Oval Office. St. John insists that there isn't a problem and that he is simply passionate about things in which he strongly believes...

Blind passion is a good thing in a lover; it's a really bad thing in the leader of an incredibly diverse nation who has a raw natural tendency to kill and eat subordinates who might want to challenge his views. It's an especially dangerous trait for a person who is attempting to use manufactured story lines and false flags to gain the highest office in the land. It may be the best reason of all to make sure that there aren't any 'Mavericks' headed toward the chair behind the big desk in the Oval Office...

Update: edited to fix some confusing and bizarre errors of grammar and omission.
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:36 PM 0 comments

Friday, April 04, 2008

Bad Anniversaries And Hard Memories 

…reflecting back this morning on the assasination 40 years ago of Martin Luther King, I am struck once again by the befuddling strangeness and the momentous sense of impact that one arbitrary Gregorian time unit like a “year” can posess. The year 1968 is like a line in the dirt – or maybe even ‘a wall’ would be the more apt metaphor – that separates so much into “Before” and “After”, defining the demarcation between the winsome hope for what we could have been and the disturbing reality of what we really became. It was a year where one teenager could marvel at the various layers of the world surrounding him and realize that a treacherous form of madness had settled in for a long stay…

It wasn’t just King laying dying on the second-floor balcony of a Mobile motel or Bobby Kennedy laying dying in a hotel pantry just two short months later that formed the spine of this demarcation, although those two events represent a degree of loss, unfulfilled promise, and misdirection that can never be adequately quantified. The world truly seemed to lose its grip on whatever hawsers held it even tenuously moored to some sense of sanity. The year began with the Prague Spring’s promise of peaceful freedom and Khe Sanh’s assurance of continued war and bloodshed. Russian tanks crushed hopes and bodies in Czechoslovakia: the battles of Khe Sahn and Hue during the Tet offensive effectively ended the reelection aspirations of Lyndon Johnson while mainstreaming opposition to the Vietnam war and setting off a fight for control of the Democratic party that culminated in a National Convention that would have looked more appropriate on the floor of a Roman coliseum than in and around the International Amphitheatre in Chicago…

The whole world was watching, or if they weren’t their attention would be captured soon enough by seeds that were planted for later sprouting by the My Lai massacre and the election of Richard Nixon. It was a year of breathtaking highs and brutal lows, from the first manned lunar orbit by Apollo 8 to the humanitarian crisis in Biafra. It saw the birth of Hair and Laugh-In and the death of any sense that there was much of anything funny or Aquarian actually going down out on those mean streets littered with the bloody debris from riots that spawned from racial tension and war opposition. The year 1968 holds more “I remember where I was” moments for those of a certain age than any year really needs to have, and too many of those moments were wrong...

So, here we are today, looking back on the anniversary of one of those larger "remember where" moments, a very specific instant that we can put our finger on as one of those clearly identifiable points where it all came off the rails. It's instructive to pay attention to these anniversaries; well over half the population has no personal memory of the moment or the pure chilling dread it brought to all people of good will, any more than I can truly feel that pure sense of joy and relief my parents felt at the announcement of Japan's surrender in 1945. It's important to remember, remind, and teach that the murder of Martin Luther King was one of those specific events primarily responsibility for grabbing the country by its ears and sending it off in a different, more difficult direction. It's also important to recall why we don't need any more 1968's for a long while...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:17 PM 0 comments

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Flying Those Friendly Skies, Gee Dub Style 

...I'm not a nervous flier by nature. As a child, I rode through the mountains of Central Idaho in a faithful old Cessna 170 piloted and owned by my dad's boss, touching down on remote mountain airstrips that didn't actually look like the sort of place a sane person would try to land on until you were on the ground and fully stopped. As an adult, I have been the frequent back-seat guest of Vietnam veteran helicopter pilots who actively sought out ways to make flying in the Mt. St. Helens blast area more exciting...I suppose in order to recapture a bit of that old adrenaline-pumped magic of their youthful days back in 'the Nam', but it may just have been to thrill in the screams of fear and panic from the passengers sitting in the back. Trust me, after you have been an unwitting party to a few high-speed "hot LZ" combat assault approachs between the skeletal dead-tree forests in an otherwise presumably secure sector of a national forest in Southwest Washington State, there isn't much that a commercial airline pilot is going to be able to do that will discourage you from seeking out extra bags of complimentary peanuts...

That could all change for me, however, if I have to hear any more of this kind of crap. Not being a jet-setter, I don't have a great many expectations of the air carrier industry. Get me there and back; don't send my luggage to Mogadishu; make the takeoffs equal the landings without any drama involving stories that make the evening news. Turns out that the Federal Aviation Administration, under the "never give a sucker an even break, and all voters are suckers" philosophy of the Bush administration, didn't really give a damn about any or maybe all of those basic air traveler considerations. In the odd, blurry view of Gee Dub's handlers and puppet-masters, the 'customer' that the FAA was primarily intended to serve was the domestic air carriers, not the traveling public that may have some raw natural objection to the idea that a cozy relationship between the federal agency on which they were forced to rely for safety issues and various air carriers might result in the aircraft within they were riding, without notice or explanation, dissolving into a slightly subsonic cloud of aircraft aluminum fragments, chunks of upholstry, and - for at least one brief moment - extremely disgruntled passengers...

As the linked story demonstrates, the disturbing story about the failure of the FAA to hold Southwest Airlines accountable for maintenance of its 737 fleet (for God's sake, doesn't anybody have a memory? Remember the story? Watch the friggin' movie??!) was only the tip of a deadly iceberg that would have, in an otherwise perfect world, ripped one whole side of Gee Dub's ship of state. The entire backbone of the national air carrier industry is suddenly obsessed by a strange fit of safety consciousness, pulling big sweaty fists full of planes off the line for all sorts of inspections of 'critical' safety-related maintenance items that they should have been taking care of all along, plunging the traveling public into the sort of crazed chaos normally only seen during powerful storm fronts in the Midwest or the opening of new terminal facilities in London...

No matter how hard Herb Kelleher wants to spin things (most likely in order to preserve his cult hero status for those who still have warm feelings for Southwest and their past reputation as a quirky, fun gang with which to fly), there is a simple cruel bottom line: folks got lost in all those 'x' and 'y' and 'z' variables of that 'protect the passenger/make a profit' equation, and people in the Bush administration served as enablers for those people when they found themselves on the wrong side of that equation. Since this is just another example of run-of-the-mill Republican malfeasance, it doesn't even rise to the level of a discussion of whether impeachment is on or off the table; on that score, this is a pretty pathetic pot of boiled beets compared to the big fish desperately in need of frying. It's just another example of why we 'regular people' can crawl out of bed every day knowing that any Republican administration is not also looking down at its bowl of Wheaties pondering how best to make the lives of us 'regular people' a better, much less survivable, experience...

The only fitting solution would seem to be to pull the oldest active 737 out of the Southwest fleet, paint it up in "The United States Of America" colors, hand the keys to Gee Dub and announce "Say Hello To The New Air Force One." A few "What to do in the case of explosive decompression" placards scattered around the cabin would be a nice touch....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:46 PM 0 comments

Monday, March 31, 2008

The Army Finally Enters The 20th Century....Juuust A Bit Late 

...there have been movies made about this sort of thing since movies have been made, so it does somewhat boggle the mind that it took the U. S. Army until 3 years into the Iraq misadventure to finally figure out that maybe it would be a good thing to let personnel who were actually married to each other and assigned to the same theater of operation to actually live together. This isn't even about addressing the traditional concept of the 'camp follower'; it's about addressing the personal needs of an over-extended military force that, far too often, includes dual-career couples who made the simple mistake of picking careers that became tangled up in George W. Bush's twisted efforts to create his Bright Shining Neocon-Approved City on that far-off hill of his...

There are all sorts of built-in risks to this seeming liberalization of the in-country cohabitation rules, but some of those risks would have been there in any case for married couples serving in the same war zone. Meaning, security, and value in life can be found in the covalent bonds that couples form, and an Army that is going to respond the the mismanagement of an occupation by assigning married couples to an area of operation for up to 15 months at a whack had better figure out how to accomodate those bonds if it wants to have any hope of retaining the expensively trained skills those couples possess. It's good to see the Army finally take this step into the 20th Century. Now if they can only make a couple more small steps to get to the 21st....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:12 PM 0 comments

Why Dubya Shouldn't Pitch To Chelsea 

...well, yeah, poor old Gee Dub has had a rough couple of days here. First, he is nearly booed off the mound of the new Washington National's ballpark by his adoring home-town fans - and that was before his pitch - and now, today, he has to listen to a presidential daughter who defines the difference between 'classy' and the smarmy, entitled sense of 'class' understood by the Bush clan as she speaks of the profound sense of relief Americans will feel as they see the moving vans backing up to the White House doors next January...

The pains of a parent when the progeny don't seem to be living up to some measure of promise can be profound and heartbreaking, assuming that parent has a soul. It can be particularly painful for a parent to see the daughter of his predecessor, a man who's approval ratings were twice his own even during impeachment hearings, become the flesh-and-blood manifestation of What Could Have Been if his own daughters had actually spent time during their White House stay thinking about things more profound than how to mix and match the latest fashions or which fake ID would get them into the right bars. Even more to the point, the events of the last two days have demonstrated that Chelsea Clinton would have gone yard on Gee Dub if she had been at the plate last night...

I'm not a Hillary Clinton fan, nor am I a Barack Obama supporter, but I would be sure to pick Chelsea right up front if a ball game were to break out at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day picnic. She's been showing over the course of this campaign that, regardless of how you feel about her mom and dad, that she's got game...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 30, 2008

The End Of Another Airline Era 

...I have to confess that I am always a sucker for a great storyline, especially when it comes to aircraft. There are so many great stories from the early years of commercial air travel when the ability to crawl into some frail silvery tube and be hurled across the skies by people you didn't know became an experience that was more readily available to the average person thanks to the supply of war-surplus C-47/DC-3 aircraft. Aloha Airlines in Hawaii was one of those basic storylines with its introduction of inter-island air travel for the common man, and the amazing saga of Flight 243 only served to cement Aloha Airlines firmly into my conscience...

Another great story seems to be ending today, in no small part due to competition that Aloha considers "unfair" from a branch of Mesa Airlines. I have my own biases about Mesa Airlines, given that their operations forced my wife to spend eight hours wandering the vast expanses of Dulles International Airport in D.C. in early January because of a missed connection, but that's just all about me and the fact that my lover was delayed by an entire day getting home. There are apparently others who have much more deeply-held feelings about Mesa Airline's entry into the Island air traffic trade. These folks may not exactly be disinterested observers (or one might so suspect), but they certainly are entertaining...

Maximizing the deregulation of the airlines was probably only one of the worst ideas of the late 1970's and early 1980's, but it seems that it has been only finally coming home to roost over the last couple of years with the sort of angry vengence that it deserved from the outset. All we actually know is that a company that has provided a service for over 60 years will cease to exist in a couple of days, and it will do so for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the root fact that the service itself is vital; it's all about competition. It is rather sad, in any case, that the fundamentally brutal laws of economics can dictate the terms of survival for companies that we always thought would be there...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:00 PM 0 comments

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