Rompin' Stompin' Jesus

What's in a name?  Apparently that question requires more than most people really are willing or able to apply and when the name has religious significance, those who have the cranial horsepower will usually use it to run like hell. That leaves people like me to comment.

Florida Atlantic University finds itself in hot water on this cold Wednesday morning in South Florida.  Seems there was a classroom exercise in which students were asked to write the name Jesus on a piece of paper and "stomp" on it.  From media sources, it's still unclear what the context was and I can only recall reading about a similar practice in Japan a few hundred years ago where suspected heretics (Christians) were required to pledge their allegiances to traditional values by stepping on a picture of Jesus.  Refuse and you were beheaded.  But anyway, Full time gardener and part time student Ryan Rotelas, who identifies himself as a Mormon still has his head attached, even though he claims he was asked to leave the classroom for making a fuss about it, but he sure is mad and always quick to defend the real and proper faith, Florida Governor Rick Scott is demanding an investigation and an apology from the Boca Raton, Florida University.  I've been demanding that he apologize for ripping off Medicare for a few billion bucks and ask God for forgiveness for quite a while now, but that's a trifle compared with stepping on sacred and holy notebook paper.  I mean that piece of wood pulp is GOD!  Transubstantiation and all that.

But what a horrible offense, to ask college level students to explore religious intolerance particularly when it concerns Christian ideas of what is sacred - like pieces of paper with grossly mistranslated and mispronounced Hebrew names. Helped by Yahweh. After all we're talking about Joshua,  Moses' successor here.

The school of course promises never to desecrate such a common South American name again.  I don't recall Scotty having said much about the Koran-Burning Christian church in Florida, by the way, but of course that would require him to stomp on Jesus again, at least figuratively.

Too bad someone like Rick didn't get all Ezekiel on a college professor of mine who wrote books about how the Nazis didn't really have death camps or intervene when as a child I had to learn songs about Jesus in elementary school, but that was years ago and we've progressed. It's good to know that Christians, at least have not only God, but Rick Scott on their sides.

Worm Moon

Worm moon.
Yachts all straining at mooring lines.
Sea swollen with the spring tide.
Cold night moon.
Sharp stars.
Frog voices quiet in the dried ponds
and worms,
such as are left by the moles from underneath
and armadillos from above
have no voices.

Those little town blues

Small town newspapers.  When I first moved here over 11 years ago, Little Boots was in the white house and although the fear machine was running on afterburner and everyone was in the process of never forgetting and sending money to Taiwan manufacturers of plastic automobile flag holders, you still had headlines declaring that some local fisherman had caught a record Snook or irate letters about litter in the park.  Now it's outrage.  Every day. Even the fish are angry.

Printed opprobrium grew over the Bush years, at least those quasi-literate, misspelled, cliche-ridden  letters to the editor written in impotent rage at Mexican farm workers, people on food stamps, Liberals, immigrants, ethnic minorities, liberals, Muslims, atheists, Jews, Democrats -- did I mention Liberals?  Yes, sure, I and a few others sometimes wrote ( brilliantly, I must admit) alternate opinons, much to the further wrath of the toothless unwashed, but it's a small town as I said, and word gets around and  I really don't want to carry a gun in my bathing suit or they may think I'm happy to see them.   Discretion, valor and all that.

Of course it's hardly new.  I remember, back in the mid 60's, living in long hair and sandals in the tiny, rural, University town of Hamilton New York.  I remember when the school had an open symposium on Communism, and the good, go-to-church and keep-Christ-in-Christmas locals flooded the opinion page with demands to bomb the bastards back to the stone age - now.  Small town newspapers.  I wish I could believe that they didn't represent America, that they weren't just some boil on the ass of an otherwise great nation.

Take the Lincoln Journal, of Lincoln County, West Virginia.  Seems public sentiment supported the termination of a teacher for fear she would "turn her students gay."  Faced with a reader's  voice mail (I used reader loosely here)  asserting that

 “We were really glad to hear that School Board is getting rid of them queers, The next thing is we need to get rid of all the niggers, the spics, the kikes and the wops.”

they decided to print it.  I don't fault them. Such people should be heard so we know what we're dealing with -- and where they are.  Now my local paper would probably not have, and it doesn't have a voice-mail line for illiterates.  Most of us here after all, come from elsewhere where literacy of a certain minimal level is fairly common, but those sentiments aren't exactly rare with the locals either.

“You know even them Catholics, they are wrong as baby eaters. We need to clear them people out and have good, white, God fearing Christians and everybody else needs to be put to death for their abominations. We’ll keep Lincoln County white and right. Thank you. "

You're welcome. White and Right indeed. I hope you do just that and perhaps building a wall will help the local economy for a while.  In fact I hope everyone like you moves to Lincoln County. It would be nice to have all y'all in one place and  I hope there's room. I'd hate to have to use up more than one of our precious nukes, but as for the stone age -- are you sure you're ready for that big an upgrade?

I have seen the enemy

and he is us.

I wonder if Liberals can claim to be united by mostly by principle, by a shared perspicacity or more by the habit of responding to organized provocation with a conditioned reflex. Certainly the kind of strong legislation designed to regulate behavior we often support and support vehemently isn't liberal in nature. Attempting to regulate what we eat and drink is, for instance, more likely to be supported by Democrats than by Republicans or Conservatives -- and yes, there is a difference. Is the spirit of submission, the tendency to find comfort and a feeling of safety under an umbrella of statutes, regulations, authorities and prohibitions really part of any definition of Liberalism or Liberty, for that matter?

It's not that Republicans are not fond, or even passionate about making certain behaviors disappear by banning, prohibiting and regulating them, but I don't really care about Republicans.  It does no good to argue about full citizenship for fertilized egg cells with people who don't believe in questioning such received certainties and in the long term, being firmly and inexorably on the wrong side of history means we only have to wait them out. Besides, they don't listen to me, so why should I bother telling you who are at least reading this, why the hijacked hulk of the GOP is headed for the rocks. I just want to warn us of the same shoals ahead.

Yes, I think Liberals can be just as intransigent and their positions as unassailable by fact or logic, herded together and immovable like cows in a stream.  Are we really the answer or are we just the opposite polarity of the same thing and just as hide-bound and intransigent; just as beholden to political puppeteers as they are?  When we latch onto a proposed 'solution' we can be just as unable to ask if it is indeed a solution, a workable solution, the only solution and if that solution really addresses real situations, or contrived, conjectural scenarios.  Yes, we have a party that really believes that a vaccine for Human Papilloma Virus will make our daughters into whores -- a belief that is independent of data -- and so we laugh at them.  But then some of us nod our heads in agreement at the notion that Americans, or at least New Yorkers are fatter than we think they should be because, and only because vendors are selling very large containers of soft drinks.  Selling what their customers want because they are greedy. Greedy profiteers for wanting not to be put out of business by someone who offers what they want.

It's that simple post hoc ergo propter hoc thing once again and we go after those mean irresponsible business men who should avoid selling what the 'experts' tell us is bad and we slam that old punching bag once again and forget to ask why we should forbid one source of calories and ignore all the others as though they weren't as much or more significant. I've yet to hear anyone propose rationing fried potatoes or cheese or bacon or mom's apple pie.  "Here's the problem and here's the solution" is all we need to hear and by 'we' I mean everyone.  Have we moored the good ship Liberal to a drifting piling, not attached to anything at all?

Sometimes I think it's what we don't ask that defines our political polarity. When we argued for "55 stay alive"  we didn't ask why the death toll was declining faster in Germany. We didn't ask why we were focusing our safety campaign on the very safest portion of American roads. We didn't even stop to notice that the proposed fuel savings weren't materializing because of all the speeding up and slowing down one had to do to get around the little bunches of cars and trucks the speed limit caused and we fooled ourselves into believing that people really were obeying the law and that we weren't making more and more people into cynical scofflaws and spending a fortune doing it. We were so sure that it was cars and cars alone driving up the cost of fuel that we forgot to regulate trucks and gave birth to the SUV.  Did those third brake lights really do a damned thing to reduce collisions? Have we ever asked?  No, the goal was to pass a safety bill and we did. 

I'm not going into the same phenomenon as it applies to our perennial approach to gun violence or drug usage or any of the other issues that not only separate us from them, but separate us from reality.
Ask yourself, does this incident the media is howling about indicate a headlong descent into chaos, or is it random incident someone wants to use to sell an idea?  Are we getting sold hysteria so as not to care whether something is getting better or worse?  Are we out waving signs and chanting for the weakest, most ill conceived solution to a problem that's not as much of a problem as you think?

Does out ability to know about every meteorite, every earthquake, every school bus accident and every epidemic within seconds and hear about it over and over really indicate some apocalypse is coming and we need to do this or that before it's too late?  Or is someone selling something?

Are we Liberals being used as a foil the way Fox used to use their token Liberal Alan Colmes? Are our scapegoats handed to us to distract us or to make us seem silly and ill informed and who created them?  Will our passionately offered solution really work and will we bother to find out if they have worked after we pass them or if they have worked elsewhere or failed?

Or will we do as we have too often done, smile and nod together like Viziers in some Arabian Night and say "we passed a crime bill"  and move smugly on to some other Crusade that needs to be completed  right now, before the bars close?  Wisdom, I think, comes from asking questions and the wise question their every thought. It's not enough to frolic in criticism of them, to feel superior to those loonies and idiots and crooks and liars.  I've seen the enemy, you know, glaring at me from the bathroom mirror. . .

ALEC and the Beast

I hope I can be forgiven for bringing this up out of phase with fashion, because it's not about a crime wave that isn't happening or Republican intransigence or the psychotic fugue brigade out to prove Obama is Satan's evil twin.

It's about pigs.  Perhaps it's because I enjoyed a piece of bacon for breakfast and shortly before viewing this video.  It's not that I'm against eating meat.  If farm animals are given a better but shorter life, free of the constant fear and the disease and parasites and hunger that define the lives of wild beasts, I can live with it.  What I can't live with is the brutality quite on a par and sometimes worse than what happened at Sobibor or Auschwitz.

I don't want to eat something that was skinned alive or that lived its entire life unable to move or that died in prolonged screaming agony.  Pigs are intelligent as animals go and yet people who get all moon eyed at kittens and puppies which may be less intelligent and aware, are themselves unaware of piglets being tossed around with pitchforks like dead meat or tossed squealing into machines of slaughter. None of that is necessary.  There are ways to slaughter animals without pain or terror and to raise them without extreme misery.  But no, it's not just about pigs, at least not the four-legged kind. It's about the monsters who own these houses of horror, the factory farms, the slaughter houses that not only scoff at the law, but want to put you in jail if you expose the satanic operations that sicken any but the most depraved and inhuman amongst us.

ALEC, a conservative business advocacy group is attempting to criminalize meat industry employees who might neglect to tell an employer how they feel about the illegal torture and abuse of animals on job applications. I'm talking about laws that mandate jail time for filming illegal activities and fulfilling a legal requirement to report them to authorities. Yes, it's already a jail-time crime in some states to expose the crimes of your employer and ALEC seems to want a country where although the government can capriciously carry on surveillance and seizure over individuals, the privacy of meat packers is sacred no matter how many heinous offenses to decency they commit.

There must be something we can do, short of  taking the family Kalashnikov down to the farm and expressing your opinion ballistically.  There are congressmen, senators and others who may under duress be tempted to ignore the blood soaked contributions of  slaughterhouses and factory farms.  Some of them can read.  Some of them do read -- and you can write, can't you?

A quick thought on Steubenville, Ohio

CPAC ended yesterday with the traditional burning of the Reichstag. That has nothing to do with anything else I'm typing; I just wanted to put it out there.

Full disclosure: my father was born in Steubenville, Ohio. Despite that, there have been no suggestions that he ever raped anyone.

However, some high school football players in Ohio filmed themselves raping a woman, and, surprisingly, were convicted (as juveniles, but hey, that's more justice than we usually get); the Right Wing, continuing their outreach to women, explained that it was her fault, because she wasn't wearing a burka and staying locked in the house like a dutiful girl should. Oh, and slut slut SLUT!!!

And across the country yesterday, thousands of men celebrated Irish stereotypes, drank heavily in public, and weren't raped. And the GOP failed to see the irony in that.

Shit-kicker conservatives?

If there's anything as loathsome to me as racism, it may be the way that many and perhaps most of us like to use stereotypes to demean a group, arguing ad lapidem or using a stereotype designed merely to unite a disparate group for the purpose of disparagement. It's one of the things Bill Maher does sometimes, that Rush and Hannity and others do all the time. It's a sin few of us are free of.

If he's right in saying that many small groups can, often with the assistance of the fair and balanced media achieve a level of influence that belies their small membership, I'd prefer that he'd do so without the cheap stereotypes. 

"From the NRA to “One Million Moms, powerful conservative lobbies that don’t reflect the values of the American people can somehow dictate what politicians on both sides are willing to stand for." 

Well yes, but so can lobbies in general, that's what they're for -- and so can lobbies that don't "kick shit"  but can and do kick the facts around just a bit. I don't think we can assume for instance, that because the NRA has only four million members  it doesn't reflect something similar to what a great deal more than four million voters believe to an extent -- rightly or wrongly.

I have severe misgivings for instance,  about the facts behind many of the pet straw men of the right and left  and sorry, there's no shit on my boat shoes -- besides, the greater issue is far too non-funny to treat in this way.    There are fewer opportunities for burlesque when describing what may be a larger plurality in America -- the moderates, the centrists, the pragmatic and the analytical.  And so we either ignore them or try to force them into a category we know how to mock, because too often mockery, hyperbole and stereotypes  are all we have.

If there's humor in the street theater we get instead of news, I'd have to bring up the crowds waving angry signs and shouting slogans like "no weapons on airplanes" in response to the TSA's decision to allow golf clubs and tiny knives so small that a diminutive Gerbil could carry an 'arsenal' in one cheek.  One "fact kicker" activist found it worthwhile to wave around a large and lethal  hunting knife for the cameras recently in hope that the sort of liberal Maher characterizes as never having met a regulation they didn't like, would identify one with the other and fail to ask how someone would take command of a jetliner with a putter or lacrosse stick much less a "weapon" hardly big enough to sharpen a pencil.  Are these people a majority or would they all fit into a VW beetle?  They'd like to make you angry enough so that you won't ask.  Does it help to dismiss the right wing faithful as "shit kickers" while we bang on the ban drum about making soft drinks illegal and prosecute parents for photographing their kids in the bathtub?  They don't miss a chance to stereotype us and we make it easy for them.

Will it take some sort of Buddha to remind us that there is a middle path, that Agnew was wrong and extremism is pretty much a vice all the time, that mockery is as much the tool of the bigot and racist and liar and crook as well as of anyone, that cynicism and sarcasm and the throwing of stones are dangerous techniques for those not beyond reproach?  Maybe, maybe not and perhaps that Buddha would risk crucifixion -- it happens.  

CPAC: Crude, Rude and Unglued

Ryan Pours Out the Budget Snake Oil, Again

 Well, here we go again: another year and another cynical, phony "budget" produced by Paul Ryan for the Republicans.

The two chief features of the Ryan budget are the reduction of the top tax rate from 39% to 25%, and the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%.  It is vitally important to notice that this is nothing but a massive giveaway to the rich, beyond anything we have seen proposed before, even by corrupt Republicans.  You would have to be a fool to think that this has anything to do with decreasing the budget deficit- in fact it would explode it, and add trillions to the national debt.

Now, for the feature that is nowhere to be found in the budget:  As has been Republican practice for the last several years, this document claims to balance the Federal budget by resorting to Republican promises about "closing loopholes" and "eliminating fraud and waste."  But in fact, nowhere will Ryan (or any other Republican) identify which "loopholes" they want to close, nor provide evidence of fraud and waste that amounts to anything but a minuscule fraction of what would be needed to cover current deficits, let alone the massive new giveaways that they are proposing to provide to the rich. 

Unfortunately, we all know that what Republicans are talking about when they cite loopholes are the mortgage interest deduction and health care deductions- which would massively punish middle class taxpayers in order to subsidize the lowering of tax rates on the rich- the only thing this ludicrous proposal is really about.

Finally, this document contains repeated malicious claims that regulation has to be done away with and the right of ordinary people to hold corporations responsible for the damage they do be curtailed; again, the same lying cant we have heard from Republicans for decades. 

In fact, this "budget" is nothing but a rich person's wish list, which could have been written any year since the fifties.  It has absolutely nothing to do with dealing with the deficit, which Republicans do not care about in any way, and everything to do with further enriching the wealthy backers who pay to keep Republicans in office, at the expense of everyone else.  That is all Republicans ever care about, because they have long ago sold themselves into slavery to the rich.  This has been true for a hundred years, and shows no sign of ever changing, no matter how much damage their behavior does to the rest of the country, and no matter how they fare in elections.

Well, there you go.  Just one more cynical demonstration by Republicans that they don't give a God damn for anyone but the rich, and one more attempt to shove a deceitful, criminal theft of the nation's resources down the throats of the American people.  Nevertheless, it will be hailed by far too many in the mainstream press as a bold, serious attempt to deal with our nation's financial situation, massively increasing the chances that the country will slit its own throat by enacting any of this disingenuous, vicious nonsense.

Note: this is a cut down version of a piece I posted on my blog, where I list all of the actual provisions of the Ryan budget, and go through them one by one.  If you care, you can find it here.

The Man Who Videotaped the "47%" Comment ...

... will be interviewed Wednesday night (March 13, 2012) at 8:00pm on MSNBC. For a background on why the man decided to release the tape, click here.  This interview may develop into an important "tell-all" story.