I sing the body mechanical

"America's love affair with the automobile" used to be the most noticeably overused cliche in the the American idiom and indeed, starting with the 20th century few things transformed private life and personal liberty like the automobile. Few things contributed so much to economic growth From the end of  WWII and through the 1960's everything was about cars.  If you're one of the dwindling part of the population who remembers first hand, I don't have to explain.  You'll remember the car culture and you'll remember how it made the USA run.  Our youth was about the freedom cars brought.  The status of our families was displayed in the driveway and our introduction to love had a lot to do with the freedom of the road and the secluded areas it led to. It's gone. It's strip malls and plastic signs and Japanese designs. It's people locked safely inside, staring at little screens.

What would have happened to Jack Kerouac, who would have heard of Ken Kesey if this had been a nation where people gleefully chose some soulless transportation appliance chosen for cheapness and that simply took you places safely and economically without your participation?  Where do you find America, how do you get there but on the road?  Why even have a road if we can live in a hive?

I can't understand the mania for taking away our cars, for looking forward eagerly to cars that differ from Subway cars only in the passenger capacity --  that run on electronic rails?  Safety and economy and the vision of  a future without back roads, the crunch of gravel, the wind in your hair on Summer nights, the smell of gumbo in road houses you pass as the V twin rumbles between your knees or the V8 sings as you change down from 6 to 5 to pass that Toyota safetybox with blacked out windows nd the 'Star Safety System' and the airbags.  I sing the body mechanical -- the music of the night and of freedom. The poetry of machines.

Soulless appliance, we don't know how it works and don't care -- a place to wait and text message and facebook and link to Linkedin and watch American idol as the soulless matrix sucks the life out of you in perfect safety.  What the hell has happened to us?  Are we really heir to the termites, the moles -- timid troglodytes  living in plastic tubes and breathing filtered air -- too timid to take control?

Pardon me, I'm making myself sick.  It's a beautiful Saturday and in the garage, my new Harley gleams, a symphony in Blue -- and route 714 waits, just over the bridge, leading west out to the big lake under miles of  trees, arched over the asphalt like a cathedral knave and the air smells the way most of you have never smelled it.  South along 441, along the levee, the live oaks and Spanish moss and fish camps and orchards and road houses and kids that still wave from front lawns as you ride by.  America, I'm still here, and I still remember. Of thee I still sing.

McRussia

The 31st of January dawned cold but clear in Moscow in 1990. It had been two years since the Communist Party had given their permission to open the first McDonalds in the former Soviet Union. Located in Moscow's Pushkin Square, the largest McDonalds restaurant had 28 cash registers and seating capacity for around 700 people.

That capacity was quickly exceeded, as people stood in line for up to six hours for their first taste of Western fast food. The Moscow restaurant broke a record for first-day sales for any McDonalds in the world - they served 30,000 people that day alone.



They remain popular in Russia almost 25 years later: McDonalds controls 70% of the Russian fast-food market, and the flagship store in Pushkin Square still serves 20,000 people per day. Ironically, it wasn't the American headquarters of the McDonalds Corporation which had pushed the new branch of the franchise. It was the head of McDonalds Canada, George Cohen, who had opened the twelve-year-long negotiations with the Soviet Union.

But within 8 months of the first McDonalds restaurant opening, the Berlin Wall fell. And within two years, the Soviet Union was dissolved.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that Ronald Reagan toppled the USSR, you can tell them that, no, it was Ronald McDonald that killed the bear.

Hitler, Newton and Barnum

I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. 

That's true for things above the level where quantum physics makes hash of such laws but for things which are not things, but lies, it has no bearing.  Promoters of things for which there is no evidence whatever and promoters of lies, hoaxes and propaganda rely on the fact that no external force will impede, delay or arrest the appointed rounds of  lies while truth often demands too much of us. Every day a new crop of gullible witlings and angry little twits is born to be deluded. Call it Barnum's Law.

I saw this once again the other day, it's been defaming anyone with any intention and a great number of people without the intention of  modifying the national policies on private ownership of firearms.

One might expect that anyone trying to equate Hitler with liberal philosophy isn't dealing with words as we generally accept them and is using definitions of terms like "liberal" that steer us away from rational dialog and into the corral to be fleeced.  and like all humans those who don't like liberals and don't want any interference with gun ownership will simply latch on to anything that seems internally cohesive in some blurry way without further question.  We're all guilty of it to one degree or another, but in this case it's more likely to be questioned by the people it's directed against and guess what.  There isn't a germ of truth to it.  There is no evidence that Hitler ever said it and the history of Post WW I German gun laws contradicts it.  Hitler in fact made guns much more available (except to Jews) in 1938.  The Weimar Republic required registration but that was only some time after the Victorious allies forbade Germans to have guns at all.  Some one made this up, probably during the Clinton years, and no opposing force has been able to stop it.  Facts don't matter. Barnum's Law prevails.

Fact is never the test of belief, if it were, this thing wouldn't keep appearing all over the place.  I've been seeing it for years and so far it seems more ridiculous every day, but as long as the need for Obama to be scandalous exceeds the supply of  scandals, it might as well be a perpetual motion machine.

There's as little evidence that it will cease to orbit and burn up in the atmosphere as there is for any actual scandal to have occurred, but it doesn't matter in a nation where half of us are so greedy for scandal, desperate for outrage and hungry for something, anything to anchor our prejudice and feed our greedy need to feel superior by knowing things we don't care enough about to research.

So sure, Hitler will always have said what he didn't say and the Obama scandal will always be quickly approaching and  your God and your Guns  and your freedom to ignore decency, the law and the tenets of both Capitalism and Christianity will continue to make a stink that no fact will diminish and no test of logic impair.

The Constitution Wins in Arizona --On this One.

Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the anti-gay bill passed by both houses of the Arizona legislature.

The crazies in the TeaPublican Party, quick to accuse President Obama of "shredding the Constitution," propose outrageously unConstitutional legislation every chance they get.  Their latest unAmerican, unConstitutional bill would have allowed businesses to refuse service to Americans whom they believe would injure their religious sensibilities.  Their target was, of course, the LGBT community, but the legislation was so poorly written that it would have allowed discrimination against any group of Arizonans for any religious reason. It was a bill that codified bigotry.  And the amazing thing is that a majority of Arizona Republican law makers passed it.

And they're not the only anti-Americans trying their best to "shred the Constitution."  Some idiot in another state wants to make it illegal for gay athletes to play football. As long as these morons are voted into office, we'll see more attempts made to enact laws based on religious bigotry.  Think about that when these hate-based zealots and bigots want your vote. 

And think about what they'd do should they gain the power of the presidency.

(CNN) -- Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have allowed businesses that asserted their religious beliefs the right to deny service to gay and lesbian customers. 

The controversial measure faced a surge of opposition in recent days from large corporations and athletic organizations, including Delta Air Lines, the Super Bowl host committee and Major League Baseball. 

Fiercely divided supporters and opponents of the bill ramped up pressure on Brewer after the state's Republican-led Legislature approved it last week. 

On Wednesday, the governor said she made the decision she knew was right for Arizona. "I call them as I see them, despite the cheers or the boos from the crowd," Brewer said, criticizing what she described as a "broadly worded" bill that "could result in unintended and negative consequences." 

Brewer said she'd weighed the arguments on both sides before vetoing the measure, which is known as SB 1062."



So the governor weighed the arguments on both sides? Why it took this long for Brewer to veto this repulsive bill should be frightening to any American who believes in liberty and justice for all and who entertains the idea of putting more TeaPublicans in charge of government.


The proposed bill passed by the two legislative houses in Arizona was not about religious liberty.  

All one has to do is look for any proposed legislation crafted by religious zealots that would have allowed people to refuse to serve divorced Americans, or Americans who took the Lord's name in vain (that's against the Ten Commandments and these people claim the Constitution and this country is based on those ten prohibitions), or people who bore false witness, or people who committed adultery.

(Imagine a business in Arizona refusing to serve Newt Gingrich or any other serially divorced American?)  

Adultery is prohibited by the Ten Commandments, so any God-fearing, God-obeying Christian would have to find a state forcing him or her to serve adulterers a state that practices fascism!

Of course no laws were ever proposed to protect Christians from having to serve or do business with people who broke those particular Commandments. That's why it is so disgustingly obvious that the Arizona "Hate The Gays" bill was nothing more than an attempt to shred the Constitution and encourage hatred against a minority.

Governor Brewer did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Faced with the loss of millions and millions of dollars in revenue for Arizona from businesses and the NFL, she vetoed the bill. Had she warned the Arizona legislature against passing the bill at the start, I'd believe she did this for the right reason.  She didn't.  So I'm not waving the flag for her.

Let it be a warning to the other red states that would use "religious freedom" to denigrate and marginalize minority Americans.  Your religion does not give you the right to institutionalize what Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station aptly calls religious apartheid.

Beer, Bigots and Business

My Nietzschean opinions about religion are no secret although I really don’t believe, as some do, that religious belief is the root of all evil.  Bigotry doesn’t  kill people after all:  bigoted people do.  Is the current attempt by some Republican legislators to revisit the arguments of the 50’s and 60’s really best handled by signs and chants and proclaiming just how nasty their ignorant beliefs are?  Do we try to outlaw speech?  Make hate illegal? Do we party like it's 1964?

The civil rights movement didn’t depend on changing people’s minds, it was about forbidding practices that are not in the best interests of  our fellow Americans. The Fed has the power to regulate trade in the best interests of the nation after all. It’s funny you don’t hear it couched in those terms but I suggest that’s really what this is all about. It's about what nearly everything is about: money and power.

 Segregation was bad for business.  Bigotry stifles the free flow of capital. The south began to prosper only after segregation ended and the extension of equal protection to all improved.  Republicans are aware of this. Like some religious leaders, they only use the "government is the enemy of freedom" argument to generate votes.  They use a fictitious attack on religious freedom to rally the fringes who would otherwise never be a part of the democratic process,  making a devil’s bargain perhaps by ignoring Lovecraft’s warning never to call up what they can’t put down.  I think this effort will be stillborn except as a last ditch to use the power of evil to win one last round of elections. It just might drag them all right down to hell with the crazies they riled up.  I hope so.

That they are really only using the small-minded for that purpose is illustrated, perhaps by the attempt a few years back to pass a county law forbidding merchants to advertise in or describe their wares in anything but English. It was applauded by the anti-Immigrant crowd.  It had much sound and fury behind it, but  It simply faded away and likely as soon as the phones began to ring at Republican headquarters  -- because no merchant is going to kiss off 25% of his potential customers and if he has to use Urdu to sell groceries or cars, he’s going to do it. Bigotry is bad for business, se habla español attracts it.

 The proposition was probably intended to portray the Party as defenders of some obscure American value like fear of immigrants and probably did so as far as the run of the mill Florida lowlife was concerned, but  preventing people from spending money is a hard sell when you’re selling it to Capitalists. 

 Minorities of all kinds aren’t really insignificant in numbers anymore.  More gay people are open about it and if you add up all the people  the Hard Right objects to, they are actually a majority.  If you’re the grocer, the restaurant, the bank or the  taxi company in town and you don’t want to do business with  “those people,” no matter who your religion tells you to hate, someone else will.   Of course it’s pretty hard to identify gay people unless they're forced to wear pink badges, but the better you are at it, the smaller your customer base will be. The bigots won't buy extra groceries from your store, but the gay people and those who think they should be treated like Americans won't buy any.  In most cases, your competition will eat you alive. Money talks and if you turn away business, it will walk elsewhere and talk to somebody else. 

Now that’s not an argument for just letting Arizona businesses stomp on the law and American values in the name of God.  It’s an argument that this has nothing to do with religion or the free exercise thereof.  That should be obvious from the prospect of some oh-so-devout Christian refusing a drink of water to a thirsty traveler on Christian grounds.  And yes, that groaning sound you hear actually is Jesus.  

The argument that forcing some self righteous, anti-Christian casuist to feed Adam and Steve for having a David and Jonathan relationship is a violation of religious freedom is vapid.  Republicans, or the people who pull their strings and finance their campaigns care about business not religion or individual rights.  It’s about the free, unregulated exercise of business and it’s the ability of the Government to regulate trade that’s in their gun sights.  Hands off business, no more regulation, no more responsibility for the dire consequences to the public your business causes. No health care, no minimum wage, no unions, no sick pay no vacations.  No more EPA, no more OSHA, no more FDA.  Nobody on the Right cares about who eats at  the lunch counter,  it’s the toxic waste, the air pollution, the environmental disasters they want to perpetrate and they sell it as a question of our freedom because people only consider the facts they are given and don’t look at the wider picture.   

The low information voters buy it.  The religious fanatics buy it and all the other classes of people who have been trained to salivate at any hint the government is curbing their freedom buy it, but it’s those who hate your freedom  behind it.

Want them to listen?  Don’t appeal to their sense of morality, speak to their greed.  Let them know we are not going to eat their chicken, drink their beer or do anything  that profits the people that sell to segregated, anti-American businesses.  We won’t visit their states, watch their football teams or buy their products and watch those bigoted blowhards shrivel up and blow away and when I say we, I think I’m speaking for a Majority.  It’s easy for them to resist what them “Libtards” are forcing them to do. Easy for them to claim persecution but damned hard for them to thrive without money.  Don’t talk to Arizona, talk to Budweiser and it will be a dry and dusty day in East Shithook Arizona  when the beer truck don’t stop there no more.

Arizona Passes Bill Legalizing Bigotry

Don't like "teh gaii"?  Arizona's got your back!  As long as you couch your bigotry in "religious freedom" terms, it's okay to refuse to do business with the LGBT community and treat gays like second-class citizens. The Bible tells these upstanding "Love Thy Neighbor Christianists" so!  


"SB 1062 permits discrimination under the guise of religious freedom. 

With the express consent of Republicans in this Legislature, many Arizonans will find themselves members of a separate and unequal class under this law because of their sexual orientation. 

This bill may also open the door to discriminate based on race, familial status, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability. 

 "Legislation of this kind has been attempted this year in Kansas, South Dakota, Tennessee and Idaho. Each of those attempts failed after prominent members of the business community spoke against the measures. While our state continues to recover from the public relations nightmare of SB 1070, the Republican supporters of this bill are willing to elicit the inevitable backlash and boycotts that will result from its passage." 

 
Remember when bigots used religion to defeat interracial marriage? How'd that work out?


"The Lovings were supported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Japanese American Citizens League and a coalition of Catholic bishops.

In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving had married in Washington, D.C. to evade Virginia's anti-miscegenation law (the Racial Integrity Act). Having returned to Virginia, they were arrested in their bedroom for living together as an interracial couple.

The judge suspended their sentence on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return for 25 years. In 1963, the Lovings, who had moved to Washington, D.C, decided to appeal this judgment. In 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile, who heard their original case, refused to reconsider his decision. Instead, he defended racial segregation, writing:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix."

The Lovings then took their case to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which invalidated the original sentence but upheld the state's Racial Integrity Act. Finally, the Lovings turned to the U.S Supreme Court. The court, which had previously avoided taking miscegenation cases, agreed to hear an appeal. In 1967, 84 years after Pace v. Alabama in 1883, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that:

"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

The Supreme Court condemned Virginia's anti-miscegenation law as "designed to maintain White supremacy".


The bigots in the Republican Party of Arizona may have a small victory in their soon-to-be-passed law that codifies legal discrimination against a group of American citizens, but it will eventually be overturned as unConstitutional, and the GOP will look like the confused and misguided, hiding-behind-"religion" bigots that they truly are in this matter.

I hope a national movement to boycott Arizona as a state for conventions, vacations, sports, and other activities will be the result of this stupid unAmerican, unConstitutional law, should Tea Party GOP Governor Jan Brewer sign it into law.  Maybe the citizens of Arizona will then face the consequences of their shameful bigotry.

However, I sincerely doubt it.




Thursday 2/20/14, 7:30pm EST: The Arizona House just passed this bill tonight. The fate of anti-LGBT segregation in Arizona now rests in the hands of the state's Tea Party Republican governor, Jan Brewer, who has five days to decide whether to sign or veto it. 

Four Score and Ten

This morning I began my 70th year of breathing and as it's inevitably another year closer to the cessation of that respiration, I like to acknowledge both disturbing facts by beginning something new.  I bought a new motorcycle and coincidental to February being Black History Month as well as the month of my birth, I began to read a new poet: Derek Walcott. 

Of course I mean new to me.  I've never been without a motorcycle for almost 50 years and Walcott won the Nobel Prize for literature over 20 years ago and is hardly new to anyone literate.  But a personal discovery, a new love,  is a rejuvenating thing even if others discovered the same thing long ago. 

Old men do look backward as they have less to look forward to.  I remember the first time I heard "Chicago" blues on a street corner along Maxwell Street on Chicago's South side. To a kid brought up on classical music it was a revelation from which I was swiftly whisked away, but firmly imprinted is the vision of three black men dressed in black, with electrified instruments, black with mother of pearl and white smiles and eyes remarking on who that boy was, looking at them as though they were the most amazing thing I had ever heard.    Maxwell street was a black man's world in the 1950's.  So was the Caribbean when I  'discovered' it a few years later, so inviting, so mysterious and wonderful yet, like a parallel universe removed and inaccessible.  Even now I go back as often as I can. 

It's 1955. You can stand on the corner listening, you can tune into WVON in Chicago on that homemade radio and hear Buddy Guy and Bo Diddley. WJJD might play some white guys playing more or less sanitized versions they had begun to call Rock & Roll.  I could wander in December around still British Nassau, much farther than from the cold and grimy North than it is now,  but always it was looking through the knothole at the 'real' world and never having a ticket to the game.

Caribbean born Derek Walcott, Poet, playwright and painter is no less a porthole but also a door into a wider world for me, if sadly a reminder of  my own inescapable mediocrity and it's a world far  wider than his native St Lucia where the sun always shines and the iceman ventureth not and where the impossibly blue water crackles in the wind and washes up my childhood like waves on the sand.

 One step over the low wall, if you should care to, 
recaptures a childhood whose vines fasten your foot.
And this is the lot of all wanderers, this is their fate,
that the more they wander, the more the world grows wide. 

Indeed it does.

SLUT SHAME, VICTIM BLAME, and IOKIYAM

May I assume readers are familiar with the acronym, ‘IOKIYAR?’ Translation: ‘It’s okay if you are Republican,’ which means you can excuse any transgression if the transgressor happens to be one of your good ole boys. Does the same adage also apply to sexual assault? The answer is “yes” if you happen to be James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal:

What is called the problem of "sexual assault" on campus is in large part a problem of reckless alcohol consumption, by men and women alike. (Based on our reporting, the same is true in the military, at least in the enlisted and company-grade officer ranks.) 

Which points to a limitation of the drunk-driving analogy. If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn't determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver's sex. But when two drunken college students "collide," the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him.

Does the penis unzip the zipper and violate the woman all by itself with no intervention or accountability by its owner? If memory serves, there is no excuse for drunk driving in a court of law – but "it's okay if you are male" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. There will never be drunk justice until the day a good ole boy becomes pregnant.

For decades, sexual predators have used every excuse in the book to beat a rape rap, often accusing their victims of provocative dress, flirtatious behavior, or a disreputable reputation.  In short, slut shame!

Here is James Taranto promoting 'victim blame' with another 'get-out-of-jail-free' card for the good ole boys. What next: Partisan spin to exonerate murder? This is outrageous!

National embarrassment and publicity hog,

George Zimmerman, has had his pathetic dream of making money off of the death of his victim, teenagerTreyvon Martin, cancelled.

So there's reason to believe there is some hope for this celebrity-crazed culture, and perhaps Zimmerman will finally descend into the ignominy he so richly deserves.




"A victory was earned today for the memory of Trayvon Martin, as promoter Damon Feldman announced today that due to public outrage, the George Zimmerman celebrity boxing match has been canceled."

 Feldman tweeted:

"Featuring George Zimmerman in the ring fighting an African American opponent was an attempt to exploit racial tensions for profit. It was also the height of disrespect to Trayvon Martin. 

Turning a young man’s murder into a cash grab was wrong. Zimmerman said that he would donate his cut of the purse to charity, but he still stood to profit off of the fight. 

It is obvious that Zimmerman is looking for ways to cash in on killing Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman wants to advance his celebrity, and the media attention that he would have gained from this fight would have done exactly that. 

 Only a group of heartless sociopaths could cook up a scheme like this, but hundreds of thousands of people stood up for decency. You said no. You put the pressure on, and you were successful. 

 It looks like George Zimmerman is going to have to get a regular job to pay his bills, because millions of Americans aren’t going to let him make money off of the fact that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin."

Dishonest Abe

I remember chuckling, in an itchy trigger finger sort of way last month when the local paper ran a "what I'd like to see in the headlines in 2014" article.  Of course they couldn't resist printing some of the tamer veiled threats to Obama, but the one item that sticks in my mind was the wish by one witling that MSNBC would admit it was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

Of course that idea, or meme if you prefer, was crafted by the Bizarro-World team at the RNC as a counter to the accusations against Fox News whose relationship to the Republican party is more easily documented than their lies.  The idea of the best defense being an offense is behind it and offensive it certainly is whether you hear it from  Lyin' Bill or Glenn Beck or Rush of the infected Rectum -- or from any of the flies that buzz around their cloud of stink.

But extreme Denialism: the practice of  fact inversion as a defense, isn't something America invented and it's certainly a documented technique as old as the Hieroglyphics it's documented in.  Losers declare victory, aggressors claim to be victims and traitors claim to be patriots.  So many of us buy it with a smile like cotton candy at the county fair.

When the Government of Japan does it, when the cronies of Prime Minister Abe pretend the atrocities in Asia never happened, that the US was the aggressor, the war criminal and they the liberator of Asian races: when Japan claims victimhood, they insult the millions and millions they slaughtered for sport.  They insult the Americans that died liberating hundreds of millions of victims of Japanese aggression.  German students  are told the truth about their country's history. Japanese students are not and even Americans seem to feel ashamed that we used force to counter acts that sickened the Nazis and aggression that threatened every bit of land wet by the Pacific ocean. How many millions more would have died had the war not ended and particularly if the Japanese had a few more months to complete their nuclear program?

According to friend of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just appointed to the board of governors of NHK, Japan’s state broadcaster, not only did the infamously disgusting Rape of Nanjing never happen but it was the US who forced thousands into prostitution for the troops.  The Kamikaze pilots?  They were pacifists writes Naoki Hyakuta.  The United States and it's allies all used "Comfort Women" as rape victims during WWII said NHK chairman Katsuto Momii.  The ritual suicide of  a right wing extremist in 1993 shows that

 “His Majesty the Emperor has again become a living god.” 

writes another NHK Board member, Michiko Hasegawa.

And of course we ended it by using primitive nuclear weapons and that makes it all true.  I wish it were only the Right Wing Japanese Extremists  who believe the revisionism. The Right is fully engaged in revising all aspects of history and the opposition watches sports and apologizes to the "victims."

Meanwhile the Abe administration forces the rest of Asia, who well remember the war with Japan in detail, toward hostilities and I have to wonder how the rise of the right, that lust for power by any means will affect not only my country, but the world.