Zen and the art of dismissal

So I hear these two guys talking on the radio. It's a conversation on the Amateur Radio 20 meter band, so half the world could be listening if conditions are right.

"I heard one of these protesters said he was there because 'Capitalism was taking over Wall Street' -- like it hasn't been Capitalist for over two hundred years! What an idiot!"

Well I'm assuming this guy isn't an economist any more than he might be a historian, and I'm assuming he got the information about what the "typical" loony-left and ignorant protesters are from some artisanal propaganda source like Fox News.

Yes, of course, there were protesters baring their breasts and preforming other charming acts having little to do with constructive criticism of laissez-faire Capitalism. While I'm the last person to discourage such acts, I'm also the last person to believe that this kind of New Yorky opportunistic revelry has anything to do with the reasons more qualified critics like Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz would lend support by their presence: reasons having to do with Wall Street practices, their relationship to the market crash, the credit crunch and the dire state of the world economy -- subjects the people who script and sculpt the news would rather mock, would rather have you mock, than discuss intelligently.

For someone who suffered through the late 1960's as an adult, the techniques political enterprises use to dismiss well grounded movements hold no novelty. I remember quite well how anyone openly questioning the benefits and reasons for maintaining an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia was told to "get a job" and had his personal hygiene questioned as well. Easier to dismiss someone, albeit clad in Brooks Brothers attire and obviously gainfully employed, as a silly, radical and stupid "hippie" than to answer disturbing questions as why killing peasants, bombing millions and stifling free elections was preventing the 'lights of freedom from going out in America' as was wrongly claimed by the Right. Then, as now, the real struggle was to keep the lights of reason off and it was fought with the same kind of smugly simplistic and fatuous fallacies the powerful always use to crucify the good.

But the dishonest selection of unrepresentative examples and illuminating them as "typical" is ancient and not the property of right wing extremists. It's the sort of thing our foul species does to advance our cults and parties that want to keep us in squalor and ignorance and the occupation of Wall Street isn't about the irrational or Communist inspired hatred of freedom or free markets, as you know, or you wouldn't have read this far. It's about corruption and the lack of rules and oversight that promotes private exploitation of free markets to the detriment of all. The occupation of Wall Street is just another station of the cross where the sidewalks are filled with mockery and abuse.

That unwitting clowns are flopping about in over-sized shoes, honking horns and mocking, is inevitable, given the well-fed smugness of the stupid. Their invisible rulers are very good at making them eager participants in their degradation and suffering; but failure isn't inevitable. It's tempting for old-timers like me to opt out of the circus, but perhaps there's hope, unlikely as it may seem, that enough people can be made to see how they're protecting the practices of the looters, pillagers and vandals on Wall Street and in Washington to do something about it. There's hope, but I'm not yet ready to bet on it.

Conservatism

One of the key reasons America votes conservative is that it has never had a government that will adequately protect the individual, so they're into the business of protecting themselves. Here's an interesting link on the red-blue split and what it means for Democrats...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/30/opinion/main20113805.shtml?tag=re1.channel

What If Germany Told Greece To Bug Off?

From everything I've seen, Greece is going to default on it's debt. The news today said Greece isn't going to make it's reduction targets this week. Every day there's a big meeting among European Union members to talk about Greece. Each time the stock markets go up or down depending on whatever Germany and France say.


I personally think screaming for cuts is ignorant since they will only through Greeks out of work and make matters worse. I draw a line between cuts and spending that is just stupid and does nothing to create jobs or investment. I think Greece needs to run a special to get tourists to come visit and people to buy their olive oil.


Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder said "We all know, people are the same wherever you go." There's a big faction in Germany that wants no bailout of Greece. These same types of people live here in America. They cheer a guy with no health insurance dying because he can't get medical care because he has no health insurance. And because these people are loud and don't care, I think Germany will tell Greece to bug off. And the birthplace of Western civilization will suffer. But it's utility plants and other revenue producing property of the Greek people will go up for sale and some big companies will get some great properties at dirt cheap prices.


And the cruel irony is the Greeks will pay more for their water and sewer and police and fire and other things while their income goes down. But they will be told how much better off they are.


We all learned about the glory that was Greece over 2,000 years ago. I hope they enjoyed their glory back then cause they're sure getting their asses kicked now.

To the Wayback Machine!

Maybe this is how we should teach history.



(Do I need to warn you that there might be some bad language? Or have you figured that out about me already?)

(That statement was merely a warning of potentially inflammatory commentary, and not meant to imply ownership or creation of this video.)

A view from the northern threshold

This interview is not particularly topical, but lays out some important framework relative to the American empire project...

Tea and Cantaloupe

It's a perfect example of how government always interferes with the sacred market forces that keep us free, happy and doctrinally pure. That OBAHma has gone after the free and holy food producers, using that Communist agency the FDA to keep infected cantaloupes off the market -- a market that would, sayeth the Rand, regulate itself after enough people die, by scaring the survivors into staying away from fruit and eating the sanctioned BurgerfriesCoke meal like real Americans. Can you imagine? (Would you like to supersize your fries?)

I mean what greater freedom can we have than freedom from the knowledge of good and bad food and if OBAHma can tell us what to eat, he can tell us anything, that tyrant. And where does the money wasted on things like the FDA and FEMA and the FAA come from? TAXES, that's right, those fruits of our own unassisted labor of which we owe no portion to anyone much less those Commie bastards in Washington who want to give MY MONEY away to those undeserving leeches who won't work for less than minimum wage and have the effrontery to vote for Democrats.

No sir, I don't want those government schools brainwashing my kids with math and science and economics and twisted history. People are poor because they are lazy and because God put them here as an example to us, the elect and we don't need those America-hating Godless, OBAHma loving liberals telling us otherwise. No sir, my house isn't going to blow down or get washed away or burned by a brushfire and if yours does, it's not my fault or responsibility. If the roads and bridges wash out, you can fix them yourself, you lazy, tax loving bums. I mean I worked hard for everything I got and I don't owe you shit.

God Bless America.

A Response to Keli Goff's Article, "Is Racism Actually Worse in the Age of Obama?"

The substance of Keli Goff's HuffPo article of September 26, 2011 is that at the present time, she and other African Americans are often confronted with what critic Toure calls "the unknowable" – a sense that one is being treated differently and not quite appropriately due to race, but one that is not backable with hard proof because, obviously, the other party isn't going to 'fess up to any misdeeds or bad intentions or bias, etc.  I think the point is that while this sort of thing ranges from the silly to the serious (like losing out on a good job or not getting a home loan), the nagging suspicion it engenders takes a toll on a person's well-being.

I'd suggest that we (including our assumptions and sensibilities) are more or less a product of the generation or two preceding us.  I have some affinity with the WWII / Depression generation – probably more affinity than I feel with my own – because of the stories and insights my parents passed on to me.  Both of them were products of those times.  I'm not African American or any other ethnic minority, so I don't experience the contemporary racial "unknowable" that the writer references to Toure – i.e. "am I really being treated differently in this instance, or am I making unfair assumptions about others?"  But it's perfectly reasonable, I think, to feel this way – if you're black, you're dealing not only with the present (which may well hit you with racist moments of its own, and ambiguous or ambivalent moments that are impossible to decide and make you feel sort of like Larry David in one of those ridiculous "WTF" situations he gets into on Curb Your Enthusiasm) but also with the blatant and dreadful insults and material injuries that may be part of your family's past and that is definitely part of black people's collective past.  We most certainly do not live in a post-racial society, and the past is still embedded in present consciousness to some extent.

The Obama presidency has really called out the full-on racists from under whatever rock they'd been hiding for a few decades, and on rare occasions when I allow myself to read a major newspaper comments section, it's pretty clear that these guys spend ALL their time tapping out racist garbage on their keyboards at five in the morning.  They hate Obama for so many manufactured unreasons that they've lost count of them.  Apparently, it's hard to keep track of all the people feeding us our unreasons these days.  Blink, and we miss ten of them….  But seriously, one can only hope that this kind of blatant, open contempt for a president of African descent marks the last gasp of the Old White Guard: you know how it goes – progress always calls forth a backlash, just as MLK Jr. would tell you.  Only when certain people feel threatened do they get downright ugly, and when they do, you know you're making progress.  The Obama presidency has been painful at times because of the vileness of the opposition, but who really should have thought it wouldn't be?  A smooth ride was never in the cards.

But here's a thought – a conservative columnist in one of the papers I occasionally read seems quite taken with President Obama's gaffes – stuff like "the intercontinental railroad" (I actually like that one!  All aboard the Kansas City to London Express!) and other verbal slipups that most presidents make simply because they have to go around the country talking a lot.  Someone might say, "liberals made fun of GWB's silly remarks and Reagan's fact-challenged gems, so how's this different?"  They have a point.  But still, what I take to be the disrespectful manner of the columnist in question makes me suspicious, and perhaps this feeling approximates an instance of what Keli Goff and Toure would call an "unknowable," even though I'm not African American and don't experience the full force of what they're talking about.  Might there be some hint, in other words, of playing to those who just can't abide the president's skin color and consider it high time that we take all that power out of his supposedly incapable black hands and give it back to a white guy where it belongs?  Maybe even to a white guy who drips with ignorant scorn for the scientific method and has no idea how a modern economy works?  In sum, I think a fair amount of the criticism launched against the current president is a product of racial contempt, acknowledged or otherwise.  Not all of it, of course, but enough to deserve serious consideration.

The hollow man

Herman Cain won the Florida Republican Straw poll yesterday, not that any of my Floridian friends or neighbors seem to have taken notice. The straw poll probably means as much as any other straw-stuffed bundle such as one might find on a pole in a corn field amusing the crows. I'm not sure how many Florida Republicans would actually have chosen him out of a line-up to be the Republican champion, even a line-up as motley and miserable as we're given to choose from at the moment, but he's preferable to Perry in a state still jealous for only being able to brag about Jeb Bush instead of his idiot brother from Texas.

But really, he might just be ideal. The perfect man to deflect the charges of racism Republicans face when making racist statements about Obama, would be the man who accused Jon Stewart of attacking Cain for racist reasons. Rovian tactics have rarely deviated from accusing the opponent of one's own glaring misdeeds, so who better to allow them to say: "you're against Cain because he's black" and "Liberals are racists."

He's just the sort of spontaneously and unwittingly hilarious clown Republicans love to vote for because what they say isn't what they said they said and so they've been for and against anything as suits the argument of the moment. "Reporters who quote me are stupid" and "compromise is killing this country" are the kinds of statements stupid and uncompromising people praise when sitting around the table, taking tea.

And of course he's made money in business, which leaves him immune to the jabs of Republican picadors such as Romney's assertion that Obama has never run a business and has spent his career in public service so he's not fit to serve the public which was asserted despite any clear indication that having been a businessman makes for a good president ( and much that says it isn't.)

And of course, the whole tea-brained idea of prosperity through parsimony is served well by recycling all that old McCain campaign material simply by painting over the
Mc and re-enlisting the delightful Mrs. Palin to distract from his unsuitability by flaunting hers. Think of the savings.

That Four Letter Word Again

Two days ago I read an article that I found of interest, "Black President, Double Standard: Why Liberals Are Abandoning Obama." (Melissa Harris-Perry, The Nation, October 10, 2011). Desiring to share the piece with others, I posted it to my Facebook Wall a day ago. Forty comments and a few attacks later, I've decided to further share my thoughts via blogging. 

Some of those who read the article took offense at their perception that the author was labeling all white liberals who don't support Obama as racists. Regrettably, they were unable to get beyond protesting loudly, "I am not a racist." Hush, no one said that you were.

The thesis of the piece is not that white liberals who question Obama's policies are racists. It fascinates me that when the term racism appears in any piece of writing, particularly by a black person, that the immediate reaction of so many whites is to become indignant at being called a racist. Makes it sort of difficult to get to the heart of the matter being discussed.

Harris-Perry's essential point can be summed up in these lines: 

The 2012 election may be a test of another form of electoral racism: the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors. (The Nation)

Harris-Perry only arrives at this point after carefully explaining the concept of electoral racism: Electoral racism in its most naked, egregious and aggressive form is the unwillingness of white Americans to vote for a black candidate regardless of the candidate’s qualifications, ideology or party. Harris-Perry is also careful to affirm that positive movement has been made beyond such electoral racism in its most blatant form.

She then tackles the issue of the criticism of Obama, who has actually accomplished a great deal, and how the liberal base appears to hold Obama to a far higher standard than the most recent Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Essentially, Perry's discussion is informed by the noble savage archetype that has characterized much of the European interaction with indigenous peoples or with those of African ancestry for generations. (See for example: Noble Savage, Magical Negro, or On Being a Noble Savage) Essential to this archetype is elevating the non-white to a favored status as noble and honest, an admirable race in spite of its oppressed status. This archetypal pattern is particularly seen in American culture, indeed it is promoted in much of early American literature in works such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Last of the Mohicans." These unrealistic portraits lead to expectations that are based on a glorified and mythological image rather than the realities of the people of color.

Perry questions whether those archetypal patterns are informing the differing expectations that generate what she labels electoral racism in which some liberals held such unrealistic expectations of Obama that they were bound to be disappointed with the reality of his presidency. In simplistic terms, take Bill Maher's comment, repeated with approval by Michael Moore in which Maher asserts that he voted for the black guy but got the white guy. (See clip from The View) In other commentary, Maher laments that Obama is too professorial and not a real black president, "the kind that lifts up his shirt so that you can see the gun in his pants." (Frances Martel, Bill Maher Disappointed that Obama Isn't a Real Black President, 5/29/2010) 

I don't suggest that Maher is a card carrying racist but there is inherent unrealized racism in his observation. What is Maher's definition of blackness? What is there about Obama that's not black enough for him? What is there in Obama's demeanor that makes Maher define him as acting white? Who is Bill Maher to define what it means to be black? A similar observation with regards to unrealized racism is asserting that, "All Asians are good at math." It doesn't have to be a negative observation, but simply a sweeping generalization that presumes to define an entire group based on a perceived characteristic.

The animosity against Obama is couched in very personal terms. Some accuse him of intentionally betraying liberal or progressive causes, of being a sellout who has turned to the dark side and abandoned all progressive goals. That goes far beyond being disappointed and desiring a change in his policies. It's the worst type of character assassination. Perry raises the question as to why so much vitriol is directed towards Obama on this very personal level when in comparison with Bill Clinton, he has accomplished as much and in many cases more than Clinton. I recall when Clinton signed DADT into law; he didn't get nearly the attacks from the left for signing the bigoted law as Obama has received for not fighting for an anti-discrimination provision in the bill repealing the law.

Race informs all aspects of life in this country. To pretend that it doesn't is naive and unrealistic. Interestingly, I've seen this same article shared by many of my black Facebook friends. Those who have shared it have found it credible. This doesn't mean that black people are always right; however, it does reflect a difference in perspectives along racial lines. The question to ask yourself is do you use these differences to engage in honest dialogue or do you shut down into a defensive posture in which you deny that there is anything to be discussed? I truly appreciate those of you who have elected the first option. I have found your perspectives affirming and comforting. It is through such honest exchange that we all learn and grow.

A quick thought on economics

Conservatives keep trying to claim that we can't increase taxes on rich people, because Obama shouldn't tax "job creators."

Can we have a moratorium on the use of the term "job creators" for rich people? Because, at the moment, they are verifiably not creating any fucking jobs. That's like calling somebody a "stamp collector" when they don't buy, sell, or keep any stamps. It's just stupid.

In fact, I'll go one step further. I'll support a tax cut for anybody who creates new jobs, in America, which are held by American citizens. Now, this has to be a net jobs increase - if you fire fifty thousand people, and then hire forty thousand, you don't get congratulated for creating forty thousand jobs - you get yelled at for losing ten thousand.

(Also, any jobs you ship overseas? Yeah, that counts as a job loss.)

And by the way, that whole idea that "lower taxes equal more jobs"? It's stupid. Reagan experienced job growth while he was in office. But only after he raised taxes. Three times.

So, can we have a little honesty up in this bitch? For once?