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Sleep is hard to find
when, looking back, you see you've
never been awake.
No
Utopia...W H A T ' S . A . S W E E T H E A R T . L I K E . Y O U .
....D O I N ' . I N . A . D U M P . L I K E . T H I S ?
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Tuesday December 20, 2007
The Christmas-Industrial Complex
7:15 am |
My sister has become a Christmas curmudgeon. She joins me in this. We’ve cjatted many times trying to figure out why, for us, the magic air has gone out of the Christmas balloon. It’s not as if 90 % of us (especially business people) aren’t constantly hyperventilating during the last months of the year to keep the thing inflated. But it is as if God and Wall Street were in cahoots.“Look, I’ll send down my son on December 25th in year 0000, arrange for some wise men to bring him some gifts (hint, hint), and you take it from there. According to my projections (which are always very reliable) by 2007 you’ll be making enough money to be set for eternity,” said God. "I didn't invent 300' yachts and gated communities for nothing."
“Ok, boss,” said the free-marketeer. The rest is history.
It’s reached the ridiculous point where everyone feels compelled to max out their plastic, rendering debt interest unto Caesar (as is his due), just to give too many gifts to others who’ve maxed out their plastic too, for you. It just seems a little silly.
It’s such a cliché to say we’ve forgotten the real meaning of Christmas it seems equally silly to bring it up again. But, we’ve been brought up since we were babes to believe that “to consume” is the essence of “to be”. For the market economy, giving the gifts is not the thing. Buying the gifts is the thing. Wall Street doesn’t care squat about what we do with the stuff once we buy it. Give it to your mother wrapped in pretty paper and bows or send it directly to a landfill, they don’t care --most of it will wind up there anyway. Once you’ve swiped your card and corporations have peeled their profits off the top and pumped them up with debt interest, the private sector’s job is done. Whoopee! Now let’s have some egg nog while we count. The rest of us are left holding a bag of soon passé cabbage patch dolls and a whopping 15% APR …if we’re lucky.
“How did we get here?” asks my sister. “Greed and stupidity are genetically linked,” I’m tempted to reply, but that would be too easy. Greed and stupidity are definitely genetic, but nobody wants to hear that. Besides, love is genetic too, or at least it goes back far enough that it may as well be. And wasn’t it love that was the substance of Christmas before the ad men commandeered it to build fortunes? Many of us know there’s a problem, so why is no one doing anything about it?
I think the problem is inertia.
Christmas inertia.
Christmas inertia is when you’re driving down the road in your three-hundred horsepower open sleigh, hit a patch of glare ice called the economy, and can’t jam the brakes for fear of sliding into a recession, or depression, financial or psychological. No matter what is hapenning in the world we must not stop buying. Forget love. “What’s love got to do with it?” as Tina Turner asked.
And even if we wanted to slow things down in the Christmas Desecration Department we couldn’t. We’d have Fox and CNN slathering on the guilt, warning of a bleak retail outlook and a failing economy; not to mention the president reminding us that at Christmas, as in periods following devastating attacks on tall buildings, it’s our duty as citizens to buy, buy, buy.I’m not a religious man. But I am a man who believes in myth --although not myth in the sense of fantasy stories, but in the sense of ageless legends that formulate who we are and teach us what’s best for us; metaphorical frameworks that infuse life with truth and meaning. Ditch the religious element and Christmas is one of these. Religion makes Christmas too complicated.
Christmas has nothing to do with either religion or commerce. It's completely non-sectarian. The myth of Christmas simply tells us that love is born into poverty and thrives when worshipped by all, from shepherds to rich wise men. You don’t even have to believe in God to understand that this is a wonderful story, a saving myth, a basic truth. Pried away from deities and dollars, it just makes sense.
Monday November 26, 2007
Who's subsidizing your cheap shoes?
6:13 am |
In this global economy it should come as no surprise that what comes cheap to the "developed" nations is probably being subsidised through the sweat and suffering of the poor of other countries. Take manhole covers for instance.
So of course New York buys its manholes from India. But as they say, ain't no free lunch, baby. Keeping costs low means that someone elsewhere pays for New York City's manhole covers with wages Americans would only spit at, while working in conditions any Manhattanite would call beyond rediculous --like working barefoot in a foundry while pouring molten steel.
Forget manholes. Ask yourself whose subsidizing your cheap shoes.
Via: TPM
Monday November 16, 2007
Over-paid parasites
10:58 pm |
John Edwards made a reasonable point when he said the other day that, as president, he would do whatever he could to recind congress' health care benefits if they didn't pass a health care bill that would benefit most Americans.
As the Agonist says:
What is so whacky about that? Nothing. Nothing at all despite the flack Edwards has been getting for uttering the blasphemy. The whiners are all daily suckers at the tit of Washington's elite sacred cow. Some have even said such a thing would be unconstitutional, which shows how much they know about the consitution. The constitution was not written to nurture overpaid parasites.
Monday November 12, 2007
Just asking
7:29 am |
Reading Matthew Chapman's account of the Dover, Pa "Intelligent Design" trial that made news two years ago reminded me of a run-in with a creationist acquaintance of mine who has a wart the size of a gumball on the end of her nose. She said science is over-rated and is often an affront to God. In the same breath she said she was seeing a dermatologist about the wart.
I asked, "Have you prayed about this?"
She said, "All the time."
I asked, "Has it helped with the wart?"
She said, "I don't pray about the wart. I pray for forgiveness for consulting a dermatologist."
With her best interest at heart, I suggested she meditate not only on the wart, but upon her inclination to view God as an idiot. She stared at me as if she were Pope Urban and I was Galileo waving around my new telescope insisting the earth really does revolve around the sun. Then she turned to take a call from the dermatologist's on her iphone.This is one of my main gripes about creationists. If they happen to slip a disk bending over backward to curse science for sticking with the evidence, they don't consult Genesis for a remedy, they head for the nearest emergency room to be doused with x-rays. Nor do they whisk their kid's broken leg off to a priest who bases his medicine on what the cutting edge was 5000 years ago. Like any heathen they want a state-of-the-art scientific rationalist taking care of their health. This is the odd schizophrenia that infests our culture at the dawn of the 21st century.
It's hard to believe that a political system instituted by men of the Enlightenment could wind up 230 years later backsliding into a condition of mysticism and magic. Those men were liberal thinkers and some, like Benjamin Franklin, were scientists. Leaders like Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin had a vision of a political system that would reason its way through difficulties rather than blindly and stupidly bow to authority --even biblical authority. And yet in 2005 we had another Scopes-type court drama like the one in the 1930s. The more recent Pennsylvania trial was held to resolve a dispute between a magical-thinking school board who wanted to sneak biblical creationism into their school's science curriculum (via ID) and teachers and parents who consider science and religion to be distinct realms that should not be conflated. Fortunately (this time) the magical thinkers lost.
But we're a nation of magical thinkers. Groucho Marx once asked, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Groucho, like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, understood that the common-sense answer to that question was often not the one left standing after a brawl. The difference is that Groucho was joking while Goebbels was being more sinister and Cheneyesque. A fundamental truth perceived by all tyrants is that people will easily bury evidence in exchange for promises; promises of safety or profit; promises of prosperity here or in the world to come. This is what the last seven years (and the preceding twenty or so since Ronald Reagan) have been about: convincing Americans that what they're seeing is not really happening. As a matter of fact something said by Joseph Mengele (the notorious Nazi Doctor who conducted experiments on Jews) could also be said to sleep-walking American debt junkies as well, namely, "The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it."
Are we a fantastical lost cause by now? Here's what polls say: in June of this year 41% of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 events. This can only be because the president said it, the media regurgitated it, Americans swallowed it, and it's now it's assimilated into their belief system despite all evidence to the contrary. It was a real stick-to-your-ribs magical feast.
But our love of magic goes much deeper than myopic belief in presidents. For instance, about one third of us also believe in astrology. This means one in three people we meet on the street believe Uranus has something to do with how their day is working out. What's more, with just as little basis, 84% us believe in survival of the soul after death and the same number believe in miracles. 82% believe in heaven, 68% believe in the devil, and 51% believe in ghosts. Not that there's anything wrong with any of this. These are personal spiritual beliefs, but this is not the kind of thinking that led to a cure for polio. When we cross science with religion both are debased because they address different aspects of our longing. And when they mate they produce groteque mutations like Intelligent Design.
…which brings us back to Creationism. Up until two years ago (at least) 45% of Americans believed the world was created in 6 days about 6000 years ago, as reckoned by the Old Testament. Forty-five percent! In other words, regardless of the geological record showing the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the fossil record which tells us that life first appeared on earth about 2.5 billion years ago, and the nearly unanimous view of scientists world-wide that mankind developed as a result of the process of natural selection, a huge percentage of us choose to believe what writers in 3500 BC concocted about the dawn of life based upon the only resource they had --their imaginations. In short, regarding the origin of the species, 45% of us have chosen to repudiate our lying eyes.
Creationists insist the bible story of our first parents is literally more credible than the one that theorizes that we evolved from earlier primates. They say Darwin's theory is full of gaps. But speaking of gaps, what I'd like creationists to explain is, where in the world did Adam and Eve's daughters-in-law come from?
Sunday November 4, 2007
Paintings by Preet Srivastava
11:21 am |
Sunday October 28, 2007
When "can do" meets "inshalla"
7:52 am |
When words collide can worlds be far behind? This is the question writer Cullen Murphy suggests in this article at American Scholar.org.
Murphy says Americans have always been steeped in the idea of willful progress. We imagine miracles that spring from putting noses to grindstones and sholders to wheels, and to a great extent this has been our history. Humble reflection, on the other hand, has not been a significant part of our character. We've not paid much attention to collateral effect; so today we have things like global warming and dead zones in seas. And when this sort of ignorance reaches the highest levels of government we have preemptive wars such as the one in Iraq and the previous debacle in Vietnam.
But (irony, oh irony!) that may change, say Mr. Murphy, because of a subtle collateral effect of the Bush-Cheney war. Here's what he says:
Not long ago, in a Q and A on the Web site of The New York Times, an Iraqi translator was asked to explain the points of difference he saw between his own people and the Americans he encountered in Iraq. He brought up the Arabic phrase "inshallah." The Americans, he said, "have respect for time"; Iraqis, in contrast, "use the word inshallah, which means `if God wishes,' to postpone things."
It may be that this point of difference won’t be a distinction much longer. An American colonel in Iraq, writing to The Washington Post’s Thomas E. Ricks, recently observed: "The phrase ‘inshallah,’ or ‘God willing,’ has permeated all ranks of the Army. When you talk to U.S. soldiers about the possible success of ‘the surge,’ you’d be surprised how many responded with ‘inshallah.’” The phrase seems to have permeated all ranks of the diplomatic corps, too: Zalmay Khalilzad, when he was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, once stated at a press conference, “Inshallah, Iraq will succeed.
...
What we can say for sure is that many hundreds of thousands of Americans have endured tours of duty in Iraq. They are writing blogs and e-mails with a new word at their fingertips. They are returning home with a new word on their lips. It will have an impact on the American Experiment, inshallah.
Will the importation of an idea attached to a word be the lasting remnant of George Bush's war? Will the USA morph from a can-do nation to one who says, "Inshalla?"
Read Cullen Murphy's article here:
Wednesday October 24, 2007
Nip & tuck, Mack & Mire, Tweedle-dee & Tweedle-dum
9:10 pm |
Look at these two guys. Doesn't there seem to be something wrong with them, or am I so thoroughly disgusted with their presence on the earth that I simply loathe their visage? I can't help it. These are not good people.
Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee
They're throwing knives into the tree
Two big bags of dead man's bones
Got their noses to the grindstones...
--Bob Dylan
Where have all the species gone... ...............?
8:41 pm |
Global warming's effect on the viability of species is discussed here briefly.
Apparently the earth has gotten hot under the collar before which led to mass extinctions during the Permian period. That we may be helping to raise the global temperature doesn't help matters any, or the prospects of our favorite flora and fauna. Still there's some small solace in the idea of cycles. When my father used to get depressed when slogging through rough periods in his life he'd say, "Well, things run in cycles." This was his attempt at being "philosophical" though things still hurt like hell.
The truth is the earth doesn't need us. We're not that important (religious arguments to the contrary). Life will most likely survive for many millenium. Whether we're here to enjoy it, is another matter.
Via:
Dumbledore Distraction
8:14 am |
Big news: Dumbledore is gay. Harry Potter's Hogwarts mentor is a homosexual. We may not have known this from experience since it was never an issue in the books and never affected the story in any way, but Potter's author, J.K. Rowling, just told us so. This is a prerogative of creators. She dreamt him up so she can out him.
But what exactly does this mean for us, dear readers? Have we been sullied? Have we been duped? Has Rowling, the wizard behind the scenes, been making fools of us all, particularly fundamentalists? And what's her point; why bring this up now when we were so blissful in our ignorance? Don't ask, don't tell is the highway to religious free-market harmony, isn't it? And the road to hell is paved with knowledge --or so suggest the vice president and his water-boy.
I mean, won't this news wreck my marriage? Won't my relationship with my wife become unglued now that the creative force behind Harry Potter has spilled the beans that the old Dumbledore has been a man lover all along? These are important questions the answers to which are a matter of cultural survival; maybe even the survival of the world. When the vital spirit behind the story springs such a troubling surprise what exactly are we to make of it? Isn't this an issue for my clergyperson? Isn't there a three-thousand-year-old blood-spattered patriarchal scripture I can mine for answers? Would prayer help?
But Rowling has done us a huge favor. Up till now the story of Harry Potter has been a stupendous success. Children have been reading who might otherwise have been blowing up enemies in macho video game wars or glued to the tube watching gargoyle wrestlers stomping each other's faces; the old-fashioned among us have been thrilled to find that the art of reading is not dead; Rowling is now off welfare; she and her publishers have made a mint; bookstore owners have been grinning ear-to-ear; Hollywood has gotten in on the action; everybody but fearful religious types have been happy despite the fact that Dumbledore has been a closeted gay throughout the whole tale. Nothing has seemed at all out of whack -except for a few spells and curses that is. So now that it's been retroactively revealed that old Dumbledore shares a sexual orientation with Walt Whitman the sky is falling? No, the sky is not falling --though the climate is changing, but who's got time for that when story-book homosexuals are on the loose.How old are we?
Consider this: J.K. Rowling, the creative force behind Harry Potter (the god behind the story so to speak) has decided that at least one of her characters be gay. And not a soul, throughout seven novels have given a sweet one because it has not mattered one bit! Dumbledore being gay has not been a problem in even a single clause, subordinate or otherwise. The story just moved along like a well-oiled machine. Everybody played their parts well --even gay Dumbledore; and there was no serious glitch in the narrative.
Well, if there really is a god behind our own story I figure he, she, or it has at least the same prerogatives as J.K. Rowling. Who, besides the Southern Baptist Convention or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would deny god a prerogative? And if our god has decided to sprinkle his cast with gays what right have we to tamper with the lord's creative process by throwing a tantrum? Are we James Dobson? Doesn't god know more about the way things should be than us?The fact is our story will progress quite well with both gays and straights playing their parts; doing their best to move the plot along --laughing, crying, working, playing, living, loving, if only the pinched-up haters of god's sublime creation would just get off their high horses and humbly appreciate how beautiful the tale could be without their angst and anger. They ought to save that for the corporate-politicians and grifters on both sides of the aisle who are looting the republic as we speak. A stupid Dumbledore distraction is just one more nail being driven into its coffin.
Sunday October 21, 2007
Catalyst for a barf-fest
8:14 am |
Following the lead of Dirty Job's Mike Rowe, Frank Rich, in his column today, climbs down into the sewer that is the Iraq war and shines some light. His hip-booted excursion into slime, which offers an illuminating look at the connections and interconnections between the Bush administration, the defense industry, the Pentagon, Blackwater, and war profiteers in general is a catalyst for a barf-fest.
Here are some clips of the ooze of it all:
- Air Force asks defense contractor to hire procurement officer Charles Riechers. Riechers later told the WaPo he didn't do anything for the job to get his paycheck. With the question hanging in the air of whether the defense contractor would expect something in return from the Pentagon, Riecher carbon-monoxides himself to death.
- Flowing from the Iraq-Afghanistan honey pot, investigations for some $6 billion worth of contracts are transpiring. They cover such ground as waste and fraud.
- $9 billion in Iraqi funds vanished during Paul Bremer's regime in Bagdahd
- Military contractors (Blackwater) murder Iraqi civilians, probably with impunity.
- Darleen Druyan, Riecher's predecessor at the Pentagon, was sentenced to 9 months for managing to get herself, her daughter, and son-in-law, jobs at Boeing and then looking well upon Boeing when it came to awarding contracts.
- The 2005 report to congress by the Pentagon's Inspector General,
which insisted Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were ignorant of any corruption by Druyan, was delivered by Inspector General , Joseph Schmitz, who almost immediately upon delivering his report moved into a job with the Prince Group, which runs Blackwater.
- Blackwater’s lobbyist Paul Behrends, once of Alexander Strategy Group, founded by a former Tom DeLay chief of staff, was in the muck in the middle of the Jack Abramoff scandals. Since then Mr. Behrends’s clients have included First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company, the builder of the new American mega-embassy in Iraq which is $144 million over its $592 million budget and months behind schedule and riddled with "...(criminally) deficient, unsafe construction," and is now being investigated, has also been accused of engaging in human trafficking to supply the labor force. But (surprise) the Bush-appointed State Department inspector general has found no evidence of any wrongdoing.
- Bribe-taker Gloria Davis, Army major, after admitting her crimes, also killed herself.
- And the beat goes on --or will go on, because J. Cofer Black, formerly of the C.I.A. and now Blackwater’s vice chairman, is also a Mitt Romney adviser. And Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's top strategist is also chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, the P.R. firm that helped the Blackwater Prince with his Congressional testimony.
- Finally. Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who worked for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005, died of a somewhat mysterious bullet in the head. In a final letter to Petraeus Westhsuing said, “I cannot support a msn (mission) that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied.”
PS: the mystery of Westhusing's wound is that, though ruled a suicide, others (such as LA Times reporter T. Christian Miller) believe he may have been murdered as a potential whistle-blower.
That's the muck and the mire of it citizens. For those who support this corrupt and bloody war, ignore it at your will. For the others, read it and weep, the USA appears to be as common and compromised an imperialist state as you feared.
Saturday October 20, 2007
What most Americans don't know about war
8:29 am |
In this excellent feature at the Poetry Foundation website, Nathaniel Fick writes about war and poetry in the same breath. Among others, he cites an astonishing poem which is so small but loaded with tremendous burden:
are two sieves
sifting
in piles of others
for you
Sinan Antoon
Poetry or American Idol?
7:38 am |
Writing at the Huffington Post, Poet John Lundberg asks why we don't read poetry and suggests some answers to his question.
Americans, by and large, just steer clear of poetry. As Lundberg says:
American Life in Poetry
7:38 am |
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
When ancient people gathered around the fire at nightfall, I like to think that they told stories, about where each of them had been that day, and what that person had seen in the forest. Those were among our first stories, and we still venture into the world and return to tell others what happened. It's part of community. Here Kathleen Flenniken of Washington tells us about a woman she saw at an airport.
Old Woman With Protea Flowers, Kahalui Airport
She wears the run-down slippers of a local
and in her arms, five rare protea
wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones.
Our hands can't help it and she lets us touch.
Her brother grows them for her, upcountry.
She's spending the day on Oahu
with her flowers and her dogs. Protea
for four dogs' graves, two for her favorite.
She'll sit with him into the afternoon
and watch the ocean from Koolau.
An old woman's paradise, she tells us,
and pets the flowers' soft, pink ears.
Tuesday October 16, 2007
Clash of Cultures
9:13 pm |
The Dalai Lama just spent some time with George Bush. What must that have been like?
How does the Dalia Lama deal with the likes of George Bush? George just fell into the presidency (being the son of a wealthy man); while the Dalai Lama was proclaimed long ago, as a child in a third world country, to be the most noted caretaker of the Buddhist perception of being. He was brought up dedicated to this. George grew up dedicated to nothing in particular. There must be a wide, wide intellectual gap separating these. It must have been a strained encounter at that covergence of minds. I imagine sparks and burning rubber.
On one side we have George W. Bush --who chose to have not much going for him but his name, which he parlayed over time into a presidency only to realize he hasn't a clue: panic mode --get me somebody who knows something!
How about Dick Cheney? H's been around. I'll make him my VP. How's that for credibility? I'll get Cheney, then I'll start a war. With Cheney behind me how could a gulliuble public disbelieve? Cheney, so fatherly, so Goering-like. Now, with the Dalai Lama meeting with me on equal terms, how could I be thought wanting?
Then, on the other side, there's the Dalai Lama trying to elevate the discussion, always shooting for equilibrium and the application of common sense. Who you gonna believe, the Liar or the Lama?
Dead to God?
6:52 am |
Having spent the last 6+ years careening down the highway to hell, the dead-to-god have now totally lost the brakes on their humvee of doom. The remnant neocons have not learned that going it alone with mere military clout is not the answer to dousing the flames of the middle east. The middle east is too subtle for the likes of Bush.
People like Bill Kristol have been ratcheting up the national angst on Iran while the military is stretched as thin as a condom on the Goodyear Blimp. Again they're pumping a military erection, as if the last 6 years hadn't happened.
People like Bill Kristol have been so, soooo wrong; so stupidly, stupidly wrong you'd think they'd just shut up and slink off into a think-tank somewhere. But here Kristol is flapping his lips again, giving us his glossilalia --his so-detached-from-reality take on things. As if anyone should listen. Who would listen?!
There's no shame in Kristol's eschelon.
Some among us may be beyond redemption. Having prostrated to the regime, egg-on-face appears to be their natural condition, which they accept with great pride. It's like they don't believe in napkins.
Video commpliments of TMP
