FAREWELL JOHNNY PAYCHECK

His biggest hit:

TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT

(Written by David Allen Coe)

Take this job and shove it,
I ain't workin' here no more.
My woman done left,
An' took all the reasons I was workin' for.
You better not to try to stand in my way,
As I'm a walkin' out the door.
Take this job and shove it,
I ain't workin' here no more.

I've been workin' in this fact'ry,
For nigh on fifteen years.
All this time, I watched my woman,
Drownin' in a pool of tears.
An I've seen a lot of my good folk die,
Had a lot of bills to pay.
I'd give the shirt right off of my back,
If I had the guts to say.

Take this job and shove it,
I ain't workin' here no more.
My woman done left,
An' took all the reasons I was workin' for.
You better not to try to stand in my way,
As I'm a walkin' out the door.
Take this job and shove it,
I ain't workin' here no more.

Well, that foreman, he's a regular dog,
The line boss is a fool.
Got a brand new flat-top haircut;
Lord, he thinks he's cool.
One of these days, I'm gonna blow my top,
And sucker, he's gonna pay
Lord, I can't wait to see their faces,
When I get the nerve to say:

Take this job and shove it,
I ain't workin' here no more.
My woman done left,
An' took all the reasons I was workin' for.
You better not to try to stand in my way,
As I'm a walkin' out the door.
Take this job and shove it,
I ain't workin' here no more.

Take this job and shove it.

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IMPORTANT LINKS CULLED FROM ESCHATON OVER THE WEEKEND

What with all the cool links, essays, jokes, and the opportunity to post my own thoughts and pit them in debate against other readers, I'm rapidly becoming addicted to the Eschaton blog page. Anyway, check out these links; I find them to be rather important information.

Bush administration attempts to supress New York peace march. Click here. This is actually quite frightening. As Atrios (the mysterious identity of the Eschaton blogger) said, "If we (actually) had a liberal media this would be a huge story." Indeed. Unfortunately, terribly, terribly, terribly unfortunately, we have a ragingly, flamingly conservative media.

Rumsfeld wants to make Germany pay dearly for opposing Bush's war, the most convincing evidence yet that he's out of his mind. Click here. I don't think it's that good of an idea to piss off Germany and potentially encourage them to build up their own military at the same time...I mean, isn't there some sort of historical precedent to worry about here?

The worst, most over-the-top example of violating the seperation between church and state I've ever heard of. Click here. Sadly, I think things are headed back in this direction in countless pockets across the country, including the school district where I teach.

A simple, clear, concise explanation of why Bush's tax plans are suicide for the USA: the most convincing evidence yet that he's really stupid. Click here. There are pretty damned good reasons why the rich should be taxed at a much higher rate than the poor and the middle class.

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NASA REVISITED

My old friend, Matt, who I mentioned in my earlier post about the Columbia explosion, sent me a link to another essay about the disaster. I feel like it poses something of a challenge to my mythologizing of space exploration and I need to respond. First, go read the essay here.

Now on to my response.

My first observation is that Joe Keohane's writing is all over the place and I am having difficulty figuring out what the main thrust of her essay is. It's probably either because she is an undergraduate (a junior at Georgetown) and hasn't quite perfected her writing skills OR because Georgetown is a much better school than the university I attended (U of Texas at Austin) and I'm not quite up to the task of following along. It's most likely a combination of both. Anyway, I'll assume that her overall point is somehow dealing with the essay's title, "Are We Really United in Mourning?" and her closing paragraph which seems to advocate some normal human sympathy for the dead astronauts along with suggesting an overall demystification of space exploration.

Keohane's essay brought to mind a couple of thoughts.

First, when UT film graduate Robert Rodriguez's Spanish language film, "El Mariachi," became a surprise success, seemingly half of Austin was abuzz about how cool it was that this guy could temporarily sell his body to Pharmaco (they test drugs on students and the homeless and pay them for it), raise a paltry $7k, and make one of the best films of the early 90's (anybody that had gone through UT's RTF production track knew that his formal education probably had nothing to do with it). I heard about a friend of a friend who was skeptical: it struck him as impossible that such a good film could be made so cheaply and suggested some sort of hype-oriented conspiracy theory.

Second, here is a bit of dialogue from an episode of the Simpsons:

Sullen Teen at Lolapalooza: Are you being sarcastic?

Another Sullen Teen at Lolapalooza: I don't even know anymore...

I feel like, given the circumstances described by Chomsky in my post below, American culture now vacillates between two extremes: people either zealously believe in some sort of set, dogmatic ideology, philosophy, or religion, or people zealously believe in nothing at all. I'm sure that Keohane has a great deal of intellectual substance (I really did enjoy reading her essay; it forced me to think a great deal), but I'm very tempted to describe her as Shakespeare's Benedick once addressed his wit-rival and lover, Beatrice: "Lady Disdain."

It's not that I disagree with most of the points she made. I don't think it's so bad that she felt no sadness about the Columbia; as the Butthole Surfers have shown, "Strangers Die Every Day." I didn't read Herbert's essay in the NYT, but I'm sure it was typically pundit-pompous and absurd. I agree that Columbia does not equal the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I agree that there are major hazards when people are idealized. I agree that the loss of the Columbia was "sad not senseless."

It's just that I got such a strong feeling of bias against mythology, against inspirational stories, against the concept of belief itself from her essay.

In another essay, "The Narrative Construction of Reality," psychologist Jerome Bruner has shown how human beings literally understand their lives and the world in terms of stories (I would have provided a link to the essay if I could but it doesn't seem to be readily available via Google search). Clearly, such a notion provides endless opportunities for evil manipulation of the masses--indeed, the philosophies of Goebbels now reign free in both American politics and American advertising/P.R. But does this mean that we must suck the wind out of ALL national myths? Must progressives believe that there is not one great thing about our culture?

I'm not sure that Keohane was advocating such a position, but I certainly feel that her essay clearly drifts toward that point of view.

My response to Keohane's essay, in short, is that Americans should, indeed, be wary of how the corporate media and politicians (and rock stars, for that matter) make myths for general consumption. After all, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the stars and stripes clearly meant war and revenge, not freedom and democracy. But we should not be so skeptical that we become totally without hopes or dreams.

Like it or not, our lives can only be understood in terms of stories and myths. The challenge is to understand exactly what those stories and myths mean, and then to discredit those which deceive, and to glorify those which enlighten.

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THE CORPORATE MEDIA SAYS...

I just noticed that CNN's Headline News is covering yesterday's mass peace demonstrations in such a way as to make them appear to be supporting Saddam Hussein. "Peace Protests Please Iraq" is the video text headline accompanying alternating video footage of the marches and rallies and of happy Iraqi citizens and leaders; the anchor's voice talks about how pleased Iraq is about worldwide resistance to Bush's war mongering. The overall effect is something like, "if you oppose the war, then you must be supporting the Evil Doers."

Look out, peaceniks, the spin is on...

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THE PEACE MOVEMENT'S TET OFFENSIVE

...in 1968 the General launched a major surprise offensive against American and South Vietnamese forces on the eve of the lunar New Year celebrations. Province capitals throughout the country were seized, garrisons simultaneously attacked and, perhaps most shockingly, in Saigon the U.S. Embassy was invaded. The cost in North Vietnamese casualties was tremendous but the gambit produced a pivotal media disaster for the White House and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Giap's strategy toppled the American commander in chief. It turned the tide of the war...

John Colvin author of "Giap Volcano Under Snow"

I was sick all day yesterday and missed the local protest but I did try to keep abreast of what was going on while at home. TV news wasn't much help (so typical), but the internet was buzzing. In fact, last night while reading news coverage at the Houston Chronicle's website, I clicked through a series of numerous photos of the numerous demonstrations around the world. The global scale of the protests totally amazed me, real jaw-dropping stuff. MILLIONS joined in the collective "fuck you" to the Bush junta. Could this have an effect similar to the Tet Offensive?

God, I hope so.

Congratulations to the peace movement on a job well done! Hooray!

(I am NOT being sarcastic; I really mean it.)

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POTENTIAL FOR FASCISM

Noam Chomsky says:

In the 1970's it was another upsurge of foundations trying to take over the educational institutions...the effect has been to pretty much demolish civil society, to turn people into what is the ideal...a completely fragmented, atomized society where everyone is totally alone doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants...go to work, get lower and lower wages for more and more hours and less and less benefits and security in a flexible labor market: that's the kind of utopia they're looking for and it's not very far from there... the country is (now) like a devastated peasant society. You really have to go back to Europe and the black death in the fourteenth century to find anything similar: people are scared, angry, hostile, hate everything, don't know what they hate, don't have anybody else to talk to, just angry, desperate. There are cults all over the place at a scale that is unknown in any other society...the level of religious fundamentalism alone is probably the highest in the world...higher than Iran...not (just) the right; the left is the same...it's just a dissolved society...the portent is ominous...the kind of a situation that, indeed, is reminiscent of Germany in the late 30's...or Iran in the late 70's.

Chomsky said this during a lecture on class war in 1996, five years before the September 11th terrorist attacks. As far as I can tell, things have only gotten worse. Listen to streaming audio of the entire lecture here.

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STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Guess who's also opposed to the impending war with Iraq? Read this:

The simple fact of the matter is, Bush is being sent a strong delusion, so that he can spiral America further down his path of perversion, drawing ever closer to her destruction. The area that is today Iraq was once known as Babylon. Anyone with half a brain and an ability to read the Bible knows that Babylon is the spiritual enemy of God's people, and the center of all that is evil, the Type used in the Bible to represent the final judgment of God against all that have rejected Him. Why would Bush, if not to position himself this way, want anything to do with running Babylon? Only the purely evil would partake on such a folly, and that gives us further proof of God's hatred for this evil nation.

That's right, it's everybody's favorite, crazy gay-basher, Fred Phelps of GodHatesFags.com. Read the rest of his psycho rhetoric on the Iraq war here.

Hee, hee. I'm a bedfellow with Fred Phelps. I hope he's gentle; it will be my first time.

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MORE ON THE O'REILLY/GLICK EXCHANGE

Read the NION press release here. I would also like to point out that I have signed the Not In Our Name statement, as well.

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FREE THOUGHT IN THE CLASSROOM

At the fantastic Eschaton blog site, one can post comments on each of Atrios's blog posts. Last weekend, I got myself caught up in a bit of a debate about issues surrounding the racist comments by and subsequent firing of Missouri middle school teacher Jendra Loeffelman. Read about it here (they may move the story into their archives soon; if that's the case, there should be a link in the right margin). If you've been reading Real Art for a while, then you probably realize what some of my views on race and racism in the US are: we live in a very racist country but propaganda tends to make most whites not realize it. Anyway, because I am a teacher myself, I am a bit worried about the outright firing of an educator for expressing a controversial opinion, despite the fact that her opinion is abhorrent to me--to quote Voltaire, "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it." Such a point of view is absolutely crucial in the classroom: without it, critical thought is impossible.

Anyway, lots of liberals still tend toward the decidedly uncritical "politically correct" point of view. This was the point of conflict for the debate on Eschaton. I'm going to post my comments only; you ought to get the gist of what it is that I am responding to from context.

the Eschaton debate (Ron's statements)

my first comment:

I, too, am a high school teacher and I find that I've got to agree with Elias for the most part. The everyday reality of public education is that it is ultimately impossible to keep a "fair and balanced" kind of ideological neutrality on political and cultural issues. As Elias pointed out, students and teachers talk; this seems impossible to avoid, even if I wanted to. Avoidance of hot topic issues is a statement in and of itself: no, can't talk about sex; no, can't talk about dirty words; nope, not religion; drugs, just say no; shut up: do as I say!

Kids are smarter than that contrary to popular opinion.

Another problem is that teachers' spoutings of conventional political wisdoms, no matter how stupid, are often tolerated or encouraged. For instance, the school where I work in Texas has a government/economics teacher who openly wore an "impeach Clinton" button during the weeks of the impeachment and trial process; nobody seemed to be bothered by this.

Given this pathetic reality, there's no way I'm going to keep my mouth shut when teenagers ask me about condoms, for instance--Texas is, by law, an abstinence-only sex ed state. Personally, I do try to tell my students that I'm one of those "crazy liberals" and to take everything I say with a grain of salt. I've also, at the beginning of every school year, taken to reading University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen's teaching philosophy (posted on his homepage) to my classes to cover my tail; it's a good essay on critical thought, objectivity, and the classroom.

Actually, one could argue that, in many ways, the main thrust of public education is ENTIRELY ideological in nature.

School heirarchies are based on a 19th century Prussian military model (this is no joke; check it out!); that is, discipline and order almost always prevail, while the pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and civic responsibility take only a secondary role. In the most important ways, American public education is about indoctrinating children into the culture of authority and obedience. School is an ideological institution to begin with but nobody wants to admit this.

The real point to consider given the unreliability of "objectivity" is the ideology being taught, or what some have called the "unofficial curriculum." I bet that Loeffelman was not the only faculty member with such views; these views are understood by students whether openly spoken or not.

my second comment:

Dominion said, "a feature of Houston High Schools..." I teach in a community right outside of Houston and my experience is a bit different from Dominion's.

Dominion said, "'free speech' rights are curtailed all the time...that is exactly as it should be." This is just not true. The part of the Houston metro area where I work is arguably far more fundamentalist than Houston in general. Here, the reality is that teachers have all kinds of free speech rights as long as they parrot the prevailing community values. That is, teachers openly bash evolution, even biology teachers. Teachers openly advocate drilling for oil in the arctic. Teachers openly profess their Christian beliefs and speckle their talk with religious innuendo. "Student sponsored prayer" is actually just a facade for school sponsored prayer. The list goes on and on.

Given this circumstance and my own progressivism, I must be very careful about how I speak. But I do speak because teenagers are very concerned with precisely those issues that Dominion says we should not talk about. I must speak because nobody else at my school seems to lean leftward--my school's students are being deprived of alternatives to their community's extremely narrow point of view.

Granted, it would be suicide to push, say, the validity of evolution but it's pretty safe to say something like, "evolution is biology's organizing principle; you don't understand modern biology if you don't understand evolution--you don't have to believe it, but you do have to understand it." Or, "feminists believe that no woman can truly be socially equal to men unless she can choose the circumstances under which she has a child; pro-lifers, however, define a fetus to be a person and therefore abortion is murder--from that point of view, America is drowning in blood." I've got to kiss a few rings, but just getting the liberal view into consideration at all is subversive given the community.

I think Elias defends Loeffelman for the same reason that I do: stifling classroom discussion from the left also means stifling classroom discussion from the right. I totally disagree with Loeffelman's comments and I also believe that she should have taken the opportunity to have a larger, more wide-ranging classroom discussion (this was her true misdeed). But teachers must be allowed to state their opinions and challenge students' notions. This is how to teach "critical thinking." Refraining from controversy makes apathetic students who make C's into apathetic adults who do not vote.

Don't get me wrong, I do not hold up Loeffelman to be a paragon of critical thought. However, the ideas at stake here are hopelessly interwoven with the controversy her comments created. Is she being fired for stating her taboo opinion or for not allowing for dissenting points of view (or telling students about them if no one knows how to or that they should dissent)?

If she can be fired, maybe I can be fired for talking about condoms in my abstinence-only, high-teen-pregnancy-rate school. This is what's on the line. The real problem is that schools in general almost never allow for a diversity of opinion. Change that and things should be better: athiest teachers, Christian teachers, feminist teachers, neo-liberal teachers, etc. Everybody gets numerous points of view.

And finally, Dominion said, "It is not, never, ever the teachers job to supplant the morals that I teach my kids at home." Get over it. School is already and always has been an ideological institution of control and discipline; this is the main lesson that ALL children graduate with: follow orders when you are a subservient; give orders when you are a superior--you are on your own. Do you really want that taught to your children? Well, it is. Given that reality, I, for one, will continue to talk with my students about morals, culture, ethics, politics, sex, drugs, rock and roll and dirty words.

my third post:

Actually, I don't equate the value of left and right opinion at all. (I'm pretty far left and my personal view is that conservatism is quite evil.) Rather, I believe that conservatism as a philosophy has become so overwhelmingly dominant in the public discourse that the United States effectively no longer has a "marketplace of ideas" (if we ever truly had one at all...). No "marketplace of ideas" equals no democracy. This is a factual reality. Obviously, it's much worse in Houston.

My point is that if students don't get multiple views all the way across the political spectrum, they never learn how to think. Unfortunately, this is the situation the country is in: people don't think and this really frightening civic problem can be blamed squarely on the schools (and the corporate media, I suppose, as well). Public education is far more about "do it because I told you to or else" than about debate and thought; questioning authority is seen as the worst thing a student can do, worse, even, than fighting. Even the major teachers' unions (unions are supposed to be liberal, right?) want more classroom discipline. The entire educational system is in on the racket. There is seemingly no hope for the situation changing.

Furthermore, in order to understand the importance of liberal philosophies, students must understand conservative philosophies. I might even venture to say that most adult conservatives don't fully understand their own points of view, ditto for liberals. That's why there is effectively no real debate in this country at the political level: political beliefs are, for most people, simply strong, emotionally image-laden slogans. Rarely do I ever encounter a true clash of ideas in the public realm.

I stand for real debate because I believe that on a fair playing field, liberal views will win. But the public is unaccustomed to true debate, to a true clash of ideas, and is, therefore, wary of that which truly enables democracy.

Just because I think that conservative views should be heard does not mean that I equate right and left thinking. In fact, I always tell my students what my opinion is on almost any subject and that I believe I'm right--I also admit that there are lots of other seemingly intelligent people who disagree with me. But my point gets across and recognizing that there are other points of view besides my own makes me all the more credible.

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GREAT GAME!

Play Gulf War 2 online.

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FUN, FRIGHTENING LINKS FOR THE WEEKEND:

Patriot Act II: "You are a rebel traitor and a spy!"

Bill Moyers exposes the latest Darth Vader empowerment bill.

Love George W. Bush!

He's so dreamy...

Hate George W. Bush!

Let's impeach the fucker.

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CONSERVATIVES ADMIT IT! THEY KNOW THERE'S NO "LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS"

Check it out here.

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TOM TOMORROW SEZ:

And a more-important-than-usual Unscientific Poll Watch: some jackasses are trying to rev up the good old days of McCarthyism and blacklists. Go here, right now, and vote in favor of actor David Clennon's right to speak his damn mind. (It's one vote per logged IP, and you have to give an email address. I know that sort of thing is likely to bother some of you, but there's always Hotmail. I think this one matters. Given the cowardice of the networks, this guy's career might well be on the line here.)

Afterthought from a reader: "Please suggest that readers not only vote, but that they add posts to their own blogs to get their readers to vote. Right now it's 2:1 for firing him. Gotta do all we can. First amendment and all that..."

Consider yourselves asked.

This is your mission should you decide to accept it...

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update to the update:

I just watched O'Reilly answering viewer email on last night's exchange with Glick. He was utterly unashamed and unapologetic, proud, even. This is "fair and balanced" in 2003, a real "no spin zone." Heh. Heh.



PSYCHO O'REILLY UPDATE

I found a link to some streaming audio of the fiery exchange. This is VERY enjoyable.

Thanks to the Hamster for the link.

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EVERYBODY'S GOTTA HEAR THIS

Thank you, thank you, thank you Tom Tomorrow for getting this transcript! These days there's nothing much more pleasing to me than a conservative asshole being made to look like an asshole. In this case, it's Smarmy Bunghole B-team starting tight end Bill O'Reilly:

Bully Bill

I caught a bit of the O'Reilly Factor during dinner last night, during which Bill berated Jeremy Glick, a signatory of the Not in Our Name ad whose father died in the 9/11 attacks. I couldn't find a transcript on the Fox site, but happily, one came in over the transom (probably pulled off Lexis, so no link available).

This is how Bill O'Reilly behaves when faced with genuine disagreement:


O'REILLY: You are mouthing a far left position that is a marginal position in this society, which you're entitled to.

GLICK: It's marginal -- right.

O'REILLY: You're entitled to it, all right, but you're -- you see, even --I'm sure your beliefs are sincere, but what upsets me is I don't think your father would be approving of this.

GLICK: Well, actually, my father thought that Bush's presidency was illegitimate.

O'REILLY: Maybe he did, but...

GLICK: I also didn't think that Bush...

O'REILLY: ... I don't think he'd be equating this country as a terrorist nation as you are.

GLICK: Well, I wasn't saying that it was necessarily like that.

O'REILLY: Yes, you are. You signed...

GLICK: What I'm saying is...

O'REILLY: ... this, and that absolutely said that.

GLICK: ... is that in -- six months before the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, starting in the Carter administration and continuing and escalating while Bush's father was head of the CIA, we recruited a hundred thousand radical mujahadeens to combat a democratic government in Afghanistan, the Turaki government.

O'REILLY: All right. I don't want to...

GLICK: Maybe...

O'REILLY: I don't want to debate world politics with you.

GLICK: Well, why not? This is about world politics.

O'REILLY: Because, No. 1, I don't really care what you think.

GLICK: Well, OK.

O'REILLY: You're -- I want to...

GLICK: But you do care because you...

O'REILLY: No, no. Look...

GLICK: The reason why you care is because you evoke 9/11...

O'REILLY: Here's why I care.

GLICK: ... to rationalize...

O'REILLY: Here's why I care...

GLICK: Let me finish. You evoke 9/11 to rationalize everything from domestic plunder to imperialistic aggression worldwide.

O'REILLY: OK. That's a bunch...

GLICK: You evoke sympathy with the 9/11 families.

O'REILLY: That's a bunch of crap. I've done more for the 9/11 families by their own admission -- I've done more for them than you will ever hope to do.

GLICK: OK.

O'REILLY: So you keep your mouth shut when you sit here exploiting those people.

GLICK: Well, you're not representing me. You're not representing me.

O'REILLY: And I'd never represent you. You know why?

GLICK: Why?

O'REILLY: Because you have a warped view of this world and a warped view of this country.

GLICK: Well, explain that. Let me give you an example of a parallel...

O'REILLY: No, I'm not going to debate this with you, all right.

GLICK: Well, let me give you an example of parallel experience. On September 14...

O'REILLY: No, no. Here's -- here's the...

GLICK: On September 14...

O'REILLY: Here's the record.

GLICK: OK.

O'REILLY: All right. You didn't support the action against Afghanistan to remove the Taliban. You were against it, OK.

GLICK: Why would I want to brutalize and further punish the people in Afghanistan...

O'REILLY: Who killed your father!

GLICK: The people in Afghanistan...

O'REILLY: Who killed your father.

GLICK: ... didn't kill my father.

O'REILLY: Sure they did. The al Qaeda people were trained there.

GLICK: The al Qaeda people? What about the Afghan people?

O'REILLY: See, I'm more angry about it than you are!

GLICK: So what about George Bush?

O'REILLY: What about George Bush? He had nothing to do with it.

GLICK: The director -- senior as director of the CIA.

O'REILLY: He had nothing to do with it.

GLICK: So the people that trained a hundred thousand Mujahadeen who were...

O'REILLY: Man, I hope your mom isn't watching this.

GLICK: Well, I hope she is.

O'REILLY: I hope your mother is not watching this because you -- that's it. I'm not going to say anymore.

GLICK: OK.

O'REILLY: In respect for your father...

GLICK: On September 14, do you want to know what I'm doing?

O'REILLY: Shut up! Shut up!

GLICK: Oh, please don't tell me to shut up.

O'REILLY: As respect -- as respect -- in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians...

GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government...

O'REILLY: Out of respect for him...

GLICK: ... not the people of America.

O'REILLY: ... I'm not going to...

GLICK: ... The people of the ruling class, the small minority.

O'REILLY: Cut his mic. I'm not going to dress you down anymore, out of respect for your father.

We will be back in a moment with more of THE FACTOR.

GLICK: That means we're done?

O'REILLY: We're done.


The last few seconds of that exchange were really something to watch. I don't think I've ever seen a shouting head actually tell his guest to "Shut up! Shut up!" or to tell his producer to "cut his mic."

Thanks again to Tom Tomorrow and his ever wise pen!

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TO GO BOLDLY

Here is an excerpt from the introduction to Susan Faludi’s seminal work (at least, I hope it will be ten years from now) on the social construction of American masculinity, “Stiffed” (so I guess that “seminal” is the right word one way or the other); it is a sort of composite account of a father and his son in the late 1950s sharing an important bonding-moment of reverence, astonishment, and awe while watching an early American satellite fly overhead:

The father touches the boy’s shoulder and directs his vision to a faraway glimmer. The boy looks up, knowing that his father is pointing out more than just an object; it is a beacon of pride and secret knowledge, a paternal gift rocketing him into a future his father had helped him to launch. At first, all he sees is the blanket of stars spreading out cold and vast between the trees. But then, there it is at last, a pinpoint of light crawling across the firmament, infinitesimally tiny, impossibly bright.

She really nailed it for me. That is, when I read this passage for the first time, I thought, “that’s me and Dad,” even though my moment was in the early 1970s instead of the 50s, and we were most likely watching TV rather than looking at the sky, coverage of Skylab or of a later moonshot or some such.

NASA, for at least two generations of Americans, probably three or four, has been symbolic of everything about our country that is good. It has meant and, for many, still means knowledge, science, bravery, exploration in an old world sense, international cooperation and friendly competition, racial harmony, hope. NASA means working toward the uplifting future offered by Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.

I am very cynical, disillusioned about much that was taught to me about America when I was a boy. But space exploration, in principle, remains unsullied to me. NASA, while certainly imperfect, still makes my heart swell with humanistic pride. I know how silly it sounds, but I still believe it with every ounce of my being: man’s destiny is in space; man’s destiny is to understand the universe.

I know that there are reasonable criticisms of NASA. Project Censored has shown how every shuttle launch is an environmental disaster. Singer/poet Gil Scott-Heron best articulates another major criticism, that space money should be better used, in his poem “Whitey on the Moon." Also, the military brass and other hawks hungrily eye space technology and the strategic advantages of space flight (a tension that has existed since NASA’s early days).

These problems, however, can and hopefully will be solved. Space exploration as a concept is not a problem in and of itself. Scientists and engineers can overcome the ecological issues. There is plenty of money in America for the sick, hungry, and homeless: take it from the military, not from NASA. And speaking of the military, they will use ANY suitable technology to make killing more efficient—war is the evil, not space.

When I woke up last Saturday and heard the awful news, all I could think of was what happened seventeen years ago. I was a senior in high school and I had to cut class to watch news coverage of the Challenger disaster. The cluttered and cramped audio-visual storage room of our school’s library had a television showing the explosion again and again and again. There were seven or eight of us watching, a crowd in the small room. I was stunned, unable to know what to think or feel, much like I had been five years earlier when I had heard about John Lennon’s murder.

But my close friend, Matt, standing beside me, understood immediately. He cried. He knew.

This is how I have always remembered the loss of the Challenger. This memory, not the loss of the Columbia itself, is what made me cry last Saturday. It is truly sad to lose such brave, hard-working, brilliant individuals. Their deaths, however, are charged with symbolic importance that exceeds the value of any individual American life. When our astronauts die in the line of duty, optimism and hope, as aspects of national identity, are dealt a savage, brutal blow.

So the real question here is not, “does this mean that we should abandon space exploration?” Rather, the question should be, “when are we going to get really, really serious about traveling to the stars?” I am happy to note that most polls are indicating that the national will is to continue exploring space.

But I say it’s time to expand, not simply continue, mankind’s greatest quest.

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Fucking shit. Not again.

STATE OF THE UNION

You know, I thought about giving a sort of point by point analysis of King George's speech for a while: "can you believe that bullshit?" or "like that's going to happen," or "oh, my god, this is getting creepy," or some such. But the more I reflected on our monarch's call to arms, the more I thought about a moment in one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek (the original series, of course). "Patterns of Force" has always and still is known affectionately in my mind as "the Nazi episode." It's one of those parallel Earth stories that were so common during the second season: an Earth anthropologist named John Gill goes to study a race of people on the planet Ekos and somehow, in a forbidden social experiment gone terribly wrong, ends up as the leader of a world wide fascist government, complete with jack boots and swastikas. When I located the teleplay on the internet, I quickly found the climactic scene of which last night's SOTU address reminded me. The parallels are almost too amusing (or too creepy) to be true. The scene centers around a demagoguery-laden speech made by Gill-as-fuher; a crowd watches and cheers while Kirk, Spock, and McCoy observe and comment:

The Fuhrer's speech.

- Hail Fuhrer! - Hail Fuhrer!
- Hail Fuhrer! - Hail Fuhrer!
- Hail Fuhrer! - Hail Fuhrer!
- Hail Fuhrer! - Hail Fuhrer!

Ekosians ...the job ahead is difficult. It requires courage and dedication. It requires faith.

(Applause)

The Zeon colony has existed for nearly--

Watch his mouth.

If we fulfill our own greatness, that will all be ended. Working together --

Captain, the speech follows no logical pattern. Random sentences strung together.

He looks drugged, Jim, almost in a cataleptic state.

...reach our goal, And we will reach that goal.

- Yay! - Yay!

I've got to have a close look at him.

...must be decisive. Every thought...directed toward a goal. This planet ...can become a paradise, if we are willing to pay the price. As each cell in the body ...works with discipline and harmony for the good ...of the entire being –

Gentlemen, I want a picture of you two with the Hero of the Fatherland listening to the Fuhrer's speech. Get that light over there, please. Get this light around here. Smile, gentlemen. Turn around, smile, and -- Now.

- Hail Fuhrer! - Hail Fuhrer!

Hail Fuhrer!

- Hail Fuhrer! - Hail Fuhrer!
- Hail Fuhrer! - Hail Fuhrer!

The Fuhrer has given us our orders, and we pledge him our lives in this sacred task. Death to Zeon!

- Death to Zeon! - Death to Zeon!
- Death to Zeon! - Death to Zeon!
- Death to Zeon! - Death to Zeon!
- Death to Zeon! - Death to Zeon!

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Unfortunately, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy do not seem to be waiting in the wings ready to perform a Prime-Directive-friendly coup d'etat. Big drag...

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the truth about cats and dogs...

You know, I don't think that Janeane Garofalo is a very funny comedian--she rarely makes me laugh. But I love her, anyway. Firstly, she is very clever, and clever goes a long way with me. Secondly, she is far more attractive than Uma Thurman. That movie they were in together where Janeane was supposed to be the homely one just didn't work for me. But it's always nice to look at her cute face...

The real reason I love her, however, is that she is an extremely articulate spokesman for progressive causes, and she doesn't have the stink of the hypocritical Hollywood liberalism embraced by Barbara Streisand and her slimy ilk. She's even managed to put it to one of the grand, high-profile FOX assholes, Bill O'Reilly, live on his show. She's just plain cool. Check out this CNN Talkback transcript to see what I mean.

Thanks to the fantastic Eschaton blog for the link.

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GO RAIDERS!!!!!!!!

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AN OPEN LETTER TO FRANCE AND GERMANY FROM AN AMERICAN

To whom it may concern:

My government's executive branch has been illegally seized by power hungry, war mongering fools who are every bit as fundamentalist in their Christian views as their Islamic counterparts are. I fear these machiavellian madmen are leading the United States down the path of self-destruction, and my fellow countrymen are either too anesthetized by television, religion, and material comforts, or too blinded by the most effective propaganda system ever devised to do anything to stop it.

Insanity reigns in America. We desperately need your help.

In World War II, many Americans sacrificed their lives to help end fascism's tight grip on the European continent; to do so was not only altruistic and just but also self-serving. Now, as a very frightened United States citizen, I beg you to help us. To do so would not only be altruistic and just but would also greatly serve your interests: I assume that Europeans have no desire to fall under American hegemony--if the White House continues with its imperialist designs, such a thought is not inconceivable.

American culture descends from European culture. We are kinsmen, brothers. Please help us.

France has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council; I understand that Germany will soon be rotating onto the Council as its Chair. The British are of no use; their government seems to be suffering a dementia similar to our own. Your two nations, therefore, have the ability to forestall the coming invasion of Iraq for a period of time. This is vital; once the war starts, if history is any indicator, the American public will push aside any questions of peace in order to rally behind our flag. Once the bombs start to drop, blind patriotism and blind support for the carnage and slaughter will embolden our bloodthirsty leaders to ever-higher levels of violence and arrogance. That's why the blatantly imperialist invasion of Iraq by the United States must be held off for as long as possible: the American peace movement grows, but is not yet powerful enough to stop those who Bob Dylan once called the "Masters of War."

Do not be bullied by George W. Bush; he's not as tough as he wants everybody to think he is and I believe that he will back down in the face of overwhelming resistance. That is, after all, what one does to a bully: stand up to him.

But the American peace movement needs more time. We are not yet overwhelming.

Please help us. Please help everybody. Right now, you may be the world's only hope.

Sincerely,

Ron $$$$$$
United States citizen
Harris County, Texas resident ("The Execution Capitol of the World")

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Now I've just got to figure out who I'm supposed to send this to. I guess I'll do a web search or something. Any suggestions? Just email me at the address in the upper left corner.

And, what the hell, I guess I'll post this, too:

"General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone
Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire.
I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in
person, but my ship has fallen under attack and I'm afraid my mission
to bring you to Alderaan has failed. I have placed information vital
to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2
unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. You must see this droid
safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour.
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."

I guess it's hard to shake my influences.

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MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. 2003: A WARM AND FRIENDLY MUPPET OF A MAN

If you pay close attention to the usual MLK day media hype, you'll probably see some film clips of the great march on Washington, hear bits of the "I have a dream" speech, and hear pundits, politicians, and other leaders give bland, inspecific praise to the great civil rights leader. It's even worse in the world of public education: here he is something of a warm, fuzzy, uplifting, friendly muppet that says nice things about black children and white children; his "dream" becomes mingled with and therefore indistinguishable from the more abstract and fictional "American Dream." Let's face it, in 2003, MLK is now far more of a symbol used by the establishment to make us all feel good about race relations than he is a martyred revolutionary.

While King was no doubt friendly, warm, and uplifting, progressives must make sure to firmly stress what he actually was, a scathing critic of the American racist, classist, imperialist, capitalist, elitist establishment. It seems that the powers that be were willing to tolerate his charismatic leadership as long as he kept his fiery rhetoric confined to simple understandings of race relations; he was assasinated within months of his speech coming out against the Vietnam war, a speech that linked American racism to militarism, materialism, and capitalism.

This MLK day, do yourself a favor and remember him not with a millionth rehearing of the "I have a dream" speech; rather, read the text of his anti-Vietnam war speech. You won't regret it.

TO ANYBODY THAT READ THE LAST POST BEFORE 4:30 P.M. CST:

I wasn't happy with the clarity of the final section as originally posted so I reworked it and reposted it earlier today. Please indulge me by rereading that section; I think it states what I think a bit more clearly now.

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CULTURE OF SWINE: WHY COPS REALLY ARE PIGS

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

Christmas Eve, 1988

One of my favorite rituals during my college days was getting the hell out of my parents’ house whenever I was home for the holidays. I spent many Christmas Eves driving around my old suburban environment with good friends, talking, bonding, and smoking cigarettes.

One particular Christmas Eve, instead of driving around, I ended up hanging out with my pals in my parents’ backyard (which was open to the streets behind and to the side of the house with a heavily forested vacant lot to the back and public easement to the other side) at, say, 11:30 or so. We were not doing drugs, drinking, worshipping Satan, joining the Communist Party, or supporting Michael Dukakis.

But that didn’t matter to the pissed off cop. We were just standing there in my parents’ backyard talking about music or movies or something: the cop had an immediate suspicious attitude and demanded to see all our driver’s licenses. All of our “yes, sir” and “no, sir” appeasements did nothing for his Christmas disposition.

“Where do you live?” he commanded more than he asked.

“There,” I said as I pointed to my parents’ house less than thirty yards away.

“Do your parents know where you are?”

“Yes, sir. They know I’m in the backyard,” I said while mentally noting the sense of surrealism that almost always accompanies my conversations with cops.

After detaining (or was it harassing?) us for another ten minutes or so, the grumpy cop was on his way. I had the good feeling of knowing that our county constabulary was on the job, protecting us all from dangerous societal elements, a sort of strong, kindly big brother figure looking out for our well being.

Not.

Two Or Three Springtimes Ago

I am a high school theater teacher in a large, working class petrochemical town near Houston. Teachers are pillars of the community, very respectable generally. Right? Right?

Not to cops it seems.

A chair, a somewhat valuable property of the theater department, had turned up missing after an inventory. The gossip was that a former student who had graduated a couple of years earlier had snagged it. The chairman of the department had been putting up with student theft for years and decided that enough was enough. She called the police.

I actually believed that the girl who was the suspected thief either didn’t have the chair or believed that she had permission to take it, a misunderstanding. But whatever. There had been many props, costumes, and set pieces stolen over the years. So I didn’t complain about involving the cops.

Bad move on my part.

Even though I knew absolutely nothing about the missing chair, a local plain-clothes detective sent a message asking me to meet him in the front office that day after school. Being the good citizen and role model that I now pretend to be, I went straight there when the final bell rang. Then, I waited. After ten minutes, I figured that he must have ended up in another office by mistake, so I went hunting for him. No such luck. I asked around and nobody had seen him. I kept waiting. After thirty minutes, I thought to myself that I was waiting for a guy who I had never spoken to and may never show up. I went home.

The next morning, Sergeant Stedanko, as I now think of him (remember the Stacey Keach character in Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke”?), and a uniformed cop came to my classroom during first period and ordered me to step into the hallway. So I left twenty-five students hanging during the middle of a lecture to go play my part in the mystery of the missing chair. I was annoyed, but then my interactions with the armed security agents of the state are always annoying.

Things got worse.

“Now, why weren’t you in the front office waiting for me after school yesterday?” Stedanko angrily asked.

Twilight Zone time. “Um, I waited for you for thirty minutes…” I said.

“No, you didn’t. I was there,” Stedanko retorted.

“Well, I was there.”

“No, you weren’t.”

I shrugged. Stedanko continued, “Now, I want you to tell me why an innocent girl’s reputation needs to be destroyed.”

“Uh…Well, I don’t really think that’s a good idea, actually.”

“So why are you accusing this sweet girl of stealing that chair?”

“Well, I’m not accusing her of anything, to tell the truth…”

“Then what do you think should be done?” he asked and glared.

I chose my words carefully, “I guess…if she’s guilty, she needs to be punished and if she’s innocent, her name needs to be cleared.”

Sergeant Stedanko just stared at me and then turned around and walked away. No “thank you.” No good byes. Just a foul taste of cop in my mouth.

So much for being a pillar of the community.

(As it turned out, the whole thing was, in fact, a big misunderstanding that I had absolutely nothing to do with. But I guess cops need no justification to harass.)

Last July, 7 a.m.

My wife and I were sound asleep. We were going to get up around eleven or so and drive to New Orleans for a few days of merry making and revelry in the French Quarter. Then, bam, bam, bam! Bam, bam, bam! “Ugh, I think somebody’s at the door,” I sleepily said. My wife got up to see what all of the ruckus was about.

“Hey, don’t you need a warrant?” I heard her yell.

I got up and was standing next to the bed in my underwear when three sheriff’s deputies, weapons in hand, entered our bedroom. “Keep you hands where we can see them!” one of them shouted.

“…Uh, okay,” I said. I hadn’t heard that hands phrase directed at me for over ten years.

The cops searched our apartment, apparently for some fugitive, and left without explanation. Becky and I were, needless to say, shaken. She said, “Ron, look out the window.” Twenty cop cars were in the parking lot. Numerous deputies ran to and fro. A helicopter circled overhead.

“This is big,” I thought, “it’s gotta be on TV.” Sure enough, we turned on the set and saw a local reporter at the entrance to our apartments. It turned out that a deputy had been shot in the leg while trying to apprehend a car thief on the property. The cops told the reporter that they believed that the suspect was holed up in one of the apartments and that they were “canvassing” all residences. I guess that “canvassing” now means “wantonly violating the Fourth Amendment.”

It is important to note that my apartment complex is about 90% African-American and Hispanic. I don’t think this would have happened at a white complex.

As it turned out, the thief was caught elsewhere, blocks away. The wounded deputy was hit by friendly fire, an accidentally discharged cop gun. The police were not in “hot pursuit;” the incident had happened seven hours earlier. In short, the illegal door-to-door search was an absolute outrage, a total abuse of police power.

My older brother, an archconservative, pro-cop business lawyer urged us to sue. He was pretty pissed about it. We didn’t sue; he wouldn’t represent us…

Last Week

Tennessee cops gunned down a tail-wagging family dog on the side of the road while the kneeling, handcuffed mother, father, and son watched, shrieked, and cried. Read about it here. This story really kicked me in the gut. It was as though Hitler’s brownshirts invaded a Norman Rockwell painting and started busting heads.

In fact, it’s hard not to cry as I write this.

I now realize that when I read about police brutality toward humans (that is, as opposed to dogs) I get angrier in my head than I do in my heart. I suppose the image of uniformed men with guns blowing away a family pet while the helpless family freaks out is, at the very least, difficult to digest. But what about the countless individuals, human beings, most of them ethnic minorities, that have been brutalized, harassed, and beaten by the police? Things are much, much worse than the sadistic killing of a dog might suggest. I ought to be angrier in my heart.

Increasingly, I am.

American police culture is out of control. (I say “culture” because I believe that there are lots of well-meaning, good individuals that are cops. But many of those “good cops” end up doing bad things or remaining silent when they witness acts of corruption and brutality performed by their less well-meaning cop brothers.) Newspapers report HUNDREDS of instances of police misconduct every year but miss the big story: THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF KNOWN INSTANCES OF POLICE MISCONDUCT EVERY YEAR! How many Richard Jewells and David Koreshes must it take? How many murdered dogs? When will mainstream (that is, white) America wake up and realize that it is no longer such a gross, radical exaggeration to say that we’re not too far from Nazi Germany? (That is to say, Arayans equal whites; Jews equal non-whites...hey, there really is a comparison there!) The only thing out of the ordinary about the killing of the Smoak family dog is that the Smoaks are white. People of color know the score but lack enough clout and power to address the injustices. Whites, for the most part, live in ignorant bliss—when a white American gets screwed by the cops it is viewed as an “isolated incident” that is not representative of the overall situation.

Of course, that’s a lie. Authoritarianism and violence are simply a big part of what cops are. I hate cops. Because, you see, cops really are pigs.

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(Well, most cops, anyway. In all fairness, I ought to be willing to change my point of view on a case by case basis or the like, but I really think that each individual cop I meet would need to prove to me that he can be trusted first. That's only common sense given the circumstances.)

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THE STATE OF ART

Michael Ventura's thoughtful essays published every other week in the Austin Chronicle first came to my attention in the mid 1990's. Here is his latest essay. It deals with the situation of the artist and art in 2003 and I think it's pretty poignant. Enjoy.

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I don't even know what to think about this.

By the way, I got the link from a weird web site that features a strange combination of political news and essay links, surrealistic art, and naked girl pictures.

If you're brave and/or curious, surf here.

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Probably the most well known and influential intellectual guru of the neo-liberal movement is a really old guy named Milton Friedman. This founder of the "Chicago School" of economics layed the intellectual groundwork for the monetary policy and Reaganomics that are taken for granted today--Friedman had already become so influential by the mid 1970's, in fact, that when Henry Kissenger arranged the coup that installed the bloodthirsty Augusto Pinochet as the Doctor Doom figure of Argentina, Friedman and his team of conservative economic homies were allowed to head on down south of the border to put their new theories to test under tightly controlled circumstances and eventually claimed success: the Argentine wealthy got wealthier. (I must mention Friedman's well known book "Capitalism and Freedom" here; the book argues that democracy and capitalism are naturally linked somehow and that's why it's the best system for all--so I don't really know how they could have claimed "success" in junta land, but I guess that's just how logic has worked for the last fifty years or so.) Several years after their South American miracle, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. The rest is history.

A little known theory of Friedman's is that conservative legislators ought to cut as many taxes as they can such that legislatures have no choice but to eventually cut programs and social services--in Friedman's view, the government should have an extremely limited role: roads, military, protection from monopoly, and that's about it. Cutting social programs is unpopular. Therefore, taxes should be used as legislative extortion.

That's why the President's HUGE tax cut for the wealthy that was announced today got me thinking. It was two times larger than what what most Republicans were shooting for.

I wonder...

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Just a thought...

When hawks say that going to war with Iraq isn't about oil, I'm reminded of southerners that are nostalgic about the Confederacy saying that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Of course, the Civil War was about slavery and going to war with Iraq is about oil. But let's not be confused by the facts.

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MERRY GOOYEAR

Why not ring in the new year with an endless flow of Frank Zappa music? Go to Zappa Radio at FZ's home page.

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CIA UPDATE

Forgive me for not getting this right on the CIA. The story is that in addition to farming out Al-Queda (or is it Al-Qaida? You say Gaddifi, I say Khadaffi...let's call the whole...ah, never mind...) suspects to torturous nations for the iron maiden, the CIA has been using kinder, gentler torture techniques on some of the suspects they keep. I think that's reported on in the NPR story, too.

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Want to know more about the Raelians from a seemingly objective source?

Check here.

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GRAB BAG

Pravda Means Truth

The FCC has for some years now been little more than a lobbying agency on the government payroll for gigantic mega-media corporations. It seems to be getting worse:

"This country's airwaves belong to the American people, and the FCC is supposed to manage them in the public interest. Unfortunately, the current FCC leadership seems hostile to this very concept. Asked to explain his understanding of the public interest, Chairman Powell once replied that he had "no idea" what it meant."

Read about it at the FAIR website.

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That Damned Constitution Is Ruining All Our Fun...

Did you know that the CIA is farming out interrogations of its less cooperative Al-Queda suspects to countries that have no legal prohibitions against torture? I guess I should be happy that the CIA seems to no longer be in the torture business itself (or is it?), but this is still pretty creepy. Listen to the streaming audio at the NPR website.

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Touched By an Angel...no, wait, I mean Touched By Madness

My first thoughts about the weirdo UFO cult that claims to have cloned a human being is that UFO cultists are crazy. Then I remembered Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

News of the Raelians and their bizarro cloning experiments.

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By the way, I'm experimenting with the hypertext feature on blogger if you haven't already figured that out. The link to the Buckley essay is the underlined word "here" in the post below...

My favorite conservative is William F. Buckley. If I want right-wing bullshit to fire me up, I listen to Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly. When I want an intellectual challenge to my progressivism with the potential to make me think and actually reconsider some of my ideas I read Buckley. (Another feather in Buckley's cap: after Gore Vidal had repeatedly called him a "crypto-nazi" while the two were gigging as talking head pundit types for one of the major networks during one of the party conventions for the 1960 presidential election, Buckley told Vidal, "if you don't stop calling me a crypto-nazi I'm going to sock you in the goddamned mouth." This was on national television during prime time. I know I'd like to sock Gore Vidal in the goddamned mouth myself.) Today, Buckley seems to be just as confused about the cloud of dust left in the wake of the Lott purge as everyone else is. When Buckley is confused, rest assured, conservatism is in intellectual disarray. I think that if Buckley had understood the ouster of Lott to be the power play that it was, he would have supported it and been ruthlessly honest about it, perhaps assembling a great argument justifying it. But no. Here, Buckley gets a bit sour about the politics of race and the politically correct imperative. I suppose that I could shrug off Buckley's essay as diversionary pro-Bush propaganda, but generally WFB is pretty straightforward (in other words, he would never say, "We're not fucking the poor at all;" rather, he would say, "here's why it is very important that we fuck the poor...").

Looks like Bush and his band of rogues, brigands, and scoundrels are gonna get away with it without much consequence.

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Happy Middlemoose

Even though I no longer think of myself as a Christian, I still love Christmas and the whole peace on Earth theme. I think that Linus Van Pelt put it best when he quoted the Gospel of Luke (verses 8-14) to Charle Brown:

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

John Lennon also put it well:

"Happy Christmas (war is over)."

That is, if we want it...

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The Strange Case of the Racist Senate Majority Leader Revisited

or

The Urge to Purge

In a move that was virtually no surprise to anyone, Trent Lott resigned his leadership position in the Senate last Friday.

I can almost hear him saying to himself, "but I'm not a racist; I like black people just fine," which makes sense given that most white people think that it's an absolutely awful thing to be thought of as a racist. In fact, over the weekend, Lott implied that such speculation might be true: he blamed his ouster on his political "enemies," whoever they are, but not on some Republican urge to purge racist elements of the party in order to clear the way for recruiting of people of color. There may be some truth to his accusations.

(C'mon, like the Republicans are really trying to fight racism!)

When the news of Lott's resignation broke, I was kind of surprised to see that Bill Frist was the odds on favorite to become the Senate leader. Bill who? I thought that Don Nickels had been positioning himself for a week to move into Lott's position. Frist, the pundits all say, is a major Bush ally. Ah-ha. I asked a Republican friend what she thought was going on: Lott was seen by the Bush faction as being somewhat difficult to work with and too independent. (Within hours of my hearing about this political hardball angle, the corporate pundits were all over it.)

The President and his Rasputins know an opportunity when they see it. It now seems that Bush very cynically used Lott's political weakness to install what could very well turn out to be a White House puppet as Senate majority leader (while also trying to appear to be fighting racism at the same time). This has got to be true. Firstly, this was clearly a coup that was fueled by certain Republicans (complete with strategic White House leaks says Lott); the Democrats (you know, the pro-civil rights party...) were hardly involved except for members of the politically weak Congressional Black Caucus in the House and a few white liberal legislators here and there. Secondly, Bush doesn't really seem to have a problem with Republican racism and the southern strategy. After all, he refused to condemn Bob Jones University for its racist policies and he called the Confederate state flag issue a "states' rights" issue--"states' rights" is widely understood at this point to be one of those southern strategy code words that appeal to southern white racist voters. Thirdly, the one thing that gets under the skin of the priests of the Bush cult is disobedience. Lott, it seems, just wasn’t being a good boy.

You know, I think I will buy that some Republicans were outraged by Lott's pro-segregationist remarks, but it now seems clear that the entire scandal was far more about Bush consolidating his power in a Stalinesque way than it was about the Republicans purging their party of racism. There was a purge, all right, a purge of one of Bush's more powerful political opponents, Trent Lott. I haven't seen such political opportunism since...since...well...well, since Bush declared war on the world and American civil rights shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The more I think about this, the more my stomach hurts. This is pretty disgusting.

It will, of course, be business as usual for the Republicans on the issue of racism. There will be more tokens. More gospel choirs. More words of inclusion and "compassionate conservatism." More code words like "law and order" and "crime" and “drugs" and "welfare queen." More winks and nods to southern racist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens. More defending of the Confederate battle flag. The Republicans really had an opportunity to do the right thing and potentially outflank the do-nothing Democrats on the issue of race, to once again truly be the party of Abraham Lincoln. But no.

They are, after all, Republicans, aren't they? It seems that they must be true to their nature. That is to say, evil.

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ADDENDUM:

Check out Attorney General John Ashcroft's racist associations. He's no better than Trent Lott, but he is in the Cult of Bush. The Nation website is a good place to start (www.thenation.com).

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Farewell, Joe Strummer.

Washington Bullets
by the Clash


Oh! Mama, Mama look there!
Your children are playing in that street again
Don't you know what happened down there?
A youth of fourteen got shot down there
The Kokane guns of Jamdown Town
The killing clowns, the blood money men
Are shooting those Washington bullets again

As every cell in Chile will tell
The cries of the tortured men
Remember Allende, and the days before,
Before the army came
Please remember Victor Jara,
In the Santiago Stadium,
Es verdad - those Washington Bullets again

And in the Bay of Pigs in 1961,
Havana fought the playboy in the Cuban sun,
For Castro is a colour,
Is a redder than red,
Those Washington bullets want Castro dead
For Castro is the colour...
...That will earn you a spray of lead

For the very first time ever,
When they had a revolution in Nicaragua,
There was no interference from America
Human rights in America

Well the people fought the leader,
And up he flew...
With no Washington bullets what else could he do?

'N' if you can find a Afghan rebel
That the Moscow bullets missed
Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist...
...Ask the Dalai Lama in the hills of Tibet,
How many monks did the Chinese get?
In a war-torn swamp stop any mercenary,
'N' check the British bullets in his armoury
Que?
Sandinista!

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Fundamentalist quotes and info (mostly for Texas, but the quotes section deals with national figures as well):

http://www.tfn.org/religiousright.htm

Have fun with the creepy weirdos!

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SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA

When I was studying theater in college, we were required to study a 1960s black radical play called "Dutchman" by playwright Leroi Jones. The play was powerful, angry, and just about the most meaningful writing dealing with race that I had ever encountered. I later found out that Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka and embraced some intense Marxism in the 1970's) was more of a poet than a playwright. In fact, I understand that he was either the only or one of the very few black beat poets--perhaps I was attracted to his work because I somehow sensed the beat/jazz connection without really realizing it. During the mid 1990's I was lucky enough to hear an hour long interview with him on Pacifica radio: his voice is powerful and rhythmic (kind of like a really pissed off Kerouac); he is uncompromising in his radical views--if he doesn't make you hate him, you're bound to love him (because he's kind of an asshole, but in a good way...).

He's recently caused some controversy with his poem "Somebody Blew Up America."

Here's a sample:

"Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere"

Of course, there's lots more to the poem besides putting Bush's African-Americans in their place; there's something to make everybody cringe a bit, so I highly recommend it. Check it out on his site:

http://www.amiribaraka.com/blew.html

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ON THE OTHER HAND:

Here is the address for a Nation essay that makes Trent Lott out to be much closer to David Duke than I had really realized:

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=208

It's pretty short.

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As a quick note, I just wanted to say that last Sunday’s post was not only to remember John Lennon on the anniversary of his murder but also to remind everybody of exactly what we are dabbling with when listening to the Beatles and their solo work. Like Jesus, John was most decidedly a leftist progressive. His work reflected that.

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and now:

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE RACIST SENATE MAJORITY LEADER

I’m starting to get a handle on this story and I think that studying how some of this is playing out can be very enlightening. For starters, I suggest that you check out www.thismodernworld.com for some cool observations and links (if you’re not checking out Tom Tomorrow’s extremely funny, extremely political weekly cartoon, you’re missing out…follow the link on his page in the upper left corner to check some of his stuff out). Second, here are some of my impressions:

Of Mullet-Heads and David Duke

I remember when I was in my early twenties back in the early 1990’s. I had boomeranged my way back to my parents’ house in disgusting suburbia for a short time; I found myself hanging out with an old friend from high school (actually when I say friend, I mean nemesis, kind of like Newman is to Seinfeld, but that’s another story). Mostly, we’d just drink in bars to while away our time in purgatory. One evening at a random Bennigan’s (which was a bit of a drive away; we thought another Bennigan’s might be a nice change of pace from the Bennigan’s we usually went to…ugh, suburbs!), we somehow got stuck in a pick-up lecture being delivered by a mullet-headed, mustachioed bartender from Louisiana. He was telling us why former KKK leader turned Republican politician David Duke was not racist. “No, he’s just for fairness. White people are being discriminated against and David Duke is the only politician out there telling the truth; he’s not really a racist at all, you see, and furthermore blaha blather blah bah….”

What do you say to a guy like that?

Of course, David Duke is a racist. He simply softened his cross-burning rhetoric and shifted his battle to save our precious white way of life to a more legitimate, subtler field. He no longer calls for a race war or anything so obviously stupid. Instead, he suggests and supports policy that quietly but clearly screws people of color in the keister.

Jack Kemp’s Hail Mary

This thought recently occurred to me: if we can solve social problems using the private sector solutions favored by many conservatives, we should do it as soon as possible. I may consider myself to be a progressive, but I’m no ideologue. To me, economic theory doesn’t really matter so much as the underlying principles and overall goals that direct the use of such theories. So if the right and the left can both fight poverty, sexism, racism and the usual host of social ills within a framework that won’t push the emotional buttons of the influential free market fundamentalist shamen, great things will be accomplished, right? Right?

This thought occurred to me right after that other thought: no, great things won’t be accomplished. The truth is that most conservatives don’t really care if social problems are solved (unless, of course, such social problems hurt business). Besides being the greatest oxymoron since “military intelligence” the phrase “compassionate conservatism” is quite clearly a simple rhetorical device used to deflect political criticism. Conservative rhetoric has placed the blame for poverty squarely on the shoulders of the impoverished for over twenty years now. King George II’s new sweet talk has barely dented the dominant discourse. The right wing’s real attitudes toward the poor are best represented by the popular 1980’s wall poster depicting a formally dressed wealthy couple raising a toast over the caption, “Poverty Sucks.”

Indeed, it does.

This is not to say, however, that all conservatives are Monty Burns (on the other hand, all men are Socrates…ah, never mind). Jack Kemp, for one, seems to be the real deal. He has spent much of his political career seriously looking at poverty issues from a conservative perspective—if I understand correctly, his time with HUD during the Reagan administration gave him a close look at poverty and it permanently altered his world view if not his politics. Kemp really does seem to be a near impossibility: a compassionate conservative. I think he really would like the Republican Party to pay more attention to these issues.

Kemp was a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills before he became a congressman. So I’ll put the situation in those terms. It’s fourth quarter. The Bills are on their own forty-yard line and down by a touchdown. Three seconds are all that’s left on the clock. Four wide receivers line up. He’s back in the shotgun. The center snaps the ball; Jack throws into a crowd of safeties and…

Jack’s actually got a chance in hell on the football field (especially against the Oilers). But the game is rigged on the field of politics. The Republican Party will never take social issues seriously because that’s not what they’re about. (Of course, when I say “social issues” I’m not talking about the bones thrown to the right-wing fundamentalists.) When Jack Kemp tries to push poverty issues in the GOP, he’s throwing a Hail Mary, but his arm just ain’t what it used to be.

Ed Norton Loses His Cherry

I really like the movie “American History X.” It’s way over the top in terms of just about everything, one of those “extreme” cultural artifacts that get so much hype these days. Ed Norton is utterly charismatic; it’s really hard to not watch him—actually, the acting is pretty great all the way around. And, of course, I totally agree with the film’s anti-racist sentiment.

The film’s one great drawback, however, is that pretty much everybody already hates neo-nazis. (I remember protesting a KKK rally at the state capitol in Austin some years back and observing that there were about twenty Klansmen and about five thousand anti-racist protesters…I held up a sign that said “I hate Illinois Nazis.”) The racist as constructed by mainstream white American culture is a monstrous boogeyman on the fringes of society: the face of racism to many, perhaps most whites is of Simon Legree, but most real racism has become subtle and abstract. Sadly, it seems that the most lasting and significant changes wrought by the civil rights era are that most white Americans don’t want to think of themselves as racist and that if you don’t use the n-word, you’re not a racist--such a simple understanding of the issue has resulted in a lot of white people believing that the problems of the past have been solved for the most part. It’s pretty damned easy under these circumstances to manipulate a general audience’s emotions with a film portraying evil in such a removed, cut and dried way. “American History X” is an anti-racist film, yes, but it is a melodrama without any real ideological relevance in this day and age. Maybe if it had been released in the 1960’s…

Racism is very real and damaging in 2002. It’s just not as obvious as were separate drinking fountains. Try this: go to an upscale department store and make note of the racial composition of the customers. Observe how the store’s staff reacts to the entrance of white people; observe how they react to the entrance of black people. I bet there’s a pretty good chance that you see no reaction to the white people. Sometimes you will see no reaction to the black people; sometimes you will see a slight increase in tension—store employee eyes will shift to the black intruder and watch him or her just to make sure nothing is stolen. When this experiment was first suggested to me in the mid 1990’s, I was skeptical; then I noticed myself doing it on my job as a waiter.

But I’m not a racist. Am I?

Well, no I’m not. But I did learn that even my own liberal self has deeply ingrained and socialized negative attitudes about race that went unquestioned, unnoticed. I learned to be on the lookout within myself for flare-ups of stupid impulses. The story doesn’t end with subconscious, individualized racism, either. Numerous pieces of legislation are passed every year that serve to whack people of color. This may very well be an inadvertent result, but the net effect is the same: racist government policy.

A Judicial Department study started during the Clinton administration and finished during the Bush administration found some great disparities in how African-Americans and whites are treated in American courts. Ashcroft’s take was that it was okay because the discrimination was unintentional.

So…I guess that means that racism is okay if you didn’t really mean it that way.

That’s just bullshit.

I changed my ways because, as a progressive, I was somewhat open to the idea to begin with. Ed Norton’s skinhead character changed his ways because his white racist prison buddies raped him in the shower. Is that what it’s going to take to get rank and file whites in America to reexamine the issue of race?

I sure hope not.

"And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either."

So is Trent Lott a racist or what? Sure, yeah, of course he is, but not in the Simon Legree way. I really think that he was not intentionally advocating a return to Jim Crow and segregation. After all, to say such a thing is political suicide, as is becoming all too apparent. I think he was just sucking up to Strom (which is suspect in and of itself, but that’s another story). He really did misspeak and the Democrats are closing in for the kill.

The really sad thing is that racism is seen so completely in superficial terms that absolutely no one is criticizing Lott for his real racism, that is to say, his consistent, career long support of policies that have a racist net result. In his apologetic press conference on December 13th, he repeated the conservative cliché, “human dignity can be found not in a hand out but a hand up.” That’s great and all, but where’s the hand up? Job creation? I don’t really think that ten thousand more fast food jobs really constitute a hand up. If Lott is keen on helping impoverished African-Americans by creating jobs, he’d better concentrate on creating jobs that can actually offer some of hope of advancement. But, of course, he won’t and he never has. Lott has always favored capital at the expense of labor. Non-whites are hit the hardest by his policies.

By this standard, most of the Republican Party is racist despite the black gospel choirs paraded on the convention stage in 2000, despite Clarence Thomas, despite Ward Connerly, despite Alan Keyes, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Rod Paige. But do the Democrats say this? No, of course not. The Democrats back most of these racist policies as well, while at the same time enjoying the lion’s share of African-American political support. Only in America.

So for the time being, it seems that we are doomed to see the politics of race played out in terms of word games. That is, one can only raise the cry of racism if somebody says the wrong thing, not if people of color continue to get the shaft.

You know what? I think that right now maybe America needs people that are less concerned with saying the right thing and more concerned with doing the right thing.

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Working Class Hero
By John Lennon

As soon as you're born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,
If you want to be a hero well just follow me.

Jesus Was a Capricorn. No, wait, that's not it...

Ronald Reagan was able to beat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election because the newly organized, newly political Christian right allied itself with business interests and the so-called neo-liberals. The alliance was an extremely profitable one for both groups. Within a few years, the word “liberal” had become almost synonymous in the public discourse with the word “idiot.” Remember Michael Dukakis adamantly denying that he was a liberal when debating King George I in 1988? Remember Rush Limbaugh’s vicious attacks on the “feminazis?” Abortion rights have been weakened. The “War on Drugs” has made for a convenient excuse to roll back numerous Constitutional protections. Evolution as a scientific concept is once again controversial and on the verge of being taught in public schools right alongside “creationism.” The neo-libs have even offered a sort of fundamentalism of their own: the mysterious, but powerful hand of “free market” forces.

Of course, this list of fundamentalist/neo-lib victories goes on and on.

But the weird thing is that the grand coalition that has kept Republicans powerful, kept conservatives in control of the American marketplace of ideas for nearly twenty years makes absolutely no sense.

Why?

The simple answer is that basic, fundamental principles of Christianity (virtually any variety of it) are utterly at odds with cutthroat capitalism, utterly at odds with consumerism, utterly at odds with conservative concepts of “individual responsibility.” Jesus was a progressive leftist. I don’t really mean this in the “eleven long-haired Friends a' Jesus in a chartreuse micro-bus,” smoking the holy marijuana way that C. W. McCall might have meant in his classic song “Convoy.” I really mean quite literally that Jesus was a leftist.

Jesus told a rich man that the way for him to go to Heaven was to "sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor.” When the rich man would not do this and left, Jesus told his followers that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. To me this means what it says: the wealthy are too enamored of their things to be able to focus on the spiritual and, therefore, doomed. For some reason, however, I’ve always heard fundamentalist preachers squirm through these verses—they say that what the passage actually refers to is an idiomatic expression that means some sort of small door into a walled city; that is, a camel can, in fact, go through “the eye of a needle,” but it’s very difficult to do so. Whatever. Even with the fundamentalist interpretation (hmm, I always thought that fundamentalists didn’t need to interpret…), it’s clear that in order to get through the door, the camel has to be unloaded and on it’s knees. A rich man cannot go to Heaven with his riches; he must unload them and bow down before God! It is undeniable: according to Christ, individual wealth is so immoral that it will send a wealthy individual to the eternal torment of Hell.

Hmmm…wealth is immoral. Kinda sounds a bit Marxist to me.

And, of course, there is the incident in the temple with the moneychangers. This Biblical passage is often cited in fundamentalist circles to demonstrate that Jesus could get angry and therefore anger is not necessarily sinful. But I don’t seem to remember any of my Sunday school teachers or ministers that referenced the passage ever go into much detail about why Jesus was so outraged by the encroachment of the realm of finance into the realm of the spiritual. Perhaps fundamentalist theologians see some tidy line of reasoning that keeps this important moment in the life of Christ from casting a bad light on the world of banking, but I certainly can’t see it. A plain, literal understanding of the moment clearly illustrates some kind of Godly animosity toward the finance industry—that is to say, Jesus seemed to have some sort of problem with the concept of making a profit without actually producing anything, so much of a problem, in fact, that he angrily ordered that the money changers be kept away from the temple. (Is that like the city councils of today restricting strip bars and porno shops to a certain distance away from schools and churches? I wonder...)

Again, I’m not trying to make Jesus out to be a Communist or anything, but…

You know, it’s interesting to note that while Jesus seemed to be uncomfortable with the moneychangers, he seemingly had no discomfort with the tax man. It’s almost a conservative joke now, “tax and spend liberals.” But when you think about the concept of “render unto Caesar,” Jesus clearly shows that he believed that the state has an obligation to levy taxes in order to conduct the people’s business; this concept is mentioned in the same breath that he speaks of humanity’s obligation “to render unto God.” That is to say, he seems to give equal importance to both ideas.

(Okay, I know it’s a stretch to call the business of the Roman Empire “the people’s business,” but they did build damned fine roads. Also, it’s hardly radical to declare that the state needs to be able to levy taxes, but in this day and age where Bill Clinton is the liberal poster child…)

Jesus owned nothing. Jesus slept in the homes of friends and followers. Jesus recruited his Apostles from the ranks of the working class. Jesus was loudly critical of his era’s institutions of power. Jesus championed the poor. Jesus healed the sick. Jesus fed the hungry. Jesus was imprisoned and executed because he challenged the powerful elite.

“What Would Jesus Do?” says the trendy Christian commercial phrase plastered on tee shirts, key chains, and bumper stickers.

To be honest, I think that if he were around today, he would do exactly the same thing. He would be killed for it, of course, and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell would testify against him at his trial, and stadiums full of Promise Keepers would be screaming righteously for his blood.

This is kind of a no-brainer argument, actually, and many others have made such observations before me—the Catholic liberation theologists of Central and South America, for instance, have, in fact, embraced the concept to some extent and I am now beginning to hear about fundamentalist movements against consumerism and SUVs. But I believe that this point of view really needs to be repeated again and again very, very loudly. Ronald Reagan’s grand coalition is not only extremely dangerous to the future of the United States and, it seems increasingly, the world, it is also founded upon weird lies about and distortions of Christianity’s holy scriptures. The aims of the neo-liberals and the aims of Jesus are fundamentally at odds with one another.

If only we could get the fundamentalists to do what they say they do and interpret the Gospels more literally!

I no longer really believe the Bible to be the word of God, although I do still value the Bible for various reasons. That doesn’t really matter. Jesus was a leftist. This really ought to be the wedge that drives the conservative movement into obsolescence.

Dare I hope?

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