Because it is better to light a candle.
Thank you, Billie Miller. —Via Eschaton.
Extremism in defense of what, exactly?
But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of— The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for—you know, these—some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not—this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over—as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly—over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What’s going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes—the daughter had come home—before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a—I hadn’t thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows—she doesn’t know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just—I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn’t say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became—one of them was published.
—Seymour Hersh, speaking at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in December
via Sidelights
Sticky eyeballs.
Yeah, I know, I should lay off the AFA; low-hanging fruit, kulturkampf is a rationalization of assholery by other means, ignore the bully, strike them down and they will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. But hey: they want you to write a letter to the FCC, telling them to stop cutting sweetheart deals with CBS, and that’s something we can all get behind, right? Anyway, here’s the pitch:
In November 2004, the FCC cut a backroom deal with CBS and its parent company Viacom.
In summary, Viacom agreed to donate a paltry $3.5 million to the FCC in exchange for dropping thousands of indecency complaints filed against it by taxpaying consumers.
Basically, the FCC cut a deal with CBS. What was the result? CBS immediately went back to their standard fare of lewd and indecency programs.
On December 31, 2004, CBS re-aired an episode of Without A Trace, complete with an extended teen-age orgy scene. The original broadcast of this episode had thousands of FCC complaints against it, which were tossed out in the November FCC/CBS “back-scratching” deal.
Click here to view the abominable Without A Trace scene for yourself! Be warned, it contains offensive and graphic scenes.
Because of these kinds of backdoor deals, the FCC continues to allow networks like CBS to flood the airwaves with indecency.
Do I need to tell you that the emphasis was in the original? —Way to drive the traffic there, Don.
The Book, the Book, the Book is on fire!
Another week, another email from the American Family Association. Shall we?
In the 27 years of this ministry, I have never witnessed a more outrageous miscarriage of justice than what is happening in Philadelphia. Four Christians are facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment.
Holy cow! Really? That’s awful!
On October 10, 2004, the four Christians were arrested in Philadelphia. They are part of Repent America. Along with founder Michael Marcavage, members of Repent America—with police approval—were preaching near Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages.
When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christians’ movement on the street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians’ messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.
Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and jailed the Christians!
Goodness. As something of a free-speech absolutist, I’m appalled. One thing, though: you say Repent America already “were preaching,” “handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages,” but then, when “they tried to speak”—tell me, why do you separate the acts of preaching and speaking like that? What, exactly, were y’all doing when you “tried to speak”? —Let’s get another point of view, shall we?
The confrontation began when the 11 protestors marched to the front of a stage at Outfest and began to yell out Biblical passages to drown out the events on stage.
Police attempted to get the protestors to move to to an area on the edge of the site. Instead they went deeper into the gay crowd. Using a bullhorn they condemned homosexuality. They then got into an argument with a group of Pink Angels, who screamed back.
It was at that point police intervened arresting the 11.
Oh.
Hey, look, folks, not to jog your elbow or nothin,’ but most definitions of “speak” aren’t so broad as to include “marching to the front of the stage and yelling out antagonistic slogans so as to disrupt what other people have peaceably assembled to do.” That just doesn’t go without saying. So, your email message? About how they’re “facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment”? Not to tell you your commandments or nothin,’ but that’s perilously close to false witness. Y’all might want to reconsider.
After all, yelling “Faggot!” at a crowded gay pride event is one fuck of a lot closer to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater than, oh, sending out a letter urging resistance to an upcoming draft. So that First Amendment? Not as operational as you seem to think, here. —Yes, I know, it’s a terribly grey area, fraught with complications, rife with the potential for abuse; like anyone who lives in a major American metropolitan area, I’ve seen how the cops will use it to shut down legitimate protest. But y’all went in spoiling for a fight, and you got one. You want my sympathy? You gonna have a problem if we bum-rush the megachurch, carrying Darwin fish emblems and yelling through a bullhorn about how the Christianist faith makes mothers cut their babies’ arms off?
Thought so.
Oh, and one more thing: the Bible has been determined to be hate speech? Really? Are you actually trying to tell me that 2,000 years and 66 books and three-quarters of a million words of theology and philosophy and myth and law and story and peace, love, and understanding can in its essence be boiled down to a couple of verses you like to use to hate on people whose sex lives make you feel uncomfortable somewhere deep inside?
Well, hell. Forget it. We don’t need no water; let the motherfucker burn.
Pissing in the wind.
This, this is what Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), former exterminator and fine, upstanding Christianist American, your House Majority Leader and mine, had to say about the 150,000 people who died, who have died, who are still dying as a result of the horrible earthquakes and tsunamis that struck on St. Stephen’s Day:
Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
And had I believed in God, as such, I would no longer: no word has yet reached Google news of the sudden and spontaneous immolation of Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land). How could any God worthy of the name allow such blasphemy to blot His earth without smiting the squalid little pisher with lightning? Or at least a coronary failure in flagrante? —There’s mysterious ways, and then there’s the only decent thing, and this, this man dares turn his back on love and compassion, decency and tolerance, on all our best qualities, the very things that make us human, that the book he professes to follow would teach him if he’d ever bother to listen—all this he spits on in a public forum before us all to play yet another game of my god is bigger than your god, Allahu Akbar motherfucker? The Old Testament God would at the very least have sent a bear to eat him up for this insult, and even the New Testament Christ at His most peaceful would eyes flashing toss this moneychanger from the temple and hurl stones upon his head.
Nor do I believe in hell, for all that I wish I could, so that I might join right-thinking people everywhere in praying fervently for his damnation to it. We could console ourselves by imagining him in the icy realm of Cocytus, and while away sinfully pleasant hours by disputing whether he might end up gripped in ice, head bent forward or backward, or completely submerged at the center of the Earth itself, awaiting his turn in one of Lucifer’s mouths. —Nor can I play the Devil, and quote Scripture to my purpose: much as I might dream of driving all-out for days from here to Washington, DC, stopping only for gas and the occasional cat nap, that I might stride horns swelling up the steps of the Capitol in my Chuck Taylors, unshaven and wild-eyed, demanding his whereabouts of everyone I met in those polished halls of power until I finally got to beard the pathetic little Texan in his wood-panelled lair and point my finger thusly, bellowing with a preacher’s booming cadences, “Know this, sinner: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”
But I probably couldn’t make it past the cops, and anyway, that’s Tarantino, not Ezekial.
Not even the cooler æsthetic comfort of poetic justice is available to me: much as I might look forward to the day when his power will be broken, the panoply of his office scattered, his house razed, when his family will deny him bread and salt and PAC money, when the pot he pisses in will be taken from him and he must beg for the very compassion he tried to drive from this land, I can’t begin to believe he will ever come to realize it is all only what he must reap for the filth he has sown and the hurt he has spread. I can’t believe he’ll ever learn a thing. Comprehension is as far from him as compassion, or shame.
GIMEL ZAYIN YUD. This, too, shall pass. Y’all had the slightest inkling of what that really meant, we’d all be much better off. My god is bigger than your god: if that is all the meaning you pathetic little shits can draw from something like this, give me nihilistic despair. Please. It’s far more human.
0wnzorship society.
Hark! That awful, sucking sound… the indescribable shape looming towards us through the gloom… that gagsome stench… What could it be? (Melvin?) —No, it’s the January Surprise: the plans to abolish Social Security, as prophesied, are beginning, slowly, to coalesce...
Social Security Formula Weighed: In informal briefings on Capitol Hill, White House aides have told lawmakers and aides that Bush will propose the change in the benefits formula…. Currently, initial benefits are set by… adjust[ing] those earnings… based on wage growth…. Under the commission plan, the adjustment would be based instead on the rise of consumer prices…. [A] middle-class worker retiring in 2022 would see guaranteed benefits cut by 9.9 percent. By 2042, average monthly benefits for middle- and high-income workers would fall by more than a quarter. A retiree in 2075 would receive 54 percent of the benefit now promised….
Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post on October 20, 2004:
Ads Push the Factual Envelope: John F. Kerry is denouncing deep Social Security cutbacks that President Bush has not proposed…. A Kerry ad, based on a private comment Bush is reported to have made on wanting to privatize Social Security, says: “Now Bush has a plan that cuts Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.” But the president, while favoring allowing younger workers to put part of their benefits in private accounts, has never put forth a plan—and has vowed that any change would not affect current retirees…
But that’s not the funny bit; that’s not the funny bit by half. For the funny bit, you have to dig into the numbers a little, and figure out what you ought to be making, what you’ll probably be making if we do nothing, and what you’ll end up making if the Republicans carry the day. Max points out the CBO study which does the math, and you really ought to listen:
In Table 2 of this study, we get estimates of benefits resulting from this approach. Since it’s all about the kids, we should start with the impact on what’s called the “10-year birth cohort starting in year 2000.” Kids born after January 1, 2000. We focus on the middle of the middle, as far as income distribution goes (“median in middle household earnings quintile”).
If Little Nell is this type of person, in retirement she would be due $26,400 a year in benefits annually under current law. This would require some kind of infusion into the Trust Fund after 2052 (when CBO says it runs a shortfall). With no such infusion, alas Little Nell can only be paid $19,900 (everything here is constant 2004 dollars). (The same type of person retiring today—“the 1940 birth cohort”—gets $14,900.)
Let’s chew on that for a second. With no transfer of revenue into the Trust Fund after 2052 (as opposed to redemptions of its assets with general revenue), Little Nell still does quite a bit better than a retiree today.
This is a crisis? Surely we can do better. What about the excellent reform envisioned by G. Bush?
When you include the returns to the individual accounts and “price indexing” of benefits, Little Nell’s benefit is . . . $14,600. SHE DOES WORSE THAN UNDER THE “BANKRUPT” TRUST FUND! Way worse! Can you hear me now? She even does worse than a current retiree.
And Matt’s right: there’s nothing ideological about this, the delusions of Grover Norquist notwithstanding. The financial industry has more money than any one of us does. So we lose. Simple as that. Our future’s been pwned.
thirteen billion dollars : thirty million dollars :: political capital : ?
The basic moral issue is why a direct political connection (a la the political bonds of Florida to other US taxpayers) creates a strong presumption of massive US government aid. Obviously, there is a political reason for a better response to Florida, since Indonesians won’t be voting for anyone in the next Presidential election, no matter how much aid we send.
But that’s a pretty pathetic moral response—disaster relief as political pork barrel.
Yup.
Mr. Newman cites a New York Times analysis which says, “even Mr. Bush’s critics do not expect spending on that scale for the far greater disaster in South Asia.”
Count me with the chorus that says, on the contrary. Oh, yes. Yes we do, and more, besides.
Actions speak louder than words.
The ultimate argument against privatization.
It’s not the clear and simple proof that Social Security isn’t in anything remotely approaching a crisis; it isn’t the accounting shenanigans that will make us all look back fondly on Enron’s best practices; it isn’t even Daniel Davies’ immortal question, just as important to ask now as it was then:
Can anyone give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.
These are all important arguments to make, and we should go on making them, as often and forcefully as we can, but much as with the war on Iraq, we’re rapidly approaching a world in which there are two kinds of people: those who know this to be true, and those who know, but choose to believe otherwise.
No, the ultimate argument against mandatory private retirement accounts is this: do you have any idea how much more junk mail you’ll be getting? From multinational financial corporations and fly-by-night penny-stock–pimping quasi-firms? Lurid brochures and badly written come-ons, envelopes tricked up to look like overnight deliveries with that stupid handwriting font misspelling your name in the corner, Kipp, I thought you would appreciate a look at this, Mr. J.K. Manly, you could be making thirteen percent, Ms. Beezel Lee, have you thought about your retirement account? Dire red-inked envelopes with bold block letters RE: YOUR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS IMPORTANT OPEN IMMEDIATELY, anonymous cheap white envelopes hoping to sneak past your first brute-force Bayesian filter, your own goddamn bank shoving ten-page slick-papered prospectuses financed by your ATM fees through your mail slot every week or so, just because they can.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest a best-case scenario would merely be an increase by an order of magnitude or so in pieces of mail delivered. Do we really want this brave new world?
An ill wind.
Apparently, I must say something, anything, about a hideous and unthinkable disaster, whose awe-striking natural terror (islands shoved to one side or the other, the planet left thrumming in its orbit) is not matched, no, but certainly compounded by a willful blindness and stupidity that is as criminal as it is all too human—I, me, this guy over here with a weblog on the sinister side of the Islets of Bloggerhans, I have to say something cogent, something approved, or every blue-state blog will stand condemend with the entire Left for just not caring enough.
All right, then:
Actions speak louder than words.
A cheap monkeywrench is thrill enough.
At some point or another I got put on the American Family Association mailing list, which makes for a sour splotch in my inbox every week or so. But here at the arse-end of the year, the Rev. Wildmon is making another touchingly naïve attempt to harness the power of the web. He wants us all to advise the President as to what sort of judges he ought to appoint to the federal courts. If one were to click here, one could send an email which says roughly,
I feel a Federal judge should seek the original intent of the Constitution, and make his or her rulings based on the original intent. Please nominate individuals who have this concept toward the Constitution.
Whereas, if one were to click here, one could send an email which says something rather like,
I feel a Federal judge should have a “progressive mind” and make laws he or she feels are needed regardless of the Constitutional intent. I think the Constitution is a “living” document and must be interpreted by Federal judges willing to make needed laws that Congress refuses to make.
And if one were to click here, one would see the total number of each email sent to date. —At the moment, it stands at 16,380 fans of “original intent,” as opposed to 288 progressive minds.
Let’s do something about that, shall we?
Canary watch.
Remember galiel’s canaries? Americans United for Separation of Church and State has a one-click email thing you can send to your various elected representatives about four of them: the “Constitution Restoration Act,” the “Safeguarding Our Religious Liberties Act,” the “Ten Commandments Defense Act,” and the “Marriage Protection Act of 2003.” —Y’all don’t need a sermon, and we can argue the political expediency of Marbury v. Madison later: the names of those bills alone ought to be enough to chill you into whatever action you can take. (Hearing that Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.) has been paraphrasing Stalin—
When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy… The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We’re not saying they can’t do that. At the end of the day, we’re saying the court can’t enforce its opinions.
(Well, hell. That’s just an extra shiver.)
—Hat-tip to Majikthise.
And when we say everything changed—
Twenty-five years after Alvin Toffler coined the term “Prosumer” in his book The Third Wave, Consumer Anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff says the Prosumer is officially here to stay and that this holiday season is their coming of age. “Think of it as the coming out party for a new species, an evolution in a consumer mindset. It is now the producers—companies, manufacturers, marketers and retailers, who need to adapt,” said Blinkoff.
A Prosumer is part producer part consumer [sic]. Prosumers are engaged in a creative process of producing a product and service portfolio with guidance from trusted friends—the companies they’ve trusted for years and the new ones they’ve come to love.
Certainly Toffler’s prophesy was becoming a reality with mass computer consumption, Internet, Cable TV and digital technologies available, but Blinkoff, a Principal Anthropologist at Context-Based Research Group in Baltimore, says something dramatic happened to the Prosumer landscape that sped up the evolutionary process. That monumental event was 9/11.
“9/11 unleashed a full scale remapping of the cultural landscape. People were and are re-establishing their identities—their sense of who they are,” said Blinkoff. “And given that consumerism is at the core of our culture, its no surprise that we went to our culture core to help us regain our identity.”
—RedNova, “The Prosumers Have Arrived and Will Be Out in Full Force This Holiday Season, According to Context-Based Research Group,” via Purse Lip Square Jaw
For some value of “our.”
The war of us and them.
And you know, I really ought to be working on the next watchmaker bit. I started revamping that old thing because I’d thought I might have a little time to post this week, but had no idea what I’d say.
Funny how things work out.
Anyway, Josh Lukin writes to let me know that “The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism” ain’t necessarily all that, but “...Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red,” now there’s a fuckin’ essay, which reminds me that I still haven’t dug my copy of Times Square Red Times Square Blue to the top of my tottering pile, so I do, and I open it to “Red,” and here, let me write out the first two paragraphs that I saw while we still have some small shreds of Fair Use left:
The primary thesis underlying my several arguments here is that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.
My secondary thesis is, however, that the class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world, though it is at times as hard to detect as Freud’s unconscious or the structure of discourse, perpetually works for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and of the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed.
That right there is a model of how things are and what happens to them as we go along. —Here’s another:
An evelm philosopher once wrote: “Almost all human attempts to deal with the concept of death fall into two categories. The first can be described by the injunction: ‘Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying.’ The second can be expressed by the exhortation: ‘Concentrate only on what is truly eternal—time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in—and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself.’ For women who adhere to either position,” this wise creature noted, “the other is considered the pit of error, the road to injustice, and the locus of sin.”
And one’s from an essay and the other’s from a science fiction novel and it’s not like it’s either the first or the second and there aren’t other ways of looking at things, I mean, for God’s sake, they aren’t even mutually exclusive, and I know you might quibble with this or that aspect of the one or the other, and that what I’m about to do is unfair and even brutally reductionist, but still: take the one, and the the other, and hold ’em up against our current situation, the great divide, the Blue and the Red.
Which does a better job of limning the struggle we’re actually in, and the actual sides that have lined up to join it?
That said, what tactics now suggest themselves? Seem more useful? Counterproductive? Downright destructive?
Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditone querentes?
So Joshua Micah Marshall links to the Daou Report, which was highlighting a Corner post by Ramesh Ponnuru, and now I have another Lewis Black earwig wreaking havoc with my equilibrium:
The risk is that liberals’ moral arguments are peculiarly prone to coming across as self-righteous and moralistic.
And yes, I know he means it in the “addicted to moralising” sense and not merely in the “pertaining to or characteristic of one who practices morality” sense, but hey: he left the door open. And it’s a lovely little piece of snark to walk away with, isn’t it? Our moral arguments are hampered by an actual morality that we insist on applying to ourselves—and thus, by extension, anyone who’d join our club.
Their moral arguments consist mostly of ganging up to tell some convenient Other on the margins over yonder that they’d damn well better knock it off.
—Snarky as it is, though, it’s the kernel that proves Ponnuru’s basic argument: playing the preaching game won’t work for us, and it’s not because Americans are Bad, but because People are Cussedly Cantankerous. Besides, it’s letting them pick the battlefield and define the terms, and Ponnuru’s post is an avis most rara: advice from the other side that’s worth the taking. He just showed us where and when their flank will ambush us. Don’t let’s take the bait.
That said, I can’t get Nick Confessore’s crazy idea out of my head. Maybe providing health insurance through the Democratic party is in itself not so great a plan, no. But the idea of using what power we have to do what we can to weld together a reality-based safety net, doing what it can to end-run those most useful bits of the government currently headed for Grover Norquist’s bathtub, providing an alternative to the faith-based megachurch charity network, and thereby reconnecting the party with the people, and reminding the people directly just why it is we come together to get things done in the first place—
Sure, it’s buying votes with bread—a practice connected to traditions as old as the idea of a republic itself. It’s also one hell of a lot more useful than half-heartedly taking up tut-tutting about Grand Theft Auto.
Panem et circenses.
Still want to cut the red states loose and go your own urbane way? Well, hell. You don’t just have Mike Thompson on your side: a big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for the rhetorical stylings of Jim McNeil!
The states Kerry won, due solely to votes in just one or two cities each, are California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. The cities that out-voted the rest of their state or adjacent areas are the District of Columbia, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle.
Kerry won just eight states (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) with balanced votes, and only two of these (Delaware and Hawaii) are outside of New England. These states gave him just 41 electoral votes.
The 11 cities listed above gave him 208 such votes, against wishes shown elsewhere statewide. Four more states could have had similar results due to city voting in Cleveland, Denver, St. Louis or the Miami to Palm Beach- area. Add D.C.’s three electoral votes and just 15 cities can award 278 electoral votes.
Thus, cities can pick our president, against the wishes expressed elsewhere nationwide.
Laugh if you like at his apparent misunderstanding of the whole point of democracy—that’s actually a standard tactic over in non-reality-based circles, where the vote is calculated by interest group, weighing the franchise of those you agree with more heavily, while discounting that of those you would consign to the Joy Division. Usually, though, this is reserved for the votes of those with funny skin: without the black vote, we’re told, over and over again, those Democrats would be sunk, yessiree. McNeil’s only innovation is to take the urban of “urban comedy” literally.
Now, I’m hardly the first person to have noticed it, but still: doesn’t one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state make you think of the chariot races?
Factions were identified by their colors: either Blue or Green, Red or White. Domitian added gold and purple but they, like the emperor, were never popular and short-lived. Colors first are recorded in the 70s BC [sic]; during the Republic, when Pliny the Elder relates that, at the funeral of a charioteer for the Reds, a distraught supporter threw himself on the pyre in despair, a sacrifice that was dismissed by the Whites as no more than the act of someone overcome by the fumes of burning incense. According to Tertullian, these were the first two factions and, although the Blues and Greens are assumed to have appeared later in the first century AD [sic], it is likely that all four colors extend back to the Republic. Whatever their origin, by the end of the third century AD [sic], Blue and Green had come to dominate the other two factions, which seem to have aligned themselves as Red and Green, White and Blue.
A pairing of Green and White, at least, can be seen from lead “curse tablets” that invoke the most terrible fate for rival factions.
I adjure you, demon whoever you are, and I demand of you from this hour, from this day, from this moment, that you torture and kill the horses of the Greens and Whites and that you kill in a crash their drivers…
I conjure you up, holy beings and holy names, join in aiding this spell, and bind, enchant, thwart, strike, overturn, conspire against, destroy, kill, break Eucherius, the charioteer, and all his horses tomorrow in the circus at Rome. May he not leave the barriers well; may he not be quick in contest; may he not outstrip anyone; may he not make the turns well; may he not win any prizes…
Which, if nothing else, tells us the two-party system has always hated and feared potential third-party interlopers more than their soi-disant rivals. (Okay, weak. But it also answers the riddle of what color libertarian states are given on the Akashic electoral map.)
But! What do we do about this state of affairs? That’s the operative question, isn’t it? —Well, luckily for y’all, they used to show The Tomorrow People on Nickelodeon, and I watched a lot of it when I was a kid:
Though if you look deeper into the kaleidoscope and see past the loud colours that are the obvious horror, sci-fi and comic book references (John losing his “super powers” when imprisoned) this is quite an interesting science fiction story about an alien race who, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in different nests. The nests being different planets and the eggs taking the shape of the dominant life-forms on each planet, in this case taking the human form. The problem being that the energy the eggs need to hatch and fly free from earth can only be generated by human anger. The aliens have the power to create anger in humans by painting pictures of different planets that have temperamental weather conditions, which somehow affect the aggression levels of human beings who come into contact with them, and also by creating badges of different colours (blue and green) so the wearer of a green badge will become violent towards the wearer of a blue badge (but only when the weather is bad on, let’s say…Rexel 4!) The Tomorrow People’s job is to convince scary and very creepy Bowiealike alien Robert (who has been living in a junk shop with someone he calls Grandad, but actually appears to be a character that has fallen out of The Goon Show), that they can generate the energy needed by everyone on earth going to sleep at the same time and dreaming violent dreams whilst Stephen and John re-route the dream energy to the hatching aliens using giant stun guns! As John himself says “It’s an idea!”
So, hey. Let’s get cracking.
Nails.
Fuck the South? —I’m a ’Bama boy in something of a self-imposed exile, a Yankee throwback who still has strong opinions on grits, and I like a good rant as much as the next raconteur, but you know what? Fuck you. No, seriously: fuck you. There’s more than enough stars and bars to go around. Sure, that asshole wrote that thing where he cut off his nose to spite his face, but so what? Assholes like that have been writing masturbatory fantasies about strange fruit for years. There’s hardball, but there’s also letting them set the rules and pick the battlefield, and it doesn’t take a Sun Tzu to point out what a mug’s game that is.
Kos tells us Frank Rich nailed it—as yet another Canute spitting into the incoming CW tide about those pesky “values voters,” anyway. And Rich has his point, even if it’s thin and dispiriting. —But when I want some quality spleen-vent, I tap the source, and once more the pseudonymous skimble fails to disappoint:
As a Blue Stater, I am sick of being told how negative I am and that I hate Christians, or the American South, or heartland states, or gun owners, or people less educated than me, or families, or rural culture.
I don’t hate any of that.
I hate incompetence. I hate unchecked greed. I hate secrecy in public institutions. I hate discrimination. I hate the distortion of public discourse by giving common words coded meanings. I hate coercion. I hate disproportionality in prosecution and sentencing. I hate the theft of public property for private gain. I hate having my privacy violated, especially in medical and financial matters. I hate that members of this administration avoided military service but abuse veterans and send soldiers and reservists to their deaths—and still pretend to recognize Veterans Day.
All of these things reduce the choices available to our citizens. All of these things contradict compassion. All of these things reduce freedom. The bullshit versions of compassion and freedom exclude the real things from our lives.
That’s what I hate.
