Monday, December 29, 2008
Down for the Count
Not a review of Valkyrie, and not really a preview, but a few points worth considering...
When historical movies are working at their best, they can remind us all of things that happened in the past that many of us may have either forgotten about or never learned about. When they’re at their worst, they can distort their stories beyond any resemblance to actual history.
With the movie Valkyrie now out, it behooves us to try to determine which is which, and which applies to this movie. Frankly, I don’t know...I haven’t seen it yet, nor have I read any reviews. I’ll try to see it this week, and I’ll post my own review to this blog, but until I do here’s a bit about the actual man that Tom Cruise is playing.
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907-1944)
(Some of this I’ve cribbed from the sites listed at the end of this article; some of it I’ve pulled from sources I have at hand and some I’ve pulled from memories of what I’ve seen on The History Channel. As far as I can determine, it’s all accurate; but I don’t intend to go into great detail and if you’re interested then please go to the web sites I’ve listed.)
Here’s part of what Wikipedia has to say:
"Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (15 November 1907 – 21 July 1944) was a German army officer and Roman Catholic aristocrat who was one of the leading officers of the failed 20 July plot of 1944 to kill German dictator Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi party from power in World War II Germany. He was one of the central figures of the German Resistance movement."
That’s enough to base a movie on...but I can’t help but wonder just how deep into history the filmmakers actually went. (The full Wikipedia entry is actually very thorough; check it out, or any of the other biographical websites cited at the end of the article.) Claus von Stauffenberg was a wounded veteran of several early WWII campaigns and occupations, and wasn’t entirely heroic; his stated attitude toward Poles and Slaves, let alone Jews (at least early on) certainly weren’t anything to recommend him to a modern audience. For example, here’s a chilling bit of a letter he wrote to his wife from occupied Poland:
"The population here are unbelievable rabble; a great many Jews and a lot of mixed race. A people that is only comfortable under the lash. The thousands of prisoners will serve our agriculture well."
How closely the film adheres to this side of von Stauffenberg’s character remains to be seen.
Also, I’m curious how the film does his wartime injuries; there was more to them than just an eye patch. He lost his eye, his right hand and two fingers from his left hand in a British fighter attack in Africa in 1943. How he was able to work the fuse on the explosive with which he tried to kill Hitler is a matter for speculation; it can’t have been easy for him.
It’s also worth noting that his hopes for the end of the war were a bit unrealistic. He envisioned a Germany that retained most of the lands that Germany had annexed and/or occupied, and would have required that there be no reprisals against serving German officers, as well as Germany retaining the right to prosecute its war criminals itself (no deportations, in other words). I very much doubt that the Allies would have granted him terms anywhere near this generous, but who can really say what the war-weary allies would have done if a Germany sans Hitler waived a conditional white flag at them? (Personally, I think they’d have told them to stick it; after all, from D-Day onward the Allies would have been bargaining from an obvious position of strength, if they cared to bargain at all.) (I hope they’d have told him to stick it.)
But history largely ignores von Stauffenberg’s shortcomings when it looks at his attempt to take the life of Adolf Hitler. That his plot failed to kill Hitler is a matter of historical record, and the plot to grab the government was a non-starter. Count von Stauffenberg has been lionized as a hero by many, but others have cast doubts on his character and motives. I’m curious to see how the movie is going to paint him.
My own point of view: Heroes are seldom entirely heroic, and villains are seldom entirely villainous. Whatever Claus von Stauffenberg's shortcomings may have been, he heroically tried to end a great evil and paid for it with his life; that the act might demand this price of him did not deter him. To me, that defines a hero.
Another matter of historical record is von Stauffenberg’s death; without even so much as a one-sided show trial he was executed by firing squad before 1 a.m. on July 21, 1944, just a few hours after the failed plot had played out. His last words are somewhat in question; some sources say that he said "Long live a free Germany" while others say that he said "Long live our holy Germany." Whether this is just a question of different translations I have no idea, but I wonder what Tom Cruise will say?
But defiling von Stauffenberg didn’t end with his death; he was buried with full military honors, but the next day the SS dug up his remains, striped him of all awards and medals and cremated his body.
Count Claus von Stauffenberg (Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg) is a fascinating character in the history of the Second World War; a man who, whatever his faults may have been, tried to put an end to the reign of one of the most evil men ever to hold vast military power. But I’m not sure that his failure was entirely a bad thing; if von Stauffenberg had gained power, would he then have continued the war in the hope of securing a better peace for his people? While I’m sure Germany would have lost the war in any case, with competent officers in command of Germany’s armed forces it might have turned out very differently, even in defeat. This will remain one of history’s greatest "what if" questions.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading
Wikipedia on Claus von Stauffenberg
Claus von Stauffenberg at the Jewish Virtual Library
von Stauffenberg at Answers.com
Heroes & Killers of the 20th Century
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Friday, December 26, 2008
"So this is Christmas..."
I was working on yet another article about my feelings; about how hard things are without my brother and how hard things are looking after my mother, about how it was to go through all of this with only me Mum to share it with, and her unable to hold on to the memory for more than a few hours. All of this should have made a horrible Christmas, and I was anticipating writing another pathos-laden article that would make everyone cry in undeserved sympathy.
Actually, it was a pretty good day.
There weren’t any gifts for me; this is hardly a new thing, and to be expected with my brother gone, and anyway getting gifts wasn’t really my thing. Giving, now, that is what I really enjoy, and I hate that money is so tight this year that I can barely afford Christmas dinner at Denny’s, not that I have all that many people to buy for any more. So Christmas wasn’t much about presents for me, not this year anyway.
Being an atheist, I’m not much of one for the whole Happy-Birthday-Jesus thing, and I’m not really into the whole Christmas movie thing, though I did watch "Jesus Christ Superstar" this year.
For me, Christmas has always been about family, and that hasn’t changed just because my family is down to my mother and me. (There’s Mark’s son, of course, but he spends Christmas with his mother since he’s only seven and we weren’t invited to her extended-family Christmas. Just as well; Mark and I used to sneak down to the basement and take a nap while her family was happily kareoke-ing away upstairs.)
Just Mom and me this year. I took her to Denny’s since I’m not anything like the cook that Mark was. And we had a good time, even if the portions were small, the prices were higher than the food warranted and the turkey would have tasted better with the feathers on. We joked and laughed and chatted, and shared a smile or two with the waitstaff, and Mom wasn’t all that much of a handful even though I had to try to keep here from eating her mashed potatoes with her butter knife. All in all, not a bad day at all.
We had a nice drive out and a nice drive home (though a long one; we live about forty-five minutes from the nearest Denny’s) and all the way back she kept saying what a nice time she had had, and she kept thanking me for giving her such a good day out.
The sad part was that within four hours of Christmas dinner, she had forgotten entirely about dinner, that she’d ever had dinner, much less that she’d gone out to a restaurant.
Well, I sort of expected that; I’d taken her to Old Country Buffet on Thanksgiving and she’d forgotten all about it by that night.
Mom’s memory has gotten horrible lately. A couple of months ago I wrote about what a wrenching experience it was when I’d had to tell her about Mark’s death all over again, and how I dreaded the inevitable day when I would have to do it yet again. I didn’t know then that that day would be the very next day, or that it would happen nearly every day since, usually several times a day and often several times an hour. That was extremely difficult, and it remains difficult, but though I’ll never get used to it I no longer find it such a shattering experience.
This, in itself, is quite shattering.
But never mind; Mom had a good day even if she can’t now remember it, and I had a good day that I won’t soon forget. Maybe it’s enough that one of us remembers.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Actually, it was a pretty good day.
There weren’t any gifts for me; this is hardly a new thing, and to be expected with my brother gone, and anyway getting gifts wasn’t really my thing. Giving, now, that is what I really enjoy, and I hate that money is so tight this year that I can barely afford Christmas dinner at Denny’s, not that I have all that many people to buy for any more. So Christmas wasn’t much about presents for me, not this year anyway.
Being an atheist, I’m not much of one for the whole Happy-Birthday-Jesus thing, and I’m not really into the whole Christmas movie thing, though I did watch "Jesus Christ Superstar" this year.
For me, Christmas has always been about family, and that hasn’t changed just because my family is down to my mother and me. (There’s Mark’s son, of course, but he spends Christmas with his mother since he’s only seven and we weren’t invited to her extended-family Christmas. Just as well; Mark and I used to sneak down to the basement and take a nap while her family was happily kareoke-ing away upstairs.)
Just Mom and me this year. I took her to Denny’s since I’m not anything like the cook that Mark was. And we had a good time, even if the portions were small, the prices were higher than the food warranted and the turkey would have tasted better with the feathers on. We joked and laughed and chatted, and shared a smile or two with the waitstaff, and Mom wasn’t all that much of a handful even though I had to try to keep here from eating her mashed potatoes with her butter knife. All in all, not a bad day at all.
We had a nice drive out and a nice drive home (though a long one; we live about forty-five minutes from the nearest Denny’s) and all the way back she kept saying what a nice time she had had, and she kept thanking me for giving her such a good day out.
The sad part was that within four hours of Christmas dinner, she had forgotten entirely about dinner, that she’d ever had dinner, much less that she’d gone out to a restaurant.
Well, I sort of expected that; I’d taken her to Old Country Buffet on Thanksgiving and she’d forgotten all about it by that night.
Mom’s memory has gotten horrible lately. A couple of months ago I wrote about what a wrenching experience it was when I’d had to tell her about Mark’s death all over again, and how I dreaded the inevitable day when I would have to do it yet again. I didn’t know then that that day would be the very next day, or that it would happen nearly every day since, usually several times a day and often several times an hour. That was extremely difficult, and it remains difficult, but though I’ll never get used to it I no longer find it such a shattering experience.
This, in itself, is quite shattering.
But never mind; Mom had a good day even if she can’t now remember it, and I had a good day that I won’t soon forget. Maybe it’s enough that one of us remembers.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Time waits for no one...
You may have noticed that I’m not writing as much lately; I’ve gone from two or three posts each day back in August to two or three per week lately. I could just say that I’m taking some time off for the holidays, but that would be bullshit. I could say that I’ve lost some of my interest in keeping this blog or web-journal of trashpile or whatever you want to call it, but that too would be bullshit.
The truth is that my time is taken up with my primary role as care-giver for my eighty-year-old mother, and I find that I’m having to spend more time at it every day.
So I don’t have as much time to write these articles now. I can no longer write in the afternoons, and I can’t write in the mornings, as me mum needs more attention these days. So I can only seem to get anything done in the evening after she has gone to sleep.
The problem there is that I’m not really at my best in the evening, but if that’s the only time I have to write then that’s when I’ll write. It’s really not much of a hardship for me, since I usually write off-line anyway and post later, doing final editing as the text goes on-line. If my output has to suffer a bit until I get this time-management thing worked out, then that’s what will have to happen.
I’ve also got a couple of other irons in the fire, like collecting these articles into a book (like anyone’s ever going to read that) that will probably be available through Cafe Press or something like. And I think I’ve proved to myself that I can still write, so perhaps it’s time for me to take another stab at fiction. But that’s still in the future.
I really am looking forward to taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays; that part wasn’t entirely bullshit. But don’t think that I’ve lost interest in keeping this blog; I’ve gotten used to venting on-line and frankly I like being able to unload, even if it’s just a bunch of political crap. So I really am going to try to work out this time-management thing; but it’s going to have to wait until after the new year when, hopefully, I can give it more time.
So please keep checking in.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
The truth is that my time is taken up with my primary role as care-giver for my eighty-year-old mother, and I find that I’m having to spend more time at it every day.
So I don’t have as much time to write these articles now. I can no longer write in the afternoons, and I can’t write in the mornings, as me mum needs more attention these days. So I can only seem to get anything done in the evening after she has gone to sleep.
The problem there is that I’m not really at my best in the evening, but if that’s the only time I have to write then that’s when I’ll write. It’s really not much of a hardship for me, since I usually write off-line anyway and post later, doing final editing as the text goes on-line. If my output has to suffer a bit until I get this time-management thing worked out, then that’s what will have to happen.
I’ve also got a couple of other irons in the fire, like collecting these articles into a book (like anyone’s ever going to read that) that will probably be available through Cafe Press or something like. And I think I’ve proved to myself that I can still write, so perhaps it’s time for me to take another stab at fiction. But that’s still in the future.
I really am looking forward to taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays; that part wasn’t entirely bullshit. But don’t think that I’ve lost interest in keeping this blog; I’ve gotten used to venting on-line and frankly I like being able to unload, even if it’s just a bunch of political crap. So I really am going to try to work out this time-management thing; but it’s going to have to wait until after the new year when, hopefully, I can give it more time.
So please keep checking in.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
On a roll
12-18-08 - This is me again, posting from the great disconnected purgatory that is this land of No Internet. I haven’t got it sorted out yet; the truth is, I’m just too lazy. Maybe tomorrow. In the mean time, I’ll keep writing and post it when I can. Enjoy. -BV
I should have been quicker off the mark.
I had a great idea for a product, but sadly it could only sell for a couple of more weeks. The product is simply this: the U.S. Constitution printed on a roll of toilet paper.
I should have made a mint selling these things in Washington to Republican senators and representatives, to people at the Pentagon, to the Bush Administration itself. Just think of it; the U.S. Constitution on a perforated roll beside every toilet in the White House. (On second thought, don’t think about it. Bush & Co. have been wiping their collective asses with the Constitution for eight years.) The election of Obama put the brakes on my entrepreneurial dreams. I think I could have sold them to McCain, Palin, and company, but it just wasn’t to be.
But I had another brilliant idea: a roll of GM stock certificates printed on toilet paper. You wouldn’t even have to use facsimiles of stock certificates; on the current market, they might as well be printed on toilet paper. (The liberal in me hopes that this one has the same problem as the Constitution idea; namely, a very limited shelf life.) My thanks to GWB for trying to keep this idea of mine alive through his current scheme to push auto makers toward an "orderly bankruptcy". (Though I can’t for the life of me figure out how any kind of nearly industry-wide bankruptcy, which would be treated by auto execs as an opportunity to get while the getting is good, throwing the auto industry as well as the many industries that depend on the auto industry into utter chaos, how this kind of gigantic economic cluster-fuck could ever be considered "orderly".) But at least two of the "Big Three" are likely to survive, in some form, and the jury’s still out on their ultimate fate, so I’d better not depend on this idea to make me rich. The auto industry might just survive...and then where would I be?
Obviously, what I need here is an idea that will play for a long time to come. Something that isn’t going to be swept away by the new administration. I need to look to Obama and the sort of President he’s going to be if I want to get rich quick. I have tried to do just that, but it turned out to be harder than it seemed.
My first such idea went in a different direction. "Famous Liberal Trading Cards" offered a trading card game that allowed kids to form their own "dream cabinet" and to earn points for correctly matching liberals to cabinet posts. Sadly, Obama named mostly moderates to his cabinet. This may be an effective way to bring the country together, to demonstrate that he’s the president of all Americans and not just the ones on the left, but it’s been hell on the entrepreneur.
So I went back to my original concept, something that allows people to make a political statement while dealing with all the shit in their daily lives. In other words, my next great idea was more toilet paper; "Famous Evangelist Toilet Paper" actually, and with Obama in power this one looked like a sure winner. Sadly, this idea was shot down by Obama himself when he asked Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. If Obama is going to make nice with the ultra-Christian right, then I just got stuck with ten thousand rolls of toilet paper emblazoned with the smiling faces of prominent men and women of God. Well, at least I can still sell a few in San Francisco. Maybe some in Greenwich Village.
I really think I’m on to something with this toilet paper idea, if only I can find the right image to grace my morning crap. I need something topical that won’t expire in a few weeks. But I just can’t think of anything right now; maybe you can come up with something. Me, I’m going to take a nap. I’m just wiped out.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
I should have been quicker off the mark.
I had a great idea for a product, but sadly it could only sell for a couple of more weeks. The product is simply this: the U.S. Constitution printed on a roll of toilet paper.
I should have made a mint selling these things in Washington to Republican senators and representatives, to people at the Pentagon, to the Bush Administration itself. Just think of it; the U.S. Constitution on a perforated roll beside every toilet in the White House. (On second thought, don’t think about it. Bush & Co. have been wiping their collective asses with the Constitution for eight years.) The election of Obama put the brakes on my entrepreneurial dreams. I think I could have sold them to McCain, Palin, and company, but it just wasn’t to be.
But I had another brilliant idea: a roll of GM stock certificates printed on toilet paper. You wouldn’t even have to use facsimiles of stock certificates; on the current market, they might as well be printed on toilet paper. (The liberal in me hopes that this one has the same problem as the Constitution idea; namely, a very limited shelf life.) My thanks to GWB for trying to keep this idea of mine alive through his current scheme to push auto makers toward an "orderly bankruptcy". (Though I can’t for the life of me figure out how any kind of nearly industry-wide bankruptcy, which would be treated by auto execs as an opportunity to get while the getting is good, throwing the auto industry as well as the many industries that depend on the auto industry into utter chaos, how this kind of gigantic economic cluster-fuck could ever be considered "orderly".) But at least two of the "Big Three" are likely to survive, in some form, and the jury’s still out on their ultimate fate, so I’d better not depend on this idea to make me rich. The auto industry might just survive...and then where would I be?
Obviously, what I need here is an idea that will play for a long time to come. Something that isn’t going to be swept away by the new administration. I need to look to Obama and the sort of President he’s going to be if I want to get rich quick. I have tried to do just that, but it turned out to be harder than it seemed.
My first such idea went in a different direction. "Famous Liberal Trading Cards" offered a trading card game that allowed kids to form their own "dream cabinet" and to earn points for correctly matching liberals to cabinet posts. Sadly, Obama named mostly moderates to his cabinet. This may be an effective way to bring the country together, to demonstrate that he’s the president of all Americans and not just the ones on the left, but it’s been hell on the entrepreneur.
So I went back to my original concept, something that allows people to make a political statement while dealing with all the shit in their daily lives. In other words, my next great idea was more toilet paper; "Famous Evangelist Toilet Paper" actually, and with Obama in power this one looked like a sure winner. Sadly, this idea was shot down by Obama himself when he asked Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. If Obama is going to make nice with the ultra-Christian right, then I just got stuck with ten thousand rolls of toilet paper emblazoned with the smiling faces of prominent men and women of God. Well, at least I can still sell a few in San Francisco. Maybe some in Greenwich Village.
I really think I’m on to something with this toilet paper idea, if only I can find the right image to grace my morning crap. I need something topical that won’t expire in a few weeks. But I just can’t think of anything right now; maybe you can come up with something. Me, I’m going to take a nap. I’m just wiped out.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
What will Sean Hannity do now?
12/17/08 - Here we go again. My Internet connection is down tonight (though I hope to have it back in a day or two) so I’m writing this off-line to be posted as soon as I can. Tomorrow, hopefully; I’ll make a call or two and try to get it sorted out. In any case, here’s a not-to-timely article that I hope will stay a little relevant until I can post it. Enjoy. -BV
Fox News has informed the world that Alan Colmes, the liberal partner of conservative host Sean Hannity on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, has announced his retirement at the end of this year. Would it be overly rude of me to point out that the world has scarcely noticed? Yes, it probably would.
For years Colmes has provided a limited amount of counterpoint to Hannity’s blatant conservative patter (I say "limited" as he seldom seems to get a word in edgewise; seems, but he actually manages to get in little better than half the verbiage of Hannity, according to Al Frankin’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) and has, not surprisingly, been largely ignored by even the most loyal viewers of Hannity and Colmes.
But then, how could it be otherwise? Colmes was carefully picked for that job; Fox could not have found a less sympathetic looking liberal if they had advertised the post saying "Wanted: One liberal milquetoast, no strong chins allowed, must be willing to defer to conservative demagogue in all matters." I mean, have you ever seen the guy? He looks like a caricature of a liberal pantywaist as drawn by Rush Limbaugh.
OK, so I’m not being fair to Alan Colmes. In truth, I really believe that he has always tried to present a point of view counter to Hannity’s right-wing drivel (you may take that as an editorial comment), or at least as far as he was allowed; there has always appeared (to me, anyway) to be a very real effort on the part of both Fox and Sean Hannity to limit Alan Colmes’ screen-time. Fox is, after all, a staunchly conservative channel and their "news" coverage has always appeared to me to be so strongly right-slanted that their cameras have to be mounted sideways to make their "news" look straight. Under difficult circumstances, Alan Colmes has done as good a job as he was allowed to do, to keep the show what it was always billed as; a news commentary and interview program showcasing opposing viewpoints. It’s hardly his fault that the deck was well and truly stacked against him.
If you haven’t already guessed, I’m not a big fan of Fox News. And I’m not a fan of the Hannity and Colmes show, either; I doubt I’ve seen more than eight or ten shows in all. So I’m basing my opinion on this admittedly limited experience of the program. However, the shows I’ve seen are so uniformly one-sided that I cannot believe that I’ve seen the only eight or ten shows that show Alan Colmes in a poor light. I think it’s far more likely that these shows are typical.
Unfortunately, whatever they may have told Alan Colmes it always seemed to me that he was there mostly to make Sean Hannity look good. This he did extraordinarily well; I don’t think Sean Hannity, on his own, would have become the right-wing icon he is today without Alan Colmes as a foil. Given that, maybe it would be better if Alan Colmes hadn’t been around, after all.
All of which begs the question, what will Sean Hannity do now? Which itself begs the question, do I care?
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Fox News has informed the world that Alan Colmes, the liberal partner of conservative host Sean Hannity on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, has announced his retirement at the end of this year. Would it be overly rude of me to point out that the world has scarcely noticed? Yes, it probably would.
For years Colmes has provided a limited amount of counterpoint to Hannity’s blatant conservative patter (I say "limited" as he seldom seems to get a word in edgewise; seems, but he actually manages to get in little better than half the verbiage of Hannity, according to Al Frankin’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) and has, not surprisingly, been largely ignored by even the most loyal viewers of Hannity and Colmes.
But then, how could it be otherwise? Colmes was carefully picked for that job; Fox could not have found a less sympathetic looking liberal if they had advertised the post saying "Wanted: One liberal milquetoast, no strong chins allowed, must be willing to defer to conservative demagogue in all matters." I mean, have you ever seen the guy? He looks like a caricature of a liberal pantywaist as drawn by Rush Limbaugh.
OK, so I’m not being fair to Alan Colmes. In truth, I really believe that he has always tried to present a point of view counter to Hannity’s right-wing drivel (you may take that as an editorial comment), or at least as far as he was allowed; there has always appeared (to me, anyway) to be a very real effort on the part of both Fox and Sean Hannity to limit Alan Colmes’ screen-time. Fox is, after all, a staunchly conservative channel and their "news" coverage has always appeared to me to be so strongly right-slanted that their cameras have to be mounted sideways to make their "news" look straight. Under difficult circumstances, Alan Colmes has done as good a job as he was allowed to do, to keep the show what it was always billed as; a news commentary and interview program showcasing opposing viewpoints. It’s hardly his fault that the deck was well and truly stacked against him.
If you haven’t already guessed, I’m not a big fan of Fox News. And I’m not a fan of the Hannity and Colmes show, either; I doubt I’ve seen more than eight or ten shows in all. So I’m basing my opinion on this admittedly limited experience of the program. However, the shows I’ve seen are so uniformly one-sided that I cannot believe that I’ve seen the only eight or ten shows that show Alan Colmes in a poor light. I think it’s far more likely that these shows are typical.
Unfortunately, whatever they may have told Alan Colmes it always seemed to me that he was there mostly to make Sean Hannity look good. This he did extraordinarily well; I don’t think Sean Hannity, on his own, would have become the right-wing icon he is today without Alan Colmes as a foil. Given that, maybe it would be better if Alan Colmes hadn’t been around, after all.
All of which begs the question, what will Sean Hannity do now? Which itself begs the question, do I care?
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Take a deep breath...
Hic!
Tonight, I’ve got a bad case of the hiccups. I mean bad. Every few seconds I get hit with a sudden
Hic!
Yeah, like that. I can’t concentrate for more than
Hic!
I wonder what causes hiccups, anyway? I wonder if there’s any way to rid yourself of
Hic!
Of course, there are a few "home remedies" that are supposed to help. There’s the old standby of
Hic!
This is getting me nowhere. I don’t think I’m going to be able to write anything tonight. I think I’ll just
Hic!
Oh, bloody hell. This sucks. I can’t maintain a train of thought
Hic!
Maybe if I tried holding my breath...
Hic!
Nope, that didn’t work. Maybe I could frighten myself out of them.
Hic!
That didn’t work either. I guess after eight years of George W. Bush nothing scares
Hic!
This is nuts. I had so much I wanted to write tonight. I was
Hic!
I was going to write something about the economy. Not very original, I admit, but I was going to say that
Hic!
I had this idea about something Garrison Keillor said back in
Hic!
Oh, Jesus H. Christ, how the hell am I supposed to get anything done when I
Hic!
Bugger it. I give up. I’m going to bed. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll dream about
Hic!
The Blues Vi
Hic!
These hiccups are mine. Get your own.
Tonight, I’ve got a bad case of the hiccups. I mean bad. Every few seconds I get hit with a sudden
Hic!
Yeah, like that. I can’t concentrate for more than
Hic!
I wonder what causes hiccups, anyway? I wonder if there’s any way to rid yourself of
Hic!
Of course, there are a few "home remedies" that are supposed to help. There’s the old standby of
Hic!
This is getting me nowhere. I don’t think I’m going to be able to write anything tonight. I think I’ll just
Hic!
Oh, bloody hell. This sucks. I can’t maintain a train of thought
Hic!
Maybe if I tried holding my breath...
Hic!
Nope, that didn’t work. Maybe I could frighten myself out of them.
Hic!
That didn’t work either. I guess after eight years of George W. Bush nothing scares
Hic!
This is nuts. I had so much I wanted to write tonight. I was
Hic!
I was going to write something about the economy. Not very original, I admit, but I was going to say that
Hic!
I had this idea about something Garrison Keillor said back in
Hic!
Oh, Jesus H. Christ, how the hell am I supposed to get anything done when I
Hic!
Bugger it. I give up. I’m going to bed. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll dream about
Hic!
The Blues Vi
Hic!
These hiccups are mine. Get your own.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The economics of health care...not
"Economics" and "health care" should never be used in the same sentence
The only time I listen to the radio is in my car, and I seldom listen closely; I keep it on for background noise. But today one particular bit of background noise caught my ear; an NPR program had an Ivy League professor (I didn’t catch his name) going on about how restraining medical costs (like any meaningful health care reform would) would be a Bad Thing for the economy, since the health care industry is one of our only growth industries right now.
Now, I never caught his name, so I can’t look him or his writing (if any) up on the web; I really don’t know if he had anything else to say, perhaps something I might agree with. I don’t know his credentials or bona fides, so I can’t say if they’re worth a damn. I can say that I’ve heard this song before, from far-right commentators and the odd loony-toon on the web, but they were easy to dismiss. This guy’s Ivy League credentials put him in a different category, that of one who should know better.
I will admit that he’s probably right. Health care is a growth industry in the U.S., and making sweeping regulatory changes in any growth industry right now could very well exacerbate a dismal situation. From an economic standpoint, he’s right.
So the fuck what?
Yes, health care is an industry in the U.S., one that’s in a state of growth when other industries are suffering. That’s the problem; health care in this country is in the control of Business (with a capitol B), with decisions made always with an eye toward the bottom line, the balance sheet, the ledger. Decisions that should be left to the patient and his or her doctor(s) are left in the hands of people with MBA’s rather than MD’s, of managers rather than healers.
So as I am listening to this joker I am wondering just how many deaths are acceptable in his quest for the bottom line. Just how much bad health care do we have to suffer because it’s more cost effective? How many poor people have to do without adequate health care because it’s not economically viable to provide them with something better? If he addressed any of these questions I didn’t hear it, and I don’t have time to find out who he is or what else he might have said, whether he addressed any of these concerns or not. I had to stop and buy gas, and by the time I got back in my car the program was on to something else. But I didn’t get the impression that the health care needs of the poor were much of a concern for him.
I got the distinct impression that Mr. Ivy League was not at all concerned with keeping people healthy; I felt that his primary concern was in keeping the health care industry healthy and profitable.
Health care shouldn’t be something we look to to turn a profit. This statement may seem un-American to some people; hell, I’ll even admit that it is un-American to an extent. It is un-American, in the sense that it’s not the way we do things in America, to provide health care without a built-in profit incentive. In fact, it’s thought of as un-American (or downright communist) to do ANYTHING without an eye to profit. And this is the problem; we need to look at health care as something everyone should enjoy, not something for sale to those who can afford it and the rest can make do.
And speaking of making do, there’s Medicaid, the government’s alternative to pay-for-play health care that is available to the poor. Now, this space was originally filled with two paragraphs describing Medicaid and its shortcomings, my personal financial woes and my main Medicaid complaints, but those paragraphs were getting awfully long and I decided to cut them. Suffice to say that Medicaid is about as efficient as a beat-up ’63 Ford pick-up with a wonky carb and no muffler. But, hey, it keeps me alive, if not running much better than that old Ford. But I digress; perhaps Medicaid is a subject best addressed in a later article.
Health care is too important, too basic a necessity, to leave it in the hands of those who worship the bottom line. People’s health is something that we as a society should be working to preserve, without figuring out a way for very rich people to make a profit off it. All other industrialized nations have some form of "national health" and if they can do it, I don’t see that America alone needs to keep health care in the pockets of the wealthy. If you continue to keep the wealthy in charge of health care (and I don’t just mean the insurance companies) then you’re going to continue to get health care that provides primarily for the wealthy; the rest of us can take Medicaid and learn to like it.
We have got to stop thinking this way; a lot of people’s lives depend on it. Insurance companies and health care managers are all trained in the business of business, and health care is their product and their responsibilities are to their stockholders. That’s how things are done in capitalist America. We need a change, and I can’t believe that there’s anything un-American about heaping people healthy.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
The only time I listen to the radio is in my car, and I seldom listen closely; I keep it on for background noise. But today one particular bit of background noise caught my ear; an NPR program had an Ivy League professor (I didn’t catch his name) going on about how restraining medical costs (like any meaningful health care reform would) would be a Bad Thing for the economy, since the health care industry is one of our only growth industries right now.
Now, I never caught his name, so I can’t look him or his writing (if any) up on the web; I really don’t know if he had anything else to say, perhaps something I might agree with. I don’t know his credentials or bona fides, so I can’t say if they’re worth a damn. I can say that I’ve heard this song before, from far-right commentators and the odd loony-toon on the web, but they were easy to dismiss. This guy’s Ivy League credentials put him in a different category, that of one who should know better.
I will admit that he’s probably right. Health care is a growth industry in the U.S., and making sweeping regulatory changes in any growth industry right now could very well exacerbate a dismal situation. From an economic standpoint, he’s right.
So the fuck what?
Yes, health care is an industry in the U.S., one that’s in a state of growth when other industries are suffering. That’s the problem; health care in this country is in the control of Business (with a capitol B), with decisions made always with an eye toward the bottom line, the balance sheet, the ledger. Decisions that should be left to the patient and his or her doctor(s) are left in the hands of people with MBA’s rather than MD’s, of managers rather than healers.
So as I am listening to this joker I am wondering just how many deaths are acceptable in his quest for the bottom line. Just how much bad health care do we have to suffer because it’s more cost effective? How many poor people have to do without adequate health care because it’s not economically viable to provide them with something better? If he addressed any of these questions I didn’t hear it, and I don’t have time to find out who he is or what else he might have said, whether he addressed any of these concerns or not. I had to stop and buy gas, and by the time I got back in my car the program was on to something else. But I didn’t get the impression that the health care needs of the poor were much of a concern for him.
I got the distinct impression that Mr. Ivy League was not at all concerned with keeping people healthy; I felt that his primary concern was in keeping the health care industry healthy and profitable.
Health care shouldn’t be something we look to to turn a profit. This statement may seem un-American to some people; hell, I’ll even admit that it is un-American to an extent. It is un-American, in the sense that it’s not the way we do things in America, to provide health care without a built-in profit incentive. In fact, it’s thought of as un-American (or downright communist) to do ANYTHING without an eye to profit. And this is the problem; we need to look at health care as something everyone should enjoy, not something for sale to those who can afford it and the rest can make do.
And speaking of making do, there’s Medicaid, the government’s alternative to pay-for-play health care that is available to the poor. Now, this space was originally filled with two paragraphs describing Medicaid and its shortcomings, my personal financial woes and my main Medicaid complaints, but those paragraphs were getting awfully long and I decided to cut them. Suffice to say that Medicaid is about as efficient as a beat-up ’63 Ford pick-up with a wonky carb and no muffler. But, hey, it keeps me alive, if not running much better than that old Ford. But I digress; perhaps Medicaid is a subject best addressed in a later article.
Health care is too important, too basic a necessity, to leave it in the hands of those who worship the bottom line. People’s health is something that we as a society should be working to preserve, without figuring out a way for very rich people to make a profit off it. All other industrialized nations have some form of "national health" and if they can do it, I don’t see that America alone needs to keep health care in the pockets of the wealthy. If you continue to keep the wealthy in charge of health care (and I don’t just mean the insurance companies) then you’re going to continue to get health care that provides primarily for the wealthy; the rest of us can take Medicaid and learn to like it.
We have got to stop thinking this way; a lot of people’s lives depend on it. Insurance companies and health care managers are all trained in the business of business, and health care is their product and their responsibilities are to their stockholders. That’s how things are done in capitalist America. We need a change, and I can’t believe that there’s anything un-American about heaping people healthy.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Monday, December 8, 2008
400 years old and still dead...Happy Birthday, John Milton
...What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
and justify the ways of God to men.
John Milton, Paradise Lost book I, lines 22-26
If that doesn't sound much like me, that's because it's John Milton.
Not that many people care, but Tuesday is the 400th birthday of John Milton, poet, politician, civil servant and the bane of college freshmen who have had to plow through Paradise Lost for four centuries (it can take that long to read it).
Actually, I’ve always liked John Milton and Paradise Lost, ever since I first read this work back in high school. How I came to read Milton I’m not sure; he wasn’t included in the English Lit textbooks we were using and I don’t recall that we ever even discussed him. I do recall that at about this time I encountered a battered old copy of Paradise Lost at a used book sale, and I was hooked. (That’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?)
I remember back then I arranged a "multiple reading" for Forensics class that combined bits of Paradise Lost with bits of Jean-Claude van Italie’s play The Serpent. (To good effect, as I recall.) We took that reading to Regional competition, if I remember correctly.
I think I was the only person in my high school that had ever read Milton; certainly the only one among the students and possibly the teachers as well.
But even then I found Milton less than perfect; I didn’t think all that much of his poetic stile, and for the passages that I used I "rearranged" Milton to suit my own taste. I still have my original notes for that project; looking back, I have to admit that John Milton knew more about what he was doing than I did. But that’s all past.
Milton should be remembered for something aside from Paradise Lost; he also wrote Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, a tract against censorship of which Wikipedia says, "Areopagitica is among history's most influential and impassioned philosophical defences of the principle of a right to free expression."
But it will forever be Paradise Lost that Milton is remembered for, even if hardly anyone has actually read it and of those that have few remember it well. And with some justification; though I respect his story and his characters, and I can appreciate his humor, reading his poetry can be like wading through molasses. Or at least I used to think so...since I’ve read so damn much Patrick O’Brian I find Milton much easier to get through.
So I’m going to say "Happy Birthday" to John Milton, and here’s to another 400 years of boring the pants off of students and teachers alike. With a little luck there may yet be one other out there who will find the same inspiration in his work that I have found.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading
John Milton on Wikipedia, Paradise Lost, Areopagitica
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
It occurs to me...
...that I haven't gone begging for people to look at my other blog for a while. Consider yourself begged.
http://blueblogslinks.blogspot.com/
http://blueblogslinks.blogspot.com/
UPDATED Still two weeks to go...
...and Obama is already being criticized for his leadership. By his own party.
UPDATE 12/8/08 - Two weeks? What am I, stoned? More like two months...less, actually, but closer to that than what I wrote. What the hell was I thinking? -BV
Well, that didn’t take long.
Barack Obama isn’t President yet, and now there are elements within his own party who are criticizing him for not acting enough like a President. Obama is famous for saying that we only have one President at a time; more recently, Congressman Barney Frank has said that this estimate overstates the number of Presidents we have.
Witty banter aside, Obama is right...we only have one President, and his name (for a couple of weeks yet, anyway) is George W. Bush. If Bush chooses not to do anything Presidential and instead wants to work on rewriting history to make his reign smell better, that’s his call. He can ignore his responsibilities if he wants to; for two more weeks, it’s his job to screw up.
I’m not sure what those Democrats want from Obama, anyway. He’s performed a miracle getting elected President of the United States, where it was once thought (last year, in fact) that a black man had no chance of getting elected President in modern America. That was no mean feat; but for some reason one miricle is not enough for some people.
More to the point, there’s nothing Obama can do right now besides assembling his cabinet, reading the intelligence briefings and studying the economy in preparation for the job he’s about to take. And these things he’s doing, and doing as well as anyone may; I fail to understand what rabbits people expect him to pull out of his hat now, before he even has the job, before he has any power to actually make things happen.
Some people seem to be forgetting that the president-elect does not have any power, executive or otherwise, before he’s the President, save for the aforementioned appointing of his staff and advisors. Sure, he can say what he’s going to do, he can prepare to start right in on day one and make pronouncements and laws and Executive Orders and the like, but before he's actually got the job he is powerless. And he’s not President yet, and until he is he can’t actually do shit.
Personally, I like how Obama has handled himself to this point. I like his proposed public works program (I keep wanting to call it the WPA) and I like that he appears to be trying to save the auto industry, without simply handing them cash with no oversight and without strings. But the economic situation is changing daily, too fast for most of us to keep up, and it’s by no means the only disaster that the new President will have to deal with. Expecting Obama to do something now that would make it all better would be like insisting on smoked salmon and Melba toast instead of loaves and fishes.
Let the man do his job; and right now, two weeks before his inauguration, his job is to prepare to be President, to see to it that we actually have a President informed and prepared to do the job as of that day; Like Barney Frank, I’m not entirely sure we have one now.
I do know that we get one in a couple of weeks; let’s not expect the man to be doing the job before he has any legal authority to actually do the job.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
UPDATE 12/8/08 - Two weeks? What am I, stoned? More like two months...less, actually, but closer to that than what I wrote. What the hell was I thinking? -BV
Well, that didn’t take long.
Barack Obama isn’t President yet, and now there are elements within his own party who are criticizing him for not acting enough like a President. Obama is famous for saying that we only have one President at a time; more recently, Congressman Barney Frank has said that this estimate overstates the number of Presidents we have.
Witty banter aside, Obama is right...we only have one President, and his name (for a couple of weeks yet, anyway) is George W. Bush. If Bush chooses not to do anything Presidential and instead wants to work on rewriting history to make his reign smell better, that’s his call. He can ignore his responsibilities if he wants to; for two more weeks, it’s his job to screw up.
I’m not sure what those Democrats want from Obama, anyway. He’s performed a miracle getting elected President of the United States, where it was once thought (last year, in fact) that a black man had no chance of getting elected President in modern America. That was no mean feat; but for some reason one miricle is not enough for some people.
More to the point, there’s nothing Obama can do right now besides assembling his cabinet, reading the intelligence briefings and studying the economy in preparation for the job he’s about to take. And these things he’s doing, and doing as well as anyone may; I fail to understand what rabbits people expect him to pull out of his hat now, before he even has the job, before he has any power to actually make things happen.
Some people seem to be forgetting that the president-elect does not have any power, executive or otherwise, before he’s the President, save for the aforementioned appointing of his staff and advisors. Sure, he can say what he’s going to do, he can prepare to start right in on day one and make pronouncements and laws and Executive Orders and the like, but before he's actually got the job he is powerless. And he’s not President yet, and until he is he can’t actually do shit.
Personally, I like how Obama has handled himself to this point. I like his proposed public works program (I keep wanting to call it the WPA) and I like that he appears to be trying to save the auto industry, without simply handing them cash with no oversight and without strings. But the economic situation is changing daily, too fast for most of us to keep up, and it’s by no means the only disaster that the new President will have to deal with. Expecting Obama to do something now that would make it all better would be like insisting on smoked salmon and Melba toast instead of loaves and fishes.
Let the man do his job; and right now, two weeks before his inauguration, his job is to prepare to be President, to see to it that we actually have a President informed and prepared to do the job as of that day; Like Barney Frank, I’m not entirely sure we have one now.
I do know that we get one in a couple of weeks; let’s not expect the man to be doing the job before he has any legal authority to actually do the job.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Prop. 8: The Tragedy
In the wake of Proposition 8 in California, and the musical short that ridicules it, there's a larger question to consider
Over the last couple of days the Web has been all abuzz about a musical production called Prop. 8: the Musical that ridicules the forces that successfully fought the Constitutional right of gays to marry in California. Now you may agree or disagree with these sentiments; for the purposes of this article, it doesn’t really matter. The point I’m trying to make is that what happened in California sets a very dangerous precedent, and if it’s allowed to stand it could have ramifications that, even if you don’t find them frightening, are certainly gravely serious.
California Dreaming
Just what did happen in California, anyway? Well, Wikipedia puts it this way:
"Proposition 8 was a California ballot proposition that changed the state Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman and eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry."
Of course, Wikipedia had a lot more to say; briefly, when the California Supreme Court said that gay marriage was legal, the opponents of same sex marriage mobilized and managed to get Proposition 8 on the ballot, which would change the state constitution and trump anything that the California Supreme Court might have to say about it. They deemed this to be a more effective approach than taking it to court again, since Supreme Courts don’t often reverse themselves. Occasionally, but not often.
They were right. It was a close vote, but the proposition passed; gay marriage is no longer legal in California.
I could go on about how the vote went, how the demographics split, how urban voters compared to rural voters, how the vote split racially, and so on and so forth; but that’s not what this article is about. (Read the Wikipedia entry if you want that stuff.) But before I get to the heart of the matter, a bit more background:
The play’s the thing
A few days ago Prop.8: the Musical started to makle itself known on the Web. It stars Jack Black as Jesus, John C. Reilly as a stuffed suit and Neil Patrick Harris as...well, as just some guy. The musical was conceived of and written by Marc Shaiman, who also wrote Hairspray and songs for South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut. The show runs about three minutes, and in that three minutes it does a better job of summarizing the history of Proposition 8 than I ever could.
The musical short manages to point out the hypocrisies involved in the debate, but I’m not going to talk about them. Nor am I going to talk about what’s right or wrong about same-sex marriage. If you want my opinions, ask for them. (On second thought, don’t; I support marriage, no matter what genders are involved, and I think that Proposition 8 was a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys. But that’s just an opinion, and in any case it’s not what I’m getting to.)
But all this eight-is-evil stuff is after-the-fact and doesn't come in time to make a difference; the votes are in and the supporters of same-sex marriage lost. The amendment to redefine "marriage" as something between a man and a woman is now the law of the land in California. Gay couples who had the right to marry (and many of them did so) have had that right taken away. And that’s what I’m writing about.
What the Constitution gifteth...
When you think about it, democracy is all about the majority imposing its will on the minority. That’s what has happened here, in its purest form. I can’t think of any other time in U.S. history when a Constitutional amendment has been used to take rights away from a minority. Before Proposition 8, constitutional amendments have been used to clarify rights, to expand rights, to recognize rights...but not to take someone’s rights away. And if it can be done in California, what’s to stop it happening elsewhere? Or nationally? To anyone?
Once some people get the idea that it's OK to take rights away from you just by polling the electorate, where will they stop? Will they stop?
That is the danger of Proposition 8. It’s the very definition of the "slippery slope" theory. It says that if you’re group isn’t in the majority, and if the majority thinks that you’re doing something immoral, your behavior can be legislated against. Never mind that all previous efforts to legislate morality have mostly failed. (Remember Prohibition? I don't, because long before I was born people realized that it was a bad and unworkable idea.)
Proposition 8 is also a failure; it was from the start. Its supporters never thought they were going to change anyone’s behavior in any significant way (much as they might like to), they just wanted to deny gay people the same rights, privleges and responsibilities that everyone else is entitled to. (OK, so my own bias is showing through a bit. Couldn't help it.) And I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of their argument, no matter how strongly I may feel. That’s not what this article is about.
This article is about the fact that the basic civil rights of a large segment of the public have been put to a vote. The outcome of such a vote is, for the purposes of this article, irrelevant; the practice of curtailing people's rights in this manner is un-American.
Oh no, not again...
I don’t see any way to solve this dilemma without yet another Constitutional amendment, one that repeals Proposition 8. No state constitution, and certainly not the national Constitution, should be used in this way. But the law is now on the books, and frankly I don’t see all that much hope in current efforts to challenge Proposition 8 as unconstitutional due to its injustice, or on procedural grounds.
Whether or not Proposition 8 stands is, ultimately, up to the voters of California. However you feel about gay marriage, this is a Constitutional issue and each of us, whether we live in California or not, should decide it on those grounds.
Oh, and keep in mind that I don’t live in California and I’m not gay; but the point that I’ve been trying to make is that if Proposition 8 is let stand then it stands as a threat to the rights of individuals in all states, of all Americans, and it weakens the Constitution. Directly, the California Constitution, but indirectly the U.S. Constitution and those of the other 49 states.
I’d call that frightening. And gravely serious.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading (or viewing)
The musical short Prop. 8: The Musical is at Funny or Die
Wikipedia’s entry for Proposition 8
A New York Times article on the musical
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Over the last couple of days the Web has been all abuzz about a musical production called Prop. 8: the Musical that ridicules the forces that successfully fought the Constitutional right of gays to marry in California. Now you may agree or disagree with these sentiments; for the purposes of this article, it doesn’t really matter. The point I’m trying to make is that what happened in California sets a very dangerous precedent, and if it’s allowed to stand it could have ramifications that, even if you don’t find them frightening, are certainly gravely serious.
California Dreaming
Just what did happen in California, anyway? Well, Wikipedia puts it this way:
"Proposition 8 was a California ballot proposition that changed the state Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman and eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry."
Of course, Wikipedia had a lot more to say; briefly, when the California Supreme Court said that gay marriage was legal, the opponents of same sex marriage mobilized and managed to get Proposition 8 on the ballot, which would change the state constitution and trump anything that the California Supreme Court might have to say about it. They deemed this to be a more effective approach than taking it to court again, since Supreme Courts don’t often reverse themselves. Occasionally, but not often.
They were right. It was a close vote, but the proposition passed; gay marriage is no longer legal in California.
I could go on about how the vote went, how the demographics split, how urban voters compared to rural voters, how the vote split racially, and so on and so forth; but that’s not what this article is about. (Read the Wikipedia entry if you want that stuff.) But before I get to the heart of the matter, a bit more background:
The play’s the thing
A few days ago Prop.8: the Musical started to makle itself known on the Web. It stars Jack Black as Jesus, John C. Reilly as a stuffed suit and Neil Patrick Harris as...well, as just some guy. The musical was conceived of and written by Marc Shaiman, who also wrote Hairspray and songs for South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut. The show runs about three minutes, and in that three minutes it does a better job of summarizing the history of Proposition 8 than I ever could.
The musical short manages to point out the hypocrisies involved in the debate, but I’m not going to talk about them. Nor am I going to talk about what’s right or wrong about same-sex marriage. If you want my opinions, ask for them. (On second thought, don’t; I support marriage, no matter what genders are involved, and I think that Proposition 8 was a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys. But that’s just an opinion, and in any case it’s not what I’m getting to.)
But all this eight-is-evil stuff is after-the-fact and doesn't come in time to make a difference; the votes are in and the supporters of same-sex marriage lost. The amendment to redefine "marriage" as something between a man and a woman is now the law of the land in California. Gay couples who had the right to marry (and many of them did so) have had that right taken away. And that’s what I’m writing about.
What the Constitution gifteth...
When you think about it, democracy is all about the majority imposing its will on the minority. That’s what has happened here, in its purest form. I can’t think of any other time in U.S. history when a Constitutional amendment has been used to take rights away from a minority. Before Proposition 8, constitutional amendments have been used to clarify rights, to expand rights, to recognize rights...but not to take someone’s rights away. And if it can be done in California, what’s to stop it happening elsewhere? Or nationally? To anyone?
Once some people get the idea that it's OK to take rights away from you just by polling the electorate, where will they stop? Will they stop?
That is the danger of Proposition 8. It’s the very definition of the "slippery slope" theory. It says that if you’re group isn’t in the majority, and if the majority thinks that you’re doing something immoral, your behavior can be legislated against. Never mind that all previous efforts to legislate morality have mostly failed. (Remember Prohibition? I don't, because long before I was born people realized that it was a bad and unworkable idea.)
Proposition 8 is also a failure; it was from the start. Its supporters never thought they were going to change anyone’s behavior in any significant way (much as they might like to), they just wanted to deny gay people the same rights, privleges and responsibilities that everyone else is entitled to. (OK, so my own bias is showing through a bit. Couldn't help it.) And I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of their argument, no matter how strongly I may feel. That’s not what this article is about.
This article is about the fact that the basic civil rights of a large segment of the public have been put to a vote. The outcome of such a vote is, for the purposes of this article, irrelevant; the practice of curtailing people's rights in this manner is un-American.
Oh no, not again...
I don’t see any way to solve this dilemma without yet another Constitutional amendment, one that repeals Proposition 8. No state constitution, and certainly not the national Constitution, should be used in this way. But the law is now on the books, and frankly I don’t see all that much hope in current efforts to challenge Proposition 8 as unconstitutional due to its injustice, or on procedural grounds.
Whether or not Proposition 8 stands is, ultimately, up to the voters of California. However you feel about gay marriage, this is a Constitutional issue and each of us, whether we live in California or not, should decide it on those grounds.
Oh, and keep in mind that I don’t live in California and I’m not gay; but the point that I’ve been trying to make is that if Proposition 8 is let stand then it stands as a threat to the rights of individuals in all states, of all Americans, and it weakens the Constitution. Directly, the California Constitution, but indirectly the U.S. Constitution and those of the other 49 states.
I’d call that frightening. And gravely serious.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading (or viewing)
The musical short Prop. 8: The Musical is at Funny or Die
Wikipedia’s entry for Proposition 8
A New York Times article on the musical
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Never posted...and way dated now. And way wrong. But worth a read...
This is the last one, I promise!
In this article, written while I was unable to log on back in September-October, I gave vent to my paranoia. I'm not sure why I never posted this...perhaps I wasn't feeling as paranoid when I got my connection back; perhaps I just forgot about it. Probably the latter.
In any case, here it is, straight out of the dark days of two and a half months ago, before Barack Obama had won and paranoia seemed like just good sense.
By the way...I'm a hell of a lot more optimistic now.
BV 12/4/08
Electile Dysfunction
Tuesday, September 16
Once again, I'm composing this article off-line because I don't have an internet connection right now. It's really stupid of me to tell you that...since I can't post this until I do have a connection, and once I have a connection I won't have to do this off-line crap. But at least this keeps me writing, and I need the practice.
If you've been paying attention to this blog (why?) you'll have noticed there's been a bit of a drop in political articles. This is because I am sick to death of politics, sick to death of the election, sick to death of both McCain and Obama, and sick to death of Sara Palin too. Haven't heard much about Joe Biden lately...
I suppose you could call it "election burnout." I managed to stay interested longer than in past elections, since there was some actual drama in the campaigns what with the will-she-support-him-or-not element to the Democratic race and the who-will-he-pick element to the Republican race. I am so tired of it all I just wish it would come to an early end. No hope of that though. But I may recover my interest...who knows, something dramatic may yet happen to rejuvenate either party. Not much hope of that either, but still...
So just to keep myself in this, I'm going to go out on an early limb and make a prediction in the Presidential race.
I know it's early, too early for any kind of accuracy (especially in a race this close), and I am well aware that anything can still happen; the debates haven't yet gotten into swing, the campaigns are only just starting to get dirty, the gloves are only just starting to come off; it's still possible that this election will get exciting again. But I doubt it. I think that we're in for another six weeks of distortions, exaggerations, and outright lies countered with more distortions, exaggerations and outright lies.
Gee, am I sounding cynical? Maybe I'm just in a bad mood.
Anyway, here's my prediction for the election:
After the Democratic victory in November, Sarah Palin lands a seat at the table on The View.
No? Well, how about this...
McCain 's secret past is revealed when footage surfaces of him selling the Pittsburgh Steelers' play book to Ho Chi Minh, but he keeps saying that it's really Obama's fault so often that everyone believes him and he wins the election in a landslide.
Too far fetched? OK, let's try this one...
Barack Obama peels off his skin to reveal that he is in reality an evil alien overlord, and this carries him into the White House because it turns out that that's what Americans really want.
Too sci-fi? How about this one instead...
Obama wins the popular vote, but the electoral college is too close to call and McCain asks the Supreme Court to step in (unconstitutional, but never mind) and they select John McCain to be our next President.
Am I being serious? Of course not...that story is too far-fetched to actually happen. Right?
OK, so my tongue was in my cheek just then...but remember that the Supreme Court scenario actually played out in 2000, and there's nothing in place to keep it from happening again. And with an election this close, it's a real possibility. Remember that the race in Ohio in the 2004 Presidential election was nearly as close. I'm beginning to think that close elections are the new thing; that the days of landslide victories may well be over. If we're overruled again in November's election, by either side, I'm going to say that democracy in America, at least on a national level, is well and truly dead.
And that's my election prediction.
It may be dead even now, and I'm just fooling myself into believing that it's still alive, but I do not want to believe that. So I won't. Like I said, anything can happen, and it's just possible that this election will be taken out of our hands. After all, it's happened before...
The Blues Viking
UPDATE 12/4/08 - Actually, I'm still waiting for Sarah Palin to end up on The View so I can not watch her.
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
In this article, written while I was unable to log on back in September-October, I gave vent to my paranoia. I'm not sure why I never posted this...perhaps I wasn't feeling as paranoid when I got my connection back; perhaps I just forgot about it. Probably the latter.
In any case, here it is, straight out of the dark days of two and a half months ago, before Barack Obama had won and paranoia seemed like just good sense.
By the way...I'm a hell of a lot more optimistic now.
BV 12/4/08
Electile Dysfunction
Tuesday, September 16
Once again, I'm composing this article off-line because I don't have an internet connection right now. It's really stupid of me to tell you that...since I can't post this until I do have a connection, and once I have a connection I won't have to do this off-line crap. But at least this keeps me writing, and I need the practice.
If you've been paying attention to this blog (why?) you'll have noticed there's been a bit of a drop in political articles. This is because I am sick to death of politics, sick to death of the election, sick to death of both McCain and Obama, and sick to death of Sara Palin too. Haven't heard much about Joe Biden lately...
I suppose you could call it "election burnout." I managed to stay interested longer than in past elections, since there was some actual drama in the campaigns what with the will-she-support-him-or-not element to the Democratic race and the who-will-he-pick element to the Republican race. I am so tired of it all I just wish it would come to an early end. No hope of that though. But I may recover my interest...who knows, something dramatic may yet happen to rejuvenate either party. Not much hope of that either, but still...
So just to keep myself in this, I'm going to go out on an early limb and make a prediction in the Presidential race.
I know it's early, too early for any kind of accuracy (especially in a race this close), and I am well aware that anything can still happen; the debates haven't yet gotten into swing, the campaigns are only just starting to get dirty, the gloves are only just starting to come off; it's still possible that this election will get exciting again. But I doubt it. I think that we're in for another six weeks of distortions, exaggerations, and outright lies countered with more distortions, exaggerations and outright lies.
Gee, am I sounding cynical? Maybe I'm just in a bad mood.
Anyway, here's my prediction for the election:
After the Democratic victory in November, Sarah Palin lands a seat at the table on The View.
No? Well, how about this...
McCain 's secret past is revealed when footage surfaces of him selling the Pittsburgh Steelers' play book to Ho Chi Minh, but he keeps saying that it's really Obama's fault so often that everyone believes him and he wins the election in a landslide.
Too far fetched? OK, let's try this one...
Barack Obama peels off his skin to reveal that he is in reality an evil alien overlord, and this carries him into the White House because it turns out that that's what Americans really want.
Too sci-fi? How about this one instead...
Obama wins the popular vote, but the electoral college is too close to call and McCain asks the Supreme Court to step in (unconstitutional, but never mind) and they select John McCain to be our next President.
Am I being serious? Of course not...that story is too far-fetched to actually happen. Right?
OK, so my tongue was in my cheek just then...but remember that the Supreme Court scenario actually played out in 2000, and there's nothing in place to keep it from happening again. And with an election this close, it's a real possibility. Remember that the race in Ohio in the 2004 Presidential election was nearly as close. I'm beginning to think that close elections are the new thing; that the days of landslide victories may well be over. If we're overruled again in November's election, by either side, I'm going to say that democracy in America, at least on a national level, is well and truly dead.
And that's my election prediction.
It may be dead even now, and I'm just fooling myself into believing that it's still alive, but I do not want to believe that. So I won't. Like I said, anything can happen, and it's just possible that this election will be taken out of our hands. After all, it's happened before...
The Blues Viking
UPDATE 12/4/08 - Actually, I'm still waiting for Sarah Palin to end up on The View so I can not watch her.
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Another old post that never made it to the board
This is another old article that I didn't want to just trash. I wrote this during that period when my Internet connection went bye-bye, and I fully intended to post it whenever I was able to get back on-line. But this article dealt with the economy, and the situation was developing rapidly then; in point of fact, the bottom was then falling out but hadn't fallen so far that we couldn't see it. Now, looking for bottom feels like gazing into a bottomless pit.
I tried, for a day or so, to keep this article updated, but after having to post three updates in two hours I decided that it was a bad job and gave it up. But while going through old articles I realized I still had it, and still liked it, dated though it was, so here it is for your historical reading pleasure.
Remember, this is old stuff; the election was still in the future and the economy, while sick, wasn't yet on the critical list. Two and a half months ago...seems like forever doesn't it?
BV 12/4/08
Are you listening, John McCain? It's me, the Economy...
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Once again, this is me writing off-line to post later. This article deals with the economic situation which is still developing, and I'll be updating it as necessary...updates will be dated, bold and italicized. (Also red. -BV 12/4) All times Eastern.
John McCain says he doesn't understand economics as well as he should. He's not alone there; economics is such a complex subject that I suspect it takes a degree in economics to understand economics. I don't think Obama understands economics either; isn't that what economic advisors are for? At least Obama's advisors seem to understand it well enough to see the problems.
Be that as it may, I don't think it takes a degree in economics to say that, economically, we are in deep shit. In the last few days, several important things have happened that aren't exactly inspiring confidence on Wall Street:
Merrel-Lynch, one of America's oldest and largest investment firms, was sold to Bank of America.
AIG, America's largest insurance company, was saved from bankruptcy by a Federal loan (read bailout), secured by collateral consisting of many of the insurance, financial and investment firms that AIG owns. The Federal government now owns most of the debt (good and bad) that AIG has acquired/accrued over the years.
"Fanny May" and "Freddy Mac," which loaned most of the money that people are now defaulting on in record numbers, and as such were facing insolvency if not outright bankruptcy, were bailed out by the Federal government.
Lehman Brothers, America's leading investment bank, went belly-up and is no more.
American business and finance (most of it, anyway) is suffering from an odd kind of dual personality. When times are good, they're all the perfect capitalists, staunchly opposing any effort to socialize any aspect of society that touches their interests and fighting any effort to tax them for services that they say they don't need. On the other hand, when they suffer serious financial losses they all hoist a red flag and turn into raving socialists; they run to the Federal government for a taxpayer-funded bailout, they want protection from their debts and their creditors, and through all of this they want to continue doing business as usual.
Morgan-Stanley and Goldman-Sacks are almost the only major investment banks left in a market that is being driven primarily by fear. Major banks are, right now, afraid to lend to each other let alone to anyone else, so the Federal Reserve (and other government-run institutions around the world) are forced to keep pumping money into the system just top keep banks in funds and able to lend money...which they're being very careful about lending. Yeah, now....
UPDATE Thursday 9/18 9:30 AM - As of Thursday morning, there is word that Wachovia is up for sale and speculation that Morgan-Stanley and Goldman-Sachs may merge, either with each other or with new partners such as Wachovia. Other mergers are rumored. -BV
It's interesting to see how all this effects the Presidential race. The weak economy favors Obama, what with McCain continually saying that the economy is strong and everyone else seeing something vastly different. How could this not help Obama? At least it's driven Sarah Palin out of the headlines for now...she can join Joe Biden on the bench.
Disturbingly enough, Bush hasn't been talking. It's traditional for the President to at least make some kind of speech at times like this, and in a timely fashion...but so far, silence from the White House. (But there are indications that he might speak up soon and quotes indicating that the President's schedule is in flux, as of Midnight Wednesday night-Thursday morning). With Bush not talking, investors are getting even more nervous; Americans like to believe that their government is doing something--anything--at a time like this. Bush needs to step up to the plate, and if not actually do something then at least tell us what he's going to do.
UPDATE Thursday 9/18 10:18 AM - George Bush has spoken at last; he just gave a brief speech (about three minutes, if that) that didn't do much to inspire confidence in the American economy. George is focused on placing Band-Aids on bleeding wounds, and hasn't offered anything to stop the cuts in the first place. -BV
And John McCain, that staunch opponent of government bailouts and regulation, has been forced to reverse himself (again) and support taxpayer funded bailouts (though they're calling them "loans") of Fanny and Freddy and to call for closer government supervision of them both.
But don't worry...John McCain has said that the economy is fundamentally strong. Yeah, right.
He really doesn't understand this stuff, does he?
The Blues Viking
UPDATE Thursday 9/18 10:00 AM - I just heard that the Russian stock market fell 11% yesterday in a panic fueled by concerns over the U.S. stock market. This is me, eating my previous words...it appears we actually can hurt Russia, after all...by going broke. That'll show 'em. -BV
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
I tried, for a day or so, to keep this article updated, but after having to post three updates in two hours I decided that it was a bad job and gave it up. But while going through old articles I realized I still had it, and still liked it, dated though it was, so here it is for your historical reading pleasure.
Remember, this is old stuff; the election was still in the future and the economy, while sick, wasn't yet on the critical list. Two and a half months ago...seems like forever doesn't it?
BV 12/4/08
Are you listening, John McCain? It's me, the Economy...
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Once again, this is me writing off-line to post later. This article deals with the economic situation which is still developing, and I'll be updating it as necessary...updates will be dated, bold and italicized. (Also red. -BV 12/4) All times Eastern.
John McCain says he doesn't understand economics as well as he should. He's not alone there; economics is such a complex subject that I suspect it takes a degree in economics to understand economics. I don't think Obama understands economics either; isn't that what economic advisors are for? At least Obama's advisors seem to understand it well enough to see the problems.
Be that as it may, I don't think it takes a degree in economics to say that, economically, we are in deep shit. In the last few days, several important things have happened that aren't exactly inspiring confidence on Wall Street:
Merrel-Lynch, one of America's oldest and largest investment firms, was sold to Bank of America.
AIG, America's largest insurance company, was saved from bankruptcy by a Federal loan (read bailout), secured by collateral consisting of many of the insurance, financial and investment firms that AIG owns. The Federal government now owns most of the debt (good and bad) that AIG has acquired/accrued over the years.
"Fanny May" and "Freddy Mac," which loaned most of the money that people are now defaulting on in record numbers, and as such were facing insolvency if not outright bankruptcy, were bailed out by the Federal government.
Lehman Brothers, America's leading investment bank, went belly-up and is no more.
American business and finance (most of it, anyway) is suffering from an odd kind of dual personality. When times are good, they're all the perfect capitalists, staunchly opposing any effort to socialize any aspect of society that touches their interests and fighting any effort to tax them for services that they say they don't need. On the other hand, when they suffer serious financial losses they all hoist a red flag and turn into raving socialists; they run to the Federal government for a taxpayer-funded bailout, they want protection from their debts and their creditors, and through all of this they want to continue doing business as usual.
Morgan-Stanley and Goldman-Sacks are almost the only major investment banks left in a market that is being driven primarily by fear. Major banks are, right now, afraid to lend to each other let alone to anyone else, so the Federal Reserve (and other government-run institutions around the world) are forced to keep pumping money into the system just top keep banks in funds and able to lend money...which they're being very careful about lending. Yeah, now....
UPDATE Thursday 9/18 9:30 AM - As of Thursday morning, there is word that Wachovia is up for sale and speculation that Morgan-Stanley and Goldman-Sachs may merge, either with each other or with new partners such as Wachovia. Other mergers are rumored. -BV
It's interesting to see how all this effects the Presidential race. The weak economy favors Obama, what with McCain continually saying that the economy is strong and everyone else seeing something vastly different. How could this not help Obama? At least it's driven Sarah Palin out of the headlines for now...she can join Joe Biden on the bench.
Disturbingly enough, Bush hasn't been talking. It's traditional for the President to at least make some kind of speech at times like this, and in a timely fashion...but so far, silence from the White House. (But there are indications that he might speak up soon and quotes indicating that the President's schedule is in flux, as of Midnight Wednesday night-Thursday morning). With Bush not talking, investors are getting even more nervous; Americans like to believe that their government is doing something--anything--at a time like this. Bush needs to step up to the plate, and if not actually do something then at least tell us what he's going to do.
UPDATE Thursday 9/18 10:18 AM - George Bush has spoken at last; he just gave a brief speech (about three minutes, if that) that didn't do much to inspire confidence in the American economy. George is focused on placing Band-Aids on bleeding wounds, and hasn't offered anything to stop the cuts in the first place. -BV
And John McCain, that staunch opponent of government bailouts and regulation, has been forced to reverse himself (again) and support taxpayer funded bailouts (though they're calling them "loans") of Fanny and Freddy and to call for closer government supervision of them both.
But don't worry...John McCain has said that the economy is fundamentally strong. Yeah, right.
He really doesn't understand this stuff, does he?
The Blues Viking
UPDATE Thursday 9/18 10:00 AM - I just heard that the Russian stock market fell 11% yesterday in a panic fueled by concerns over the U.S. stock market. This is me, eating my previous words...it appears we actually can hurt Russia, after all...by going broke. That'll show 'em. -BV
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
It’s never over, even when it’s over
The election is mostly over; tonight it got a bit more mostly over.
In Georgia, where a close election failed to produce the state-mandated "50% + 1 vote" majority for any candidate, the run-off was today, and Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss has defeated Democratic challenger Jim Martin by a comfortable 60-40 split. According to current projections, that is; but with 60% of the vote counted it certainly looks that way. (As of 9:00 PM Tuesday, that’s the way the run-off election seemed to be turning out.)
This is the final nail in the coffin for the Democrats’ hopes for that magic 60 Senate seats, that so-called "veto proof" majority that they’ve been longing for. Ain’t gonna happen...not this year, anyway. Remember that we get to go through Senate elections again in two years, and if the Democrats don’t manage to screw up (or if they manage a fast enough economic turn-around to keep the electorate satisfied) they have a good chance to change things in 2010.
But that’s a pretty tall order...not only do they need to do a good job for the next two years, they need to show real and tangible improvement in the financial arena by the next election. Not just some improvement, but enough improvement that the public will be convinced that the recession (now that the government actually admits there is one) is well and truly over.
That’s not so impossible; remember that no recession in the U.S. has ever lasted more than about a year and a half or so, and everyone now admits that the one we’re in now has been going on for a year already. (Now they say it’s been on for a year. Hell, I could have told them that; anyone could have told them that.)
The Republicans might not want to gloat too much either. I recall back in the days of the Clinton administration, when the Republicans regained control of Congress two years into a Democratic administration. I remember Republican Newt Gingrich (then Speaker of the House) proudly saying "we will not compromise" and virtually salivating over the ability to block whatever Clinton hoped to accomplish. But it backfired for the GOP; they used their new-found power to block Clinton at every turn, sure enough, but against conventional thinking the public actually blamed the Republicans for not getting anything done. The Republicans thought Clinton would get the blame for Congressional inaction; they never expected the public to put the blame where it belonged.
Here’s the lesson of history, and it would do the Democrats well to remember it also: The President’s coattails, while not nearly big enough for everyone to ride, are nowhere near big enough to hide behind, either. No matter which party he represents, yours or theirs.
The Democrats need to remember that Congress, not Obama, will be held responsible if nothing gets done in Congress. And the Republicans need to be aware that the public can’t be counted upon to be so dumb that they can’t see who’s actually responsible for holding things up.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
In Georgia, where a close election failed to produce the state-mandated "50% + 1 vote" majority for any candidate, the run-off was today, and Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss has defeated Democratic challenger Jim Martin by a comfortable 60-40 split. According to current projections, that is; but with 60% of the vote counted it certainly looks that way. (As of 9:00 PM Tuesday, that’s the way the run-off election seemed to be turning out.)
This is the final nail in the coffin for the Democrats’ hopes for that magic 60 Senate seats, that so-called "veto proof" majority that they’ve been longing for. Ain’t gonna happen...not this year, anyway. Remember that we get to go through Senate elections again in two years, and if the Democrats don’t manage to screw up (or if they manage a fast enough economic turn-around to keep the electorate satisfied) they have a good chance to change things in 2010.
But that’s a pretty tall order...not only do they need to do a good job for the next two years, they need to show real and tangible improvement in the financial arena by the next election. Not just some improvement, but enough improvement that the public will be convinced that the recession (now that the government actually admits there is one) is well and truly over.
That’s not so impossible; remember that no recession in the U.S. has ever lasted more than about a year and a half or so, and everyone now admits that the one we’re in now has been going on for a year already. (Now they say it’s been on for a year. Hell, I could have told them that; anyone could have told them that.)
The Republicans might not want to gloat too much either. I recall back in the days of the Clinton administration, when the Republicans regained control of Congress two years into a Democratic administration. I remember Republican Newt Gingrich (then Speaker of the House) proudly saying "we will not compromise" and virtually salivating over the ability to block whatever Clinton hoped to accomplish. But it backfired for the GOP; they used their new-found power to block Clinton at every turn, sure enough, but against conventional thinking the public actually blamed the Republicans for not getting anything done. The Republicans thought Clinton would get the blame for Congressional inaction; they never expected the public to put the blame where it belonged.
Here’s the lesson of history, and it would do the Democrats well to remember it also: The President’s coattails, while not nearly big enough for everyone to ride, are nowhere near big enough to hide behind, either. No matter which party he represents, yours or theirs.
The Democrats need to remember that Congress, not Obama, will be held responsible if nothing gets done in Congress. And the Republicans need to be aware that the public can’t be counted upon to be so dumb that they can’t see who’s actually responsible for holding things up.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Giving Bush his due
"Everybody wants to be liked," President Bush said recently. "But being liked because you've actually done something constructive that's measurable is the best way to try to be liked." If I were looking for something on which to agree with GWB, I’d have to look no further.
As much as I dislike George W. Bush—and if you’ve read much of this blog you know that I’m no fan of his—I believe in giving the man credit where he’s earned it. And he’s certainly earned it in Africa.
Of late, Bush has seemed overly concerned with his "legacy"; that is, the way he’ll be remembered as a President. He’d like Americans to forget things like a stolen election, the illegal detention of prisoners, the denial of basic civil rights to prisoners, the torture of prisoners, the subverting of the Constitution, his highly suspect reasons for going to war, his "rewriting" of his reasons for going to war, and all that patient merit of the unworthy takes. Little things like that. If I were him, I’d be concerned about my legacy as well.
But it has to be admitted (and has largely gone unnoticed) that he has a real legacy, a positive legacy, one that he should be proud of, in Africa.
Bush has instituted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and funneled more than fifty billion in relief to Africa, and the money has made a difference that is real and tangible. You can’t always say that of Presidential initiatives, and when you can it can seldom be said positively. This time it can.
And as if that weren’t enough to be proud of, Bush has also put in place a plan to control Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). That word "neglected" is important; they include devastating conditions such as leprosy and elephantiasis; not as high profile as AIDS, perhaps, but devastating and widely uncontrolled in large parts of Africa.
This is Monday, December 5, World AIDS Day. It is appropriate that we remember George W. Bush for the good he has done. As for the other things, the things that will stain his legacy for years if not decades to come, we’ve got the other 364 days in the year to remember those. I hope that his darker legacy will long be remembered, but the truth is that Bush has made life better, longer, and easier for millions in Africa and he deserves to be remembered for that as well, even if it’s only for a day.
George W. Bush does indeed have a lot to be proud of. Sadly, he also wants to be remembered for things that, frankly, he should be more than ashamed of.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading
The Real Bush Legacy May Be in Africa (Huffington Post)
Bush loosening up on his legacy (International Herald-Tribune)
In Global Battle on AIDS, Bush Creates Legacy (New York Times)
The President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) at Wikipedia
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
As much as I dislike George W. Bush—and if you’ve read much of this blog you know that I’m no fan of his—I believe in giving the man credit where he’s earned it. And he’s certainly earned it in Africa.
Of late, Bush has seemed overly concerned with his "legacy"; that is, the way he’ll be remembered as a President. He’d like Americans to forget things like a stolen election, the illegal detention of prisoners, the denial of basic civil rights to prisoners, the torture of prisoners, the subverting of the Constitution, his highly suspect reasons for going to war, his "rewriting" of his reasons for going to war, and all that patient merit of the unworthy takes. Little things like that. If I were him, I’d be concerned about my legacy as well.
But it has to be admitted (and has largely gone unnoticed) that he has a real legacy, a positive legacy, one that he should be proud of, in Africa.
Bush has instituted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and funneled more than fifty billion in relief to Africa, and the money has made a difference that is real and tangible. You can’t always say that of Presidential initiatives, and when you can it can seldom be said positively. This time it can.
And as if that weren’t enough to be proud of, Bush has also put in place a plan to control Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). That word "neglected" is important; they include devastating conditions such as leprosy and elephantiasis; not as high profile as AIDS, perhaps, but devastating and widely uncontrolled in large parts of Africa.
This is Monday, December 5, World AIDS Day. It is appropriate that we remember George W. Bush for the good he has done. As for the other things, the things that will stain his legacy for years if not decades to come, we’ve got the other 364 days in the year to remember those. I hope that his darker legacy will long be remembered, but the truth is that Bush has made life better, longer, and easier for millions in Africa and he deserves to be remembered for that as well, even if it’s only for a day.
George W. Bush does indeed have a lot to be proud of. Sadly, he also wants to be remembered for things that, frankly, he should be more than ashamed of.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading
The Real Bush Legacy May Be in Africa (Huffington Post)
Bush loosening up on his legacy (International Herald-Tribune)
In Global Battle on AIDS, Bush Creates Legacy (New York Times)
The President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) at Wikipedia
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
What to do until the zombies come
Monster Island by David Wellington
(print version) Running Press, Philadelphia $13.95
Full text available on-line at brokentype.com
A small band of Somali child-solders, with a former UN weapons inspector, survivors of the zombiefication of the Earth, come to New York in search of vital medical suplies. The only things in their way are about forty million New Yorkers. Dead ones.
I don’t normally read horror novels. Mostly because they’re normally horrible.
So believe me when I tell you that I didn’t initially pick up Monster Island for the subject matter; rather, in spite of it. Not that I think there’s anything all that wrong with the genre; H. P. Lovecraft was a masterful author, as were Bram Stoker (Dracula) and Mary Shelly (Frankenstein). And, of course, Richard Matheson wrote a classic novel very like Monster Island in theme, namely I Am Legend.
But as for more "modern" horror authors, well, I’ve read a few, all highly regarded authors with well reviewed books, and even if I admired the writing I’ve never warmed to what was written. So now you know where I’m coming from.
What attracted me initially to Monster Island was the way it had been published. It originally appeared free on-line as a series of blog posts, a few new posts every week, back in 2004. The book gained quite a following that way and was finally brought out in print (that’s actual hard-copy print) in 2006 (the free "ebook" is still available on-line). Since then there have been two sequels, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, making a well-reviewed trilogy.
I liked the idea of publishing a novel on-line that way, but privately I doubted that it would be any good. I’ve read a couple of similar "on-line publishing" attempts in the past, and found them lacking. Bloody awful, actually. But since this one had gone from on-line book to print, and was still available on-line, I thought this one might be different.
Not different enough to bother looking up, though; because I didn’t find the idea of a "zombie novel" all that appealing, I never even bothered to look for the web site. I had just heard about the book from someone, and filed that information away in what’s left of my mind and went on with reading books with ships on the covers.
Then I’m in a bookstore a week or so ago, looking for (of all things) a book to read and finding nothing that struck my fancy, when I noticed a copy of Monster Island just asking to be bought and read. So I bought it and read it.
And I have to admit that I really liked it.
But I’m no fan of horror novels, and aside from Matheson’s I Am Legend a total stranger to books about shambling hordes of the undead wondering the streets, so perhaps I’m not qualified to review the novel. So I won’t. Suffice to say that the book deals with a small band of survivors in zombie-infested New York, and leave it at that; not all that imaginative, perhaps, but pretty damned well written and it certainly kept me reading. No mean feat, that.
As much as I liked the novel, from the start I was more taken with the way it had been published. Frankly, in a type of publishing venture that has so often failed this one succeeded and succeeded brilliantly. That alone would have made the book worth looking at; the fact that it turned out to be a damn good read was a bonus.
I found it extremely interesting that what had been published was, in effect, the first draft. As a first draft, this is an amazing achievement. I imagine it must have been quite the experience to read the novel as he wrote and posted individual chapters on-line, and I wonder how much of a plan the guy wrote to. In other words, I can’t help but wonder how much of the novel followed any sort of outline and how much was allowed to, as it were, grow organically. In my own writing, I’ve tried both approaches, with varying degrees of success; I have never found a workable balance between the two approaches and I wonder if Wellington has.
And I like the idea of keeping the on-line version available free even as the printed novel is selling in bookstores, in effect competing with itself. I get the impression that for David Wellington, getting his work before the public is more important than selling it. I admire such an attitude.
It’s risky to publish this way, without an editor or a publisher or a group of "beta" readers. You’d be publishing blind, working, as it were, without a net. All of these people, in traditional publishing environments, provide layers of protection for the author, and each successive step in the process provides one more chance to fix anything that needs fixing. That’s why traditional publishing works the way it does...because that way does work. It may be cumbersome, and a bit frustrating, but it works.
Wellington has taken a non-traditional approach and made it work for him, and work very well indeed. I can admire him for that. Sadly, his is the exception rather than the rule. But I can’t help but notice that if you added up all of my blog posts, I’d be a fair way along to a novel myself, if I had chosen to go that route.
As I said, I really liked this book. Will I read the others in the trilogy? Probably...eventually. Well written though they may be, they’re still not my kind of novels, so I won’t be rushing right out to pick up the unread volumes. Even though I’m glad I read the first novel, right now I feel like rereading Redwall or Watership Down...something with cute furry talking animals. Live ones.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading
Read what Wikipedia has to say about this novel
The on-line version of the book
Order the printed novel from Amazon.com
David Wellington’s web site
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
(print version) Running Press, Philadelphia $13.95
Full text available on-line at brokentype.com
A small band of Somali child-solders, with a former UN weapons inspector, survivors of the zombiefication of the Earth, come to New York in search of vital medical suplies. The only things in their way are about forty million New Yorkers. Dead ones.
I don’t normally read horror novels. Mostly because they’re normally horrible.
So believe me when I tell you that I didn’t initially pick up Monster Island for the subject matter; rather, in spite of it. Not that I think there’s anything all that wrong with the genre; H. P. Lovecraft was a masterful author, as were Bram Stoker (Dracula) and Mary Shelly (Frankenstein). And, of course, Richard Matheson wrote a classic novel very like Monster Island in theme, namely I Am Legend.
But as for more "modern" horror authors, well, I’ve read a few, all highly regarded authors with well reviewed books, and even if I admired the writing I’ve never warmed to what was written. So now you know where I’m coming from.
What attracted me initially to Monster Island was the way it had been published. It originally appeared free on-line as a series of blog posts, a few new posts every week, back in 2004. The book gained quite a following that way and was finally brought out in print (that’s actual hard-copy print) in 2006 (the free "ebook" is still available on-line). Since then there have been two sequels, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, making a well-reviewed trilogy.
I liked the idea of publishing a novel on-line that way, but privately I doubted that it would be any good. I’ve read a couple of similar "on-line publishing" attempts in the past, and found them lacking. Bloody awful, actually. But since this one had gone from on-line book to print, and was still available on-line, I thought this one might be different.
Not different enough to bother looking up, though; because I didn’t find the idea of a "zombie novel" all that appealing, I never even bothered to look for the web site. I had just heard about the book from someone, and filed that information away in what’s left of my mind and went on with reading books with ships on the covers.
Then I’m in a bookstore a week or so ago, looking for (of all things) a book to read and finding nothing that struck my fancy, when I noticed a copy of Monster Island just asking to be bought and read. So I bought it and read it.
And I have to admit that I really liked it.
But I’m no fan of horror novels, and aside from Matheson’s I Am Legend a total stranger to books about shambling hordes of the undead wondering the streets, so perhaps I’m not qualified to review the novel. So I won’t. Suffice to say that the book deals with a small band of survivors in zombie-infested New York, and leave it at that; not all that imaginative, perhaps, but pretty damned well written and it certainly kept me reading. No mean feat, that.
As much as I liked the novel, from the start I was more taken with the way it had been published. Frankly, in a type of publishing venture that has so often failed this one succeeded and succeeded brilliantly. That alone would have made the book worth looking at; the fact that it turned out to be a damn good read was a bonus.
I found it extremely interesting that what had been published was, in effect, the first draft. As a first draft, this is an amazing achievement. I imagine it must have been quite the experience to read the novel as he wrote and posted individual chapters on-line, and I wonder how much of a plan the guy wrote to. In other words, I can’t help but wonder how much of the novel followed any sort of outline and how much was allowed to, as it were, grow organically. In my own writing, I’ve tried both approaches, with varying degrees of success; I have never found a workable balance between the two approaches and I wonder if Wellington has.
And I like the idea of keeping the on-line version available free even as the printed novel is selling in bookstores, in effect competing with itself. I get the impression that for David Wellington, getting his work before the public is more important than selling it. I admire such an attitude.
It’s risky to publish this way, without an editor or a publisher or a group of "beta" readers. You’d be publishing blind, working, as it were, without a net. All of these people, in traditional publishing environments, provide layers of protection for the author, and each successive step in the process provides one more chance to fix anything that needs fixing. That’s why traditional publishing works the way it does...because that way does work. It may be cumbersome, and a bit frustrating, but it works.
Wellington has taken a non-traditional approach and made it work for him, and work very well indeed. I can admire him for that. Sadly, his is the exception rather than the rule. But I can’t help but notice that if you added up all of my blog posts, I’d be a fair way along to a novel myself, if I had chosen to go that route.
As I said, I really liked this book. Will I read the others in the trilogy? Probably...eventually. Well written though they may be, they’re still not my kind of novels, so I won’t be rushing right out to pick up the unread volumes. Even though I’m glad I read the first novel, right now I feel like rereading Redwall or Watership Down...something with cute furry talking animals. Live ones.
The Blues Viking
Further Reading
Read what Wikipedia has to say about this novel
The on-line version of the book
Order the printed novel from Amazon.com
David Wellington’s web site
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Better late than never...
I actually wrote this back on September 11, 2008, and I don’t have to tell you what that’s the anniversary of. That was also the time my Internet connection went the way of all things not paid for. I intended to post it as soon as I had my connection back, but for reasons I now don’t recall I failed to do so. My bad.
But while cleaning out old files I ran across it as a MSWord file, and realized it was too good (and to long) to just trash, even though it is a bit out of date and the next anniversary of the event in question won’t come for ten months. So rather than hold on to the article until September of 2009, I present it here. Sorry about the delay.
The original title of the article was simply September 11, 2001.
But while cleaning out old files I ran across it as a MSWord file, and realized it was too good (and to long) to just trash, even though it is a bit out of date and the next anniversary of the event in question won’t come for ten months. So rather than hold on to the article until September of 2009, I present it here. Sorry about the delay.
The original title of the article was simply September 11, 2001.
September 11, 2001
(As I write this, my Internet connection is down. This isn’t really that big a problem, as I usually compose off-line and post later anyway, saving final editing until I’ve posted. It’s now Thursday, September 11, 2008 and the connection is still down. I’ll be posting this as soon as I have a connection again. I apologize for not being able to post this in a timely fashion and hope you’ll be, or have been, patient.)
WARNING - This is going to be a longish post full of a lot of history that you probably already know, with a smattering of remarks from me that probably won’t surprise you either. If you want, and aren’t smart enough to just skip the whole damn thing, skip ahead to the section titled "In Conclusion" to read my conclusions and find out what the hell all this history stuff was getting to. But I’m feeling wordy tonight, so I’m going to keep typing.
This is the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and if I need to tell you that then you’re living either in another country from me or under a rock. Here’s the story as I remember it, about the attacks and their aftermath, and a bit about where they’ve taken us. A bit about what we have become in the years since, and it ain’t all that complementary.
Reliving History
That September morning, I was on my way to work. and running a tad late.
I had a forty-five minute drive to my office, and I was pushing it a bit to get there as close to on time as I could. So, there I am, driving down the freeway, when I notice car after car pulling over to the side of the road. I had no idea what was going on. Thinking that there might be a problem with the road up ahead, I turned on my radio to try to get a warning of any upcoming difficulty.
I could not possibly have predicted what I heard next.
The station I had set was a music station that never had network news, but I was suddenly listening to a network newscast about something that had just happened in New York. What the hell?
Within five minutes I was one of those drivers that had pulled over to try to get a handle on what they were hearing. For the record, I didn’t. Not then, and not entirely even now.
I sat, stunned, listening to how a jumbo jet had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Even though the newscasters were already speculating about terrorists, I didn’t want to believe that...after all, something very similar had happened in the 1940’s when a B-25 crashed into the Empire State building. That certainly could have happened again; I did not believe--did not want to believe--that this could be a terrorist attack.
I remembered that on the day of what had previously been the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, the Oklahoma City bombing, many people had initially cried "Arab terrorists!" when in fact the terrorists had been entirely home grown. I thought that if this did turn out to be an act of terror that it was far more likely to be domestic malcontents rather than foreign "Solders of God." But really, I wasn’t thinking terrorists; after all, it had happened before.
Then a second plane crashed into the other tower, stretching probability beyond the possibility of an accident. From that moment on, the America that I lived in became a far different, far darker place.
In the months that followed, a wave of highly un-American feeling swept through the country and disguised itself as patriotism and "Americanism." It was anything but. I watched as Americans and their government institutionally accepted acts that would have been unthinkable, illegal, immoral, or downright evil on September 10. Racial discrimination, gross violations of the Bill of Rights, sweeping powers given to the government (and particularly the President), restrictions on free travel, free speech and habeas corpus, all things that would have been unthinkable on September 10, became not only accepted but the law of the land (or when not actually written into the law, at least the rule that governed the of the application of the law).
What amazed me, and amazes me to this day, was that the very people who had been so steadfast in championing the rights of the individual, the people with bumper stickers that read I Love My Country but I Fear My Government, the people who up until September 10 had yelled the loudest at any threat to individual freedoms, became the first people to jump on the government’s bandwagon in their efforts to severely restrict those very same freedoms, come September 11. The same people who had laughed about G. Gordon Liddy printing President Clinton’s picture on paper shooting targets, and asked where they could get one, and had scoffed at the "liberal media" for making a big deal of it, now treated any word spoken against President Bush as an act of treason.
What a difference a day makes.
I remember stumbling on a web site that someone had put up following the attacks, a web site that showed pictures from U.S. embassies around the world showing the spontaneous outpouring of grief and sympathy felt by people in other countries; Europeans and Asians and Arabs and Persians and Indians and all manner of people from all manner of places. People crying, flowers left at the gates, signs of sympathy and support. I have to admit, I cried when I saw that site. (I imagine that that site is long gone now; if anyone has the URL of such a site please send it to me.) The sympathy of the entire world was with us. We could have used that universal good will to accomplish so much in the months that followed September 11, 2001. Our people, though grieving, were never more united; our nation was willing and able to move as one to accomplish a common goal.
The Bush League
Unfortunately, our leader was George W. Bush. Bush used the united American people to push his own agenda. In addition to the one thing he did that I don’t have a problem with, invading Afghanistan (some of us had been saying since the Taliban came to power that they should be dealt with, and I regret what it actually took to get us moving), most of what GWB did wasn’t so laudable.
For example, immediately after invading (and achieving victory in) Afghanistan, Bush pushed is into a war in Iraq on the pretext that :
1. Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussain, were somehow linked to Al Queda and Osama bin Laden (they weren’t.), and partially responsible for the attacks of September 11 (no evidence of this, either).
2. Iraq had, or was developing, "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD’s), notably nuclear and biological/chemical weapons, which they would inevitably deploy against the U.S. (Despite exhaustive searching, not one WMD was ever found, nor could we find any evidence of them, no evidence that any were in storage or any evidence that such weapons were currently under development.)
3. The Iraqi people were just waiting for us to liberate them and they would all welcome us with open arms. (How late do they stay open? Still waiting on this one.)
We let these things happen. We let a lot of things happen back then. For example, we let our government detain and brutalize prisoners and deny them the rights guaranteed by the Constitution; indeed, the government tried to argue that since they weren’t U.S. citizens they had no rights. This radical interpretation of the Constitution hasn’t stood up to the Supreme Court’s standards, but I haven’t seen the Bush administration in any hurry to make changes.)
And the most tragic thing about the whole Iraq mess is that, initially, most of us bought into it. Even me. While I was expressing doubts about the invasion before it had even happened, even I thought we’d actually find WMD’s or at least some evidence of them. I didn’t buy all of the garbage Bush was spewing to get us into war, but I never thought that once we were there that we’d find nothing. I rather think that Bush was counting on finding something to use to justify what he had done, but nothing. Nothing.
So George starts to spin things another way. Suddenly it wasn’t about WMD’s at all, but it was about liberating Iraq from a despot who would use poison gas on his own people. Which he did do; no question, he was a bad guy and deserved removing, but that is not how the war was sold to us and I wouldn’t have gone along with a war just to change an unfriendly regime. Whether there actually was a justification for Iraq based on Saddam’s actual behavior and not his imagined behavior, as bad as he was I can’t say that it was enough to justify an invasion, especially not one billed as an act of self defense. When we invaded we did it for other reasons, more selfish reasons, and to say otherwise when the lies are exposed is disingenuous.
And while he was doing all this, GWB also managed to piss away damn near every ounce of goodwill that the U.S. had gained after the attacks. (It wasn’t just abroad that George had blown it; his own popularity at home, which had been phenomenally high after September 11--higher than any President other than Reagan--is now phenomenally low.) More than anything else, this really pisses me off. We had spent decades being thought of as the neighborhood bully, despised yet almost always deferred to (a status greatly diminished since the other big kid, the Soviet Union, had left town) when fate makes us the objects of the entire world’s sympathy and respect. So what did we do with that? We invaded a couple of Middle Eastern countries and started throwing our weight around trying to regain our lost bully status. Respect went out the window, with sympathy close behind. GWB obviously wanted us feared again; he got us hated and distrusted, but not exactly feared.
In Conclusion
It all comes down to this: Bush lied and we let ourselves be lied to. Even though what he was saying wasn’t true, we so wanted it to be true that it became a justification for our actions. (That’s our actions, not just our government’s; the government was not only acting in our name, but with our blessing.) When it all proved to be smoke and mirrors, a different story was created, one that still cast us as the Good Guys, and even though many of us were by then ready to say that the Emperor was naked it was and remains a story that a good many Americans are more than willing to buy.
And here’s where we actually get to the point:
Notice that I keep saying "our actions." It’s one thing to blame George Bush, et al, for lying to us and leading us down the primrose path, but we have to admit that he couldn’t have led us if we hadn’t wanted to be led. This all wasn’t something he did, or at least not just him; this was an action of the United States of America, and that’s us. All of us. Remember that Congress, even the democrats in Congress, largely supported Bush’s drive to the Persian Gulf. Remember that public opinion, while not without significant dissent, was solidly behind Bush.
It bothers me not only that so many of us are still willing to go along with all this crap, but that we were all so damn quick to buy into it in the first place. None of us have clean hands in this, and we can’t entirely blame our leaders for doing what we wanted them to do; leading us. We the people were, for s long time, more than willing to be led.
(I take no comfort in the fact that we didn’t actually elect Bush in 2000; the Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiters of all things Constitutional, defied the Constitution and selected a President for us. But that’s another topic for another day.)
I don’t hold out much hope that we’re going to become a nation of people who tell their leaders what to do; after all, we have a long-standing tradition of being told what we want and buying it (literally). But we need to be aware of just where our leaders are leading us; it’s one thing to rally behind the President in a time of national crisis, but we can not, should not follow so blindly that we’re led right off a cliff. It’s one thing to say, as an old favorite song of mine said, we won’t get fooled again; the truth is that we might. Politicians being what they are, we probably will. But it’s our responsibility to be aware of where, and how, we’re being led. Any time someone says "trust me; I know what’s best for you" demand an explanation, and if one isn’t forthcoming then perhaps it’s time to stop following.
If your trying to go east and the train you’re on is headed west, the time to jump off is well before the train gets to wherever it’s going.
The Blues Viking
UPDATE - 11/22/08
If ever an article needed updating, it's this one, even though I've just published it.
Remember that I wrote this more than two months ago; the economy hadn't completely collapsed, Barack Obama hadn't been elected, we were facing an election with an uncertain outcome and things looked a bit bleak.
Well, the ecomomy has fallen apart and the election is over without any of the disruptions that I and others had feared. And even though things certainly look bleak as far as the economy goes, I have to say I have more hope for the future than I probably have a right to. I credit this not so much to Obama's election, as unlikely as that was, but more to the President that Obama promises to be. Here I am, facing a far more dismal future than I could have contemplated just a few months ago...and I feel better about it than I really should.
In short, I have hope.
But hope or not, I stand by what I said in the article; that the greatest loss to America in the attacks of September 11 was the loss of ourselves, of the high ideals that America had always, before GWB, aspired to. I hate what that man has made of us,and I hate that he actually got us to do it to ourselves, and I recognize the uphill battle that Obama will have to fight to undo all that Bush has wrought.
Good luck, President Obama. -BV
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Friday, November 21, 2008
About last week...
Last week I wrote an article about Rush Limbaugh.
Now, normally I try to ignore Limbaugh, and in general I do a good job of that. But last week I called Limbaugh (and others, like that notorious Rush-wannabe Sean Hannity) to task for saying one of the most absurd things I have ever heard: that Barack Obama was to blame for the current economic crisis.
Is that crazy or what?
I won’t get deep into the details here (use this link for that) but the gist of it is this: that fear of Obama and what he might do...in six to nine months...is actually responsible for all our current economic woes. Seriously; Rush actually said that! But something that happened today has made me revisit this silly idea. Today Obama said that he’s prepared to name his "economic team" as soon as Monday, and the Dow Jones exchange finished up nearly five hundred points. Not a huge rally, I’ll grant you, but a rally nonetheless.
So I‘m wondering if these guys are prepared to claim that if Obama is to blame for recent market falls, as they apparently are, are they also prepared to give him credit for today’s rally?
In a pig’s eye they are.
I fully expect most "right wing" pundits to ignore this occurrence; any who do mention it will either minimize it or try to deny that Obama is in any way responsible. This last approach is dangerous for them; I don’t see how they can claim on the one hand that Obama’s influence is to blame for months of economic free fall and on the other hand deny that Obama’s influence had anything to do with today’s rally, especially when the rally can be directly linked to something Obama actually did.
But it’s just one day’s worth of rally. For now. Monday, either the market will be down again and Rush and Sean will be saying "See? I said it wouldn’t last!" (whether they actually said so or not) or the market will continue upward, in which case they will either ignore it, deny it or say it’s only temporary.
The odd thing is, I don’t see this small recovery anything that Obama can really take much credit for, myself. (And I notice that he hasn’t.) The market, starved for good news, reacted to a bit of good news. This is hardly surprising. But Limbaugh and Hannity et al can’t claim that Obama isn’t responsible for a bit of recovery, however small and however brief, unless they are also willing to admit that their previous drivel, that bit about Obama being responsible for the current economic crisis, was just so much cow flop.
But I never expect that much reason to come out of these guys’ mouths.
Oh, and about that "rally"...the one thing I’ve learned from watching the economy of late, listening to all of the "experts" and following all of the "conventional wisdom" about the market and the economy, all I can say for sure is this:
No one knows a damn thing about it. Not the experts, not the pundits, not the bloggers and certainly not me.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Now, normally I try to ignore Limbaugh, and in general I do a good job of that. But last week I called Limbaugh (and others, like that notorious Rush-wannabe Sean Hannity) to task for saying one of the most absurd things I have ever heard: that Barack Obama was to blame for the current economic crisis.
Is that crazy or what?
I won’t get deep into the details here (use this link for that) but the gist of it is this: that fear of Obama and what he might do...in six to nine months...is actually responsible for all our current economic woes. Seriously; Rush actually said that! But something that happened today has made me revisit this silly idea. Today Obama said that he’s prepared to name his "economic team" as soon as Monday, and the Dow Jones exchange finished up nearly five hundred points. Not a huge rally, I’ll grant you, but a rally nonetheless.
So I‘m wondering if these guys are prepared to claim that if Obama is to blame for recent market falls, as they apparently are, are they also prepared to give him credit for today’s rally?
In a pig’s eye they are.
I fully expect most "right wing" pundits to ignore this occurrence; any who do mention it will either minimize it or try to deny that Obama is in any way responsible. This last approach is dangerous for them; I don’t see how they can claim on the one hand that Obama’s influence is to blame for months of economic free fall and on the other hand deny that Obama’s influence had anything to do with today’s rally, especially when the rally can be directly linked to something Obama actually did.
But it’s just one day’s worth of rally. For now. Monday, either the market will be down again and Rush and Sean will be saying "See? I said it wouldn’t last!" (whether they actually said so or not) or the market will continue upward, in which case they will either ignore it, deny it or say it’s only temporary.
The odd thing is, I don’t see this small recovery anything that Obama can really take much credit for, myself. (And I notice that he hasn’t.) The market, starved for good news, reacted to a bit of good news. This is hardly surprising. But Limbaugh and Hannity et al can’t claim that Obama isn’t responsible for a bit of recovery, however small and however brief, unless they are also willing to admit that their previous drivel, that bit about Obama being responsible for the current economic crisis, was just so much cow flop.
But I never expect that much reason to come out of these guys’ mouths.
Oh, and about that "rally"...the one thing I’ve learned from watching the economy of late, listening to all of the "experts" and following all of the "conventional wisdom" about the market and the economy, all I can say for sure is this:
No one knows a damn thing about it. Not the experts, not the pundits, not the bloggers and certainly not me.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
What color is your lifejacket?
Here’s a couple of terms for you to ponder. Well, the same one really, but different definitions.
"Bail out" is something you do in a sinking boat in the hope of keeping it afloat.
OR:
"Bail out" is to exit a burning plane before it crashes.
Similar, I’ll grant you, but notably different as they apply to the proposed auto industry bailout.
"If you go down in the flood, it’s gonna be your own fault..."
On the surface (if I dare use that term) the proposed bailout is intended to allow the auto industry protection from the ravages of the financial crisis while it (hopefully) recovers. In theory, a loan from the government now would protect the auto industry from having to go bankrupt, and allow them to continue to do business while the economy recovers enough to buy new cars again. In the interim, the auto industry would (again, in theory) "retool" to produce cars that the American public will actually want to buy. Their business operations would (in theory; see a pattern here?) be streamlined to operate more efficiently, more economically.
Sounds pretty good, but it has a few problems. Unless sweeping changes in Detroit’s business practices are mandated by law, I don’t see them happening. The history of the automotive industry is one of changing as little as possible at any given moment, and when change is mandated they try to find a "loophole" (if not a reversal by the next administration) in any new law or regulation that has mandated any kind of meaningful change. In short, I don’t see change happening, unless the "old guard" in charge of the Big Three are thrown out. (Which is a road strewn with landmines; read on.)
(There’s a movie about all of this; Tucker; The Man and his Dream. It’s about Preston Tucker, who tried to produce a better, and much safer, car back in the late ‘40s. I loved this movie.)
Think about it. The automobile industry has resisted safety features (like seat belts, safety glass and air bags, to name a few), mileage standards, crash test standards, a plethora of mileage-increasing measures, electric cars (any kind of alternate fuels, for that matter); in fact Detroit has resisted any changes in their product line that would cost anything to develop or produce.
I remember when California mandated an increase in gasoline mileage (avereged over all of the vehicles in any manufacturer’s fleet) that spurred the development of an electric car, the EV1, by General Motors. Factory space was found, parts and materials were allocated, and production had actually begun (the initial vehicles were available for lease in California) when there was an administration change; the then-new Bush administration was more willing to do whatever the auto industry asked, as was the new Republican governor in California (Arnold the Barbarian); the regulations were "rolled back," the car was canceled, and every one that had already been produced was crushed and recycled. Even though the people who had driven them generally loved them. (There’s yet another movie about all of this, Who Killed the Electric Car? that I haven’t seen.)
This is typical of what has gone on in the auto industry for decades. And I don’t think they’re likely to change until they’re forced to. But the problem with mandating anything is that Detroit will do as little as they can and hope that the next administration will be more to their liking. This is how they always operarte.
Besides, there already is a provision in the law which protects any corporation from their creditors, giving them time to reorganize and retool and possibly pull themselves back fro the abyss. It’s called bankruptcy.
Going down in flames
Then there’s the other metaphore; the one about the burning plane, remember? I very much fear that this will be the road that Detroit takes; rather than put forth any effort to save their industry, if no bailout is forthcoming they will likely just let it fail and get themselves out of it as best they can. That’s the potential danger of not giving them a bailout; they may just take one themselves, and leave no one at the controls. And like a jumbo jet, the auto industry is just too big to let fall wherever it happens to fail, with no capable hand on the stick.
So I’m of two minds on this; on the one hand, letting the industry go bankrupt may be the best thing for them, giving them the necessary "breathing room" to save their industry themselves. On the other hand, I fear that if left to save themselves they might do just that—save themselves, and the rest of us can clean up their mess.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
"Bail out" is something you do in a sinking boat in the hope of keeping it afloat.
OR:
"Bail out" is to exit a burning plane before it crashes.
Similar, I’ll grant you, but notably different as they apply to the proposed auto industry bailout.
"If you go down in the flood, it’s gonna be your own fault..."
On the surface (if I dare use that term) the proposed bailout is intended to allow the auto industry protection from the ravages of the financial crisis while it (hopefully) recovers. In theory, a loan from the government now would protect the auto industry from having to go bankrupt, and allow them to continue to do business while the economy recovers enough to buy new cars again. In the interim, the auto industry would (again, in theory) "retool" to produce cars that the American public will actually want to buy. Their business operations would (in theory; see a pattern here?) be streamlined to operate more efficiently, more economically.
Sounds pretty good, but it has a few problems. Unless sweeping changes in Detroit’s business practices are mandated by law, I don’t see them happening. The history of the automotive industry is one of changing as little as possible at any given moment, and when change is mandated they try to find a "loophole" (if not a reversal by the next administration) in any new law or regulation that has mandated any kind of meaningful change. In short, I don’t see change happening, unless the "old guard" in charge of the Big Three are thrown out. (Which is a road strewn with landmines; read on.)
(There’s a movie about all of this; Tucker; The Man and his Dream. It’s about Preston Tucker, who tried to produce a better, and much safer, car back in the late ‘40s. I loved this movie.)
Think about it. The automobile industry has resisted safety features (like seat belts, safety glass and air bags, to name a few), mileage standards, crash test standards, a plethora of mileage-increasing measures, electric cars (any kind of alternate fuels, for that matter); in fact Detroit has resisted any changes in their product line that would cost anything to develop or produce.
I remember when California mandated an increase in gasoline mileage (avereged over all of the vehicles in any manufacturer’s fleet) that spurred the development of an electric car, the EV1, by General Motors. Factory space was found, parts and materials were allocated, and production had actually begun (the initial vehicles were available for lease in California) when there was an administration change; the then-new Bush administration was more willing to do whatever the auto industry asked, as was the new Republican governor in California (Arnold the Barbarian); the regulations were "rolled back," the car was canceled, and every one that had already been produced was crushed and recycled. Even though the people who had driven them generally loved them. (There’s yet another movie about all of this, Who Killed the Electric Car? that I haven’t seen.)
This is typical of what has gone on in the auto industry for decades. And I don’t think they’re likely to change until they’re forced to. But the problem with mandating anything is that Detroit will do as little as they can and hope that the next administration will be more to their liking. This is how they always operarte.
Besides, there already is a provision in the law which protects any corporation from their creditors, giving them time to reorganize and retool and possibly pull themselves back fro the abyss. It’s called bankruptcy.
Going down in flames
Then there’s the other metaphore; the one about the burning plane, remember? I very much fear that this will be the road that Detroit takes; rather than put forth any effort to save their industry, if no bailout is forthcoming they will likely just let it fail and get themselves out of it as best they can. That’s the potential danger of not giving them a bailout; they may just take one themselves, and leave no one at the controls. And like a jumbo jet, the auto industry is just too big to let fall wherever it happens to fail, with no capable hand on the stick.
So I’m of two minds on this; on the one hand, letting the industry go bankrupt may be the best thing for them, giving them the necessary "breathing room" to save their industry themselves. On the other hand, I fear that if left to save themselves they might do just that—save themselves, and the rest of us can clean up their mess.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
"Say it ain’t so, Joe..."
UPDATED 6:00 PM 11/18/08
The news this morning says that the decision is in regarding Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat turned Independent who supported John McCain and campaigned against Barack Obama.
This sort of behavior was unlikely to be ignored by the Democrats...there was talk of booting Lieberman out of the Democratic caucus and stripping him of his chair of the Homeland Security committee. But today the word came down that the Democrats were going to be magnanimous and allow Lieberman to continue to caucus with them and to keep the chair of the Homeland Security committee, but he’ll lose his place on the Environment and Public Works committee.
Lieberman was able to achieve this only through the intervention of President-elect Obama, who surprisingly came out in support of Leiberman both staying with the party and staying at the helm of the Homeland Security committee. This soon after the election, Congress still has a sort of "Whatever Barack wants..." attitude, so his wishes were law with them.
(A thought that I didn't include in the original article, but should have: The Democrats are still imn persuit of that magic sixty seats. This would be impossible to acheive without Lieberman's seat on their side...and the Republicans have been openly courting him. As far as I know, he hasn't said that he'd definiterly bail on the party if he lost that chair, but it's certainly more likely. And notice that word "magic" ceaping into the article; what is this, Harry Potter and the Renegade Senator?)
It may seem like Lieberman has gotten away with a slap on the wrist...but think about it. The Homeland Security committee was important because of the emphasis George Bush put on homeland security, on using the very words "homeland security" to browbeat Congress and the public and bend them to his will. When the Democrats came into the majority in Congress a couple of years ago, the White House must have breathed a sigh of relief when Lieberman, who many considered Bush’s "tame Democrat," got that particular chair.
But even though we don’t actually live in a different world today, we look at it differently. In the incoming administration, the words "homeland security" aren’t likely to be uttered as some sort of magic phrase that will bring people to their knees in fright. The Homeland Security committee, while it will remain important, isn’t likely to be as important as it was under GWB.
The Environment and Public Works committee, now; that’s another kettle of mercury-tainted fish. The environment and the state of the nations' infrastructure were sadly ignored for most of the Bush administration as resources were sent to the Middle East. Under Barack Obama, these things are more likely to get the attention (and funding) they deserve.
It’s likely that in the new administration the Environment and Public Works committee will be as important as, if not more important than, the Homeland Security committee.
So Joe Lieberman has indeed been punished, and with public dissatisfaction regarding his performance on the rise back in his home state it’s unlikely that he’ll see reelection, with or without the Democratic party’s help. Which I doubt he’d get in any case. Lieberman was Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate, and he still has a lot of friends in congress on both sides of the aisle, but I don’t think that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put his career back together again. I think this is just the beginning of Joe Lieberman’s marginalization.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
The news this morning says that the decision is in regarding Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat turned Independent who supported John McCain and campaigned against Barack Obama.
This sort of behavior was unlikely to be ignored by the Democrats...there was talk of booting Lieberman out of the Democratic caucus and stripping him of his chair of the Homeland Security committee. But today the word came down that the Democrats were going to be magnanimous and allow Lieberman to continue to caucus with them and to keep the chair of the Homeland Security committee, but he’ll lose his place on the Environment and Public Works committee.
Lieberman was able to achieve this only through the intervention of President-elect Obama, who surprisingly came out in support of Leiberman both staying with the party and staying at the helm of the Homeland Security committee. This soon after the election, Congress still has a sort of "Whatever Barack wants..." attitude, so his wishes were law with them.
(A thought that I didn't include in the original article, but should have: The Democrats are still imn persuit of that magic sixty seats. This would be impossible to acheive without Lieberman's seat on their side...and the Republicans have been openly courting him. As far as I know, he hasn't said that he'd definiterly bail on the party if he lost that chair, but it's certainly more likely. And notice that word "magic" ceaping into the article; what is this, Harry Potter and the Renegade Senator?)
It may seem like Lieberman has gotten away with a slap on the wrist...but think about it. The Homeland Security committee was important because of the emphasis George Bush put on homeland security, on using the very words "homeland security" to browbeat Congress and the public and bend them to his will. When the Democrats came into the majority in Congress a couple of years ago, the White House must have breathed a sigh of relief when Lieberman, who many considered Bush’s "tame Democrat," got that particular chair.
But even though we don’t actually live in a different world today, we look at it differently. In the incoming administration, the words "homeland security" aren’t likely to be uttered as some sort of magic phrase that will bring people to their knees in fright. The Homeland Security committee, while it will remain important, isn’t likely to be as important as it was under GWB.
The Environment and Public Works committee, now; that’s another kettle of mercury-tainted fish. The environment and the state of the nations' infrastructure were sadly ignored for most of the Bush administration as resources were sent to the Middle East. Under Barack Obama, these things are more likely to get the attention (and funding) they deserve.
It’s likely that in the new administration the Environment and Public Works committee will be as important as, if not more important than, the Homeland Security committee.
So Joe Lieberman has indeed been punished, and with public dissatisfaction regarding his performance on the rise back in his home state it’s unlikely that he’ll see reelection, with or without the Democratic party’s help. Which I doubt he’d get in any case. Lieberman was Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate, and he still has a lot of friends in congress on both sides of the aisle, but I don’t think that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put his career back together again. I think this is just the beginning of Joe Lieberman’s marginalization.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Monday, November 17, 2008
This has been an especially bad day
POSTSCRIPT 11/18/08
This is going to be another self-absorbed article, the sort that I write whenever I’m feeling self-indulgent. If it bores you, I don’t overmuch care. -BV
My heart is heavy and I’m not sure I can cope. Tonight I had to tell my mother (again) that my brother Mark was dead.
My mother hasn’t had what you’d call an easy life. She grew up in suburban London during the German blitz, she came to America alone in the early 50’s and ended up on the docks in NYC alone on New Years Eve, expecting to be met by her fiancé but met by no one. She made her own way for a few years before marrying my father...and that was no picnic either. Neither were her two sons.
The younger of those sons, Mark William Rosecrans, died last January at the age of 47. I remember that night all too well; the phone call, the tears, having to tell my mother that her youngest son was gone, telling her that no, it wasn’t a mistake, holding her as we both cried. The events of that night are engraved as if in stone in my memory.
And I’ve never gotten over them...and I’m not sure I want to. For me, "letting go" (as my friends all advise) would feel like giving up all that I still hold of Mark, and I don’t care if all I have left is this gnawing grief; if that’s all I have to hold on to then that’s what I’ll hold on to.
But tonight, as I was making her dinner, she asked me where my brother had gone, said he was just here with his son and where had he gone?
My mother will be eighty years old in January, and she’s not altogether all together any more. In short, she forgets things. Lots of things. She forgets to do things I ask her to do, she forgets not to do the things I’ve asked her not to do, she forgets to bathe or feed herself and can’t turn on her TV or light her own cigarettes. I’m sure she doesn’t know her age or who’s President or what day or month or year it is.
And tonight she forgot that she had lost her son.
And I had to tell her. Again.
I told her that Mark was lost to us, that she would never see him again, that it must have been a dream when she thought she’s seen him. What else could I say? Should I have lied to her, told her that he’d just gone to the store and he’d be back soon, told her that I’d let her know as soon as he got back? I could never do that. (It would be so much easier if I could, but I can’t.)
Should I have taken her at her word, and believed her? Should I just accept that (for her at least) Mark had come back to her, perhaps to say goodbye? That, too, would be easier but I can’t do that either; I can’t make myself believe in something that I can’t otherwise believe, and I can’t pretend that I believe. Not to my mother, anyway.
So I told her what I’d told her that night in January. I told her that he was gone, that we’d lost him, that I was so sorry, that I would miss him for the rest of my life just as I knew she would.
And the worst part is that I know that is a few weeks, or however long it takes for her to forget, I’ll have to do it again. Now, how could I possibly let go of my brother when I’ll periodically have to reenact the night I learned of his death, the most difficult moment of my life?
Oddly enough, I’d been planning an article about Mark, about how this was his favorite time of year, about how hard it was to see the leaves turning or the snow falling without having him around, but I just can’t do it now. I can’t get all nostalgic about something that is causing me so much pain. I miss Mark so terribly. It’s taken me a while to write this article because I have to stop frequently and cry like a baby. I am not, and I suspect never will be, over his loss.
And all I have to look forward to is having to relive this horror again.
The Blues Viking
I held on to this article for about an hour, unsure that I would post it. I finally decided to do so (obviously) since I didn’t think I’d ever be able to post again with the specter of this article haunting me. So here it is, more for my own peace of mind than for anyone's enlightenment, and if you don’t appreciate drivel like this I can’t say I blame you, but go fuck yourself. -BV
Postscript--A reader has advised me to remove that last "go fuck yourself" line, saying that it "...besmirches a beautiful blog entry." My response was that perhaps it needed besmirching. I went on: "I am, by nature, a crude man and I make no apologies for that, nor do I revel in it, but it does sometimes color how I express myself and I am aware that that's not a good thing. But I felt that way when I posted the article, and I feel that way now." But I do sincerely apologize if my language offended anyone; I do not apologize in the slightest for what I said, merely for how I chose to say it. Which I would probably choose again. I also said, "These are the dangers of not having an editor." -BV
This is going to be another self-absorbed article, the sort that I write whenever I’m feeling self-indulgent. If it bores you, I don’t overmuch care. -BV
My heart is heavy and I’m not sure I can cope. Tonight I had to tell my mother (again) that my brother Mark was dead.
My mother hasn’t had what you’d call an easy life. She grew up in suburban London during the German blitz, she came to America alone in the early 50’s and ended up on the docks in NYC alone on New Years Eve, expecting to be met by her fiancé but met by no one. She made her own way for a few years before marrying my father...and that was no picnic either. Neither were her two sons.
The younger of those sons, Mark William Rosecrans, died last January at the age of 47. I remember that night all too well; the phone call, the tears, having to tell my mother that her youngest son was gone, telling her that no, it wasn’t a mistake, holding her as we both cried. The events of that night are engraved as if in stone in my memory.
And I’ve never gotten over them...and I’m not sure I want to. For me, "letting go" (as my friends all advise) would feel like giving up all that I still hold of Mark, and I don’t care if all I have left is this gnawing grief; if that’s all I have to hold on to then that’s what I’ll hold on to.
But tonight, as I was making her dinner, she asked me where my brother had gone, said he was just here with his son and where had he gone?
My mother will be eighty years old in January, and she’s not altogether all together any more. In short, she forgets things. Lots of things. She forgets to do things I ask her to do, she forgets not to do the things I’ve asked her not to do, she forgets to bathe or feed herself and can’t turn on her TV or light her own cigarettes. I’m sure she doesn’t know her age or who’s President or what day or month or year it is.
And tonight she forgot that she had lost her son.
And I had to tell her. Again.
I told her that Mark was lost to us, that she would never see him again, that it must have been a dream when she thought she’s seen him. What else could I say? Should I have lied to her, told her that he’d just gone to the store and he’d be back soon, told her that I’d let her know as soon as he got back? I could never do that. (It would be so much easier if I could, but I can’t.)
Should I have taken her at her word, and believed her? Should I just accept that (for her at least) Mark had come back to her, perhaps to say goodbye? That, too, would be easier but I can’t do that either; I can’t make myself believe in something that I can’t otherwise believe, and I can’t pretend that I believe. Not to my mother, anyway.
So I told her what I’d told her that night in January. I told her that he was gone, that we’d lost him, that I was so sorry, that I would miss him for the rest of my life just as I knew she would.
And the worst part is that I know that is a few weeks, or however long it takes for her to forget, I’ll have to do it again. Now, how could I possibly let go of my brother when I’ll periodically have to reenact the night I learned of his death, the most difficult moment of my life?
Oddly enough, I’d been planning an article about Mark, about how this was his favorite time of year, about how hard it was to see the leaves turning or the snow falling without having him around, but I just can’t do it now. I can’t get all nostalgic about something that is causing me so much pain. I miss Mark so terribly. It’s taken me a while to write this article because I have to stop frequently and cry like a baby. I am not, and I suspect never will be, over his loss.
And all I have to look forward to is having to relive this horror again.
The Blues Viking
I held on to this article for about an hour, unsure that I would post it. I finally decided to do so (obviously) since I didn’t think I’d ever be able to post again with the specter of this article haunting me. So here it is, more for my own peace of mind than for anyone's enlightenment, and if you don’t appreciate drivel like this I can’t say I blame you, but go fuck yourself. -BV
Postscript--A reader has advised me to remove that last "go fuck yourself" line, saying that it "...besmirches a beautiful blog entry." My response was that perhaps it needed besmirching. I went on: "I am, by nature, a crude man and I make no apologies for that, nor do I revel in it, but it does sometimes color how I express myself and I am aware that that's not a good thing. But I felt that way when I posted the article, and I feel that way now." But I do sincerely apologize if my language offended anyone; I do not apologize in the slightest for what I said, merely for how I chose to say it. Which I would probably choose again. I also said, "These are the dangers of not having an editor." -BV
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
