Get Happi Again

C'mon, America: Learn The Secret Known To The Ancients. Or, not.

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Random Barking

The New York Times online reported that a suicide bomber in Baghdad killed forty or more today.

Over the past few weeks in my neighborhood, I've noticed uncollected garbage, discarded clothing and furniture, sitting on sidewalks -- and I live in a relatively affluent area on Nob Hill (not in the actual Rich Person's part of it, though).

And watching people act towards each other in public situations, there seems to be a harder edge, a what do you want; get the hell outta my way attitude; a presumption that the world sucks and will continue to suck even more as time progresses.

There's a lot of anger, even hatred, out there, looking for somewhere to flow. The Big Boys and Girls on the Right would like to channel that -- into votes, into advertising and commercial profit, into larger attendance in Megachurches.

They've already tried it, in the Teabaggers -- but they're not reading the poll numbers: People believe politicians suck; that the Dems suck -- but Repubs suck even more.

As The Great Curmudgeon noted, anything different is difficult for anyone to remember, now.

However, I keep thinking that it didn't have to have turned out this way. Or, perhaps (given what humans are), there really was no other outcome.

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Anchored

"First and foremost, I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest audience possible so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.” Then he added -- as if he had to after a rare moment of honesty -- "But in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement."
John McManus, "The Flap Over Limbaugh", New American, April 2009


(Photo: Courtesy Knowledge Rush.com -- No Joke)

Lard Boy, 63, racist homophobic misogynistic junkie and self-described shill "intellectual engine" for America's Rightist movement, was reeled in and moored over the weekend to wed 33-year-old Kathryn Rogers in a 'Hawaiian Themed' celebration at a Miami Beach hotel.

This the Blimp's fourth time into the Swine Unit mating chute, and the first for Ms. Rogers.

Guests at the wedding included Karl Rove, Rudy Giuliani, Lard Boy's personal anesthesiologist, and the reanimated corpse of Dean Acheson, who caused a moment of dismay when, as he stood up during the ceremony, his lower jaw fell off.


Lard Boy Salutes The Crowd With Bride And Undead Acheson

When the classic question was raised, If anyone here present knows of any reason why these two may not be joined in holy matrimony, the nose of Rove and a number of other conservatives who sat quietly grew in length by approximately 200 per cent.


Embraced By The Horror: The Couple At A Celebration Of Scotch

The most-remarked part of the celebration in the media was the evening's premiere entertainer, Sir Elton John.

After years of applauding Lard Boy's gay-bashing on-air -- just as they applaud his racist remarks and incitements to defy the government bordering on sedition, even revealing anti-semitism -- many conservatives and evangelicals were "dismayed" that Sir Elton's appearance at the wedding seemed hypocritical.


A Color Guard At The Wedding: Official Photo

However, Zav Chafets, the official biographer of the Michelin Man, hurried to defend his meal ticket remind us that not many people knew it, but Slobodan Milosevic was a deeply sentimental man; and that in his heart, Nikolai Chaucescu really loved dogs and children. A whole a lot.



In an interview last summer [Limbaugh] told me that he regards homosexuality as most likely determined by biology, considers other people’s sex lives to be none of his business and supports gay civil unions. I’m pretty sure that Elton John’s sexual orientation never even crossed Limbaugh’s mind.

I'm sure these samples of the Blimp's comments are proof of his deeply-held personal beliefs.

The new couple have made pleas for privacy. "We try to live our lives as normal people," Lard Boy said in a message on his website. We do not seek media attention. We do not want it, especially for this."


This government is governing against its own citizens.
This president and his party are governing against us.
We are at war with our own President, we are at war with
our own government.
Voice Of The Blimp, January 9, 2010

The media is, aber natürlich, all a-gog and a-twitter. The New York Daily News (competitor to Little Rupert's New York Post) reported "Rush Limbaugh marries gal pal Kathryn Rogers"; USA Today, always insightful, asks "But Will She Love His Cars Too?"

And, everyone, just everyone, wanted to see photos of the event. The Blimp allowed a controlled release, each with his tasteful trademark "Excellence In Broadcasting" stamp.


Excellence In Broadcasting Man Will Save Us From The Scary Awful
Evil Illegitimate Negro Leader, For Ten Gallons Of Fudge Ripple

Psychology Today also weighed in on the event:

Rush Limbaugh's multiple marriages is a 21st century American story... we Americans are crazy about both pair bonding and breaking up...

In his public comments about his marriages, Limbaugh seems to fall right into this conventional pattern of explanation for marital failure... Real insight into a divorce involves understanding one’s own role. Limbaugh at one time did show potentially deeper insight into why he was not good love material.

“I’m too much in love with myself,” he said once between marriages. I wonder if his new wife saw that quote, or this one: "If you want a successful marriage, let your husband do what he wants to do," he once said.

What seared me at the end of a troubling week is the public story line that it’s wonderful to keep trying to find a lifelong mate despite any evidence that the newlyweds have learned squat from past divorces.

Unless she's a brainless, Inflate-o Love Doll with no sense of self, taste, or personal hygiene, I sentence the happy couple to no less than two, and an absolute maximum of four, years.

Take a look at Rogers' body language in photographs of Limbaugh and herself; you could read her body tension as discomfort with the unfamiliarity of being a 'public person' and the focus of photographers. But when in that situation, the tendency would be to relax or lean closer to someone loved and yearned for; where you would feel safe. And -- sorry to harsh your extreme buzz, Rush -- I don't see that in Rogers' posture. Quite the opposite.


Blimp's End: 'Tucked In With A Spade' ; Or, A Large Crane

All I look forward to is seeing the Zeppelin's obituary in Little Rupert's papers ("Giant Of The Age Passes - And The World Mourns"). And (depending upon the language in the inevitable pre-nuptial she will have to sign), in my opinion, Rogers may be keeping that day in mind as she, uh, 'experiences' the connubial embrace of The Blimp. Over and over and over.

But, who cares? I'm much more interested in this.

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'Her First Name Could Be Doctor'

Congenital Racist Dr. Laura (Photo: Ugly Neck Monthly)

Mary Elizabeth Williams reports from Salon that this past Tuesday, the Right-wing radio host, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, ripped off the rubber mask of tolerance and revealed her true ugly, reptilian face.

Kind of like that moment in the original "V" series, when the aliens' masks got ripped and showed their dark green, scaly hides and vertical-slit eyes -- except in this case, Dr. Laura's ripped mask revealed she was wearing (gasp!) a Ku Klux Klan Hood!

... the controversial radio host/crackpot [Williams reported] fielded a call on her program from an African-American woman who said she was weary of her white husband's family and friends' racist comments. ...The caller... explained that her husband's comrades ask her questions like "How do you black people like doing this? Do black people really like doing that?" -- which Schlessinger promptly dismissed as "not racist... A lot of blacks voted for Obama simply 'cause he was half-black," Dr. Laura continued. "Didn't matter what he was going to do in office. It was a black thing."

Ruh-Roh. If I'd been Laura's on-air publicist, I would have been making the "kill" sign -- drawing an index finger across my throat -- to get her to not go there. However, that's a message never given to coddled and pampered Rethug media stars, most of whom can't seem to keep their inner Strom Thurmond in check (Imagine trying to tell Lard Boy not to make a racist comment!).

Anyway; filled with the righteousness and moral rectitude she so often preaches from her little radio pulpit, Laura charged ahead: Look -- it's Stalingrad! We can take one city; how much trouble could it be?


Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Rant

The caller then pressed on, asking: "What about the N-word? The N-word's been thrown around" [i.e., by friends of her husbands']. To which Dr. Laura airily retorted: "Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a buh-lack comic, and all you hear is nigger nigger nigger. I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it's affectionate."

The caller, clearly agitated by now, nevertheless remained respectful, asking, "Is it ever OK to say that word?" Schlessinger responded by accusing her of having a "chip on [her] shoulder," telling her, "Don't NAACP me", and that [the caller] possessed "a lot of what I hear from blackthink." For the kicker, she added, "If you're that hypersensitive about color and don't have a sense of humor, don't marry out of your race."

Predictably, a large number of people said Laura was a silly bint and offensive in the extreme. On Wednesday, she issued an apology on her website.



Though she said, "I did the wrong thing," adding that she was so upset about the incident she had to cut her show short, she also continued to display her trademark cluelessness. "I was attempting to make a philosophical point," she explained, adding that "I ended up, I’m sure, with many of you losing the point I was trying to make, because you were shocked by the fact that I said the word."

Sure; absolutely, that's why people were disgusted.

For the clueless, like Frau Schlessinger, use of the n-term between blacks is a recognition of solidarity around past slavery and present second-class-citizenhood in the eyes and minds of people like herself. It's an "Our Thing", infra dig reference, and not to be used by outsiders. Period.

Guess you can't use HBO as your guide when it comes to determining the reality of racial sensitivity and common humanity -- eh, Laura?

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Fifty Miles Of Bad Road

For several years I've been expecting that we would wake up one morning to discover Iran had been hit by a series of air strikes to reduce or destroy its capability to manufacture weapons-grade, enriched Uranium. I still do.

Despite that possibility, and in the face of UN economic sanctions, the fundamentalist Islamic clerics and corrupt Republican Guards commanders running that country have pushed ahead in developing that capability. At the same time, they claim to want to negotiate with the UN, then rebuff them over and over; oddly, very much like the North Koreans treated the UN and the United States in the run-up to developing their very own Bomb.

The Iranians have also counted on the fact that a) Any attack would further unite the Islamic world against Israel and the West, when America needs the support of moderate Arabic states, needs their oil, and needs to push Israel towards peace with the Palestinians; b) Attacks would (at least publicly) unite the Iranian people behind their government; and c) Draw international condemnation over radioactive contamination that would result from bombing nuclear facilities.

The Iranian rulers are clever, and resourceful, but they have to know none of that matters. To the Israelis, it's this simple: Iran (or any neighboring state of Israel's) cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Period.

So; when? is the question. In the most recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg, their national correspondent, published an article which took months to research and write titled "The Point Of No Return".

(Note: Goldberg has been criticized by Glenn Greenwald at Salon ["Does the past record of journalists matter?" ], and "Wanker Of The Day" by The Great Curmudgeon, among others.)

(Their criticism is based in Goldberg's 2002 writings, which pushed lies about evil Saadam's WMD's in Iraq, used by Lil' Boots and President Cheney as justifications to invade that country.)

(These were in fact lies; and journalists [such as the NYT's Judith Miller] who sold them to the U.S. public were noting but shills for the Bush administration, which shat on the world for nine years. Goldberg was seen by Greenberg and The Curmudgeon as an enabler of lies and worse than lies about Iraq, and that he is writing something very similar about Iran now. Just so you know.)

As Steve Clemons in TPM notes, "after conducting dozens of interviews with senior members of Israel's national security establishment as well as many top personalities in the Obama White House, [Goldberg] concludes ...that the likelihood of Israel unilaterally bombing Iran to curtail a potential nuclear weapon breakout capacity is north of 50-50."

And, there's funny in the article, too: Goldberg recounts how Lil' Boots refused to listen when President Cheney wanted a joint bombing of Iran in concert with Israel. Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer pressed Lil' Boots to attack, and (with that propensity of the hereditary wealthy to bestow nicknames on pets, children, and retainers) Bush referred to them as "The Bomber Boys".

"In short [Steve Clemons relates], Goldberg paints a picture that despite the likelihood of very high cost blowback from Iran in the wake of a unilateral strike by Israel, or a coordinated attack with the US, there are numerous tilts toward bombing embedded in the current political orders in both Jerusalem and Washington."

Given that the Iranians have already lied and repeatedly tried to hide aspects of their Uranium-enrichment program from UN inspectors; and that their President, Little Mahmood, seems to speak for Iran's Islamic leadership when he claims the Holocaust never happened and that Israel should cease to exist; and that Israel's current government is captained by Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the hard-line head of the Likud Party...

I'm hoping that something else will happen. I'd like Iran's leaders to see reason; but they haven't so far, and I don't believe they will. I'd like the Israeli government to be judicious, but they weren't in Gaza and this is a much more threatening situation from their perspective. What other outcome is possible?

When maps were being made in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries, cartographers used an inscription on occasion to signify blank areas on a map where things were unknown: Here There Be Dragons, or Here There Be Tygers... and everyone understood, 'If you venture here, no one knows what will happen'.

And in Vietnam, signs would be erected at the start of an area where hostile fire was expected: Fifty Miles Of Bad Road Ahead.

UPDATE: On Friday, August 13th, the New York Times online reported that the Russian government announced its state nuclear power company would take a crucial step this month to start Iran’s first nuclear power plant.

The company, Rosatom, said technicians would move tons of low-enriched uranium fuel from a storage site into the reactor on Aug. 21, the first of three steps in starting it up, a process that will take months.

The United States had asked Russia to delay the plant’s start-up, until Iran had stopped uranium enrichment and allayed concerns that it was using its civilian nuclear program as a cover for weapons development.

Well, that worked out well.

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Lines In The Sand

One familiar theme I keep pursuing is the continual escalation by America's political Right of rhetoric and action that tends towards the absurd or the violent.

I'm not a professional historian, but I was originally trained as one. And in my main area of study (European history after 1815, with a focus on Mitteleuropa between 1914 and '45) there were plentiful examples of one side, or party; even scientists and artists, continually crossing lines. And the thing about crossing lines: Whether it's political or cultural, it's always about changing what is perceived as permissible.

And in this mid-cycle election year, there are more candidates for Congress -- all of them Republicans, or running as one -- spouting utterly crazy nonsense. Stupid nonsense, as if they had been raised on a diet of right-wing talk radio, where nothing has to relate to reality and there's no accountability for what gets said.



Rand Paul. Tommy Tancredo. Sharron Angle. Michelle Bachmann. Pat Toomey. Meg Whitman. Black helicopters, race miscegenation; attacks on southwestern cities by armies of Mexican drug lords; aliens in control of banks and governments. Stupid nonsense, man -- and that's just the most visible stuff.

There are 16-plus million people out of work; the National Debt is nearly $14 Trillion Dollars (Thanks, Lil' Boots!). Between 2 and 3 million gallons of oil were released into the Gulf. The Taliban are resurgent, still, in Afghanistan. What does the Fox Cable crap these pretend politicians keep spouting have to do with reality? Why do we coddle and enable this kind of adolescent behavior when the threats we face are so deadly serious?

In a way, this was the point of the post about Newt Gingrich below: When a person's statements or conduct are seen objectively as negative or harmful -- and none of that seems to affect their chances of being elected to high public office -- then something is fundamentally wrong... with our electoral system, with our media, with the culture.

At TPM Media, a reader sent an email which discussed this.

I understand there is a strong temptation to look at primary victories by extreme [Republican or Teabagger] candidates ... "good for Democrats." As a strong Democratic partisan I also see them that way... On the other hand, I find it disturbing that [an extremist candidate] was able to win the primary of a major political party.

As a Democrat, I want to say "See, look: the Republicans have gone crazy." But as an American I find the trend toward conspiracy theories and paranoia (on both the right and the left) profoundly disturbing.



It's simply not healthy for a Democracy when you have a relatively large percentage of the population believing crazy theories about plots against the United States executed by the UN, or a secret one-world government, or whatever it is these folks believe. This kind of paranoia is poisonous to a Democracy, and opens the doors to demagoguery of the most dangerous type.



Of course this is nothing new, this kind of thinking always seems to take hold to a certain degree during times of great stress and especially economic hardship. But the fact that this kind of thing is predictable does not make it any less dangerous. Having a major party candidate l...spouting this kind of nonsense only serves to further legitimize it, whether he wins or not. The press needs to be extremely vigilant against these kinds of delusions, ruthlessly exposing them to the cold light of fact and rationality.

Think Fox will do that? Little Rupert's business model is based on packaging and selling extremism, rumor and innuendo as fact. The Mainstream Media appears to treat it all as theater.



Seriously, in order for a Right-wing candidate (or, a politician) to be discredited, it almost seems that they would have to be caught, on camera, in a love nest with an underage, same-sex partner, while torturing and killing defenseless animals (Kind of a touchy issue with me).

And even then, Lard Boy would claim they'd been "set up" and victimized by a vicious, all-powerful liberal press; House Minority Leader Boner would publicly state that "we should wait for all the facts to come in", and the candidate would already be booking their initial 'comeback' appearance on Oprah.

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What They Are

(Photo: © Newscom / Wenn)

A long time ago, I was involved in speech and debate competitions. 'Extemporaneous Speaking' was one category, where you were handed a slip of paper with three topics chosen from current news events. To compete, you had to know what was going on in the world; to inform yourself (so our debate coach told us), you had to read the weekly news magazines of the 1950's and 60's: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report.

It was clear from their editorials, and the general focus of their articles, that the major news magazines were ideologically split: U.S. News was solidly conservative; Time, a creation of Ol' Henry Luce, was Center-Right; and Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post's redoubtable liberal publisher, Katherine Graham) leaned to the Left. This editorial split remained true for nearly forty years.

In the early 1990's, when the Republicans had taken control of the House, and Newt Gingrich had become the new Speaker and the intellectual power of the GOP, I remember Newsweek publishing a balanced portrait of the man -- even so, you walked away thinking This guy's a vicious little ass. What led me to that conclusion were two incidents Newsweek had reported.

Gingrich had grown up with a stepfather, an officer at the U.S. Army's infantry school at Ft. Benning, Georgia; he had been diagnosed with cancer when Gingrich had just begun his political career in the Congress.

At one point, the stepfather had broken down, exhausted by disease and treatment, crying, telling his family he was frightened of dying. Newt refused to comfort him, telling him to "Shut up and act like a man".

Nice.

The second vignette is by now well-known, but when Newsweek reported the story, it was a fresh revelation: That Gingrich had served his first wife, Jackie Battley, with divorce papers as she was lying in a hospital bed recovering from Uterine cancer surgery.

Very nice.

A year later, he married again -- and he would divorce his second wife, Marianne, under similar circumstances as she was suffering from a serious illness -- to marry a young staffer with whom he'd been having sex in his office, or in his car in the Congressional parking garage ("If you see my car rockin'", he reportedly told an aide at the time, "don't come knockin'").

Over the years, the magazines have been sold (Newsweek will shortly be sold to Sidney Karmann, billionaire and partner/founder of Harmann-Kardon). Since 1992 and Newt's "Contract For America", our political Right has become more and more strident and aggressive; even Gingrich has been outdistanced by the ramblings of a Rand Paul, or the continuing drama of a Glenn Beck.

And, publishers have decided that it's better to go with what they believe is the future of America: Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rupert Murdoch, Evangelicals and Teabaggers. Newsweek made a right turn some time ago. They would never publish the kind of portrait of Gingrich as they had in 1994 when it appeared he might be poised to run for President against Clinton.

And Ol' Newt is resurgent -- now appearing on the Sunday talk shows as the intellectual, the rapid-speaking leader-in-waiting of America's conservative movement. He's opened PACs and already received sizable contributions for a possible Presidential run in 2012.

This week, Esquire magazine published an article about Gingrich -- actually, an extended interview with Gingrich's second wife, Marianne (Newt is currently on wife number four, I think).

It's not pretty. Apparently, Herr Gingrich just couldn't keep his zipper up and his wick dry, and had been congenitally unfaithful to Marianne. And everyone knew it; Gingrich turned out to be the cause of his own political demise.

One night, Marianne says, Bill Clinton called from the White House. She answered the phone and the President asked if he could please speak to her husband. Could the Speaker come over immediately? After he hung up, Newt summoned his driver and went in the back door to the Oval Office. During that meeting, he would tell her later, Clinton laid it out for him: "You're a lot like me," he told him.

A classic scene, something right out of All The King's Men: In the Oval Office, Clinton gets up from behind the same desk used by JFK, takes Gingrich over to the sofas in the middle of the room and tells him they're two Southern boys. They're a lot alike. Then he tells Newt what they had on him about his sexual escapades, and that if he stepped out of line he'd be washed up in politics and in Washington.

Ironic, given what happened to The Clenis a year later.

Newt Gingrich was muzzled in the critical run-up to the [19]98 midterms. Three weeks before the election, Gingrich got a visit from Kenneth Duberstein, a senior Republican who had served as chief of staff to Ronald Reagan.

[Marianne recounted to Esquire] "He says, 'What's going on? We're gonna lose seats if something doesn't change.' "

Marianne jumped in, too. "I asked Newt, 'What are you doing? Why aren't we out there blasting them?' "

This was his true turning point, she believes. As his personal failures and his political contradictions closed in on him, she began to entertain fears about his fundamental decency.

So, Newt Gingrich is a vicious little ass, a serial adulterer, a liar, and Esquire lays it out rather neatly.

Please pay attention to this part, though, because it will be on the final: If, despite plentiful evidence about his character, Newt still becomes one of the GOP front-runners (if not their candidate) for President in 2012 -- then I would become very, very afraid.

Look: The actual unemployment rate in America is between 16 and 18 per cent. The "recovery" has stalled. The Republicans in Congress will do nothing, and the Democrats can't seem to do the right thing because they've sold their soul to the Fed and the Banksters. Communities are laying off teachers, firefighters, police; roads are being plowed back to gravel; they're talking about doing away with Social Security and Medicare -- and no one is out in the streets raising their voices about any of it.

The possibility of a Gingrich Presidency would be as bad as Lil' Boots Bush (the only difference is, Gingrich has a better command of spoken English) -- but if such a thing ever becomes possible, it will be because -- even with clear evidence of what kind of man he is -- it would not matter to voters.

It would be more proof (if you needed it, that is) that the game is rigged; the fix is in; that it's Chinatown -- and that Americans will prefer government by sociopaths; and proof that the lowest common denominator in this country will have suddenly fallen to depths unimaginable even twenty years ago.

If you want to stop and consider that for a moment, it's what many thinking Germans must have felt when their country mutated into something clearly and unmistakably malignant, right in front of their eyes.

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Fazed And Contused

© Tom Tomorrow 2010

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If You Want A Taste Of The Future You Must Bring Your Own Spoon

Last month (reports the New York Times online), the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, and Those Dominions Across The Seas, began the slide down The Great Austerity: "[T]he British government abolished the U.K. Film Council, the Health Protection Agency and dozens of other groups that regulate, advise and distribute money in the arts, health care, industry and other areas."

The shiny new Tory Conservative British government has decreed that to reduce the national debt by lowering annual budget deficits, cuts must be made in nearly every spending category across the board. And their effects will be immediate.

In June [the New York Time reported], the government announced its first round of cuts, removing about $10 billion from the current year’s budget.

While that is a drop in the bucket compared to the final goal, the reduction measures have already had severe consequences. Public sector workers across the country, except for the lowest paid, will have their salaries frozen for the next two years. Oxfordshire, facing a nearly $1 million trim in its road safety budget, has been forced to shut down all its 161 traffic speed cameras.

The cuts mean that Nottinghamshire plans to close three recycling facilities and some of its day care centers. And that the city of Coventry, which already cut spending in January, is trying to find $5.6 million more to cut from its current child services budget.

But none of this is much compared to what the country will face when the government issues its long-term budget plans in October. Mr. Mutton, the Coventry official, predicted that the next round of cuts would cost the city at least 10,000 jobs in the public and private sectors. Analysts have estimated that some 600,000 public-sector jobs could be lost nationwide.

... and no idea how many private sector jobs. I wonder where those people will find work? Basically, I believe Britain in the immediate future will be very much like England in the nearly twenty years after World War Two (1945-63), when Great Britain was a cold, drab place -- certainly not Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia".

And the British Tory politicians who have done this have American Cousins in the House and Senate who believe we should do exactly the same here.

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Western Civ. 103: The Seldon Theories

Glenn Greenwald posted an article at Salon today ("What Collapsing Empire Looks Like"), enumerating the slow-motion of deterioration wrought by the Crash.

>> Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.

>> Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

>> Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

>> It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning: "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how "paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue."

>> Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional.

>> And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free."



The nation didn't stop falling after the Crash of 2008. Only the pace has slowed, enough to make us believe that, somehow, we avoided real trouble. And as we continue to fall, the descent is accompanied by commercials and television, iPads and SmartPhones; anything to keep people from realizing what's happening to the society they've lived in all their lives, and to the promises that society has held out to them as the American Dream.

It's human to not want to see the water rising, to focus on the familiar and the comforting, not to hear the sound of the steady drummer, "drumming like a noise in dreams".

In our Western Civilization classes, the rise and fall of empires -- Egyptian, Persian; Greek; Roman, Merovingian; Danish, Swedish, Russian; French, British, German -- was covered in a few chapters; a night's reading before the exam. In my particular area of interest, Wiemar Germany lasted less than twelve years, followed by a Great Depression, and then another twelve years of nazi rule and a devastating worldwide war: 1919 to 1945 -- still, something you could read through in a few hours if you had the stomach for it.

Different, now, to live through times which -- with the added crisis of climate change -- we're just on the cusp of. The fun hasn't even started in earnest yet, and who knows where we'll all end up.


Natley (Art Garfunkle) And The Old Man: Catch-22 (1970)

OLD MAN: ...Italy is a poor, weak country. And that is why we will survive, long after your country has been destroyed.
NATLEY: What are you talking about? America's not going to be destroyed.
OLD MAN: Never?
NATLEY: Well...
OLD MAN: Egypt was destroyed; Greece was destroyed; Rome was destroyed; Persia was destroyed -- Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours?
NATLEY: ...What you don't understand is that it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
OLD MAN: You have it backwards. It's better to live on your feet than to die on your knees. I know.
NATLEY: How do you know?
OLD MAN: Because I am a hundred and seven years old. How old are you?
NATLEY: I'll be twenty in January.
OLD MAN: If you live.

-- Buck Henry; Screenplay to Mike Nichols' Film of Catch-22 (1970)

Will America dissolve into a State run by 'Pastors', conservative Oligarchs? Will most of us queue up for water, clothing; living space? Will we become like Britain, with CCTVs on every light pole and an electronic dossier on every citizen's email, personal buying and travel habits? Will someone in the Nuclear Club finally decide to uncork the Genie again?



We don't believe these things are possible; not here, in America. This is a land of opportunity, almost a meritocracy -- we don't have a class structure here based on family lineage or money; and we are the guardians of truth, justice, and the Rule Of Law™. You can rise as high as you can reach through hard work and the Free Enterprise system.

We don't murder our leaders; we don't single out people for imprisonment or harassment because they espouse unpopular opinions. We are free to speak or write or create as we like. We are the strongest military and economic power on the face of the earth. We're not dictators. We don't quit, we don't surrender; we treat our enemies fairly and with compassion because that's the American Way.



Right.

As I've mentioned before, a Romanian acquaintance once said, while Chaucescu was still in power, "In the Eastern Bloc, if you are enough of a problem for the authorities, they take you out into the woods and shoot you in the back of the head. In America, if you are enough of a problem, they restrict your ability to make money."

And, today, what passes for common wisdom among the political elite, pundits and media is that in order to prevent higher deficits and more National Debt, the government should enact policies that reduce it -- to privatize Social Security, reduce Medicare to a voucher system, freeze the pay of the military (that'll go over well with the boys and girls in Afghanistan), and slash every Federal program possible. To cut, and not stimulate.

At the same time, these same Austerians say that raising income taxes is regrettable, but must be done. Only -- they mean raising taxes for everyone except the top two per cent or so, who will receive a tax cut. Because the wealthy are the ones who,through their purchases of Bulgari jewelry, Bentleys and designer clothing, will raise the rest of us up from poverty... a millimeter at a time.

This isn't a joke. It's policy. As Paul Krugman notes, "We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade."

(The wealthy, in America particularly, remind me now of the 'Owners' in Paul Theroux's 1986 novel, O-Zone, which I strongly recommend; it's as perceptive a book about the future in its own way as Atwood's Handmaid's Tale or Huxley's "Brave New World").

So official policy is to protect the wealthy, and allow the country to pass slowly into history. Greenwald concluded his column with a quote from International Monetary Fund Chief Economist Simon Johnson, from his article last year in The Atlantic Monthly, "about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues" -- and not targeting the rich is just par for the course:

"Squeezing oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments.

"Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the Oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or -- here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique -- the assumption of private debt obligations by the government.

"Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk -- at least until the riots grow too large...

"But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests —- financiers, in the case of the U.S. -— played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them."

I don't know why, but I keep thinking of a poem written just before the beginning of the Great War; Barbara Tuchman used it as a section title ("The Steady Drummer") in her 1966 book, The Proud Tower -- another book I recommend; not many are being written like them any longer.

On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad" (1896)


At the Moment, This Idea Seems Reasonable...

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