Bo Diddley’s son arrested in Bo Diddley Park as part of OWS
October 16th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Just that. Here he is just before the arrest.
Go, Bo Diddley.
I’m seeing the resemblance. Anyway, things go on; things look back; things grow and recede.
Am I back? I don’t know. You decide.
An American classic
July 2nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Dave Alvin may never attain greatness, but I can’t imagine American music without him.
I almost hate to have to bring it up again, but he won’t go away.
June 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Newt just doesn’t get the message. He’s been hated on profusely by the GOP for dragging his baggy baggage into their presidential nomination scrum, and then his election campaign staff resigned en masse complaining that Gingrich is a grifter not a legitimate candidate. It makes you wonder who they thought they were going to work for. It’s not as if the name is unfamiliar.
But he keeps on keeping on. So when the GOP unloaded its clown car of candidates for its first real – first really real – debate, Newt was there. But first, what are we to make of this debate, these candidates? Gingrich isn’t the only pathetic joke to show up – we’ve got Bachmann, Santorum, Cain, Paul! Paul seems like a sweet old man who hasn’t been outside his apartment or turned on a TV set in twenty years, but at least he seems somewhat sincere in his beliefs. The others? My god. It’s hard to know whether ignorance or crazy gets the upper hand there.
And then you get the real candidates, Pawlenty and Romney. The take-away from the debate is that Pawlenty’s showing was so weak and unmemorable that it pretty much cinched that as the already growing sense of his public persona. Romney of course emerges as the frontrunner – by elimination if nothing else – but the word already is that he’s not going to be able to get the nomination not only because of Romneycare but now because he’s broken away from the GOP’s lockstep orthodoxy on global warming.
So anyway, one of the big questions was how much Islamophobic bigotry are the candidates going to throw out in the debate to rile up the rubes? The answer – not terribly much. But it did make an appearance, mainly pizza salesman Herman Cain trying to both back-peddle on some of his previous crazy ignorance. Ignorant crazy? Can someone make that into one word for me? Anyway, along with stumbling over some stale urban legends about sharia law, Cain offers to make a distinction between peaceful Muslims and militant Muslims and says that maybe he would after all, despite earlier comments, allow Muslims to work for his administration, but only after they answered “certain questions.” What questions? Probably not like ones asked Cain at the debate, like whether he prefers deep dish or thin crust pizza. (Dude answered “deep dish.” He doesn’t know jack about pizza either.)
Anyway. You can’t single out a religion for loyalty oaths, you know. Pesky Constitution. Which reminds me – I’m going to start mentally substituting “authoritarian” for every time a conservative says “constitutional” – like “constitutional conservative” – and see if that makes more sense.
So Romney has another one of his “I’m the sensible one” moments and points out that all this sharia fear-mongering is pointless nonsense, and more: “Our nation was founded on a principle of religious tolerance. That’s in fact why some of the earliest patriots came to this country and why we treat people with respect, regardless of their religious persuasion.” Whoa. That’s actual history.
But I’m getting sidetracked. So then the history professor, that’s Newt Gingrich, remember. That was his improbable dayjob. So then the history professor has this to say:
“Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I’m in favor of saying to people, ‘If you’re not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period.’
“We did this in dealing with the Nazis and we did this in dealing with the communists,” Gingrich continues. “And it was controversial both times, and both times we discovered after a while, there are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country. And we have got to have the guts to stand up and say no.”
The first comment is just dumb. Of course loyalty to the U.S. is a prerequisite for serving in the administration. But that’s not what folks were talking about. They were talking about loyalty tests for certain religions. But the rest is batshit crazy. We did this in dealing with the Nazis?! Muslims are like communists?!?
No, Newt. We did not do this with the Nazis. In World War II, the group we singled out for potentially conflicted loyalty were the Japanese-Americans who we placed in internment camps, an action that did not make us any safer and soiled and damaged our nation’s claim to respect rights and human dignity. That was an embarrassment we’re still suffering from. Nazi sympathizers did exist, but they weren’t so much infiltrators and saboteurs as they were prominent businessmen, industrialists, and clergy.
No, Newt. We did not do this with the communists. Although there were unquestionably Soviet spies in the U.S. after World War II, the anti-communist hysteria was not about them so much as producing a climate of fear to promote the agendas and careers of demagogues like Senator Joe McCarthy, and accomplished nothing other than the intimidation of legitimate dissent and ruined the lives of many people simply on the suspicion that they might hold unpopular political beliefs. It also is credited with hampering the actual investigation into foreign espionage on American soil. Once again, there is a reason McCarthyism is a swear, not a success.
You would think Newt doesn’t know anything about history. And I suppose I’ll continue to feel compelled to show that he doesn’t until he finally just goes away for good.
Why do so many authoritarians consider themselves libertarians?
June 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
It’s a question that keeps coming up. The latest is Rand Paul’s recent gaffes supporting detention of people for listening to speeches: “If someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison,” he says. And for perpetual FBI investigations of Middle Eastern exchange students. In truth, Paul the son has put a few degrees of separation between himself and the political movement that sustains Paul the father’s presidential ambitions, but the base of his political support is largely the same, and his defining political stance has been a “libertarian” objection to the Patriot Act.
And I applaud him on that, but that’s about where the libertarian angle seems to end, though if you listen to him and his supporters they’ll tell you that it’s also behind their insistence that government is a hindrance to the free exercise of the cultural and economic prerogatives of an ostensible conservative ruling class. Sorry, dudes. Liberty is not a zero-sum game, and the more people are enfranchised, and the more deeply they are enfranchised, the freer we’ll all be. But this is not the prevailing attitude driving contemporary identification with “libertarian” political movements. A recent study from Havard Business School confirms what we already know: while both blacks and whites see freedoms for blacks increasing, only blacks see this as a net gain. Whites view black gains as meaning a loss of white freedom, to the extent that whites now increasingly view anti-white discrimination and false accusations of racism as a greater societal problem than discrimination against blacks. That this perception in no way reflects the world we live in is obvious to thinking people, but perhaps that’s part of the problem.
But people still mistake Paul and the “libertarian” side of the Tea Party for those somehow interesting in actually protecting or even expanding upon our existing liberties. Hapless clowns even now continue to promote the Tea Party because the Tea Party parrots some old-time libertarian talking points and drops the right names from lists compiled by true believers and sworn to be pure and free from the taint of real world considerations and compromise. Matt Welch tells you to listen to Rand Paul’s YouTube speech on the Patriot Act and then “after you’ve watched it, forward it to any friends you might have who suspect that Tea Partiers in general and Rand Paul in particular are reactionary Dick Cheney fans.” If Matt were paying more attention to actual Tea Partiers and less to his fantasies of relevance, he’d know that the Tea Party in general are reactionary Dick Cheney fans.
I admit that you’re likely to find a slight degree more antipathy to the Patriot Act in the Tea Party than in mainstream Republicans, to the degree that any difference can still be distinguished. But by and large the Tea Partiers support the Patriot Act, if no small part because the Tea Party is also the party of rabid, small-minded bigotry and they’re willing to give up any civil liberty not so much for their own security as they would just to be able to stick it to a few dozen Muslims.
Here, take this small test. Do you think that people receiving welfare should be drug tested? Hey, it’s an honest question, and there’s no shame in answering it either way. But if you said yes, then you’re not a libertarian. You may not be an authoritarian Tea Partying type, but whatever you are, you just flunked a basic dividing line between supporting individual liberty and supporting the state’s control over individual actions. (O.K., I lied. There is a little bit of shame in answering yes: you’re penalizing the poor for being poor – liberty doesn’t mean you can interpret a person’s economic standing in moral terms.)
Here’s a bigger test, and one that does carry some ethical baggage. Consider the policy decisions your politics tend to support. Do they promote a more diverse, pluralistic public that finds fewer restrictions upon any number of possible whims and desires no matter whether you yourself would want to pursue those whims and desires? Then you tend toward a libertarian political type. Or do they promote a more conformist and homogenous society of reduced choices based on tradition, faith, history, law and order, “natural” or cultural norms, etc. in which fewer alternatives to majoritarian lifeways are allowable? Then you tend toward the authoritarian political type.
You want a final test. Here, look at this picture.
If this makes your heart flutter, then you’re not a libertarian. Period.
The hilarity continues.
May 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Repellant meta-joke Rick Santorum not only doesn’t get the joke about him, he keeps stepping into it time after time after time again.
First he reappears on the scene to complain about his Google problem, telling Roll Call, “You want to talk about incivility. I don’t know of anybody on the left who came to my defense for the incivility with respect to those things.” Dude, that’s not incivility, that’s karma. Plus, he really is composed mostly of fecal matter.
Then stories like this keep coming up in the press: “Dog Pee Can’t Stop Santorum.” It’s like the entire universe is in on the man-on-dog meme and won’t let him forget it.
But then he piles it on even deeper with these inadvertent howlers coming out from his Twitter feed. It’s almost like his new media and press people are in on the joke and just feeding it.
Thanks to media saint Dan Savage for those. But there’s still more coming! Check the feed to find your own gems like this one:
There’s no right so secure that it can’t be taken away.
May 28th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Neo-fascism has been on a slow but steady rise in Europe, and currently the Netherlands’ anti-Islamic Party for Freedom or PVV, which is predominantly a sanitized neo-Nazi party like England’s BNP, forms part of a center-right coalition in the Dutch Parliament. On a side note, one of the unique features of contemporary extreme right-wing nationalist discourse is the role of Israel. Support for Israel has been one of the PVV’s founder Geert Wilder’s central policies rather than the traditional anti-Semitism. It seems as if the presence of Muslims in Europe has allowed neo-fascism the ability to focus on a threatening foreign taint that’s not Jewish, thus allowing the presence of Israel and its struggles in the Middle East to work as some kind of synecdoche for Christian cultural identity on the Continent. Something very similar, of course, which is developing here in the U.S., where the exception of Pat Buchanan, American conservatives are only anti-Semitic around Christmastime.
PVV doesn’t have complete control, and seems unlikely to get it just yet. They were unable to form a majority government in the city Almere, despite winning a plurality of the votes, because of their insistence on “nonnegotiable” initiatives such as a ban on Muslim cultural practices and the ability to field “city commandos” - a para-police force run through the political rather than civic side of city government – to patrol the city and “maintain law and order.” Scary, no?
But what’s got me annoyed is that the PVV has been successful moving the Netherlands to increased restriction and one would assume eventual ban of their legendary coffee shops, places where marijuana products can be bought and consumed without restriction. Though a complete ban is the PVV’s stated goal, the current policy, to go into effect toward the end of the year, is to ban all non-Dutch from the coffee shops and then to restrict patrons of each coffee shop so a subscription only membership not to exceed 1,500.
It seems like such a dumb cliche, and that’s maybe why no one’s really paying that much attention. But, seriously, when the Nazis come to power, the first thing they’re going to do is take away your right to smoke weed.
The awesome Ian Murphy
May 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
So NY-26 went for the Democratic candidate, Kathy Hochul. One of the reddest NY districts, it’s being described as a bellwether of anti-Republican sentiment, particularly in the context of recent GOP positioning to end Medicare. Once again, a special election in NY state had a split conservative ticket, with a mainstream GOP contender, Jane Corwin, and a spoiler Tea Party candidate, Jack Davis. Except Davis was a vanity candidate that didn’t get much support from either the Tea Party or GOP voters in general, and the end didn’t draw that much from Corwin. From a 73% safe Republican seat to a solid Democratic win (47% to 43% according to early results announced by the NYT) the story is less about GOP division in the ranks than outright incompetence on messaging.
Anyway, our favorite candidate, the Green Party representative, Buffalo Beast editor, and prankster supreme Ian Murphy made just 1% of the vote. I suppose I knew a surprise upset really wasn’t in the cards, but I wanted to believe. Wiegel found him basically not campaigning for the vote at all: after all, the Green Party only has about 800 supporters in that district.
So Murphy engaged in some awesome dada anti-campaigning with some truly hilarious results. But the best one of all is this, a mock Corwin site that just nails it, and not just the vacuous political movement Corwin is a stand-in for, but the utter lack of integrity that is the contemporary political process.
State ceremonies in Florida now “private” ceremonies.
May 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The corporatization and privatization of American public life and spaces is one of the great unexamined tragedies of the 21st century. The bizarre ideological meme that business leaders make better politicians, administrators, and executives of any kind of organization – despite considerable empirical evidence to the contrary – continues to spread and lead to all kinds of malfeasance. Governments and schools are nothing like businesses, and if you try to run something that’s not a business like a business … well, you basically fuck it up. But people just don’t seem to notice.
So Florida elected a healthcare entrepreneur governor of their already ridiculously dysfunctional state, and maybe in this case people are beginning to notice, because Rick Scott is widely loathed there. Some things you should have thought about before you elected him, Floridians, are 1) healthcare is another area where all empirical evidence points to the inability of business models to administer it effectively, and 2) the guy is a known criminal! Not only a criminal, but a major, record-breaking criminal: the largest fraud conviction in U.S. history.
Anyway, I’d say that his effort to portray his administration of the Florida state government as working toward the benefit of the citizens of the state as a another epic fraud, except that these days that’s pretty much politics as usual. In a ceremony to celebrate the public rape of the state, what his government is calling the state’s budget, the governor’s office had the Sheriff’s department of Sumter Country walk through the crowd with party operatives and remove anyone present that looked like they might oppose the governor’s budget initiatives on the grounds that it was a “private” ceremony.
Private ceremony? If he’s getting married or a child is getting christened, that’s a private ceremony. Whatever he does as a governor is public. Period. How much money he makes, what he does during the day, his official communications – many things that would be private should he be in a different line of work.
Now I’ve never been terribly thrilled at the liberal modus vivendi that sets off a public and a private sphere in order to allow for substantial freedoms while still sustaining a pluralistic society – in my mind the private sphere is too commonly used to sustain illiberal restrictions on freedom or to confine voices or actions deemed disruptive of the public sphere, but I’d rather find creative ways to collapse the distinction between the two, not obliterate the Enlightenment understanding of the public – the common, mutual good – to replace it entirely with the private sphere. Now the location of the ceremony was a very large private retirement community called The Villages, and ostensibly a private development. But that certainly doesn’t justify weeding out the crowd by party apparatchiks until only the faithful are present. If you celebrate a public event in ceremony, the public must be in attendance, no matter how rowdy and disapproving they may be.
And the notion of private communities just deepens my disgust. Somehow, without anyone really noticing, the past century has virtually eliminated public spaces with the sole exception of the massive federal mausoleum-like Washington Mall, out-of-the-way nature parks, etc. Where’s the town green? Where are there common areas for people to assemble? They’re being replaced by privately developed parking lots, where the renters and owners reserve the right to eject the untidiness of free and open public life like skateboarders and Salvation Army Santas and people seeking an audience for whatever rant they feel compelled to deliver. The chaotic, crazy but deeply authentic and generative public voice is being muted as the notion of private property rights become a categorical absolute: anything that now exists without a private owner is suddenly somehow suspect and threatening to the social order.
