Current Comedy, 12.22.09: Live Free or Die? Yeah, Right.

Though seasons greetings might suggest I write something even more warm and cozy than last week’s Yule Log, I dedicate this week’s holiday column to the presumed patriot I recently saw downtown with the titular slogan emblazoned on the passenger side crew cab window of his pickup. “Live Free Or Die.“ It was a large display. There was the whole “Don’t Tread on Me” snake twined around a Liberty Tree of sorts, presumably watered by the blood of patriots, as Jefferson suggested. There were other rightwing redneck bumper stickers on the vehicle. As a person whose own tailgate is held together by bumper stickers, I understand the compulsion, and so I scanned the other slogans eagerly, but nothing stood out to me with the power of the simple Revolutionary era slogan/New Hampshire state motto that has been recently re-appropriated by the Tea Partiers.And I thought: “Live Free or Die”? Dude, please do. I mean go ahead and die, because ain’t no one, at all, anywhere, “livin’ free.” If you really are the kind of person who would live and die by such simplistic propagandistic hokum, then you are the kind of person the Darwin Awards were invented for. I have not been convinced that people of your ilk are actually benefiting our society and while I in no way would agitate to pursue your harm, I wouldn’t necessarily mind if you voluntarily thinned the herd.OK, I guess that’s a poor example of holiday spirit. Maybe a little. Let me re-state this: First off, there is no freedom--existence, every existence, comes with a certain set of parameters or limitations thus making being “anything” the opposite of being “everything” and thus, to “be” at all is to not be “free.” But not a more basic level, you are not going to Wal-Mart and snag yourself a twelve pack without paying for it, or put in your 40 for the boss man without expecting something back for it, because there is no “free.“ This is not a free country. Everybody’s got bills to pay, everybody’s got to get paid--ain’t no free lunch, ain’t no living free, only dying and how appealing is that during the holiday season?You aren’t going to live in America without commerce, that is income and expense, that’s cash, and cash, in this year as in days of old, remains the actual risen King. And cash is just the first sacred cow among the infinity of restrictions we accept to exist. Among two of my favorites: corporality and animation. Again, no freedom. I like living among walls and floors, which also restricts me. Again, no freedom, but dang this time of year especially, indoor living is a prison maybe, but it’s life.So, there is no “live free” and those who claim to live by such, should, by their own rules, die as such. Not that I actually want you to take it this seriously; but you could take your life or at least your belief system more seriously. Just saying. If you think of our country as a democracy then this is not a free country because then you are obligated to participate in the decision making and improvement creating processes of the country and taking an obligation is a rejection of freedom. You can’t say forget everyone else and just look out for yourself: that’s not democracy.Mr. “Live Free or Die,” are you not even aware of the conditions of servitude you accept daily, no matter how much joy you believe you take in them? Since these kinds of bumper stickers surround me like a sea sometimes, I am hoping I am dealing with people who are a bit more aware than that. But sometimes the evidence suggests I’m wrong.I for one think of our country as an obligation. It’s not a ground-score meant for my plunder, it’s a chance at a stewardship and maybe we can make it better. Of course that concept involves giving of one’s self from time to time and so giving up one’s freedom; thus democracy itself is not free. If you say you think of the country as capitalism, then it is even more clearly not “free,” since capitalism is explicitly an assignment of value and thus a negation of “free.”Mr. “Live Free, Or Die,” my good brother, have you thought this through? Obviously not, but perhaps we can write this off as a growth experience. Child, I forgive you; but now if you’ll take a second to realize the hollowness of that slogan, perhaps you could acknowledge that there might be a few other concepts you’re being sold by the hucksters of the right that also might, maybe, slightly be, less than truthful.Perhaps the most subversive thing a person can do in a capitalist society is to give something away for “free.” Maybe that is the actual truth and that is what will set you “free.” This is the season of giving, so give this idea a chance Mr. “Live Free Or Die”: When we give of ourselves, or our things, then we are not being part of someone’s system for profit. It’s still a choice between various sets of limitations, but it is closer to “free” than most. Maybe that’s why we claim to take a break from oppressive capitalism for a day or two around the holidays and just give. No worry about the cost, just give. Well, that’s what we claim to do. Just as some claim to exist by a credo of “Live Free or Die.”--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy: 12/14/09: Wingnuts Boasting By An Open Pyre

Gosh-ee, happy holidays, bah-humbug, and all that other rot. ‘Tis the season to make folly, as I seem to say every year when it comes time for the Xmas piece. With so many jokes available in this present, one hardly knows which cans of worms to open up 1st.
Intro
You must enter an Intro for your Diary Entry between 300 and 1150 characters long (that's approximately 50-175 words without any html or formatting markup).
Gosh-ee, happy holidays, bah-humbug, and all that other rot. ‘Tis the season to make folly, as I seem to say every year when it comes time for the Xmas piece. With so many jokes available in this present, one hardly knows which cans of worms to open up 1st.
Let’s start with a lame off-topic celebrity news distraction joke to give some credence to the current crop of marshmallow fluff they feed us as news. As I know you’ve heard, Tiger Woods is a sports star who has been bagging babes from here to Kalamazoo since he was old enough to want somebody else to carry his balls for him and that is as expected. Face it, the fantasy of getting to bag beautiful groupies is a component of the determination that keeps some kids, maybe most kids practicing long enough to grow to be sports stars; and that particular fantasy is also a component of the communal fantasy we share of our sports stars. We want ‘em to be sexy. Sports is all about vigor and that makes it sexy. We’d be kidding ourselves with somebody else’s false morality if we tried to pretend it was otherwise, by and large, for most sports fans in these American states. For every mock-shocked talk jock out there who pretends to have his delicate sensibilities afflicted by the news Tiger Woods has shagged his more than his share in the rough; well, there are scores of red meat Americans on both the left and the right who are quietly thinking "You go bro. Nine women, no way?" Now those people will wait till the Pharisees finish their faux scold and wind up liking Tiger even more because of it. So in the long run the yolk will be on the shock squawkers over this one. So this joke here is for those who feel they were honestly shocked and awed: hey folks, they didn’t call him pussycat, did they? No. They named him "Tiger." Though apparently horn dog might’ve worked just as well. Now, the present I’ve have most wanted to open for the longest time has got to be those miraculously "found" 22 million Bush era emails that somehow "disappeared" right around the time investigators began to have questions about the odd pattern of firings of US Attorney Generals around the country for patently political motives. Lawsuits against the Bush Admin finally shook the long missing emails out of the underbrush, but 22 million emails means there are a lot enlargement spam and lol cats forwards to weed through so this might take awhile. Then there’s that one piece of news so weird it’s like somebody paid Chuck Shepherd to make it up: Official War Prez Action Figure Barack Obama staged a26 hour attack on Oslo to steal somebody’s Nobel Prize and then triumphs in his proclamation that war is peace. To make sure the audience didn’t bolt before they can make their getaway, this same week Team Obama also threw down numerous landmine treaties and defended John Yoo in a lawsuit against him brought by one of his tortured. One can only imagine what Obama will do for education if war is his answer to peace? It’s seems the freedom of slavery works in there somewhere. The joke in this one? The prize itself. While the stunned world gasped, Team Obama hurried back to Washington so he could appear scold big banking. The joke on this has got to be Obama’s quote to 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft, "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." Really? I thought that’s what they had hired him for. They were his number one campaign contributors after all. Alas, the joke in this case seems to be on us. Lastly, this week, I want to climb up on Santa’s lap and go wah-wah-wah about all those Grinches turning Copenhagen into Nopenhagen. The Palin fanned fake "Climategate" to get things off to a bad start and get the deniers all erroneously up in arms. Though demonstrably faked up to create derailing controversy the right wing anti-global warming noise machine drummed up the call of faux scandal. As time wastes away at another climate conference while the US fiddles around and the rest of the world is doing a slow burn. Which would be bad enough all by itself without the further holiday mistreatment of having to endure all these GOP wing nuts boasting by the planet’s open pyre. Then when the news of a secret back channel treaty between the US and other industrialized nations that gave very little got out the G77 (which somehow equates to 130 different countries) denounced America among others as callously destroying everyone’s planet. I mean, when you’ve got 130 nations banding against you and walking out of the talks, you may well be offtrack. Just saying. But the most sobering news from Copenhagen is not the damage we are about to fail to prevent, but the grim results of the damage already wrought. US scientists gave an opening day report on the impending end of Arctic ice which could not help but give one chills. As expected, the ice is melting more than expected. Seems CO2 loves cold water, so it absorbs more right out of the air, conveniently put there by greenhouse gases, conveniently put there by you and I and our coal, oil and gas.. Yes, it‘s those same greenhouse gases global warming deniers propose to purport as harmless. Meanwhile, this increase in carbon in the seawater raises its acid level, eventually killing ... well, first plankton, then the guys that eat plankton, then the guys that eat them and so on. The scientists say that they don’t want to alarm anyone by using the phrase "tipping point" but they sure make it sound more like "Already Gone Over the Cliff." The ice will go away, be gone by 2050. The water will turn to carbolic acid, and that’ll be a problem by 2020 and then the planet will, what, pickle? The Great Pacific Gyre, a Sargasso Sea of plastic crap thrown into the oceans, gathered by the currents, a floating monument of our mess. Dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico where not even Oxygen lives and now an acid Arctic, which is already spreading? Have we really, already killed our oceans? We’ve come to another case where Vonnegut may have indeed written humans’ epitaph when he quipped this quote should carved into the Grand Canyon as our memorial: "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap." Ho, ho, ho and boo, woo, woo, I’m trying to fake some holiday spirit here; but this acid oceans thing sure leaves a sour taste in my mouth. This is the ghost of many interesting Xmases to come announcing it is time to check your boarding passes and survey your quarters. Ladies and gentlemen, the Titanic has sailed. If that’s what passes for you as holiday spirit then, get your deck chairs, strike up the band, the show should be spectacular. Season of lights, after all. --mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy 12/10/09: This Week in Capitalism

And no, this week’s title is NOT a ploy to once again promote Michael Moore or his new movie Capitalism. Aside from that blatant plug.
No, this has been an exciting week for Capitalism folks, as in the economic enterprise that supposedly sails our ship of state through the stormiest of seas. If only we believe. If only we believe and remove the shackles of unfair unfree trade. Once again that definition of Free Trade: anything Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh agree is good for business and they always agree with their bosses.
Broken down to its nuts and bolts: Capitalism means you screw people over as hard as you can for as much as you can. If they lose their homes, die from lack of medical service, or find themselves treading water next to a drowning polar bear, it is not your problem if you can successfully deny it through litigation. OR, that other popular definition for capitalism: provide as minimal a good or service as possible all the while convincing your customers that they are happy. OR, the one most of us live through: essentially slavery, except they also get to torture you with math problem you’ll never solve: how can you afford to live on the little bit you make. And the capitalists will tell you loud and long how they have done you a favor by inventing this system and your place in it; but most of all theirs.
By those and numerous other standards, 2009 has been a very good year for capitalism. This year saw the number of billionaires in America nearly double at a time when the rest of the world lost over five trillion dollars. Where did the money go? Up the ladder. It’s the famous trickle up theory made famous by Reaganomics loving neocons way back when. There are now 793 billionaires in America. That’s a lot of billions that had to go somewhere, such as away from our schools and roads and healthcare. But it sure made a lot of millionaires a whole lot richer.
In fact among the factoids amid this week’s news flotsam is that the 400 richest people in America got 30 billion richer. Whew. At a time when 3.5 million more homes are expected to go belly up, it warms my heart to know the money is safe.
Look how much happier we all are now that they have our money and not just our houses, but our taxes too. With a year like this, it is hard to keep straight which example of unfettered capitalism is the most audacious, so I personally have taken to breaking down my list to a week-by-week basis. With several outstanding examples of why this paradigm has been good for society in the current news cycle there are so many choices to be dazzled by.
To hear the right-wingers blog about it, the biggest news this week is that the entirety of global warming is a hoax and that every scientist everywhere who does not propound that Jesus dated dinosaurs is part of a conspiracy to ruin petrodollar profits and thus screw over Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney and several Bushes all at the same time and that, sir, is Un-American.
Those of you who know that Rush is always right also knew it all along that it’s all those phony lying lefties that cooked up this whole fake global warming thing and now they have been busted. Sure.
Where is my Hummer? Can I get it to reduce my mileage to like 5mph, maybe 3? And why not if there’s no global warming? Maybe you can get it rigged up to run on clubbed baby seal?
Anyway, all that was good red meat for the anti-environmentalists around the country. Except the opposite side, the folks who say that quote scandal is a classic misdirection, folks who say it’s all a conflation and intended to distract the public support away serious commitments at Copenhagen’s Climate Change Conference, happen to be the majority of the world’s scientiests who are hoping we as a people will wise up before we destroy our planet beyond recognition.
They explain that the accusations being hurled against the emailing climate scientists in question are intentional outlandish distortions of language and intent. By the way, backers of the emailers include their bosses, and John Roberts, the CNN reporter sent to talk up the teapot into a tempest and even Bill Nye the Science Guy doing his level best to debunk the global warming would-be debunkers. The CNN coverage of the controversy was a load of bunk to be sure. But as Roberts noted, finishing his coverage, by the time the experts sort it out, Copenhagen will be over and Exxon-Mobile can continue to make billions by destroying our future for the mere cost a few hackers and a couple of bribed talking heads spreading a little doubt.Capitalists win!
Over in the Banking sector which has been so inspiring this last year when it comes to doing dirt unto others and calling it good clean profit, many folks are impressed with Bank of America’s announcing they are attempting to return their TARP money so they can award themselves more profits and bonuses. But I am partial to that other Bail Out Powerhouse AIG. In “Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food,” Yasha Levine’s not-that-astonishing expose on AIG going all 3rd world on the poverty stricken of Rural Kentucky. Taking a page from the Bechtel rape of Bolivia’s water supply back in 2000, AIG subsidy Utilities, Inc. acquired the water supply for poor mountaineers who barely keep their families fed and then jacked their rates by more than 51%. Phony, erroneous and repetitive billing ensued. Kidding aside these are people whose per capita income is 13,000. Through the rate hike and working out the “bugs” in their new billing system, AIG nets an additional 3/4s of a million and all they had to do was torment a few more poor people. Why not, they’re good at it, they’re capitalists.
But my choice for This Week in Capitalism’s “Just Getting Down to the Brass Tacks of it All” Award for cutting to the essence of capitalist values, at least the espoused capitalist values of our captains of capitalism in the press and the pubs of America … well, it actually goes to Mexico. That’s right, the people who were once held as farm animals and concubines for their Spanish missionaries have now gone that ultimate last mile for capitalism, cut labor costs completely and just kidnapped themselves a bunch of slaves right in the heart of the biggest city in the world. That’s right, December 4th the Associated Press, among others, reported that a factory in Mexico City that disguised itself as a rehab center was actually kidnapping people off of the streets then forcing them to work 16 hour days making shopping bags and clothespins. One hundred and seven people were rescued having been found working as slaves and 23 suspects allegedly working as their overseers and guards were taken into custody.
And I say, well what happened here? Why has the free market failed capitalism? People need their cheap plastic bags and clothespins and business man has a right to make a profit doesn’t he? Of course that’s not that different from the occasional corporate faux pas here in America where dozens of undocumented immigrants happen to be working in the same meat packing plant, or restaurant, which just happens to be owned by some big American business: like Tyson, like McDonalds, like Swift.
Like another Swift might once have suggested, next thing you know the capitalists will be selling us our own babies to eat. Why not? It’s pure capitalism in motion. They don’t have to pay for the labor. They don’t have guarantee the product. They don’t have to protect the consumer. Yipes, if the capitalists ever figure out how to make a buck on this, we’re doomed.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ

Current Comedy, 12/2/09: Terrorists

Let’s get one thing straight from the start. If you are the kind of person who would hate a person because they are a Muslim, then you are neither a good American, nor a good Christian for that matter, and there is no point in this discussion.If you are still reading, I will type more. In the recent major news there were two stories of public figures with Muslim sounding names responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. I am, of course, referring to Nidal Hasan and Barack Obama. The case against one seems simple, but is not; and the case against the other seems outlandish, but is quite simple. So, as a long time peace activist, I would advocate that one of these men is a terrorist. As surely most of the media-fed world knows, Nidal Hasan is the US Army Major, a military psychiatrist no less, who treated returning GIs for PTSD, until he himself went nuts and shot up half of Fort Hood, TX in early Nov. Thirteen dead, thirty wounded. Hasan made Harris and Klebold look like amateurs, which of course they were. Hasan wasn’t a major by accident. He had worked himself up through the ranks and gone back to college and earned an MD. He won service medals for fighting in the Gulf War and the “War on Terror.“ All of which sounds good, until he starts shooting up the place.While there is no doubt that his actions, and the media reactions it triggered, have terrified the nation, there has been a subsequent wave of news about the murderer that has tried to paint him as a terrorist, an Islam-o-fascist as the phrase goes. There can be no doubt in looking at the man’s life, he was a devotedly religious man who grew revolted at the carnage he was forced to face from his patients. As should any religious man when faced with tales of violence, cruelty and depravity, in particular happening for a cause itself that he felt wrong. The rules about killing are fairly clear in most belief systems.However taking vengeance into one’s own hands put one above or separate from that religion. It’s not serving god, but playing god, a role we would want no man to have.While Hasan’s actions clearly could qualify a person as a religious fanatic, if it were indeed religion that drove him to it, and, it is well known it is always a good idea to keep the weapons away from the religious fanatics, it does not make that person part of an international terrorist network, or a member of a sleeper cell or another representative of this crazy killer religion and so we have more proof on how we have to hate the Muslims. Like we used to be told we had to hate the Jews. Think of all the Gentiles who have done evil things. Perhaps we should hate them too and that would just include everybody, since we are still being shown all the reasons we should hate Blacks, Hispanics and Indians all the time.But I digress. In Mark Ames’ chilling AlterNet article “The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives,” there is a different picture much of the media would like you to forget. Ames’ compilation of original and subsequently revised major news coverage of the Ft. Hood Shooting reminds us what we already knew the second we heard the news of a lone gunman shooting up his workplace, in this case a military base. It’s the tragic case of a loser who loses it. In this case he happened to be trained in small arms.Hasan was a faltering officer doing a well documented slow public decline. He was religiously, emphatically, against the war, he was appalled by the same stories that were devastating his patients. His personal life sucked, his performance evaluations were going downhill. He was trying to report his patients for war crimes, because, of all things, they were reporting war crimes and he told people it was driving him crazy. He was fighting his deployment tooth and nail and obviously exactly the wrong guy to send to the war front and in typical military snafu, that’s exactly where they insisted on sending him. And he went postal. Stupid us. Remember all the calls about why didn’t anybody catch the warning signals? It was because there were so many for so many years that the military ignored. It’s not because he was deep double agent, part of some super-secret Al Qaeda spy ring operating out of the same Falls River Mosque attended briefly by two of the 9/11 highjackers. That would be simply guilt by association. By that rationale then the Bush family would be terrorists because they were in bed financially with the Bin Laden family, as in Osama. In fact George Bush, Sr. was doing business with them that very day of Sept. 11, 2001 and that does not make him a terrorist.The Bushes, both father and son, have been well proven as terrorists in their own right. Once again we need to set some terms here: WMDs? No. No WMDs. Never Happened. It was a deception the administration put upon America to sell us the war. Saddam = 9/11? Pure BS. Even though at one point as many as 70% of the public swore it was true and thought President Bush had told them so, it was never true and he officially denied it in the press the day after the 5th anniversary of Sept. 11. Look it up.If you’re still with me then follow this: As FAIR will document exhaustively for you, the Bush admin knew there were no weapons of mass destruction and Hussein was never linked to Al Qaeda and yet over 900 times they quite intentionally mislead the public to believe to get us to believe it in the lead up and first year of the war. So, it’s a war of aggression. It’s a war sold on lies. It is a war that is wrong and while there are tons of reasons speculated as to how or why Bush did it, there can be no doubt he made America a terrorist. We needlessly destroyed another country to attack a misrepresented image of a man. Though of course Hussein was a terrorist to his own people, he was not a threat to us. He was a target Bush trained America to attack by lying to us. It is an ugly truth, a shameful truth and until we act to correct it, we perpetuate the crime. In America we have the luxury of blaming our president; but a country at war is every citizen’s shame. To the rest of the world, it is America, the terrorist. Until we correct this great wrong, it is hard to prove them mistaken. Why do they hate us? It has Nothing to do with our freedom, and lot to do with their chains.So here’s my argument: If Bush was a terrorist and awful and wrong to wage this war he sold us on lies, how could Obama not also be guilty if he continues Bush policies. The dribble of public relations style cosmetic restoration of civil rights and cessation of hostilities dried up it seems. Obama sides with Bush on torture a little, Guantanamo a little, Iraq a little, domestic spying a little. A little here, a little there, it kind of adds up. And now a surge in Afghanistan? If you can risk an spare 40,000 US soldiers and not have to return your Nobel, how many can you spend and still walk away with an Oscar?Oscar for what? Impersonating George Bush, terrorist. As Oscar winner Michael Moore reported and Jon Stewart skewered on the Daily Show, shortly Obama is now quoting Bush nearly line by line. Moore simply compared Fox News transcript of the Obama speech announcing his surge to excerpts from various Bush speeches. Obama: "We Did Not Ask for This.” Bush: "We Did Not Seek This.” Obama: "New Attacks are Being Plotted as I speak.” Bush: "At This Moment ... Terrorists are Planning New Attacks.” It is almost too comic, if only it were funny. But here’s the truth. If Obama sends more soldiers then more soldiers will die and the war will still be wrong and, unlike the recession, those war dead, including his extra American soldiers, will be his.If Obama is imitating Bush then he is being a terrorist and it has nothing to do with the sound of his last name. Of course, now that Obama’s hired back Dana Perino, Bush last days press secretary, who would be surprised what happened next. Whatever it is, I pray it gets better. I am so tired of being America the terrorist.--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ

Current Comedy, 11/25/09, “Democrats Rising!”

I kid you not, at the recent quarterly meeting of the Arizona Democratic Party (ADP, as the in-crowd affectionately abbreviates it) held in our own fair Kingman, AZ this last weekend (11/20-11-22/09), I was asked to join in singing the following lyrics written by retired music teacher/longtime Dem party member, Del Bohlmeyer to the tune of “Zip-pediddie Doo-Dah: “Democrats Rising, we’ve had our say/Washington’s changing, what a great day/With Obama in the White House, all the world is praying/ that for eight years he’s staying ….”At this time when the national GOP requiring “purity tests” and loyalty oaths, it seemed like a small request, but somehow I balked.We were in the banquet room at the Hotel Brunswick on a Saturday night after a long day of Democratting for the awards dinner of the League of Democratic Women Voters. It was the capstone event after a day of caucuses and speeches. My wife a teacher turned novice political candidate was about to receive an award and possibly campaign donations. I had walked in with a dark beer on draft and the crowd was taking up the tune.“…He has won the No-bel Peace Prize, Now, we’ll all see whether we can live in peace together/ Zip-pi-ty doo-dah, zip-pi-ty ay.”There’s young Ron Glassman, a giant of a man with a mile-long resume and potential powerhouse senatorial candidate whose exploratory campaign is trying to net 10,000 AZ contributors before he intends to declare against John McCain; or, at least wait till Jan. 2010 to officially announce his candidacy, less as a Tucson city councilman Glassman would have to resign according to AZ election laws. Glassman’s singing with gusto, his handlers gathered around him in color-complimenting outfits and in a pretty fair harmony. Nearer to the door and not to be outdone Attorney General candidate Felecia Rotellini, beneath her busy business woman’s scarf, is pumping her arms in rhythm. And there was my sweet loving wife, Beth Weisser, bravely chasing after the tune. Essentially an independent until the GOP blatantly self identified as an enemy of the state, in particular our education system, Beth had thrown herself into the hornet’s nest of AZ statehouse politics to challenge current state senator Ron Gould on everything from haircuts to tax cuts, but mostly on education funding. She’s one of a handful of locals I recognize. While not quite the James Carville and Mary Matalin of our time, Beth is a centrist-progressive and I’m from the “Kucinich wasn’t even left enough for me” crowd.In a town and a county that typically skews 65% Republican, my wife is much more in keeping with the majority of local Dems who challenged Bush ideas, and state GOP party ideologues. Though Kingman herself boasts fewer public Democrats than militia chapters, the party faithful from around the state had schlepped to town and filled up the room to reach out to Mohave County. County Dem leaders showed up in their regalia. The award winning Dem volunteer duo of Mitch and Susan Smith were in from down in Fort Mohave. Kingman’s mother-son team of Mary McLaughlin and Patrick Gonzales were there through the day though Patrick was elsewhere that night. Plus there were all the other Dem faces from around the state that I’m supposed to be remembering. The lyric sheets were on the table at each placemat in the rows of banquet tables that fill the hall. And everyone was singing and several were looking at me. “… He is trying to fix our health care; and the wars around us/the e-con-o-my that hounds us … Democrats Rising, What a Great Day!”And, in all honesty I did not succeed in joining in the song. Well, not wholly. Like the majority of people in this city, this county, this state, but not in this country as a whole, I am not generally a Democrat. I am not one to support blatant war criminal thieving would be dictators, so I haven’t been able to support the GOP for quite some time. But the Dems have been no bed of roses either. As a true liberal, there is much about the mainstream approach of the Democratic party that I find obstructionist, shortsighted, or even farcical.That’s not to say I haven’t given them my time on issues over the decades, however. In fact, shilling for the Democratic Party was the first political thing I ever did. I would have been nine then, it was the eve of the presidential election in 1968. I scrawled “Humphrey-Muskie Are our Man [sic] Nixon-Agnew Garbage Can!” on the street in front of our house in chalk thinking that would make all the difference, which it did not. Since then it is true, I have championed most every Dem against most every Republican in most every election I’ve encountered where party mattered. I wrote pro-Clinton anti-Bush material in ‘92 and pro-Gore anti-Bush material in 2000. I volunteered with the Dems for their presidential campaigns in both ‘04 and ‘08, though neither candidate was the one I wanted. It wasn’t the first time either. I found Carter ineffective and thought the only thing truly Democrat about Clinton was his libido.But now, I have taken the whole Dem-love thing to a new level and am actually in bed with a prominent local Democrat--my wife. Still, like George Washington I emphatically oppose political parties, though like the rest of America two hundred and thirty some odd years afterward, I am held their hostage. Washington feared that when political activists drew together to promote their own agenda that that’s what they would do and the needs of the people would become secondary to the men’s efforts to further themselves. And pretty much since Washington’s demise in 1799 we have suffered exactly that fate. As a younger much more idealistic thirty year old, I was once offered a job to report on the Illinois State Legislature. I lived in the capitol, Springfield, IL, which is definitely a company town, with 35% of the metro workforce employed by some government agency. Reporting on how the legislature made the whole thing work seemed like it was going to be such a cool job. I got into work at 9am that first day and had quit before 3pm. Both sides of the aisle were loathsome. Petty egos, controlling the lives of the public through their caprice, posturing, and self aggrandizement. Sent to solve crises, they perpetuated them. Sent to represent the public, they handcuff our access, ignore our pleas, make backroom deals, condescend and grandstand away most true progress they could have achieved. Sent to be the solution, they become the problem.Democrats as much as any. It is a two party lock in this country. Like they say “clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right.” In fact the only good thing I can say about the party as a whole is that at least it is not the Republicans. Between Reagan and the Bushes most any safeguards the public had from predatory businesses and a war-profiteering economy were stripped away. Plutocrats have been raping the rest of us and now the global economy is on life support, while the right wing have been holding us in position so they can get a better aim for god and country. Rights made shambles, our integrity as a country squandered, our economy destroyed. America the beautiful has become America the train wreck. And then when we elect one party to throw the bums out, in most cases, they replace the faces but not the policies. At least I knew with my wife that wasn’t going to happen-- Which is why, when Beth opted to become a Democrat, then a candidate and challenge Ron Gould for the state senate seat in LD3, I shuddered for a second, then threw in with her and started attending events where donkey butt is considered a fashion accessory. Though a longtime political pundit myself, when we do Dem deals I am strictly the arm candy, only the candidate‘s spouse. It was fun to roll along in the auxiliary role like that. I actually spent much of the day volunteering with the Penny Kotterman campaign for Superintendent of Public Education. One of the main issues of the party meeting and the talk of a variety of caucuses was a proposed change to the party bylaws which would have allowed the party to essentially ignore the rural corners of the state in favor of a tri-annual state party meeting schedule aligned along what was called “the I-17/I-10 Corridor.” Seems several central party members in the central state areas--Tucson/Phoenix/Flagstaff--considered it a hardship to attend meetings out in the rural corners of the state such as Yuma, Bisbee or any place in Apache or Mohave County. Party dismay over travel time showed in the attendance numbers. Last quarter’s party meetings in Flagstaff filled a huge auditorium of over 300 and hosted luminaries like soon-to-be Dem gubernatorial candidate Secretary of State Terry Goddard and President of the Navajo Nation, Dr. Albert Hale. Of the 640 some odd party delegates from around the state, only 152 arrived for the Kingman convention, far short of the 272, or 40% that should have been present for the assembly to conduct business. However more than 300 proxy votes were sent in with those that did attend. Through out the day you could tell how many votes each delegate was responsible for the proxy of according to how many nametags he or she wore around their neck. Some’s necks appeared to be bowed from the weight as if hoisting accordions. However despite pressure to urbanize the party outreach efforts from some, the party that presumes to represent the power of the people, democracy itself, will now continue to represent all the people of AZ, even the ones who don’t conveniently live in Maricopa County. When the issue was put before the delegates assembled for the afternoon meeting, the voice vote on the issue wasn’t even close. APD wants all Democrats, even the ones who don’t live in Phoenix. Many say it is the only way the party will ever achieve that holy grail they pursue every election cycle: to turn AZ Blue.As one local Dem called out in the Progressive Democrat Caucus that morning, “The party already wins in metropolitan areas. Until you work on all 15 counties the way Howard Dean set up the 50 state strategy of fighting in each state, not just some of them, until you work to change the mentality throughout the state and not just in the cities, Arizona will continue to think like a red state. The best you will do is give AZ a blue stripe, but it won’t become a Blue state.“National party strategists are hoping that the Copper State democrats can pull it together for the 2010 mid-terms and are watching AZ as a “likely to flip” state by 2012. Though both political parties are suffering from the recession, the Dems claim to be out raising the state GOP by a 2 to 1 margin. To be sure, throughout the day the state party members seemed optimistic that they were a party of change and change was on the way. They act as if just because Obama’s in the White House, the Democratic Party was large and in charge, despite the fact that nationally the GOP with the help of the media, as they did in Carters’ time and in Clinton’s, manages to derail any progress their president tries to make. And despite the fact that in the state itself, the Republican party out and out ignores any overtures toward negotiations with the minority Dem party and runs roughshod over any opposition. The AEA, aka the state teachers association, recently filed a lawsuit against the new education budget which includes policy changes designed to limit free speech and punish teachers for actively opposing ed budget cuts throughout 2009. AZ GOP leaders contend the state does not need public education and several have been caught in private school funding frauds. Meanwhile in addition to millions in cuts, new policies which just went into effect on Nov. 24, strip away teacher seniority and tenure, and penalize teachers for political activism. Lord knows what they will make of this column.Any AZ Democrat honest with himself would tell you the Dems are not in charge around here … yet. The last eight years damaged the party in ways a few pundits cannot dismiss away and the GOP leadership keeps tarnishing the brand. With continuing outrages from earlier GOP offenses and the outlandish statements made by Republicans during the Obama administration, it is safe to speculate the GOP could marginalize themselves out of relevance within a couple of election cycles, even in traditionally conservative areas such as the cowboy state West. AZ is a red zone. Kingman in particular I might add. The opening Friday night of the convention dinner parties popped up around town and some Kingmanites, in typical red-state redneck fashion, did not take it well. At the Dambar, when a local big booted big hatted Kingman cowboy found out the Democratic Party in that very building, he hissed , “Sheesh, Democrats. That’s all we need.”I, ever the antagonist, piped in, “That’s right. Democrats ARE what we need.” As he and his buddy and their wives all stood aghast I rushed them a little. “Democrats, yes! After the last eight years of our president making our country a war criminal, after our state GOP destroys our people so their rich friends can have a tax cut, Democrats are exactly what we need. Peace and love, man, peace and love.”At which point his buddy spat me an expletive and shot me the finger as they left. The ADP may be ready to reach out to Kingman, but Kingman still has a long way to go to be ready to reach out to the ADP. In the meantime, Del, can we work on that song?--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ

Current Comedy 10/26/09: “Capitalism” Isn’t Funny

Dear Kingman Readers:More or less two months ago I read a fellow blogger’s column in my hometown Kingman Daily Miner: Edward Tomchin’s “An Open Letter to Michael Moore regarding his latest offering, Capitalism, A Love Story.” Tomchin hadn’t liked Moore much and preemptively disparaged Moore’s upcoming film. I then took umbrage, being a big fan. Neither of us had seen the movie at that point. There was some spirited debate online. A variety of readers weighed in, which was all cool. Nearly two months ago.BUT, on many levels, as soon as I hit the “send” button and whisked away my snappy little missive to splatter all over that other guy’s page, I felt like a doofus putting myself out there defending Moore’s latest since I also had not seen it. Sure I got to take the high minded approach of saying don’t condemn the thing until you’ve seen it; but what if it did suck?So, knowing the chances of catching it at the local theater on Stockton Hill Road were about as great as seeing Nancy Pelosi kissing babies in the Andy Devine Parade, the very next weekend, while out of town, I saw the film. I haven’t been the same since. And have not known what to write since. So now after more than 8 weeks of deliberation on the issue, I can render a verdict. Forgive me Edward Tomchin. You were right. You said Moore would work against Capitalism in his film, that he would trash Capitalism, he‘d wreck it. He does, Moore makes an absolute mess of it. Capitalism is clearly Michael Moore’s weakest film since 1997’s The Big One. Which is a shame, because it’s also his most important, about the most important topic anyone can even discuss about the life of our country, despite being comparatively weak next to his other recent work (Fahrenheit 911 and Sicko). Which is so disappointing because this is a topic so serious that it makes Bowling for Columbine and The Big One seem trite in comparison. Unfortunately, Capitalism makes those films look like Truffaut. Of course, Tomchin was right, a person does not have to see the film to know Michael Moore purported premise: capitalism is killing America. And No, as I expected, when referring to the concept of “capitalism,“ Moore is not talking about your average mom and pop business where everybody works their hardest because they love each other and love what they do. And neither he nor I are not talking the diligent inventor who toils away his nights to create a device that improves life on this planet and thus deserves compensation; but he is talking about companies that get richer taking out insurance policies that bet on their employees dying while they leave the surviving widows and orphans penniless to cope. We’re talking an economic enterprise that is preparing to reward its “talent” with billions of dollars in bonuses because that talent figured the way to make money off of rendering another American family homeless every 7 and one half seconds, about the time it took to read these words. All in the name of a bottom line. We’re talking the kind of mentality that America has been taught to think of as success, a kind of capitalism as a vampirism: sucking the vitality of a society away. Rest assured, Moore has the super-sobering goods on the super elites whose money makes this happen, the fabled 1% who now control more than 90% of the rest of us and are ruining everyone’s life in the process. Thanks to a leaked Citigroup memo that is a centerpiece in Moore’s case against unfettered free markets we now know this cabal see the world as a “Plutonomy,” with its greatest threat being that the other 99% of us still vote. As Warren Buffet once said and Moore quoted in the closing credits, “There’s a class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class that’s making the war and we’re winning.”That one quote by itself, (originally appearing in a New York Times article by conservative humorist Ben Stein--btw, not made-up by Moore, as his numerous detractors might have you believe) should be enough to prove the scary reality that the robber class rich are destroying the lives of the rest of us and have taken control of our government via Goldman-Sachs and our millionaire class congress. This crisis in our country is so urgent an issue that it should be required viewing for every American before it’s too late. Yes, required viewing for every American, especially the patriots who mistake their love of our country with their allegiance to a rigged economic system that insults the name “free market.” It’s the same thing those liberal agitators have been saying since history. And they’ve always been right. The difference is that at this time the gap between rich and poor is widening rapidly because in addition to buying everything else, the rich have also purchased Congress to tip the tables even further in their direction and as the crap rolls downhill it is fouling everyone else’s next. So many of the problems that our country and our world are facing are generated by the rich and won’t be solved as long as they can profit. Climate change, health debacle, housing crisis, credit crunch, all manufactured by the elite for their own benefit, at our expense. If these problems are not solved soon there may not be a world left for the meek to inherit. And all this urgency of message rest upon the shoulders of the most widely reaching liberal ideologue pundit provocateur in America, Michael Moore. Funny thing that the conservative Michael Moore haters fail to realize about his films and message is that the serious left dismiss him as a hack, frequently complaining about the same issues the right dislikes. The true beret wearing Sartre quoters carry laundry lists of the flaws in his films, which they are as happy to read riot to you any time you say something nice about the guy.Understand, I am not just familiar with Michael Moore. And I didn’t get my info on him from Rush or O’Reilly either. I am more or less a fan. I’ve seen everything since Bowling For Columbine, some of the earlier stuff and own a couple DVDs. Seeing Fahrenheit 911 with my son its opening weekend back in ‘04 is easily one of the most powerful movie experiences I ever had. I later conducted screenings of that film at the local community college. I’ve also shown Sicko several times to houseguests here at the themepark, including one screening with one of the doctors from the film’s Cuban scenes watching it with us while she was in town for a visit. Further, I’ve read 3 of Moore’s books and own a couple of others, been to his website on and off since the Iraq War began, and even written him fan letters.Including one in the middle of week four and five of not finishing this column.But also understand: even though I love his ideas, I haven’t always loved each art work. Moore is a master of mixing mind boggling facts and outrages, gotcha video, with droll commentary and comic stock footage till he comes to the big sell at the end, but he also tends toward shambling slack narrative, simplification to the point of parody and a kitchen-sink aesthetic, where he throws all sorts of scenes together that seem to relate to a topic, whether they advance the clear-line narrative or not. It works or it doesn’t. By those standards, the meticulous construction of Fahrenheit 911 and the scope of Sicko are works of art. Capitalism is not.On the plus side he won an Oscar, a Palm D’Or at Cannes, and thirty-one other prizes. On the other hand Moore’s work is often poorly supported by those on the left you should be his biggest fans and positively detested by those on the right, without any consideration to the points Moore labors to make. As critic Leslie Felperin explained in Variety, even those who “agree with Moore's politics, just can't stomach his oversimplification, on-the-nose sentimentality and goofball japery." In specific I have my own laundry list of faults in this film and despite my love for his passion and praises for his efforts to bring these issues to a public light, after now two months, I still can’t get over them. We teach our school kids that the opening and closing sentences in an essay are the most important parts. Moore muffs the first so badly it challenges the viewer. Without much introduction or exposition the film opens with two set of vignettes: an old classroom video on the Fall of Rome with shock cuts of contemporary footage spliced in and a heart wrenching home video of an eviction taken from inside the house as the police arrive and start breaking in to serve the papers. Each piece is in itself amazing, but they don’t actually connect well and neither gets to the economics lesson we know the film is meant to be. And in the middle of them, somehow, Michael Moore chooses to play an lol-cats video. That’s right, the most important topic he has ever taken on, and the man’s not been a lightweight [pun intended], and here he breaks in the action to show us a cat flushing a toilet, like 5 times complete with crappy music. Having seen it twice, I can’t say that I ever recovered. It wasn’t the only weakness in the film (the under focused visit with the “Realty Vultures“ slime ball in a business suit stands out as another misdirection that dilutes impact of the stronger scenes around it), but starting off that way made this viewer weigh each questionable choices Moore made in making his film.Which brings up a second big little problem: cussing. Now as everybody freaking knows I flipping am not the flap afraid of an frog forking fouled-up f-word now and then; so this is not an issue of prudery. BUT, as far as I‘m concerned, profanity, violence and sexuality are all choices that must be justified as advancing the artwork. If they don‘t help the project they need to be jettisoned. When it comes to cinema, the issue of profanity can have direct immense impact on the type of audience a film attracts, so a choice to include cussing in a film should only be made if the profanity helps not hurts. There are some pretty clear lines regarding the ways films get rated and the audiences those ratings dictate. Cinephiles out there, I recommend Kirby Dick’s 2006 film, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, for the ins and outs of the ratings game. For the simple version look to John Travolta’s character Chili Palmer in 2005’s Be Cool, “you get one f-word in a PG-13 movie.” One. It is a line directors legendarily dance around, a mark Moore surely knows and yet crosses here, gratuitously, with three f-bombs tossed, one by Moore himself. They cluster in the middle of the movie, much as the three f-monsters huddled in one war zone scene in Moore’s Iraq War masterpiece Fahrenheit 911. And in both cases the cluster-f earned the films R-ratings, which cut the film’s viewership in a great big way.It is a very odd conscious choice. It bothers the firetruck out of me.This topic is so pertinent to our society that Moore has to get it right, right now. The whole “recession” with 10% unemployment numbers (some say the actual figure is already up to 17%). Biden now acknowledges it is the “depression” our country is going through, and this crisis is due to the long train of abuses from this same banking crowd who then repaying themselves for their own foolish losses at our expense because they also are running the government. While it is true our country has always in general been a self-made plutocracy since we broke free of the aristocracy of England, this current group, principally in the banking industry, are making decisions that imperil the public. Wall Street bankers began appropriating the White House as home turf during the Reagan years. Moore documents the distain in the interplay between Reagan and treasury Secretary Donald Regan with a moment of contempt on Regan’s part toward Reagan that is so scalding it almost made me feel sorry for the Gipper, even though I’d generally longed to see him indicted for Iran-Contra.Regan directed Reagan’s actions to free up the restraints corporate banking interests had had placed upon them to protect the public good. Bankers, principally for Goldman-Sachs, then enter the government and control the purse strings of government through Treasury or more insidiously through the Federal Reserve--which is not a part of the government at all, though it acts that way. These people control most of the money in America and thus control everyone else’s lives. And now they have found a way take the wealth away from the people and the same time they impoverish the people by rendering them homeless and jobless, creating public misery for profit. And yes, it really is a vast conspiracy.Vast is a key word here, because even though we want to consider a paltry number like 1% as statistically insignificant, when you’re talking a population of 300 million, it still adds up to something three million people, the richest three million people in America. Having already rigged the game to make sure they win, they’ve now taken to making money off of making sure the rest of us lose as well. For example their carefully manufactured mortgage crisis. The housing crash that involved banks selling each other bets on faulty mortgages that they wrote themselves, then selling those debts round robin till they rose on a mound of artificial value only to crash and need to be subsidized by the poor being thrown out of their houses. It’s like the Tulip Bubble all over again, it’s like the S & L Crisis all over again. Except worse, because the problem is now global and they are impoverishing the rest of us for this artificial money. Numbers like hundreds of millions are moved around like pawns by those who duke it out with everybody else’s money on Wall Street for prestige points in their joisting game; but here in the real world that hundred million wasn’t just some board marker, it was the life’s blood of families, millions of families destroyed for this theft, while the government endorses it and the citizens are sold to the corporations as fodder for their profit even if that profit means making society miserable. The health care industry makes profit off of keeping people sick, banks make profit out of throwing people out of their houses, successful companies make profit by laying off their workers.It’s a problem that is accelerating and we can’t count on the government to solve it without massive prompting because they are consciously among the crowd that is causing the problem to make a profit. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now recently reported that now 237 members of Congress are millionaires themselves with seven valued in the hundreds of millions. Of course we now live in a world where there are thousands of billionaires, most of the money made through artificial profit for them, bought by real-world suffering for us.Where do we go? Not long ago, while at the dermatologist’s, an older woman in front of me was lamenting loudly to the clerk about the co-pay. She explained she was a fixed income cancer patient, and the three and four $35 a pop co-pays a month were starting to add up. As she finished with the clerk she continued to lament, at which point I said, “Lady look, the rich people got the tax cut they bought for themselves and that’s the American Way. And as long as they can make money off of our suffering they’re not going to let us fix it.”There was an understandable silence following my remark. What could we say? The game was rigged. She paid her co-pay and we all shut up.What else was there to say? It has taken me months to figure out some way to overcome that silence. That silence also brings back to mind the biggest problem with Michael Moore’s movie, the other elbow of the parenthesis from that jarring opening act, that‘s right: the ending.Truth be told, in between the beginning and the ending Moore, who functions as an American Idol for instant-justice for the corporately abused, is a man with plenty of stories to tell and most of his segments in this outing do work fairly well. Some of the pieces he covers are terribly moving. In particular the grieving family of a dead cake decorator Wal-Mart made a mint off of the death insurance for and the evicted Peoria, IL who have to burn their own possessions as part of their eviction are hyperbolically heart-wrenching. Moore orders his arguments well as well, bringing in the religious case against the kind of capitalism being practiced by the plutocrats, the enormous social costs we are enduring, the historical evidence of its rise, the way propaganda campaigns have been used to sell the concept to us; and the basic anti-democratic nature of the whole enterprise. But he only taps the surface of the possible condemnations available by a scan of the numbers of the afflicted in the headlines. A topic like this: “how have the rich screwed us over today?” could have provided Moore not merely with more movie, but surely with an entire TV series, even a daily syndicated series.Instead Moore brings us a film with a modest two hour running time that attempts to bring us up to speed on a crisis that has taken decades to perpetrate. There are so many things he had to leave out, but for his finale Moore still breaks out his patented fat guy slapstick and begins mock harassing Wall Street: call in the keystone cops, Moore’s going to make a citizen’s arrest. At what appears to be about midway through a supposedly sidesplitting routine involving crime scene tape, however Moore pulls the film to a screeching halt and over a blackened screen says, “I don’t think I can keep doing this--”Which is exactly how it feels sometimes when I sit staring at monitors trying to make jokes about something that is no laughing matter. Moore gives himself a way out by adding, after a pregnant pause, “--without your help.” Then he tells up to hurry up and the credits roll. No further hope, no further discussion. He just throws up his hands and seems to walk away. Which is why the fact that the movie had movie flaws in it upset me so much I could not speak, or at least type on the subject. If Michael Moore is so overwhelmed he’s giving up what chance do I have? I attempted to do a piece on rightwingers’ outrageously shameful schadenfreude over Obama losing the Olympics, then it seemed he got the Nobel as a consolation prize and that felt ridiculous to try to defend, so nothing there. Though you’ve got to admit, in comparison it wouldn’t take much to look like a peace prize winner next to Bush. Heck even Mike Tyson seems in the “Sister Teresa” range next to Bush. By the time I tried to blend that all together it was called “Degree of Difficulty” and it lived up to its name.But something inside me makes me want to keep trying to change the world through my writing. Moore’s choice to film his disillusion and apparently leave us hanging, while quite effective theatrically, was in the end more of an artistic choice than a life choice. If he had truly been defeated there would have been no point in finishing the film, much less doing all the press over which is where, months ago, I entered this fiasco of a writers block. And I know I will not be free from this cursed topic till I completed this article. So dear Kingman readers, now I have done just that. To overcome the paralysis I had to write more about Moore, really I really wanted. I in fact have written the first and last word on “Moore” this round. I think I’ve tried to do justice by this topic and doubt I should or possibly could say any more.

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.

Current Comedy, 9/29/09: Easy Answers

Before anyone even asks: Yes, I’m going to try to take the easy answer about the G20 protests in Pittsburgh last week: I think that the vandals at the heart of the Thursday night riots in Pittsburgh should be caught, arrested, jailed and made to pay for the personal property damages they did. However, I doubt they can be suitably punished for the far greater crime they committed: the damage they did to the legitimate causes they claimed they were working for is irreparable. Once again, ALL liberals and their ideas get demonized for the violence of a few. Thanks, you scum.
As if the news from the G20 protests wasn’t already bad enough, as many expected it would be, the disparity of enforcement and coverage between DC and Pittsburgh was grave injustice that any Americans who cared to watch plainly saw--in the ways that the Sept. 12th anti-American government protesters were treated by DC police and lionized in the press, and the ways that the anti-global oppression protesters were tear gassed, rounded up, and pepper sprayed by the Pittsburgh police at said G20 Summit. Sound Cannons? OMG.
Now, I know, when I put in all those qualifications my easy answer isn’t so easy to swallow. It’s in fact the harder answer to make because it sounds like I am avoiding the $50,000.00 of property damages done by the vandals. What a terrible thing some people did in protesting for what they thought they believed in. It’s almost as bad as shooting an abortion doctor for Jesus, while he’s ushering at a church. No, not really.
But as supposedly liberal groups from the Weather Underground to Earth Liberation Front have had to admit: violence in protests damages more than the buildings razed or even the lives lost: it discredits the whole idea of a movement, the good the movement already had made or may have done, and all the good work of everyone else who is also working on that cause. Your group is now the demon whether the rest of you earned it or not.
Well, it’s for certain your opposition will attempt to use it that way.
Ending the Vietnam War was in itself not a bad idea, but the violence of some of the protests against it turned the judgment of American History against those whom the events of history have proven right. But if you talk to Mr. and Mrs. America, those rotten dirty hippies were all worthless no-good-nicks who hated America.
History has again and again Americans were right to complain about some of the things our governments have done. It is not un-American to note that our country has often suffered through and had to work against the some type American governmental misbehavior and those who work to condemn the tyranny get demonized by government and the press as a rabble of no consequence.
In the Spanish-American War: business sentiment called for a war, the press whipped one up and we went on to slaughter Filipinos in the name of democracy far worse than their Spanish colonial masters had. Meanwhile US government contractors unscrupulous business dealing outfitting the war effort led to ten times as many GIs dying from food poisoning due to tins of tainted beef than those that died by a Spanish bullet.
In World War One, Wilson campaigns as a pacifist to get re-elected in 1916, then does an about-face and throws us into a war where huge numbers of righteously indignant Americans openly resisted the draft, so Wilson made it illegal to speak against the war in any way, which led to outrageous civil liberties oppressions. Afterwards it was clear bankers and weapons manufacturers had trumped up the war for their own profits. After wards people looked back on this folly and thanked their preferred deity we humans could learn from such mistakes.
And that’s just two of the wars we said we’d learn from.
Yet when Iraq comes along the government with the aid of the press gin up some fake story about weapons of mass deception, demonize Saddam enough to where Americans want to wipe the whole of Iraq off the map, we jump on the bandwagon just like 1890s rubes. Then when the whole thing fizzles as it was bound to, we quibble over which act the underlings did that qualifies as torture and leave the policy makers alone when they were the ones who made decisions to destroy the lives of millions then consciously sold those decisions to the American public based on lies. Meanwhile government contractors make billions while building showers so shoddy they electrocute our soldiers. We wind up killing Iraqis at a pace far greater than Saddam and his sons ever managed in their finest rape rooms.
Nowadays, climate change, fiscal regulation, peace in the Middle East and addressing religious violence are all worthy causes and most Americans would in themselves support some interpretations of these issues. But now due to the violence in the Pittsburgh streets so reminiscent of 60s era mayhem, each of those issues now will to some seem unjustly radicalized, suspect, un-American. And that is a mistake on our parts, both our people and our press.
Meanwhile Wall Street is clamoring with excitement over their good news: strong 3rd quarter earnings will once again lead to outrageous executive bonuses for Wall Street, even though their business practices first impoverished the nation. Even though they enjoys their current fortune due to being propped up by the rest of us. So they are expected to spend as much as half of their earnings on compensations and bonuses. This year, Goldman-Sachs alone will have its profit measured in hundreds of billions. And where did they get that money? From the people they foreclosed the homes of.
And this doesn’t even address the issues of climate change and ocean acidification. This list doesn’t address the efforts of protest groups in Pittsburgh to call attention to China’s civil rights abuses. You remember those? Tibet Conquest, Tiananmen Square, Prisoner organ harvesting, Falun Gong religious persecutions? Internet Censorship and governmental spying? The same old stuff we always said we hated. Remember how as children we were taught to always hate the Chinese governments for their inhumanity to their own citizens?
Until those governments became our favored trading partners and bankers. Now the American governments turn a blind eye. It’s supposedly better for American business.
These concerns were just a fraction of the driving issues that pulled tens of thousands to Pittsburgh last week. All of them now with their reputations tarnished due to the violence of a handful of hateful zealots. As a liberal I must tell my readership how sorry I am to see such behavior in my name and in the name of causes I believe in.
I cannot imagine how shamed some of you must feel following the Sept. 12th rally, which came off like a rightwing hate fest. Surely those folks shown in so many photos with the racist treasonous signs were a miniscule minority among the 50,000-70,000 loyal American activists who converged on Washington to make their love of country known.
Well, I guess it must be hard to defend some of those images your movement is now associated with. I know how it goes. With some behaviors there are no easy answers.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.