tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41391807527916017932024-03-13T04:38:49.699-04:00Go West, Old ManA man walks from Michigan to California.Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.comBlogger388125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-72629145092347736682024-02-01T17:04:00.004-05:002024-02-01T23:36:59.781-05:00It"s Here<p>Cathedral City, California</p><p>February 1, 2024</p><p> To follow up on my last posting, this to announce that my YouTube channel is up and running. I put out my first "show" last week. To view it, go to YouTube and search for "Bizarro Gospel Hour" and you'll see my smiling face, and my first program. </p><p> Although I will say so on my next show, coming soon, I wish to apologize now for the poor production values of the first one. I got frustrated trying to edit it on iMovie, where I thought I could easily put in an opening title, and also some closing words and maybe a little music. This is probably possible, but I couldn't figure it out, and decided instead simply to load the video from my phone directly onto YouTube and launch the channel.</p><p> I'll film the next show vertically, so it fills up the screen, and I will try to sit up straighter. Also, I'm going to iron my bishop's mitre so that it looks a bit more even. And gradually I will improve the presentation of the program, though until I get some hands-on technical advice from my grandson (also a YouTuber) I probably won't get it the way I'd like it to be. </p><p> To you my faithful readers I'll add a small warning. I intend to "recycle" some ideas from my previous blog posts as sermons on the YouTube show, so don't be surprised it you hear familiar things. Not that pretty much everything I say isn’t more or less the same.</p><p> At any rate, thanks for tuning in.</p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-41576467732764728162023-12-21T16:37:00.002-05:002023-12-21T16:37:35.521-05:00Coming Soon!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_xbDsHF9EkQka1HiRK233GHywFCA0rK7zjhIZHqmTMgtzbCZ3Ox4rzDS_kVcdmyftqDa1PbwBLoaAhVRkzg6ngy8F-qpX1gvUczypoykpFf-mmWj_Bp_-6DfDCaEJwGDX4irdDCdZpnumq-2BczpvGJ07BOUfBhoPtLwGgILqCKzojRjDCUyOCkn35IY/s220/bishop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="220" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_xbDsHF9EkQka1HiRK233GHywFCA0rK7zjhIZHqmTMgtzbCZ3Ox4rzDS_kVcdmyftqDa1PbwBLoaAhVRkzg6ngy8F-qpX1gvUczypoykpFf-mmWj_Bp_-6DfDCaEJwGDX4irdDCdZpnumq-2BczpvGJ07BOUfBhoPtLwGgILqCKzojRjDCUyOCkn35IY/s1600/bishop.jpg" width="220" /></a></div><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p>December 21, 2023</p><p> Greetings to my faithful readers--the few, the proud, the indiscriminate. As you're all well aware, the number of posts to this blog has been diminishing over the years to practically nothing. I got a shot to the gut when Trump was elected, because his chicanery easily eclipsed the most roguish and absurd political theater I could have imagined up to that point. It left me without much to say about politics that couldn't already be imagined based on real events. And the post-Trump administration antics of the nation as a whole and the Republican members of Congress in particular have beggared belief. </p><p> At this point I was about to say that the Europeans could more easily understand this insane turn toward fascism than we Americans, having been through it not too many decades ago. And that's true to a great extent. However, when we look back on U.S. history and the bargain with the devil we made at the very inception of the country to allow the continuation of slavery in order to have a "union" of colonies we could call a country, and then the post-Civil War countenancing of a century or more of apartheid, I don't know that we can claim the moral high ground regarding right-wing craziness, except for the fact that we did help win a war against worldwide fascism. Now of course we are in the midst of a mass-media spate of false conspiracy theories that easily rivals the anti-Semitic European hysteria that arose between the two World Wars, although one hopes it won't result in millions of people being rounded up and exterminated. Certainly if the Christian right and the other Trumpian fellow-travelers get their way there will be far less tolerance of many already-marginalized people in the country.</p><p> But all that bad news isn't why I'm writing to you today, folks. Instead, it is to announce the beginning of a new show I will be putting on YouTube, to be called <i>The Bizarro Gospel Hour</i>, with your host Bishop Pete. For those of you who knew about my earlier broadcasting antics on public access cable TV, this will look familiar. The difference is that the new show will be accessible to a worldwide audience through the magic of YouTube. So look for it over the next few weeks. Right now I'm waiting for Amazon to deliver my bishop's hat, and after that I'll start recording and posting shows, if I'm able to navigate the editing process and get them streaming. I'll have the advice of my grandson Jacob, who has his own show on YouTube called The Shed Productions, so I should be okay if I run into any technical glitches. </p><p> I wanted to get the word out here on the blog so that you, my faithful readers, can see more of yours truly. You may address me as Your Excellency. Or not, what the hell. Whether or not I continue the blog remains to be seen. </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-61211305364251924912023-09-20T19:03:00.008-04:002024-01-03T22:15:51.251-05:00Ozzie<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8_DaDBuoIW7BBIVZvV1SmIeA4TuV2JfrSnHW4DmXIixL3Rz04Lixr5aaNoiN1KNY9M6moKwu-UVrv3GF60bTZwVZYcTmDsGCVvIURKNGPwRlxcqeD1tzk3P3cH1sc5tBVshGByT26sd9aqpS2POYyiPs9LeN6NPsBG4TMoc4vRPA9sL6TMnIl3okpQB4/s144/ozzie.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="120" data-original-width="144" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8_DaDBuoIW7BBIVZvV1SmIeA4TuV2JfrSnHW4DmXIixL3Rz04Lixr5aaNoiN1KNY9M6moKwu-UVrv3GF60bTZwVZYcTmDsGCVvIURKNGPwRlxcqeD1tzk3P3cH1sc5tBVshGByT26sd9aqpS2POYyiPs9LeN6NPsBG4TMoc4vRPA9sL6TMnIl3okpQB4/w278-h234/ozzie.jpg" width="278" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Pentwater, Michigan</div><div><br /></div><div>September 20, 2023</div><div><div> </div><div> One of the nice things about modern streaming TV technology is the wide variety of obscure programming available to the curious and intrepid viewer on the Roku platform. We get a few of the ones that cost money, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, but my preferred ones end up being the freebies such as the Roku Channel, YouTube, and Tubi, which is my current favorite. The latter two are laden with commercials, but what the hell, they're no worse that what one has to endure when watching a live sporting event on regular network TV. And they also feature many old situation comedies, like <i>Leave It To Beaver</i>, <i>The Honeymooners</i>, and <i>The Life of Riley</i>. They afford me the opportunity to see just what kind of stuff--good, bad, or indifferent--I spent the idle hours of my youth watching. It's a great way to see what kinds of garbage the media-meisters of yesteryear thought the public wanted to see. If you're lucky they even include some of the old commercials, often rudimentary by modern standards, but no more or less ridiculous than the ones they have today.</div><div><br /></div><div> Lately I've done a deep dive into <i>The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet</i>. I realize that when I was watching the show as a kid, I was probably watching some of it as it appeared weekly, and some of the older ones as reruns, since we didn't get a television at our house until about the mid-1950s. (I remember sitting by the radio listening to <i>The Lone Ranger </i>before we had TV.) Right now I'm watching season five of <i>Ozzie and Harriet,</i> which takes place in approximately 1957, in which Ricky Nelson is a high schooler, and David Nelson is attending USC, but living at home. On the horizon, about to break, but not quite yet, is Ricky's blaze into teen idol fame, which was heavily promoted--indeed launched--via the show itself, with Ricky ending each show in front of his band, strumming the guitar and curling his lips to a series of hot charting tunes. Ricky's style was a mix of the sensuality of Elvis and the rockabilly renderings of the Everly Brothers, plus his own clean good looks inherited from his parents and a deft way of conveying the probably imaginary fact that, despite his fame, he was just a lonely teenager looking for a girl to call his own. Not wholly original stuff, I grant you, but very effective at attracting his audience, and all done without the need for him to appear on weekly variety shows in order to keep his chiseled features before the adoring public.</div><div> </div><div> But it's Ozzie Nelson I want to concentrate on here. This guy really fascinates me. On the show he plays a benign, lovable, and occasionally whiny paterfamilias, always getting himself into small scrapes with his braggadocio and low-level hubris, then getting caught up short and having to at least partially admit that he was mistaken, but always being forgiven by his long-suffering wife Harriet and devoted sons David and Ricky. Other TV men of the era played similar kinds of fools, to be sure. Ralph Kramden and Chester A. Riley come immediately to mind. The difference between them and Ozzie, however, is that Oz doesn't bellow or verbally abuse his wife or commit acts of absolute stupidity. He just sort of lets his best-laid plans, or his incorrigible dispensing of fatherly or husbandly wisdom, go slightly sideways, but in the end he owns up to his shortcomings pretty casually and effortlessly. And he's a decent, generous, and tolerant dad to his sons. Meanwhile Harriet provides the gentle sarcasm and wit needed to keep Ozzie in line, and she's usually one or two steps ahead of him all the way. Unlike Alice Kramden, she doesn't get in the last word with her arms folded and a frown on her face, but instead does it with grace and charm and an unfailing smile that makes you wonder what the hell she sees in this bumbling, lazy, goofball husband of hers.</div><div><br /></div><div> One thing that separates the show from other situation comedies of the day is that it features all four members of the real Nelson family, and, I've discovered, was filmed in a studio replica of their actual house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills.
As I said, it’s Ozzie himself who most fascinates me. So, in an effort to learn more about him, I explored the internet and also took the extraordinary step of buying and reading a used copy of his autobiography, appropriately titled <i>Ozzie</i>, written in the early 1970s, just a few years before his death. Overall, I learned a number of things about Oswald George Nelson, born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1906. Early on, Ozzie took an interest in music, and began playing several instruments, including the ukulele and the saxophone, all very Roaring 20s and collegiate in nature. He began playing at local clubs in north Jersey and New York, and by the time he matriculated at Rutgers in the mid-1920s he was regularly burning the candle at both ends, going to college by day and leading big band gigs until the wee hours, all the while playing football and swimming for the school. Oh, and before that he was an Eagle Scout, attending an international jamboree in England and Europe in the early post-World War One years. After graduating from Rutgers he obtained a law degree, of all things, but decided at that point to go into the music biz full time, playing at high-toned clubs and speakeasies, mostly in Manhattan. Soon after, the band, consisting of him as leader and about a dozen musicians, began a practically endless tour of the east and Midwest that would have put many later rock groups to shame for its nonstop rambling from town to town for months on end.
In the meantime Ozzie cut some records, including—get this—the first-ever recording of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with Ozzie himself doing the vocal in a sort of Rudy Vallee-style croon. And he could carry a tune. That was in 1931, when he was 25 or so, well before greats like Ella Fitzgerald made the song famous, and a generation before Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas scored with the most successful version of the song. Check out Ozzie’s rendition on YouTube. Or just imagine a young Oz crooning “Say nighty night and kiss me,” backed by soft strings and muted horns.</div><div><br /></div><div> A few years after that a young vaudevillian named Harriet Hilliard joined the band as the obligatory “girl singer,” and in due time the two of them married. Harriet, who had been born Peggy Lou Snyder in Des Moines in 1909, was by then a stage veteran and also in demand for Hollywood B movie parts. They spent their time on the road, conquering the nightclubs and hotel ballrooms east of the Mississippi, with Harriet occasionally going to LA to make a movie, until she quit the movie biz, for the most part, to become a wife and mother. Nah, just kidding. Between and after having David in 1936 and Ricky in 1940, she continued to tour with the band and do radio with Ozzie, pretty much full time. The two of them had a regular role on the Red Skelton radio show, singing and leading the band and doing some husband-wife schtick, until Red got drafted in about 1944, and they found themselves pretty much in charge of the show. I note all this to point out to those, like me, who only knew them on TV, that they were already very well known all over the country before <i>The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet</i> was ever conceived.
In the late 40s it occurred to them, or to someone else in the business, that they should do a show that was about them as a family, so they could include the boys and be with them and more or less exploit the fact that they were this All American post-war family. So began the program, as a regular radio show, written, directed, and produced by none other than Ozzie himself, with some help from his younger brother Don. When radio shows began to give way to TV in the early 50s, Ozzie and Harriet decided to do the show on television, but they didn't stop one and start the other. Oh no. For about two years they did BOTH the radio and TV versions of the show at the same time, with, of course, different writing and production and studios for each. As if this weren't enough, during the summer hiatus (then only 13 weeks off in the summer, with about 39 shows a year being produced), they toured the country in summer stock productions of popular musicals and stage comedies. I mean, damn! And lest you think they neglected the boys with all this work, no, not at all. They traveled with nannies and relatives and attended ball games at Hollywood High and all the shit that model parents are supposed to do. </div><div><br /></div><div> Aside from hyping and presenting a perhaps rosier-than-life picture of the Nelson family, my real purpose in all this has been to tell you how I arrived at the answer to the puzzle that nearly all <i>Ozzie and Harriet </i>viewers have had over the years, namely, what the hell did Ozzie actually do for a living, and why did he always seem to be loafing around the house and taking naps, no matter what day it was? When confronted with this question, Ozzie would generally evade it, and say that he wanted to have the show seem as if it were taking place on the weekend, so that the audience would be able to relate to him and the family better. But this wasn't always the case. The show often took place during the week. So Ozzie would say, if really pressed, that his character was a lawyer. But even this seems far-fetched, because if he was indeed a lawyer, he worked only part time, if that. Many was the afternoon when he'd wander home in the middle of the day, dressed in a sport coat and tie, but not looking anything like a working attorney. Indeed, he had a neighbor, Darby, who <i>was </i>a lawyer, and who dressed the part. </div><div><br /></div><div> Anyway, I think I finally figured out the key to Ozzie's indolence on the show. I believe he was acting out a fantasy--that of a guy who had nothing much to do, and plenty of time in which to do it. Because the reality is that Ozzie Nelson, and for that matter Harriet, were tireless workaholics, probably with barely a moment to spare between acting, writing, producing, rehearsing, performing, promoting, and parenting. They were Energizer bunnies on steroids, day after day and year after year. Their idea of relaxation was what most of us would consider vigorous activity. There are people like that, I know. I'm just not one of them.
So if you're creating a fantasy alternative television life for yourself amid all that frenzy, why not have your protagonist just kick back, put his feet up, and relax, occasionally doing a light chore or chatting with his next door neighbor, even if it takes you 12-16 hours a day to create this illusory character? Ozzie did this for 435 episodes over fourteen years, from 1952-66, still a record for the most sitcom episodes ever produced. This guy's life was cut short by cancer at 69, but he lived at least two lifetimes during that span--Eagle Scout, school athlete, law student, band leader, actor, etc. etc. etc. It's exhausting just to think about. So when you watch the show, if you do, just remember that Ozzie Nelson on screen was, as the cowboy said of the Dude in <i>The Big Lebowski</i>, "taking 'er easy for all us sinners."</div><div><br /></div><div> I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that.</div></div>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-8554645798101600812023-04-07T17:52:00.004-04:002023-06-15T17:36:57.613-04:00Restless, But Not So Young<div class="separator" dir="rtl" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsSFmVqcdIpdkBYTCzMFzvmnIsUbXsnHt08wA2p4A04UoUFgn1j3X4vWYKysOPH8X75LAOjOAJI8XlUK6AvH1hAvyz1yUeoPUqO9dntsMDLdwV_w8JQ-eO_fE2wfwqW4R05S0BfhUGzTn7PJdTxFxkw52-JGT9nn5DKP70sMg4enhXcsHoanAFsY8C/s1072/Eric_Braeden.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1072" data-original-width="639" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsSFmVqcdIpdkBYTCzMFzvmnIsUbXsnHt08wA2p4A04UoUFgn1j3X4vWYKysOPH8X75LAOjOAJI8XlUK6AvH1hAvyz1yUeoPUqO9dntsMDLdwV_w8JQ-eO_fE2wfwqW4R05S0BfhUGzTn7PJdTxFxkw52-JGT9nn5DKP70sMg4enhXcsHoanAFsY8C/s320/Eric_Braeden.jpg" width="191" /></a></div><br /><p>Cathedral City, California </p><p>April 7, 2023</p><p> Several years ago I posted about <i>The Young and the Restless</i>, a soap opera I’d been watching. Now, after a long hiatus, I’ve begun following it again, though not every day. </p><p> As is the way with soap operas, the show’s core characters have remained the same, with some additions, but a few of them are being played by different actors. Adam Newman, the black sheep of the wealthy and powerful Newman family, who was my favorite back when I originally posted about the show, is now portrayed by a different guy, and I can’t quite get used to him. The wily Tucker McCall, illegitimate son of the late Katherine Chancellor, is also being played by someone else, but I like this new guy better. And so it goes. Also, there are a few newer younger characters. They’re less straight and white than the old timers, but still boringly the same in terms of wealth and privilege. They trade off positions as CEOs or COOs or CFOs of divisions or subsidiaries of the mega corporations owned by the big families of Genoa City, Wisconsin, where, improbably, all this wealth resides. Originally the businesses were competing cosmetics companies, but they’ve diversified to include media groups and fashion arms. It’s humorous to hear these good-looking but clueless actors plan mergers and acquisitions, startup enterprises, and such, knowing that in real life they have very little idea of what they're talking about, and that for the most part neither do their viewers. But really, why <i>shouldn't </i>people who are about as deep as the Kardashians rule the corporate world? They might do less damage.</p><p> The mainstays of <i>The Young and the Restless</i>, truth be told, are not young any more. Eric Braeden, who plays Victor Newman, the ruthless ruler of Newman Enterprises, and easily the most important character in the soap, is 82 years old, but still going strong. (Those of you who have watched the soap will instantly recognize his photo, above. But as is the case when hearing about other peoples' grandkids, if you don't watch the show, you won't give a damn.) Victor Newman's current wife Nikki is played by Melody Thomas Scott, who is 66. Peter Bergman, who plays Jack Abbot, the head of the rival Jabot company, is 69. They and their adult children are quite fond of playing musical spouses with one another. It would be fair to say that they have the sexual memories of barnyard animals. Victor leads the pack, as he should, having been married fourteen times to nine different women. Jack Abbot is a comparative celibate, with only six or seven marriages to four different women. Nikki has been married twice to Jack and four times to Victor. And one woman, Sharon, has been married to Victor and both his sons. </p><p>These folks have grown long in the tooth along with their parts and with the soap itself. Back when he came into the show in the 1980s, Eric Braeden/Victor Newman was in slick early middle age, with a nice fat porn-star moustache. The moustache remains, but silver has taken over his still-enviable hairline. He's a decent- looking guy who has held up well, as has Bergman. Melody Thomas Scott is rather pretty too, and hanging in there, though she's being held together with corsets and plastic surgery and makeup. Some of the middle aged women are prone to showing far too much cleavage (or more accurately unsupported gappage), which at this stage is quite a bit lower on their chests than it once was. But part of the blame for that surely lies with the show’s wardrobe people, not just with the actors themselves.</p><p> <i>The Young and the Restless</i> is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. And like old couples who've been together that long, some of the core characters have grown a little softer and more tolerant of one another, not because they really get along, and not because they don't want things to happen differently, but because they lack the energy or motivation not to get along. </p><p> As I write this, Phyllis Summers, with the connivance of Jeremy Stark, has faked her own death, and it looks as if she's going to frame Diane Jenkins for the apparent murder. This is a bit of karmic payback to Diane, who faked her own death some years ago, after which Nikki Newman got the blame, although she was exonerated. Then, last year, Diane Jenkins reappeared in Genoa City, alive and well, in order to reestablish her relationship with her adult son Kyle, whom she gave birth to after a relationship with Jack Abbott, and also to steal Jack away from Phyllis, which she has successfully done, so far. Got it? If not, no problem, since it doesn't really matter.</p><p> Now, there are those who say that soap operas are unrealistic, because of things like absurdly wealthy folks sitting around drinking coffee and scotch and trading corporate responsibilities, and characters faking their own deaths, and people coming out of comas after years, and the fact that the principal actors constantly marry one another, and so on. But aside from all that superficial silliness, I would submit that soap operas, as a form of story-telling, are closer to reality than movies and episodic prime time television shows, and certainly more so than most novels, short stories, and plays. Indeed, there are key elements of truth in soaps that are almost entirely missing from other story-telling mediums. First, soap operas, like real life, don't have a dramatic beginning, middle, and end, in which a story is smoothly moved along to its supposedly logical conclusion by fortuitous or unfortunate events and then tied up, for better or worse. Instead, they just continue for years until the actors die and others replace them. They creep, in their petty paces, from day to day, like Macbeth’s proverbial tomorrows. Secondly, soap operas, like real life, consist of a series of short, fragmented, and often pointless or inconclusive conversations, in which little is accomplished one way or the other. What action actually occurs usually happens elsewhere and at a snail's pace, or instead randomly and instantaneously. Often things that seem important at the time turn out to be unimportant, and vice versa. Rarely does a <i>deus ex machina </i>descend to intervene, and often the good go unrewarded and the bad go unpunished. All that, I submit, is real life. And perhaps it is that verisimilitude, rather than the glamor of hotel-dwelling tycoons, that most attracts those viewers who find themselves at home alone in the afternoons, shackled to their quotidian tasks, day in and day out. </p><p> And the young on both sides of the screen, even when they are no longer young, are still restless.</p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-71255504712684773352023-03-01T16:45:00.011-05:002023-03-05T17:05:12.731-05:00Okay, Seriously<p>Cathedral City, California</p><p>March 1, 2023</p><p> <i>Poor me! A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own.</i><i> --</i>Percival Everett, <i>Erasure</i></p><p> Okay, seriously, this post won't be about politics. I've ridden that horse so much lately that it needs a rubdown and a rest over at the livery stable. And very soon I'll be astride the beast again. So today, for a change, I'll rant about my second most favorite subject, religion. </p><p> Religion, I hasten to say, isn't always a bad thing, though I've pretty much put it in my own rearview mirror. There are some benign affirming aspects of religious practice, such as the celebration or observances of various passages through life--births, marriages, deaths, and a few other in-between things. With their organized approaches to such passages, religions sometimes give us a measure of comfort and a sense of belonging, whether we actually believe the mumbo jumbo in the liturgical background about The One Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; or heaven and hell; or the exacting requirements of Allah or Hashem; or whatever else a religion might have that is designed to keep the faithful on their toes (or their knees), and which is generally a pain in the ass and pretty difficult to comprehend using ordinary human logic.</p><p> But even the things that are out and out weird can serve a purpose, and that purpose is (drumroll, please) to take our minds off the absolutely mundane and terminal nature of human existence. We function physically pretty much the same as the rest of our fellow-animals, about which we hold no illusions as to their going into an afterlife, and all that, except for a few sappy people who talk about doggie heaven. For our own species (since we suffer from a seemingly unalterable conviction of uniqueness and a profound sense of our superiority to all other beings), we hold different aspirations, as scientifically untenable as they may be. By praying five times a day, or by attending worship regularly, or by observing silly dietary restrictions, we sometimes successfully occupy our minds and bodies when we might otherwise be pacing the floor in despair in light of the biological inevitability of the closeout of our existences. By believing that we are not, as individuals, simply going to <i>cease to be</i> at some point, we can stave off the existential terror and depression that sometimes plague us as a species. We might be filled with hope for a better land beyond this one, or terror that if we misbehave we'll go to a worse one, but, thanks to most religions, we don't have to be content with the blackout end of everything for all time.</p><p> However, beyond a rather superficial acquaintance with the basic theology of our religions, most of us don't really dwell on the specifics of salvation and eternal life. Unless--and this is a big unless--we take the whole thing too seriously. That generally happens when a society or subgroup within a society puts too much emphasis on religion. In our own country we profess to practice religious neutrality and freedom of worship. We have no official "state" church, as many countries do. But by having none, and by insisting on accommodating a multitude of religions on a more or less equal footing, including cults and quackish quasi-religions on the lunatic fringe of even the general lunacy of standard theology and epistemology, our common sense as a nation has <i>subordinated</i> itself to religion rather than what I think was the original plan, namely, to free ourselves from its domination.</p><p> In contrast, the average western European country has a long and strong tradition favoring Christianity, and also one Christian denomination over another. The United Kingdom has an official religion, the Church of England. Although it tolerates other religions--Catholicism, Islam, various branches of Protestantism, and so on--as a sovereign nation, it is staunchly in favor of the Anglican church, even putting its clergy on the national payroll and in the government. Americans might think this to be heavy-handed and prejudicial, but in reality it works very well. In the U. K. one's default religion is the good old C. of E., and the rights and privileges of that church are available to all without any need to search for them or be convinced of the mystical or theological logic of the church. The Anglican church is just <i>there</i>, like convenience stores or the post office, in almost every town and village, and if you want it, you can have it, but if you choose to ignore it or go to another church, well, that's okay too. As a result, none of it really matters much to the average Brit. And just to reinforce the relative irrelevance of the Church of England, it is not some imam or pope who rules over the church temporal, but rather the good old King himself. I mean, what religion that takes itself seriously would place a secular hereditary monarch, the latest sinner in a long dynastic line of them, at the pinnacle of its religion, for God's sake?! Oh, sure, there are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, ostensibly the highest prelates in the whole outfit, but they are appointed by--guess who--the monarch himself, on the advice of the Parliament. There's no goofing around trying to figure out who is closest to the Almighty or any of that.</p><p> Other European countries have similar setups. In the Scandinavian countries Lutheranism is the state religion, at least insofar as the monarch is required by law to be a member. In the Netherlands it's the Dutch Reformed Church, not an official state church, but one with a history of being the default church and the one that the monarch belongs to. In all these countries the utter lack of interest in these churches by the citizens, except maybe as places to have funerals or weddings, is profound. I read some time back that despite the fact that Holland was founded as a staunchly Protestant nation, the most prevalent religious preference in the country is Roman Catholicism (by a plurality, not a majority), simply because most Dutch Protestants don't give a shit about church at all. Good stuff. And really, much better than having <i>no </i>official religion, because having no official denomination, or at least a denomination that has traditionally been the preferred one, creates a dangerous vacuum. In the U.S. that vacuum gets filled by wacky fucksticks and charlatans instead of by benign and feckless vicars and pastors.</p><p> I propose that we adopt the United Church of Christ, or U.C.C., as the state religion here in the U.S. Some readers might not know anything about the U.C.C. Let me assure you that it's liberal, safe, tolerant, and above all, unobtrusive. You want to go, then go. You want to stay away, then stay away. You want to take communion, then take it, or not. You want to attend the Christmas Eve service or the Easter Sunday get together, have at it. You want to believe in Jesus, great. You don't, not really a problem. But it won't chase you around or fill your ears with mealy-mouthed promises of the life everlasting or the gospel of prosperity or try to make you vote for anyone. Of course, it would like your dollars, but it doesn't demand them, and to be sure, by its relatively progressive stance on social issues it telegraphs its political preferences, but it doesn't try too hard to piss anybody off. It says it believes in the trinity and the virgin birth and all that other standard Christian stuff, but it doesn't try to shove it down your throat. And I like the name. It sounds almost like a labor union. United Church of Christ, local 1431. Solidarity forever. Its denominational polity is pretty laid back, too. No bishops or other hierarchical know-it-alls to lord it over the faithful, just ministers affiliated with a loosely-knit, democratically-run synod that functions as a guarantor of pension benefits for the clergy, and puts some checks and balances in place in case an individual congregation gets too carried away in some direction or another. And the congregation gets to hire and fire the preacher. </p><p> Under my plan, if the U.C.C. became the state religion of the United States, the nation wouldn't have to spend money on it, just support it "morally," so to speak. Maybe a U.C.C. clergyperson would open sessions of Congress with a religiously neutral and meaningless prayer. (Truth be told, that already happens, even without a state church.) But here's where, under my idea, things would take a profitable turn. The state religion would be the only one that enjoyed tax-exempt status for its property and contributions to it by the public. Other religions would be free to exist, but they'd have to pay property tax and tax on their incomes just like any other business, and they wouldn't be classified as charitable entities.</p><p> Of course all this would require the repeal of a portion of the First Amendment to the Constitution, but what the hell, it's high time that happened. And yeah, the Catholics and Baptists would have a shit fit, but fuck 'em. It's not like we'd be telling them they can't exist, just that they have to hop off the gravy train. And most importantly, by adopting the U.C.C. as our national religion we'd be telling the rest of the world, as the British and the Scandinavians and others do, that our religion is the foundation of our priorities. Sure, there'd be a bit of that Jesus on the cross stuff, but we already have to put up with that a lot anyway, and besides, does anybody really believe any of that? Come on. The main thing would be that the social and moral stances embraced by the denomination would be <i>our </i>national social and moral stances as a country. And what are they? Racial justice, social justice, gender inclusiveness, open and affirming marriage, and so on. I mean, what more could you ask for?</p><p> Organized religions have always been about politics anyway. Let's quit pretending that our politics has no religion. If we believe in gender equality, same-sex marriage, a woman's right to choose, racial justice, aid to the poor, etc., etc., etc., then the U.C.C. is the way to go. The main thing here, and I know I'm repeating myself, is that NOT having a national religion has proved to be a lot more dangerous and divisive to our nation than having a nice comfortable one would be.</p><p> So let’s quit our national pretense of religious neutrality, which allows fundamentally anti-democratic and exclusionary retrograde groups like Scientologists, Southern Baptists, Catholics, and Muslims to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religions that actually believe in universal human justice. It’ll be the next best thing to no religion at all, that higher state that other species appear to have achieved.</p><p><br /></p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-80443565229737304232022-04-15T16:56:00.008-04:002022-04-17T16:05:42.210-04:00A Great, Ignorant, Simple-Minded Land<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2lK_in6ar78HUVmtoPemPCugOZ84Ev3_5Ypz8J22NQflWzImwZFNW1zIpzMENskOBnIl2Lp9jWhVBNmTPT8wi3hp7HLfWCv6cD9DyYugCXDFky2mPnX6gPj5Oh5GI0ohahZBrscx4kXCv_2mdrgTNG4WPe4FZsbZcGzifsY7y3MsNGlyVnEvayQ0D/s225/gump.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="225" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2lK_in6ar78HUVmtoPemPCugOZ84Ev3_5Ypz8J22NQflWzImwZFNW1zIpzMENskOBnIl2Lp9jWhVBNmTPT8wi3hp7HLfWCv6cD9DyYugCXDFky2mPnX6gPj5Oh5GI0ohahZBrscx4kXCv_2mdrgTNG4WPe4FZsbZcGzifsY7y3MsNGlyVnEvayQ0D/s1600/gump.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><br /><p>April 15, 2022</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> In my ongoing critiques of the United States, I am, as you can imagine, always on the lookout for validation from outside my own perspective. Recently I read a quote from W. E. B. DuBois, one of the more insightful scholars and commentators on the state of the country, particularly, but not exclusively, from the perspective of race relations. It had to do with the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial," in which a young man was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 for breaking that state's law against the teaching of evolution in public schools. By way of commentary, DuBois said, "Americans are now endeavoring to persuade hilarious and sarcastic Europe that Dayton, Tennessee, is a huge joke, and very, very exceptional. The truth is and we know it: Dayton, Tennessee, is America: a great, ignorant, simple-minded land."</p><p> To be sure, "hilarious and sarcastic Europe," for its part, is certainly not free from its own monumental ignorance and self-centeredness. Each of the powerful nations of western Europe, in particular, has its own utterly unselfconscious sense of exceptionalism that tends to edge out any introspection regarding its own faults and quirks. The phrase "my shit doesn't stink" comes to mind. A look at the haphazard and often unsuccessful individual national European approaches to the Covid pandemic should tell us something about that, and if we need to look further, there's the whole disastrous history of the 20th century, and for that matter, many earlier centuries. And, after all, from what part of the world did the United States inherit its narrow-mindedness, bigotry, and pure hypocrisy, if not from those countries in particular? And who were France, Spain, and Britain rooting for during the Civil War, for their own selfish capitalistic reasons? (Hint: not the North.)</p><p> But back to evolution. In the 1920s, with universal public education only recently having been adopted, state by state, some states were at pains to keep their public school children from being taught anything other than that the world was created in six days, about 6000 years ago. (God, being a regular hard-working dude like us, needed to rest for a day after all that heavy-duty creating, and thereby set the precedent for the six-day work week, which lasted all the way into the 20th century. What he did the next week, of course, was to begin fucking with human kind in his sadistic anal way. And just for shits and giggles, for his own cosmic amusement, he faked the dinosaur evidence, the carbon dating, the geology, and everything else. I mean, he's God, right?) Back in the 1600s, one British "scholar," the Anglican prelate Bishop James Ussher, even figured out that creation began on October 23, 4004 BC. As good a time to create a planet as any other, I guess. Although this view of creation is still adhered to by an uncomfortably large number of evangelical Christians, and by certain ultra-conservative Jewish and Muslim folks, by the 1920s it was pretty much done for elsewhere in the western world, probably not long after Darwin and his predecessors put a fine point on the subject, though some countries were slow to catch up. Hence the DuBois reference to "hilarious and sarcastic Europe"--not that Europe wouldn't have found other things in the U.S. about which to be sarcastic. In any case, the Scopes trial served to shine a bright light on the subject, and in its aftermath the trend that led to several state bans on the teaching of evolution in public schools began to lose steam (although bans on teaching evolution remained in effect in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee until 1970, and such bans have had a small resurgence in the logic-forsaken 21st century). But in general, the idea sort of faded for the simple reason that dinosaurs have proved to be fun and exciting for school kids and adults alike, even more so than a couple of naked people eating fruit in a garden, as titillating as that might be in the short run.</p><p> Today, a century after Scopes, the U.S is engaged in another paroxysm of denial of the facts, as we are so wont to do. In this instance, and almost in the same way as some states sought to withhold and deny the facts of evolution, several states are busy struggling with a matter much less removed in time than the creation of the earth. It is the creation of the racist society in which we all live. Therefore, as recently as last week I read that the governor of South Dakota has by executive fiat forbidden the public schools to teach anything that would make modern-day students feel somehow bad about their ancestors' misdeeds, particularly, in the case of South Dakota, with respect to Indians, but also with respect to other nonwhites. Notice that the students the law intends to protect are the precious young white kids, lest they grow up feeling somehow less confident that they are the rightful rulers of this land. Elsewhere in the country the same thoughtful restraint is being put on the teaching of how, from its first invasion by the Spanish onward through the occupation of various parts of it by the French and the British, this continent and its adjacent islands have been subjected to the systematic annihilation, subjugation, and enslavement of the native populations, as well as by the use of millions of Africans, forcibly imported and bred to be used as slave labor. </p><p> And regarding the post-colonial period of the country, and particularly the post-Civil War period, some states enjoy restraining the teaching of anything critical about the horrors of slavery and the stubborn resistance of the South to Reconstruction, as well as the imposition of the oppressive post-Reconstruction system of apartheid which lasted at least until the 1960s, and the lingering institutional white supremacist bent of the powers that be in this country, including most conspicuously the increasingly fascist-style behavior of local police forces all over the country, where the nationwide motto has become "If they're Black, shoot 'em if they stand, and shoot 'em if they run."</p><p> Also, to its eternal credit as a great, ignorant, simple-minded land, many of this country's states are now attempting, at the public school level, to curb the recognition of anything other than traditional heteronormative sexuality. Elsewhere in the news, in our systematic attempt to oppress women (so self-righteously condemned by us when it occurs, <i>as it surely does</i>, in various Islamic countries), a large portion of the country is busy reinstating statewide bans on abortion, in anticipation of a decision by the Supreme Court to greatly curb its legal use. </p><p> Certainly, some of our policies of oppression, such as wiping out the Indians and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, have been carried on by the federal government acting on behalf of us all. But in the main there is one strong common thread running through all these retrograde ideas, from slavery through the banning of the teaching of evolution up to the present-day attempts to oppress minorities, women, and gender-nonconforming folks. And that is that we as a country are consistently impeded from progress because of the powers and desires of certain of our individual states. The federal Supreme Court legalized abortion fifty years ago, but it is because of pressures from particular states, and the ignorant folks in them, that the issue is once again before this currently conservative high court. How that will play out remains to be seen, but it ain't looking good.</p><p> As I have opined in previous posts in other contexts, it is the rights of individual states to decide what is good and right for them, rather than the federal government, that underlies many of the evils with which we live in this country. It strengthens the parochial backwardness of shithole places like Idaho, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, and gives them and other underpopulated states a disproportionate representation in the Senate, thus holding many progressive federal initiatives hostage to the minority. And when it comes to presidential elections, that tyranny of the few over the many comes out even more starkly. With our winner-take-all state-by-state system of electoral votes (based on popular representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, but also including two free extras for each state's Senators), as opposed to a straight national popular vote, these smaller states are able to secure the victories of Republicans in spite of the fact that more voters wanted the Democrat to win. This has happened twice in the last quarter century.</p><p> Except insofar as certain states (like California) are able to exercise more progressive policies than even the federal government is willing to do, often dragging the federal government into a more reasonable stance, the "states rights" governance of the country has been disastrous. It led to the Civil War, and even in the aftermath of the South's loss, to the institutionalization of horrible suppression of Blacks. (That's not to say that northern states haven't exercised their share of systematic <i>de facto</i> oppression.) Today, and for some time previously, the term "state's rights" has simply been code for policies of discrimination and outright stupidity. I can't think of a single instance where anything good was done in the U.S. in the name of state's rights.</p><p> The policy of state's rights was a dubious expedient for the sake of holding the country together when it began by allowing smaller or less populated states to have an equal voice in the Senate with the giant colonies of New York and Virginia. This equal representation of each state in the Senate has proved, over and over, to be the tail that has wagged the national dog. It was the southern Senators who created the idea of the filibuster, requiring a supermajority of Senate votes to pass a great deal of legislation that had been passed by a simple majority in the House of Representatives. This was done specifically to block civil rights legislation, but the practice persists to this day, preventing the current razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate from getting a hell of lot done unless the matter before them is almost entirely uncontroversial (such as condemning the Russians).</p><p> But it wasn't just the Senate that was affected by the policy of state's rights. The committee that wrote the U.S. Constitution was presented with a dilemma from the very beginning, namely, whether or not to include slaves in the population count for purposes of proportional representation in the lower chamber. This shouldn't have been a dilemma at all, since the slaves were not legally entitled to any representation. Some northerners quite logically said that since slaves had no status as humans, and were really just chattel, they should not be counted. After all, they argued, we're not allowed to count our livestock. Others, in particular men in the slave-holding states, thought that <i>all </i>slaves should be counted, so they could get more Congressmen, and hence more power, in the House of Representatives, particularly since in some of the original states the number of slaves exceeded the number of white people. This notion was sort of odd, as I said, since the slaves weren't treated like human beings, except insofar as they could communicate as humans, and could be impregnated by both fellow slaves and white men alike. (Indians, by the way, didn't count at all, since they were considered separate nations, albeit nations that the U.S. could manipulate at will.) Finally a compromise was reached whereby three-fifths of slaves were allowed to be counted toward the populations of the slave-holding states. Modern-day people decry this compromise because it devaluated the humanity of slaves by forty percent, but in reality the humanity of enslaved people was already devaluated by one hundred percent, and allowing <i>any</i> proportional representation of slaves, even fractional, only enhanced the power of the slave states at the ultimate expense of both the enslaved people and the free states. And the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (the 14th and 15th), establishing the full recognition of former slaves as citizens and allowing their men to vote, only gave African Americans a brief moment of enfranchisement, before the white South once more prevented them from voting for another hundred years, but this time with the advantage of being able to count <i>all</i> of the former slaves for purposes of political representation, while providing no effective representation for Blacks at all. Pretty sweet deal. The North, by giving up on Reconstruction, had effectively snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.</p><p> Finally, with all this in mind, let's return to the original gravamen of this posting, namely, the banning of the teaching of evolution in public schools. It is no coincidence that the states which disallowed teaching of evolution, and a few that have begun to do so more recently, were all, at one time, slave-holding states or territories. In fact, with the exception of a few yet-to-become states, like Idaho and the Dakotas, almost all of the most unregenerate and backward states in today's America were once the bastions of the institution of slavery, including Oklahoma, which didn't become a state until the 20th century, but existed back then as the official national concentration camp for Indians from all over the country. (None of which is to give a <i>carte blanche</i> pass to northern "purple" states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, or any other place in the U.S. where conservatism is capable of flourishing on its own.)</p><p> The social historian W.E.B. DuBois, whom I quoted earlier, was himself born into a small community of free Black people in Massachusetts, but the main target of his accusations was the South and its influences on the North, not to mention the ways that northern capitalism tacitly encouraged slavery to exist in the first place. Because of the disproportionate political power of the South, which drags on into the present day, and whose regressive ideas infect likeminded people all over the country, the South has risen from the ashes of its momentary defeat in the 1860s to become a force for evil even greater than the North. The brutal institution of slavery, which it fought to protect and expand, permanently corrupted its white population, turning them into subnormal beings. In addition to its already-mentioned general disregard for basic human rights, the South has been a haven for opposition to organized labor, promotion of capital punishment, promotion of gun ownership, a bastion of backward religious fervor, and promotion of poverty, obesity, and general unhealthiness of body and mind. The South is, as it always has been, if not always the political, then most assuredly the moral and spiritual leader of the great, ignorant, and simple-minded land in which we live. </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-91014960067467002652022-04-01T18:04:00.002-04:002022-04-14T15:06:10.625-04:00The Devil You Know<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFSSAGKyJCjOPlMQ1Z_0IPWeBPvQ7SdtSBlw6EU69D3sGPcC4V1AyUJSo6o4w9IeL3J8esBDtr7BDgvVYg9GzdYrGWaRqHT7FPrssX1w-ASf7zSY-qetWN5Bk2WEK02Px_FzuOKV9nQwr_sNYmnxsqe4hhnHQILnawqyhRIA0pVq7hmr7pRzzxnFqo/s275/taylor%20greene.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFSSAGKyJCjOPlMQ1Z_0IPWeBPvQ7SdtSBlw6EU69D3sGPcC4V1AyUJSo6o4w9IeL3J8esBDtr7BDgvVYg9GzdYrGWaRqHT7FPrssX1w-ASf7zSY-qetWN5Bk2WEK02Px_FzuOKV9nQwr_sNYmnxsqe4hhnHQILnawqyhRIA0pVq7hmr7pRzzxnFqo/s1600/taylor%20greene.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQIZesyXuCi2L2Qhv2u1AAhisOgQOsdRVoxqWZ7nPjJdLXhMJGBPBHVTtPGeRTU4S-_FTh1ObVD6uobhs1qmZvYJzaj8rgGshu_bkuXTNaegU9BnSkkGSpx6upZbo8RnYQSWEHzxUgTqFaxOL8GDwjST6IzHdy02A-BQWm41KukSvfjGJrXcPWBah4/s1800/ted%20cruz.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQIZesyXuCi2L2Qhv2u1AAhisOgQOsdRVoxqWZ7nPjJdLXhMJGBPBHVTtPGeRTU4S-_FTh1ObVD6uobhs1qmZvYJzaj8rgGshu_bkuXTNaegU9BnSkkGSpx6upZbo8RnYQSWEHzxUgTqFaxOL8GDwjST6IzHdy02A-BQWm41KukSvfjGJrXcPWBah4/s320/ted%20cruz.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgguaunncwiNqEP-Nj2_tl0E8DmjiTeJ08FY_EnzN1ImTIAyTBwDgkvEorsGQy5IoJZOc8-M-khCeLQBZdN9oPcjzIDQFJt4V8thg6U0mo3E5uxzgbI4k82LY03VEHgKn-lACzIkMDOR7bPgNiQD9SqeliDnWbxmc_n1iEdObWi1yBJuP8plkEr8KeM/s265/devil.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="190" data-original-width="265" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgguaunncwiNqEP-Nj2_tl0E8DmjiTeJ08FY_EnzN1ImTIAyTBwDgkvEorsGQy5IoJZOc8-M-khCeLQBZdN9oPcjzIDQFJt4V8thg6U0mo3E5uxzgbI4k82LY03VEHgKn-lACzIkMDOR7bPgNiQD9SqeliDnWbxmc_n1iEdObWi1yBJuP8plkEr8KeM/s1600/devil.jpg" width="265" /></a></div><p>April 1, 2022</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> Here is a quote from a blog posting I put up a couple of years ago, after the confirmation of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court:</p><p><i>We suffer when we assume that there are good people on both sides of the political aisle, because we waste time that could be better spent opposing the bad ones. Perhaps at one time there were "good" Republicans, but no more. If they're good, they won't be Republicans. Sorry, maybe your dad was a Republican and you think of him as basically a good guy. But your dad was foolish and misguided at best, and bigoted and filled with fear and loathing at worst. Time to stop thinking there are salvageable Republicans, male or female, and recognize them all for what they are--the minions of the devil.</i></p><p>If it weren't so damned long, I'd like that carved on my tombstone. But my tombstone would have to be the size of that of the Unknown Soldier, which would be pretty ridiculous, not to mention preposterously egotistical. And really, who would take the time to read it, anyway, before it got covered with lichen and mold? So I'll just settle for the name and dates, like most everybody else.</p><p> To be sure, there are Republicans who occasionally do the right thing, but I think it's mostly by accident. And there are Democrats who don't do the right thing, like that idiot senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia and, locally, Alex Villanueva, the wolf in sheep's clothing who presides as the sheriff of Los Angeles County, no less ruthless than the fabled sheriff of Nottingham. </p><p> As we begin the long off-year election season (longer even than major league sports seasons), it's probably a good idea to keep in mind that the simpler we keep things the better. If we're not Republicans (as I assume is the case with all my readers, unless they've randomly stumbled on this blog), we should be prepared for a dazzling display of pure mendacity on the part of the GOP candidates for various offices, from national congressional ones to local state elections of governors and other state officials.</p><p> The Republicans will, as has become their usual habit, simply try to tell the public that tax breaks for the wealthy are good for the poor, that racism and xenophobia are the best forms of Americanism, and that the Democrats are responsible for all the bad things the Republicans themselves have brought about by obstructing the Democrats at every turn. They will tell us that war is peace, that freedom is slavery, and that ignorance is strength. Sorry, got a little carried away there at the end, but Orwell's lessons from <i>1984</i> are good ones. That Stalinist future he foresaw wasn't nearly as frightening as the real thing has turned out to be. It would be one thing if the U.S. was living in dull grey, stripped-down, Soviet-style misery, like Winston Smith's world was, drinking watery gin, and all that. But we're living instead in a colorful world of multiple television and movie channels, Facebook, movies filled with action comic book heroes, and much more. It's so dazzlingly bright when we look at the screen that we hardly notice the grimness that dwells outside. Which is simply the modern version of bread and circuses. And as for politics and politicians, well, we now expect them to lie regularly, so what's the difference?</p><p> But for as cynical as we all seem to be about politics, it's amazing that we repeatedly continue to vote (or not vote) in opposition to our own interests. Even people who genuinely care about things like racial, social, and economic justice will fail to vote for Democrats, simply because Democrats don't always deliver on their promises, or because they perceive the "Government" to be some organic evil monolithic force that is out to subdue us all, when in fact the government, when decently led, is the only agency whereby we are decently protected and provided for. And even when people don't vote for either Republicans <i>or</i> Democrats, they are essentially aiding and abetting Republicans, who generally are in the minority in this country. By not voting for Democrats they oppose no one and nothing, including evil. I cannot overemphasize this point. "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around," to quote "Life During Wartime" by the Talking Heads. </p><p> If you're looking for a mantra--a simple and correct evaluation of the state of the U.S. political landscape in 2022--it is this, set out in syllogistic fashion:</p><p> <i> All Republicans are bad;</i></p><p><i> Many Democrats are good.</i></p><p><i> Therefore, if you want a chance to increase good in the country, you must vote for Democrats.</i></p><p>See how easy that is? You don't need to evaluate things any further. But just in case, here's another thought from a previous posting about the Republican thought process, particularly with respect to the pandemic. It was written early in the rough going of 2020, but it as relevant now as ever, as people begin to unmask with the thoughtless glee of young children given permission to do whatever they please, but still too immature or uninformed to understand the inherent dangers of the world: </p><p><i>Right wingers, led by the example set by their leader, are not only heedless and ignorant of the concept of the public good, but also apparently incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves. Government of the selfish, by the selfish, and for the selfish is their credo as they careen down the highway of destiny. Can you imagine anyone during the middle ages parading down the streets proclaiming their RIGHT to get the bubonic plague, or to give it to someone else? People would have thought they were crazy. They barely understood the disease, or the germ theory of disease, in anything like the way we understand it today, but one thing everyone knew was that they sure as fuck didn't want to get it, and if they could help it, they didn't want to give it to anyone else.</i></p><p><i> </i>So, my friends, in this case at least, don't heed the old adage, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know." Avoid the devil you know and opt for those who might just embody the better angels of our nature.<i> </i></p><p><br /></p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-90925973297328929342022-03-26T18:24:00.020-04:002022-03-28T18:01:07.733-04:00The Power Of The Dog<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwB98nBG8bkYvcCVP3wVuTA0P-VifO7HFPKV3C7bS_IcDzJnMgbucRsJHXGMzKY6uKiWBg-9HZp_2KbfpQHGvGU9I-fyE6l1JSCbW004Yfc787DPRJqTHFkRcPKU7uJSnqVGisjstkL0HAtIOCxLe0rk-e6jJucQw-RsDiMI4OQ0m0G2edeKLAjWPR/s766/basset-hound-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="766" data-original-width="666" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwB98nBG8bkYvcCVP3wVuTA0P-VifO7HFPKV3C7bS_IcDzJnMgbucRsJHXGMzKY6uKiWBg-9HZp_2KbfpQHGvGU9I-fyE6l1JSCbW004Yfc787DPRJqTHFkRcPKU7uJSnqVGisjstkL0HAtIOCxLe0rk-e6jJucQw-RsDiMI4OQ0m0G2edeKLAjWPR/s320/basset-hound-1.jpg" width="278" /></a></div><br /><p>March 26, 2022</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> As Oscar night fast approaches, our chief regional newspaper, the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>, is busy gushing over Hollywood's yearly output. Full-page ads and special articles abound in the features section, promoting this movie or that, and using superlatives ordinarily reserved for God alone to describe the accomplishments of the director or various of the actors.</p><p> One in particular that has garnered my attention is, as of this writing, in possession of more nominations than any other movie the industry has deigned to consider one if its own this year. That movie is called <i>The Power of the Dog</i>. It was directed by Jane Campion, and stars Kirsten Dunst, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons.</p><p> I have watched this movie, and for the life of me I can't see what's so great about it, or that it's even mildly great, from the standpoint of acting, directing, writing, editing, or cinematography (in all of which categories, and then some, I think it's been nominated). Gretchen and I watched the first 25 minutes or so and stopped because we were bored with it. But later, seeing all the hype and thinking that I might have missed something important, I watched the rest of it. Then I watched it again, just in case. Nope, it didn't get any better. Oh sure, there's a plot, but damn, does it take a long time to unfold, and when it does you still don't quite know what's what.</p><p> First, I should say that I don't think a movie needs to grab you right out of the chute, to borrow a rough tough rodeo term. I am pleased to let the storyteller begin with a few clearings of the throat, so to speak, in advance of starting off in earnest. And of course I don't expect the entire plot to be revealed immediately. Nor do I demand that a movie be absolutely unambiguous. But I do like to see a tiny bit of action, or whatever passes for action, within the first quarter of the movie. That didn't happen. Nor did it happen during the second quarter, or even the third.</p><p> SPOILER ALERT here. If you haven't seen it, I'll tell you how the story begins, and begin to lay out my several grievances against the movie. It's 1924, and a couple of brothers own a cattle ranch in a vast expanse of what is supposed to be Montana. I say "supposed to be" because Jane Campion, the director and writer, who is from New Zealand, chose to film it there, and have New Zealand mountains and plains stand in for those of Montana. Most people who watch the film probably can't tell the difference--mountains are mountains, right? But having spent a decent amount of time in Montana myself, I could easily tell the difference. There's something distinctly volcanic and non-Montana-ish about the topography of New Zealand. So what? you might ask. Well, here's what: for all the hoopla the film has garnered about its magnificent scenery, there's very little integration of the story into this grand background. Almost all the action, if you can call it that, takes place indoors or in comparatively confined areas outside. The majority of the outdoor parts of the movie could have been filmed in front of a blue screen and a second unit could have been sent to the <i>real</i> Montana to shoot some nice backdrop footage, and no one would have been the wiser. It's all well and good to use New Zealand as the setting for some completely fictional place like Middle Earth in the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> movies, or when the actual story takes place in New Zealand, as in Jane Campion's movie <i>The Piano </i>(another snoozer), but not when there's a surfeit of vast wide open expanse in the very location where the movie is set.</p><p> So, on with the story. These two brothers, one a chubby would-be gentleman rancher and the other a rough and tumble dirty cowboy (but, curiously, Yale-educated), run this ranch. The chubby one is played by Jesse Plemons, who in general I like, but who, in this case could have been substituted for by the Pillsbury Doughboy or the blow-up copilot from <i>Airplane!</i> for all the drama he brings to the role. Advocates of the movie will say, well, he's supposed to be dull and unanimated. Yes, that's true. But do you want one of the major characters in any movie to be dull and unanimated? I can get that for free by looking in the mirror. And speaking of dull and unanimated, the much-touted Kirsten Dunst is almost equally dull, looking like she's just stepped in out of a rainstorm, with a washed out and unkempt 1920s curly permanent that resembles a worn mop and, I swear, never changes. She develops a penchant for booze and spends a lot of time in bed or drunk, and occasionally expresses her fear of Phil, her menacing cowboy brother-in-law (oh yeah, she marries the Pillsbury Doughboy, offscreen, and comes to live at the ranch). She even yells a bit here and there, but ultimately she's a timid rag doll, and not at all interesting to watch. Nor are she and her real-life partner Jesse Plemons given anything interesting to say. And the host of ranch hand extras who surround the place have virtually no part in the story other than to grunt and occasionally call someone a name. They're supposed to be slightly menacing, I think, but they're not. At all. </p><p> The remaining two main characters, brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are a little less dull, but just plain weird. Peter is the Kirsten Dunst character's young adult son, who's studying to be a doctor but spends some time at the ranch on summer vacation. Reed-thin, and limper than his mother's dishrag hair, he's as true an oddball as there ever was, twirling around, making paper flowers, dissecting rabbits (for medical purposes), and, I shit you not, swaying his hips with a premodern hula hoop. All this is supposed to convey, I guess, that he's gay, and a gentle and delicate soul, and he gets called names on account of that, which upsets his mom, but doesn't seem to faze him much. He seems to be fairly comfortable in his own unique skin, and not nearly as weak as mommy thinks he is. But I think the writer-director tries a bit too hard to make him into a sort of helpless, pining away, closeted soul, which ends up just making him a bizarre and rather insulting stereotype of a certain effeminate type of person. Still, his real sexual proclivities remain unknown. All we know is that he loves his mother (though he's aware of and complains to her that she's overprotective) and likes to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots.</p><p> Phil, on the other hand, is truly closeted. He's constantly praising his long-departed rough-riding cowboy mentor (and naked sleeping bag buddy), Bronco Henry, the secret love of his life, who apparently molded Phil into a butch man's man, in the Greco-Roman style. Phil rolls his own cigarettes, castrates bulls, and never takes off his chaps and spurs, even indoors, and his crew lays around shirtless (but in chaps) and swims nude. Guy stuff. Wait a minute: Bronco <i>Henry</i>? Why not Bronco Clarence or Bronco Leslie? Is Jane Campion just trying to make fun of gay people here, or merely of gay stereotypes, or is she simply, as I suspect, clueless? It's hard to tell, but if she's not trying to parody something (besides herself), then she's really got her head up her ass.</p><p> Anyway, long into the movie, Phil stops making fun of Peter and starts in earnest to groom him into a hard (or at least harder) cowpoke, apparently the way old Bronco Henry did to the young studious Phil so long ago. He's going to wean the lad off his mother, and make a real man out of him, because that's the kind of man he's attracted to. As for Peter, maybe he's flattered by Phil's attention, and maybe he's a little tempted to go along, but there's something too off-putting about Phil. It could be that he stinks, literally, or that that's not the type of relationship Peter wants. I'm sure he hates the fact that Phil intimidates his mom so much. In any event, Peter has other ideas, and a plot to hatch, which he does, but in such a slow moving, improbable way, and so late in the game, that we're left with a movie that ends not with a bang but a whimper, consistent at least with the way it has plodded along throughout.</p><p> Like a decennial groundhog, Jane Campion emerges every so often with a movie of dubious quality. If this film wins big tomorrow night, it will be for one reason, and that is that Campion is a <i>female </i>director and film writer, and it's important to give a female director and film writer an Oscar. It certainly is, but at what cost, as far as quality is concerned? Hollywood is hellbent on making amends for its historical sins of exclusion, but can only seem to do it by naked sporadic tokenism. Two years ago, under pressure to give awards to movies made by nonwhites and non-Europeans, it gave away the entire store to a quirky Korean movie. A few years before that, under pressure to recognize not only Black film contributions but gayness, it got a twofer by rewarding a movie called <i>Moonlight</i>, about nothing much more than a kid who grows up in bad surroundings, realizes he's gay, gets a handjob on the beach from another guy (in the moonlight, get it?), then goes on to become a lonely drug dealer. I mean, really, is there nobody in the Academy with any brains? I guess not. </p><p> Proponents of <i>The Power of the Dog</i>, or perhaps those who simply want gayness to figure more prominently in the movies (a laudable goal certainly, if it's not done to ridiculously), have suggested that there's a genre called the "gay western" to which this movie belongs. Well, that's a pretty short list, as far as I know. The only other one that comes to mind is <i>Brokeback Mountain</i>, and that was more a love story than anything else, and in addition to love it had drama, tension, sadness, and most importantly realism. <i>The Power of the Dog</i> isn't possessed of any of those things. It's just a dog of a movie that seems to have become inordinately powerful to the powers that be. So its name is the only thing about it that works.</p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-12353629715558658682022-03-17T19:05:00.004-04:002022-03-17T19:40:30.563-04:00And Now For Something Completely Different<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgvrX-NajeJjdf6MuH2DxTXwLjfKLr8hNs4_WPv60gFrUro0ITnM_BTY1i4EGHPncLydMYWciaoELJhFCEvEtjHUYwo0i0sdtAXzM8JUA1r2v8LLjsnafxziV7zy13IzOaVIak9Eez7jn60XfI1vZv0MWlqJahmix9FHzPt6fU2ut9Hjd6-RJ2Pwdq_=s507" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="338" data-original-width="507" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgvrX-NajeJjdf6MuH2DxTXwLjfKLr8hNs4_WPv60gFrUro0ITnM_BTY1i4EGHPncLydMYWciaoELJhFCEvEtjHUYwo0i0sdtAXzM8JUA1r2v8LLjsnafxziV7zy13IzOaVIak9Eez7jn60XfI1vZv0MWlqJahmix9FHzPt6fU2ut9Hjd6-RJ2Pwdq_=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p>March 17, 2022</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> Nah, just kidding. This won't be different.</p><p> Politics is the ultimate insoluble problem. It's just people throwing words around, right? People hurling ideas and accusations at one another while holding shields to ward off the opposing ideas and accusations, and meanwhile taking bribes and emoluments from the highest bidders. It's meaningless and a pain in the ass, not to mention something that saps our energy and gets the country nowhere.</p><p> Well, no. Not really. Politics is, in fact, idealism. Without political parties and factions within those parties, there would be no debate on any significant ideas, except informally. And whether you agree with the politics of either party (because let's face it, there are only two in the United States, like it or not), the actions of its members, taken as a whole, reflect the ideals of that party, although they may be watered down by attempts at consensus. That's why it's not too difficult to figure out, in this country, which party stands for what, and it's also the reason that people who profess to be undecided between the two parties are, to put it bluntly, idiots.</p><p> By "ideals" and "idealism" I don't mean anything superhuman or celestial, or even necessarily good. I simply mean the things upon which, if wishes were horses, as the saying goes, any given politicians and their adherents would ride. They are the cherished beliefs, hidden or otherwise, of those politicians and the folks who vote for them.</p><p> Republican ideals include American exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world), white supremacy, hatred of nonwhite immigrants, hatred of taxation, glorification of wealth, suppression of organized labor, and nostalgia for the days when men were men and women were their handmaids. More recently, the Republican idealists have added abolition of legal abortion and of homosexual marriage, and hatred of gender fluidity, vaccinations, and free elections.</p><p> The ideals of Democrats also start with American exceptionalism, because that's been pounded into our brains from birth, regardless of who we are or which party we favor. Republicans may think we're the greatest country on earth because of who and what we <i>have been</i>, whereas Democrats may think we're the greatest country on earth more because of who we <i>can be</i>. But nobody here, unfortunately, can get past the idea that God has blessed this country above all others. That's a typical nationalistic trait the world over, of course, but we carry it even further than all but a few other western countries. </p><p> However, Democrats espouse, in addition, the ideals of racial and gender inclusiveness, the equality of men and women, support for organized labor, help for the poor, help for immigrants, belief in the right of women to choose, belief in the benefits of taxation however much we may hate it, belief in science, and most importantly belief in free and open elections, particularly because, unless statistics lie, there are more Democratic votes out there than there are Republican votes, and to believe otherwise as a Democrat would be self-defeating.</p><p> I know I veered off into cynicism with that last comment about Democrats' belief in free and fair elections. But let's face it, wouldn't any self-respecting Democrat be happier if Republicans just didn't vote at all? Certainly Republicans feel that way in reverse, which is why they wish to make it harder for nonwhite people, who tend to vote Democratic, to get to the polls. They're not about to have another election stolen from them by the Black voters who decisively tipped the balance in favor of Joe Biden in 2020, and to whom, be it known by one and all, Joe Biden owes his very political life at this point. In fact, I imagine that most Republicans would be much happier if Black people were somehow prohibited from voting at all. They certainly had it that way for a long time, especially in the South (back when the Democratic party was what the Republican party is today). But, you say, aren't there Black people who vote Republican? Yes there are, but not those who have any self-respect. I say this at the risk of being presumptuous about the thinking of an entire race in this country, but come on, is there really any reasonable voting choice for Black people? I think not. However imperfect and disappointing the Democratic party may prove to be on progress toward racial equality, it at least professes to be committed to that ideal. Republicans don't even pretend to be.</p><p> (A word here about foreign policy. Because both parties are burdened with the myth of American exceptionalism, their foreign policy views do not vary significantly. This posting is really meant to discuss domestic policy, since elections in this vast country, separated by two oceans from the rest of the world, are seldom won or lost on the basis of foreign policy. We really care most about, as Bill Clinton famously said, "the economy, stupid." There are a few slim differences, I guess. Republicans, because they believe we're better than any other country, tend to be more snooty and isolationist in their approach to the rest of the world, and Democrats, because they believe we're better than any other country, feel it is their responsibility to insert the joy of our magnificent way of life into whatever corner of the world they think might need it, by force, if necessary. Both parties earnestly believe that if everybody else on earth could just be more like us, governmentally, economically, and socially speaking, the planet would be a happier place. But in the end, voters care much more about the price of gasoline than they do about whichever country we might be in the process of interfering with.)</p><p> Which brings me back to my earlier characterization of people who are undecided between the two parties as "idiots." That they are, for sure. But why? First, let me say that there are absolute idiots safely within the confines of both parties, the Republican party more so than the Democratic party. Poor white people who vote Republican invariably do so against their own economic and social interests, since the Republicans don't care about them at all, and are anti-labor and dedicated to keeping their wages as low as possible. But these idiots cling to the idea that it's better to be poor and white than to be Black, and they resent the idea that Black folks are allowed to make any progress at all (except in sports and music, where it's permissible). That kind of idiocy is probably most impressively on display in the state of West Virginia, one of poorest and whitest states in the union, where the only decent way to make a living (until recently) was to condemn yourself to a short life mining coal underground, followed by a miserable death from lung disease. Today, only about 10,000 West Virginians mine coal underground (about one percent of the male working population), and about 2,500 are involved in above-ground strip mining. The largest legal employers in the state are Walmart and various chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which have never been threatened by the Democrats. Despite these facts, West Virginia gave the Republican candidate his largest majority of any state in the union in both 2016 and 2020, based on his support of coal mining and white supremacy, in that order. These are people who would benefit greatly from the ideals of income redistribution espoused by the Democrats, and who would be far better off without the evisceration and poisoning of their land by the strip mining of coal, which provides very little in the way of jobs for them any more, but plenty in the way of water pollution. So West Virginians are a special bunch of idiots. But they're white, and proud of it. And pretty inbred too, which might help to explain things. </p><p> Democratic idiocy tends to take the form of "cutting off your nose to spite your face." The more left-leaning members of the party will sometimes refuse to vote for a Democrat because that person isn't as progressive as they would like them to be. This happened in 2016, contributing directly to the loss of the presidential election by the Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the unleashing of an unprecedented reign of terror by her Republican opponent, because Clinton wasn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders is. Enough Democrats threw their votes to the Green Party and another minor party to deliver Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the more united Republicans, and that made the difference in the electoral vote. This they did <i>despite</i> Bernie's earnest urgings to vote Democratic anyway, even after he lost the nomination. That goes hand in glove with another bit of Democratic idiocy, namely, clinging to the belief that there could ever possibly be a viable left-wing third party in this country, or any government run by even a moderate socialist. The answer to the question of whether that's possible is a resounding NO, borne out solidly by party politics at least since the time of the Civil War. I confess I used to be this kind of idiot, but ceased to be well before the turn of the century, and in any event my votes for the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Communists didn't make a bit of difference in the outcome of any election. Since we do not have a parliamentary form of government where parties can form ruling coalitions, third parties do nothing but mess things up for one of the two major parties, and deliver the presidency to the candidate whose party remains more united. </p><p> So back, once again, to the truly undecided idiots. I'm puzzled by them, and would be tempted to dismiss them out of hand, except for the fact that virtually all presidential elections, and most congressional ones as well,<i> seem </i>to be run on the basis of both candidates trying to appeal to these undecideds. I mean, why bother to spend millions just to preach to the choir, right? They must be people who don't really possess as solid or uniform a set of ideals as do the Democrats or Republicans. This might be due to the fact that they just don't pay attention, or simply do not possess any moral compass. Even most "one-issue" voters can easily choose between the parties. LGBTQ voters will easily choose Democrats. Cuban exiles will easily choose Republicans. And so on. In some ways I respect an avowed right-wing white supremacist gun-toting Republican thug more than I do a person who is so benighted as to be <i>unable to decide </i>between the two parties based on their platforms and their members' performances while in office, particularly as the differences have become starker. Partly this has to do with the fact that, as I said, they don't pay attention to the issues, only to the individual, as if a presidential election were a large version of American Idol or your high school prom king and queen election, rather than a duel between two different political philosophies. Fortunately for the country, Joe Biden got elected in 2020 not because he was particularly attractive, but because he was less grotesque than his opponent.</p><p> The undecideds, also, are folks who profess the sentiment presented in the very first paragraph of this posting, namely that all politics is worthless bullshit, and corrupt bullshit at that. This belief relieves them of having to think and choose. I really hope people like that don't vote at all, because the Republicans need their votes more than the Democrats do. A flat-out numerical breakdown of voting in this country reveals that Democrats outnumber Republicans, and have outvoted them in seven of the last eight elections, even when the Republican has won. But due to our unique form of electoral politics, giving individual states control of the process, the majority does not rule nationwide when it comes to the presidency, or for that matter, the senate. And it bears mentioning that this system was conceived by a group of guys in wigs who were trying to make a country that could hold together even though half of its states had slavery and the other half didn't, and who had absolutely no intention of ever allowing nonwhites or women or people who didn't own property to vote.</p><p> So, as we enter another hectic round of primaries and congressional elections, I wish to make this plea to all voters who are undecided about which of the two parties' candidates to vote for: please don't vote. Watch American Idol instead.</p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-45618593165059075062022-02-24T16:34:00.013-05:002022-03-01T15:17:48.564-05:00Supreme Politics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjSe-wSYZt_xzqMzHGTxz-8AtQdyQ2d0wUsnUrf3nYvOGqpr4tKWtIiJiCO4Mhy7JKKsd822Y_SB8ixsWnE5YAih6svyrWHWlEqe1FgiajfMp-U7dUE7tz2PfUevx71utCOyf3MFEiho-knew0M9vKcy_3LP8CZYSUfF2BbDuwZSlEExNMeqabojJsx=s246" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="246" data-original-width="205" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjSe-wSYZt_xzqMzHGTxz-8AtQdyQ2d0wUsnUrf3nYvOGqpr4tKWtIiJiCO4Mhy7JKKsd822Y_SB8ixsWnE5YAih6svyrWHWlEqe1FgiajfMp-U7dUE7tz2PfUevx71utCOyf3MFEiho-knew0M9vKcy_3LP8CZYSUfF2BbDuwZSlEExNMeqabojJsx" width="205" /></a></div><br /><p>February 24, 2022</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> Let's talk about the Supreme Court of the U.S. I'll dignify that rather flaccid group by capitalizing its name, although it probably doesn't deserve such respect at the moment. The constitution gives the president the authority to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, but the Senate must agree to allow the appointments to go into effect. Since no one has much of a sense of the history of the country or of the Supreme Court, and since the news media love nothing more than to sensationalize things and foretell the doom of the nation, today it's sort of assumed that the bunch currently comprising that body is uniquely politicized, just as the country itself is aware of its own increasing political polarization. There persists a myth, or perhaps more accurately a misunderstanding, regarding the political neutrality of the Supreme Court. In fact, it is indeed highly political, and has been ever since the inception of the country, but particularly since the beginning of the 1800s, when party politics really began to heat up. </p><p> Before getting more into that aspect of the Court, let's take a look at its current makeup. In the days of yore, when George Washington and his early successors were appointing justices, the country was run solidly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, save for a Catholic or two, usually from Maryland, which before it was a state was a British Catholic colony. Such was the case with the Supreme Court, which didn't acquire its first Catholic justice, in the person of Roger Taney (from Maryland of course), until 1836. Taney died in 1864, and another Catholic didn't come along until about thirty years later, but a tradition of sorts then evolved to reserve at least one seat for a Catholic. Not long after the turn of the century, in 1916, the Court got its first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, and thereafter for most of the 20th century there have usually been one or more Jews on the Supreme Court. </p><p> Fast forward. Today's Supreme Court is a far cry from the bewigged gaggle of WASPs who first inhabited it. Protestants? Well, I think there's one, Neil Gorsuch, although it appears that he started life as a Catholic but seems to prefer to be an Episcopalian now. There are two Jews left after the demise of Ruth Ginsberg--Elena Kagan and Steven Breyer--although the latter is soon to depart from the court. There is at present one African American justice, Clarence Thomas, who filled the "Black" seat on the Court after the death of Thurgood Marshall. Soon there will be another African American, a woman, whose religion I don't know at this point. It appears that of the top three likely candidates for nomination to succeed Breyer, one had a Jewish father but hasn't revealed her own religion, another is married to a Jewish man but might be Protestant herself, and the third is Catholic. After all that shakes out, the breakdown of the Court will be as follows: six Republicans and three Democrats; five men and four women; seven whites, one Latina, and two African Americans; and seven or eight Christians and one or two Jewish persons, including six or seven Catholics, one or two Protestants, and one or two Jews. It'll be a complex group demographically, and never before has the Court been quite this far away from its initial WASPishness, which on a stand-alone basis <i>seems</i> like it might be a good thing.</p><p> You might well ask why it matters in the least what the religions of the Supreme Court justices are in a nominally secular nation, and most of the time you'd be right. Who gives a shit about their religion, or whether they are religious at all? Roger Taney, the first Catholic (pictured above), was a nasty and vehement racist and slaveholder, who gave us the <i>Dred Scott </i>decision, containing one of the most blatant manifestos of white supremacy ever to emanate from the Court. In it he declared that a black person had no rights that needed to be respected by any white person. But most of his fellow justices were slave holders, too, and went along. The Catholic justices who followed Taney were a mixed bag. Until very recently, that is. Most of today's Catholic justices have been carefully chosen by their appointers (the two George Bushes and Donald Trump) not to increase religious diversity, but rather to decrease it, because their conservative Catholicism influences their political thinking in a rightward direction. This is not to say that Catholics in the U.S. on the whole are Republicans; statistics indicate that they're split pretty evenly between the two parties. But today's members of the conservative bloc, all Catholics save for the high church semi-Catholic Neil Gorsuch, are meaningful partly because they were selected based not only on the basis of their Republican political conservatism but also on the assumption that since they are Catholics they will oppose abortion rights, will support public spending for conservative parochial schools, will uphold discrimination against gays in the name of freedom of speech, and generally will erode the separation of church and state in as many ways as possible. All of these things are coming to pass, thanks to that Catholic conservative bloc. It would have been just about the same if the Bushes and Trump had appointed right-wing evangelical Protestants instead of Catholics, except that evangelicals on the whole aren't as intelligent or well-educated enough to become federal justices. There is, to be fair, one lonely liberal Catholic on the court too, in the person of Sonia Sotomayor.</p><p> Which brings us back to the inherently political nature of the Supreme Court. Many people inadvertently confuse the nominally neutral role of judges at the lower levels of state courts with judges who are appointees to the federal bench by the President. That's understandable. When you're facing a judge in an ordinary courtroom, you are entitled to expect that judge to at least <i>appear </i>to be fair and impartial (even though many are not), and not to impose their political agenda on you, whether you're a prosecutor, a criminal defendant, or a civil litigant on either side. The personal politics of the judge should not enter into whether you get a fair trial at that level, and if it does, that judge might be accused of committing some reversible error, the one thing lower court judges fear the most, because it's a sort of a rebuke to their competence and marks them as fair game for appeals from then on, not to mention limiting their chances of upward mobility.</p><p> Now let's look at the federal judiciary, by contrast. Because federal judges at <i>all levels</i> (district courts, circuit courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court) are appointed by the President or someone working for the president, and approved by the Senate, it is not merely by chance that they are usually of the same political party as the President is, or at least not significantly opposed to that President's politics. And there are hundreds of federal judges--870 as of now. Once on the bench, federal judges are there for life, so long as they behave themselves. Their big boss is the Chief Justice of the United States, but they may be impeached by the Congress, just as a president may be.</p><p> At the district court level federal judges are trial judges, just like their state counterparts. But at the appellate and Supreme Court levels they do not retry cases on the merits, except for the Supreme Court in very limited circumstances. Instead, they review lower court decisions and decide whether some federal (and hence constitutional) issue needs to be addressed. However, they are all thoroughly political, <i>especially</i> the justices of the Supreme Court. They wouldn't be there if they weren't, because no President with his wits about him would squander the chance to put his imprimatur on the Court by appointing someone who didn't think like he did, at least in broad terms. Because federal judges are appointed for life, the one thing a President may do that will ensure his or her political legacy long into the future is to appoint federal judges and Supreme Court justices. Other executive actions can be undone by successors, but the appointment of judges and justices cannot. Donald Trump's single most nefarious accomplishment while president was getting three extremely conservative justices onto the Supreme Court, and they could well live for another thirty years before the Devil calls them home. </p><p> Again, this isn't new. Thomas Jefferson was the first president this country had who would, in today's politics, be considered a Republican, although he was counted as a Democrat until very recently. (The labels hadn't been exactly settled on back then, but there were Federalists, like Washington and the Adamses, and their opponents, the Jeffersonians). Why would Jefferson be a Republican today? Well, for starters he was an avowed white supremacist and a profound hypocrite, as most Republicans are. While eloquently declaring for the basic rights and equality of all persons, he owned hundreds of slaves, and forced one of them to be his concubine when she was about 14 years old, showing her off in Europe as he courted the French. She soon got pregnant and ultimately gave him six more slaves. (By the way, the aforementioned woman, Sally Hemings, happened to be Jefferson's late wife's half sister--in other words, Jefferson's father-in-law had sired her with one of his own slaves.) Even though as president he signed a law banning the U.S. involvement in the international slave trade, at the time of his death he freed only about ten of his own--those with the cherished Jefferson blood coursing through their veins. Also, he was in favor of the rights of individual states over the federal government (a perennial guise for pro-slavery and white supremacy, and a staple of the Republican party of today). State's rights eventually led to the Civil War and since then has been the excuse that former slave states have used to perpetuate the suppression of minorities. He also favored tax reductions, primarily to benefit the already wealthy, like him, another favorite Republican hobby horse. Jefferson nevertheless gets high marks for his "forward thinking" and for being a brilliant and verbally nimble Renaissance man. This forward thinking included his purchase of the French claim over the middle third of what is now the United States, enabling the spread of slavery and the forcible removal of east coast Indians to west of the Mississippi. </p><p> But the bane of Thomas Jefferson's existence during his eight-year presidency was the domination of the Supreme Court by independent and judicially-active Federalists appointed by Washington and John Adams, headed up by Chief Justice John Marshall, who, in 1803, established that the Supreme Court was completely independent from any sitting president and, moreover, was the ultimate authority on what was, and was not, constitutional. Until then, that hadn't been quite clear, and Jefferson really didn't care for the idea. While Jefferson did get three of his boys onto the court, he didn't have the majority of Republicans he would have wished for. It wasn't until thirty years after Jefferson, when Andrew Jackson took office, that the Supreme Court was altered for good and filled with men even more roguish than the self-aggrandizing Jefferson would have chosen.</p><p> Occasionally, nevertheless, the Supreme Court of today surprises even those who favor the politics of its majority. Donald Trump found out, to his dismay, that he didn't own them, when they turned down, for the most part without comment, his sore-loser claims regarding the 2020 election. But that was more a matter of repelling Trump's outright idiocy than it was of rejecting his basic Republican political views. In related areas, such as allowing states to suppress voting rights and abortion rights, the Court will even things out for Trump and his followers in the coming months and years.</p><p> In conclusion, lest anyone think for a moment that the Supreme Court of 2022 is overly politicized, bear in mind that there has never been a time in the history of the country when the politics of that august body has not been overwhelmingly in evidence, from the upholding of slavery and segregation, to the suppression of immigration, to the dismantling of the New Deal, to the enhancement of civil rights and the rights of criminal defendants, to the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, to the restriction of affirmative action, to the upholding of corporate rights, to the tearing down of the wall of separation between church and state. Those of us who grew up in the days of the Earl Warren court were happy enough with its liberal decisions, even when presidents were not. Today, barring a quick series of untimely deaths within the conservative majority, we will be living with some unhappy constitutional interpretations for the foreseeable future. </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-40244078281764897082022-02-01T20:59:00.012-05:002022-10-04T00:40:00.754-04:00Is It Warm In Here, Or Is It Just Me?<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi-RKKdX8cspdv0ogvSuibFRdU68h-zGcc-Xpqg-IhhrIn3ylH1tGYQ_1XrPJ0F7YBo0FdiqyQJS8fD1jOgXFJY4K2_NISZIcdHnRU32ln16bhHGmPCQBTLHmmDngsEJYbjCwuTMHxRAJtHm6JdRRMA6b88XI_U1b_bK5rt4QZcHlk3s45s8YIZOLr0=s300" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi-RKKdX8cspdv0ogvSuibFRdU68h-zGcc-Xpqg-IhhrIn3ylH1tGYQ_1XrPJ0F7YBo0FdiqyQJS8fD1jOgXFJY4K2_NISZIcdHnRU32ln16bhHGmPCQBTLHmmDngsEJYbjCwuTMHxRAJtHm6JdRRMA6b88XI_U1b_bK5rt4QZcHlk3s45s8YIZOLr0" width="300" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><p>February 1, 2022</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> Let's talk about global warming, shall we? Or climate change, as they like to call it, since the overall warming of things also causes anomalies in some places that don't make it warmer, and then stupid people are likely to say, "Global warming my ass, look how fucking cold it is out there!" and the point gets lost. It's about two or three degrees of complexity beyond the thinking capacity of the average knuckleheaded American, at least, to connect the dots having to do with changes in ocean currents and weather patterns and all that. Only when people in south Florida are up to their ankles in water at the Tiki Bar listening to Jimmy Buffett songs will they really get the point. And maybe not even then.</p><p> I'm not blogging here for the benefit of anybody who doesn't think global warming is happening. But I also do not wish to beat a dead (or slowly drowning) horse. The science is there, and I believe it. Ice is melting off the glaciers at the poles, and when you add more water to a container of water (the oceans in this case), the water level goes up. Anybody who's had Scotch on the rocks should know that. And the carbon dioxide layer that is causing the melting is also holding in more heat everywhere. So there you go.</p><p> In a book I read recently, the author divided people's reactions to the inevitability of global warming into three categories: optimism, in which people think that everything's going to be pretty much okay, come what may; pessimism, in which people think the world as we know it is going to be disastrously obliterated; and futurism, in which people are searching for a way to escape the planet and start over again somewhere else. I'll address the futurists first, to get them out of the way. They're a bunch of fools and nuts, and also monumentally selfish for thinking they can leave their own shitty mess behind and create another one somewhere else. </p><p> Now let's take a look at optimism and pessimism about the effects of global warming. First, let me say that I don't fall squarely within either of these two camps. I would call my own view one of guarded optimism. I don't think everything's going to be great, by any means. Lots of people will have to move because they live too close to shore. And there will be large populations that can't move because they're too poor, and so they will fall victim to typhoons and floods and tidal waves. Everyone won't be as affluently tidy and industrious and foresighted as, say, the Dutch. Besides that, as it gets warmer, the distribution of fresh water will change, too, and agriculture will surely change as a result, maybe for the better and maybe for the worse, but change it will. And that will be that.</p><p> But there's this, also. We're heading for hell in a fairly slow-moving handbasket. That gives us time to come up with solutions, which is something we have a tendency to do when we are forced to. By "we" I mean our species. Other species will, for the most part, have to fend for themselves, unless they are ones we particularly care about and depend on for our own survival, like livestock and pets. Whether or not that's a good thing is not going to be the subject of this posting. But the fact remains that the only reason we care whether certain species become extinct is because it affects <i>us</i> in some way--morally, aesthetically, or materially.</p><p> Back to the warmth. It's a done deal, for sure, but the real question is what it will do to the resources we depend on for survival. Our survival is paramount to us, just as, I assume, the survival of other animals is paramount to them. Everything we've seen about human progress indicates that as time has gone by, there have been more of us and fewer of other species. Maybe some day it'll just be humans and corn and a handful of pollinating birds and insects. And that'll do it. </p><p> Here's a funny thing about global warming. These days, absolutely <i>every</i> damned thing that happens, weatherwise and climatewise, gets blamed on global warming. If there's a hurricane in New Orleans, well, that's global warming. If it's a colder winter than usual in Iowa, that's global warming. If it snows in Istanbul, well, you know what to blame that on, right? This warming trend gets the blame for it all, whether it's at the root of it or not. And in any event there's not a goddamned thing we can do about it, really. <i>Iacta alea est</i>, as Caesar said. The die is cast. We can certainly slow the progression of warming a tiny bit, or speed it up, but we can't change the fact that it's going to keep happening for the foreseeable future.</p><p> So I say, relax. But by relax, I don't mean do nothing, only just quit wringing your hands, or gnashing your teeth, or doing any of those other things that start with a silent letter (knocking on wood? psyching yourself out?). Worrying is going to do absolutely no good, and will divert us from our goals. Instead, get to work, mankind. Already we've seen what can be done in this country when the government even modestly encourages (under the current administration), rather than vigorously discourages (as was done under the previous administration) the transition to energy sources and usages that spew less carbon into the air, or at least slow that process down. Windmills, which I personally hate and consider a blight on the landscape, are proliferating, and getting bigger and more efficient. So I'll put up with the ugliness, at least until they come up with something better. Solar panels are another good way to create electricity, and we seem to be creating more solar areas in the deserts and on rooftops, and most importantly, the collection technology is improving. And those are just the two that come to mind. Electric vehicles are a foregone conclusion and going full tilt now, too, though the source of the electricity for their recharging needs to be cleaner, too. </p><p> However, despite all our best efforts, even if we were to somehow magically unite worldwide on the issue of carbon emission and dedicate ourselves to putting the brakes on it, nothing will reverse its inevitable course. There are too many people using too much stuff for that to happen, and the rest of human progress has done nothing but create conditions for the population to increase, rather than decrease. And even as we try to become more affluent and spread a higher standard of living throughout the world, we create more of what has put us in this global warming mess in the first place--cars, appliances, and the need for more carbon-emitting energy. So should we throw up our hands and say, in effect, forget about it, because it's only going to get worse? Should we somehow, magically, revert to some prehistoric manner of living? That would be the thinking of the pessimists on the issue. And it is going to get worse, or warmer, anyway.</p><p> Coming to grips with global warming is a little like suddenly facing up to the fact that you're getting older. Your first impulse is to deny it, as many people are denying climate change, or ascribing it to natural fluctuations in the earth's temperature that have happened historically over millions of years, and doing nothing except to ensure immediate comfort. Then after that, with respect to aging, your impulse is to panic, and to ascribe every little thing to the aging process. Oh my god, I have an ache or pain that I didn't have yesterday--I must be getting older. Shit! Then after that, for some folks at least, the next step is to get busy changing lifestyles in order to stave off the effects of aging--changing diet, getting more exercise, taking medication to improve cardiovascular health, all the while cheating a little here and there. That's the stage where we are now <i>vis a vis</i> global warming, at least among the Paris Climate Accord nations. But as with aging, while that may buy us some time, it's not going to reverse the process. It's going to progress.</p><p> But here my analogy breaks down. Because with individual human aging the inevitable outcome is, simply, death. On the other hand, with climate change we don't know the outcome yet. It might be the death of <i>homo sapiens</i>, but I really doubt that. Nor will it be some sort of accelerated evolution in a specific direction, like Kevin Costner with his gills in that silly movie <i>Waterworld. </i>Rather, I predict that we'll muddle along for a long long time, just getting warmer and dealing with it. And who knows whether this will come about, since it will happen over centuries and this blog will disappear or become as incomprehensible as the languages on the Rosetta stone once were.</p><p> So fuck it, and don't worry.</p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-31928884416975452512022-01-19T16:25:00.009-05:002022-01-22T17:44:41.562-05:00In The Year<p>January 19, 2022</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> I woke up on the morning of New Year's Day with an old song from the late 60s in my head, "In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans, a couple of one-hit wonders from Nebraska, of all places, who had a band called The Eccentrics. Although statistically speaking, some famous and semi-famous people are bound to be from Nebraska (Johnny Carson and Henry Fonda come to mind immediately), I've always had trouble imagining anyone returning to and staying in Nebraska after fame has touched them, however briefly. But this is just what Denny Zager, one-half of that duo did. Now in his late 70s, he lives and builds custom guitars somewhere in the Cornhusker State. The other half, Rick Evans, died in 2018 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. </p><p> I don't have much more to say about Zager and Evans, the guys, because that's all I cared to find out from Google. And it's enough about them. Unless they sold and signed away their royalty rights to the song (a distinct possibility, given the shady nature of the record business), this tune must have generated a nice modest income for them, having sold millions of copies over the years and having been played on oldies stations for decades to come.</p><p> The song, as its name states, is about the future, and how things will be dramatically different. And like any such song, or story, or movie of the sort, it was wrought from the uneasy feeling that was generated (pre-social media, mind you), by the 1960s news of the fast-changing nature of things, scientific, political, and otherwise. The song was written earlier in the decade, but it came out in 1969, around the time the first men walked on the moon. And it even has a subtitle. The complete name of the song is "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)." The latter two Latin words mean beginning and end, although really the song isn't about the beginning of anything in particular, just about the possible end of things, or maybe the beginning of the end, I don't know. I think it was an affectation put in there to give it a bit of an intellectual flavor.</p><p> The song is basically silly and self-parodying, but I think it's meant to be taken seriously. It fancifully predicts various changes in human conditions over thousands of years. Here I might as well set out at least some of the lyrics, in case you weren't around when it came out, or have forgotten, or were living in a country where it didn't get any airplay: </p><p><i><span> </span><span> </span>In the year 2525, if man is still alive</i></p><p><i><span> </span><span> If woman can survive, they may find</span><br /></i></p><p><i><span><span> </span><span> In the year 3535</span><br /></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span> </span><span> Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie</span><br /></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span> </span><span> Everything you think, do and say</span><br /></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span> </span><span> Is in the pill you took today.</span><br /></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span> </span><span> In the year 4545</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> </span><span> You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> </span><span> You won't find a thing to chew</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> </span><span> Nobody's gonna look at you ....</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i> </i></p><p>And it goes on from there, at intervals of a thousand years or so, with humans needing less and less of our physical faculties, due to technology, and being able to choose test-tube babies, then ending with some expectation that God might come back and put an end to it all, because, of course, we've fucked everything up--we haven't taken care of the earth. This was a sort of amalgamation of Christian orthodoxy and the then-current thinking of disaster mongers like Paul Ehrlich (zero population growth), and a general uneasiness about technology that persists to this day.</p><p> The idea of a dystopian future based on technology gone awry wasn't new to Zager and Evans, of course. There was Orwell's <i>1984</i>, and Aldous Huxley's <i>Brave New World</i>, and that granddaddy of time travel books, H. G. Wells's <i>The Time Machine</i>, which came out over 125 years ago. Really, when you think about it, Mary Shelley's <i>Frankenstein </i>sort of got that ball rolling back in 1818. But let's not forget that granddaddy of dystopian fantasies, the book of Revelation at the end of the Christian bible. At any rate, from the very birth of television and cinema we've been churning out stories by the truckload about the future gone off the rails, because they sell like hotcakes. Hotcakes gone horribly awry. The Hotcake that Ate Cincinnati.</p><p> The thing that practically all science fiction has in common, regardless of its media form, whether it's a lightweight pop song like "In the Year 2525," or a serious tome like <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>,<i> </i>or a series like the "Planet of the Apes" movies, is that it's not really about the future at all. Nor it is about the past. It's about the present, and the things in the present that scare us, whether they be pollution, or nuclear warfare, or runaway technology of some sort, or the evolution of species. And it's never about how much <i>better</i> things will be in the future, but rather about how messed up they've become. Which brings me to my main point.</p><p> Fear rules us. It is the motivator of all hatred, distrust, search for meaning, religious mumbo jumbo, you name it. The conglomeration of media machines that perpetuate fear are our main sources of information, and the touchstones of all our anxieties. Back before there was much in the way of mass media, fearmongering was almost exclusively in the adept hands of religious practitioners--the clergy, whether you called them priests or prophets or soothsayers. Keeping people in fear of danger on earth and eternal damnation has been the business of Christianity throughout its history, and a hell of a lot of money has been made by helping people to think they are staving off that damnation. And before Christianity, going back thousands more years, even farther than Zager and Evans went in the other direction into the future, fear of the unknown kept us as a species guessing and wondering what would happen next--famine, fire, eclipses, floods, injuries, attacks by predators, you name it. All fear, naturally, is based on our fear of the one thing over which we have no control whatever, namely, the fact that sooner or later we are all going to die. </p><p> But just a brief look back into human history ought to infuse any sensible person less with fear than with hope, at least in terms of what we're capable of doing technologically to postpone our inevitable demise. Yeah, sure, we've killed lots of people with wars. I'm not forgetting that. But as far as what we've been able to accomplish for the overall success and longevity of our species, we've really kicked ass. Let's go back just a hundred years, a mere twinkle in the eye of the Almighty, if we're disposed to think in such terms. In 1918, when the influenza pandemic was sweeping the world, we had no penicillin to fight off the secondary bacterial pneumonia that was one of the main reasons the flu killed so many people rather than just making them sick and miserable. Smallpox was deadly everywhere because medical science hadn't yet perfected mass inoculation against it. Diabetics routinely died because insulin injections hadn't been developed. Tuberculosis was something to fear, as well as diphtheria and whooping cough and yellow fever and cholera and a host of other illnesses or conditions. In fact, a century ago infectious diseases of all kinds were the leading cause of death, period. But besides that, people clogged their arteries simply as a byproduct of their normal diets, and high blood pressure was considered inevitable, so heart attacks and strokes just happened once you got to a certain age. Cancer was considered pretty much unpreventable. Those things all happen now, too, but a hundred years ago human life expectancy was at least twenty years less than it is today. And that's just the medical side of things. </p><p> A century ago most people didn't have telephones or television. Cars went 30 or 40 miles per hour tops, and the roads they bumped along on weren't much good. Air travel was barely in existence. Computers hadn't been invented. Human sanitation still mostly consisted of outhouses and pumps on the back porch and ditches filled with sewage that ran indiscriminately into the nearest river or ocean. Women were even more restricted in their opportunities and independence than they are today. It was against the law to be anything other than hetero in your sexual practices. And as for being nonwhite, well, forget about it--you just had to hunker down and take whatever shit the white man felt like dishing out. I could go on and on. And true enough, many of those things aren't even close to being fully corrected yet. But incrementally, we're getting better, not worse, than we were then. And still, we tend to be pessimistic in our predictions for the future. Bad news sells. Optimism doesn't. Humans seem to be born to be fearful, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Fear, I suppose, was wired into us at an early stage in our development, and hasn't left, only found new outlets. </p><p> Now, a thing like Covid has to give one pause, since it's not really a good piece of news for the human species, and shows how vulnerable we can be. But consider the fact that science and governments, in just two years, have fostered and created vaccines and boosters that effectively mitigate Covid's worst symptoms (so far at least), and have made these vaccines readily available, for the most part, to those who choose to get them, and also, come to think of it, to the stupid assholes who refuse to get them. The virus, which only wants to live, like we do, has, thanks to those unvaccinated people, stayed alive and well, but also has mutated into a form that is much more alive and well than its original version, if less deadly at present. Viruses don't want to kill off their hosts, they just want to be able to pass successfully from one host to another. But here's the good news. Even an unscientific guy like me knows all that, thanks to the diligence of the scientific community. And the scientific community, in two years, knows more about this virus than it learned about smallpox or cholera or the plague over hundreds or even thousands of years. So that's a bit of a silver lining in the dark cloud that hangs over us currently.</p><p> Nevertheless, we'll continue to be bombarded by worst-case scenarios, both in the news media and in the science fiction extensions of our current fears. And the lines between the two will continue to blur. I don't know how many people actually believe in zombies and vampires and the probability of a meteor hitting the earth soon, but I'll bet it's a significant percentage of the population. And an even larger percentage <i>don't</i> believe that medical science can assist us in managing things like Covid, if we would only listen. Now <i>that's</i> scary. </p><p><br /></p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-1254676960376404612021-12-31T17:52:00.012-05:002022-02-02T15:37:52.428-05:00So Far<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjTCs3JYoD8o95N_60SvSCbJGsuyaaXJYgXFHRFNzOJjyLlcNIagqz1vTIj1Sph6G5fmoMLbQO_GRBDvdC0F-yZKWCBlZEC1zWGC_0WIGZcG_wpnwBoAtgCcFtFeAKJSafHGMXkHXitLPuriahqeSJimhmJXZB_CzBg21XkbZjwPOVSn_xEdKeDWgxD=s275" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjTCs3JYoD8o95N_60SvSCbJGsuyaaXJYgXFHRFNzOJjyLlcNIagqz1vTIj1Sph6G5fmoMLbQO_GRBDvdC0F-yZKWCBlZEC1zWGC_0WIGZcG_wpnwBoAtgCcFtFeAKJSafHGMXkHXitLPuriahqeSJimhmJXZB_CzBg21XkbZjwPOVSn_xEdKeDWgxD" width="275" /></a></div><br /><p>December 31, 2021</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> Fast away the old year passes, as they say. Amid all the news about the omicron COVID variant, there is still a little something to talk about other than the pandemic. If it doesn't kill us all before it runs its course, there will be something going on in the country afterwards. (Hell, even if it does kill us all there will still be plenty of things going on, except that we won't know or care about them, because we'll be dead. Such is life--and death.)</p><p> What I'm thinking about is how Joseph R. Biden, the duly elected president of the U.S., is doing after almost a year in office. Opinion polls are far too fickle in this regard, because when people feel generally good about things, their opinions of their leaders go up, and when they're bummed out (as most people are now, although that's largely their own fault), those opinion numbers go down. So President Biden's numbers are, predictably, and according to the newspapers at least, down, as if he can help the fact that the virus continues to mutate and people continue to ignore his advice to get vaccinated and wear masks in public. Actually in that regard he's done quite a bit, forcing the military to get vaccinated, mandating vaccinations for federal employees, and also mandating vaccinations for most employees in the private sector. That latter mandates have still to be given the final go-ahead by the Supreme Court, and I think that's due to be heard by them in early January.</p><p> Here I must interject that it's surprising yet encouraging to me that this stiff-necked ultraconservative Supreme Court continues to uphold vaccine mandates, but they do, at least those imposed by governments on government employees.<i> </i> This is for the most part based, I think, on a long line of Supreme Court decisions in connection with the executive's emergency powers, going back to past epidemics, wars, and various other national disasters. It's a solid chunk of jurisprudence that is pretty much unassailable, even by the troglodytes who anchor the right wing of the court to the shallow end of human compassion in most other regards. Also, I imagine that the fact that most Supreme Court members are pretty old, and probably fairly concerned with their own health, outweighs their urge to side with the idiot demagogues who put them on the bench in the first place. It goes to show you, anyway, that when it comes to the Supreme Court, nothing is an absolute given, regardless of the overall political leanings of the court at any particular time. It doesn't hurt that the Supreme Court sits atop a vast pyramid of federal judges and court systems throughout the country, and as the leaders of their own co-equal branch of the government, they're inclined, as would the heads of either of the other two branches of government, to cozy up to the idea that heads of governmental units (local, state, and federal) get to do what they feel like doing.</p><p> But back to Joe Biden, and how he's done in his first year. It's been an eventful year, to be sure, and I say that he's done a pretty damned good job, especially for someone without strong backing in Congress, and very little at the Supreme Court. He's had to put up with a bare majority in the Senate that really isn't a majority at all, but a pretend majority containing a ringer from the other side, in the person of Joe Manchin, or the Insidious Doctor Fu Man-chin, as I like to call him. (He really is a doctor of sorts, having received at least one honorary doctorate that I know of, from West Virginia State University. I know this because my brother, who was in the administration of that institution, used to brag about having placed the doctoral hood over Manchin's shoulders at the ceremony wherein he got that degree. Lately my brother hasn't been bragging about that so much, since Manchin has turned out to be such a fly in the Democratic ointment. He really should have put the hood over his head and fastened it with a zip tie.)</p><p> But in spite of the Insidious Doctor, the President has managed to get a pretty big chunk of change to the American people, and is working hard on getting even more out there. This is money the stingy bastards in the Republican Party would have begrudged the nation, and continue to begrudge us, especially the poorest among us. They'd rather give it to the rich and assume that it will somehow trickle down to everybody else. Or not. They really don't care. Why the citizens of West Virginia don't realize how much damage their own senator is doing to them personally, poor as they are, only speaks to how thoroughly brain-dead they are, on the whole. Okay, enough about the Insidious Doctor and the benighted hillbillies of West Virginia, whose state song was co-written by a guy from out west who barely even visited there. Jesus what a bunch of blockheads, and what a God-forsaken place they live in. Okay okay, I've beaten that dead horse enough. </p><p> What with Congress not being his best friend and all that, Biden has had to do most of his good stuff the same way his predecessor did most of his bad stuff, by exercising his inherent executive powers. And he's done a lot of that. He's reversed a number of environmentally damaging decisions regarding federal land use that the last guy put in place, for instance. Also, he's diversified his cabinet in refreshing ways, and appointed a large number of women and nonwhites to the federal bench. His FBI, under the ultimate authority of Merrick Garland, a guy who should be on the Supreme Court right now, has rounded up and is in the process of prosecuting over 700 of the seditious turds who stormed the Capitol last January 6. The FBI is also on the hunt for right-wing extremist organizations. Biden's departments and agencies have given the go-ahead to the building of vast solar farms and have tried to promote other alternative forms of energy and carbon-reducing measures. He's rejoined the Paris climate accord, tried to reassure NATO and the EU that we're not their enemy, and has quit kissing Russia's ass.</p><p> In August Biden ended the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, which was a very good thing. Yeah, the Afghanis are getting the shits put to them by a bunch of Islamic crazies, but that's not exactly a new thing for them, and no matter how many more years we might have stayed there it wouldn't have changed the situation, except to have kept a bunch of feckless crooks in charge of a government that only we were propping up. Were we protecting ourselves? Hell, no. Were we protecting Afghanistan's neighbors? Well, considering that its neighbors are Iran, Pakistan, and a couple of the lesser Stans, hell, no to that as well. Were we maintaining some sort of delicate strategic balance in the region? Shit, no, because there is no such balance. Anyway, now the Taliban is in charge and it's going to have to start acting like the leader of a nation instead of a perpetual guerilla force. This will either bring them down from within or push their neighbors to do something to keep them in check, instead of having the country bankrolled by the U.S. and European colonial powers. So Biden finished ripping off the band-aid that Trump, in perhaps his only decent foreign policy move, had begun to peel off a couple of years earlier. </p><p> Biden and his government also have continued to stand up for the right of women to have abortions on demand, even though that might not work out so well in the coming months. This he has done in spite of being a Catholic himself, which makes him a better Catholic than some of the nasty shits on the Supreme Court who seem poised to take the U.S. backwards into the middle of the last century on the abortion issue. It's always struck me as interesting that a country like Ireland, held for centuries under the brutal and abusive thumb of a rigid Catholicism, could legalize abortion almost overnight, whereas the good old U.S. of A., technically religiously neutral, could give in to the most conservative elements of both the Protestant and Catholic branches of Christianity, thus balkanizing the country on the abortion issue. What a farce. Biden also opposes the death penalty, which is in keeping with his religious beliefs, but also shows that he has some guts and common sense and humanitarian leanings when it comes to the administration of justice.</p><p> All right, on immigration Biden hasn't been doing so well. In part he's been hampered by the federal courts, but he seems to be interested in reversing some of Trump's harsher policies. And all in all he's more liberal on immigration than the President under whom he served as Veep for eight years. </p><p> That brings up a final point, before I end this rather turgid posting. Joe Biden, despite his flip-flopping moderate past in the Senate, is today <i>the</i> most domestically liberal president this country has had since Lyndon Johnson. Seriously. No wonder conservatives hate him. Sure, he has a lot more to do, and it's bound to get tougher to do after the midterm elections. And yes, he's reversed his old positions on a number of issues, but in the right direction, not the wrong one. That shows maturity and growth and a willingness to listen to others, not hypocrisy. And he has not, since he was sworn in, taken a single position that I'm aware of that isn't fundamentally in line with the liberal ideals of his party. If you can name one, then let me know.</p><p> I shouldn't have to say this, but I will. For a President, being liberal is a good thing. It's not a panacea for the nation's ills, by any means, but it's better by far than being moderate or conservative. This is a time for realpolitik, not whiny idealism, yet Biden remains an idealist, just not of the whiny sort. He's a plodder, plodding in the correct direction, and he's surrounded himself with similar folks. No, he's not a socialist, and we might wish him to be, but if he were he'd have an even tougher row to hoe than he does now. </p><p> And one last thing: charismatic he's not, no doubt about it. But he's taken this country, in less than a year, from a presidency based on a disgusting cult of putrid personality, where every day saw a new headline about a new atrocity of presidential abuse or incompetence or dishonesty, to one where the President doesn't want or need to grab headlines on an hourly, or even a daily, basis. Biden is a normal human being, with an abnormal amount of humility for someone in his position. For that I give him a lot of credit, and wish him well. </p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-67130299168743951102021-12-28T22:23:00.026-05:002022-01-01T17:35:53.831-05:00A More Perfect Union<p>December 28, 2021</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> People will tell you the country is deeply divided, politically and culturally. I won't dispute this. Probably at no time since the Civil War has one political party in the United States been so unalterably opposed to the views and values of the other as today. In fact, I'm not sure the Democrats and Republicans at the beginning of the Civil War were as predictably divided as they are now. After all, there were Northern Democrats who, while not condoning slavery in their own states, and believing in the preservation of the Union, still supported the right of the Southerners (Democrats one and all) to have slaves if they wanted to. Today the ideological viewpoints of the two parties have pretty much flipped, but the dividing lines are even brighter and less capable of being crossed than they were then. </p><p> The modern Republican Party comprises two basic types of people. The first are wealthy folks who don't wish to pay taxes and who wish to be able to conduct businesses of all kinds without having the government interfere in any way with how they treat their workers, but do expect the government to help them get richer. They also wish to be able to pollute the earth at will and ignore the current and coming changes to the world's climate. The second are poorer, more ignorant folks, who suffer under a huge variety of delusions. They imagine that being wealthy is an inherent virtue, and many of them think they'll be wealthy some day, so they don't want the government to interfere with the wealthy. They profess to respect unbridled capitalism, yet they complain when they don't get enough money from the government. They want welfare for themselves, but begrudge it to anyone who doesn't look like they do. Both the rich and the poor folks are, predominately, white, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, excessively patriotic and religious, and backward-looking. Most of all they are fearful. They feel threatened by everyone and everything that isn't exactly like they are, or that portends change. This harkening back to a nonexistent time when things were better is the real allure of the Republican Party, and the antidote to their fear. Oh, and the stupid ones also believe that Trump had the election stolen from him in 2020 and that it's not necessary to take any precautions against the spread of COVID, or else they doubt that there is such thing as COVID, and even if COVID exists, they're afraid of the vaccine. Fear, fear, fear.</p><p> The modern Democratic Party comprises people in all income brackets who believe, more or less, in sharing wealth with the less fortunate, welcoming newcomers, paying their fair share of taxes, conserving our natural resources, curbing pollution, trying (however vainly) to combat climate change, and extending more rights and privileges to people who don't carry with them the automatic privilege of being white, male, heterosexual, and affluent. If they're religious they tend to belong to religions that teach tolerance, forgiveness, and inclusiveness rather than vengeance, condemnation, and punishment. And they believe that Joe Biden won the election fair and square, and they try to curb the spread of COVID through vaccinations and the wearing of masks. Courage and caution, but no fear. </p><p> Republicans and Democrats are scattered all over the place, it's true, but in terms of which states are reliably "red" and which are reliably "blue," there's really no dispute. There are a small handful of states that might be termed "purple" swing states in an election, too, and whose electoral votes are sufficient in number to make a difference. These states are fiercely fought over by the two parties. During the most recent presidential election, these swing states included Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and, surprisingly, Arizona and Georgia. In 2016 all those states went for Trump, whereas in 2020 they all went for Biden. But beware of assuming where they'll go in 2024.</p><p> Okay, everybody who might be reading this already knows all this, so what's my point? Well, I have a modest proposal. Because the blue states and the red states differ so greatly in their political, social, philosophical, and moral perspectives, and because these differences are unlikely ever to resolve themselves, why not have another civil war between the states? Nah, just kidding. Anyway, that would be a waste of time, energy, and lives, and besides, the blue states would win because they're smarter, more technologically advanced, and mostly because they outnumber the red states in population, which were pretty much all the reasons why the North beat the South the last time. Assuming the two sides don't nuke one another, it would be just a matter of time before the war would be over and the outcome would be the same as it was after the other Civil War--victory for the good guys and perpetual refusal to accept loss by the bad guys. I mean, hell, if the Trumpers couldn't accept that Biden beat him by 74 electoral votes and seven million popular votes, how could you expect them to acknowledge having lost a civil war? </p><p> So let's just skip the bloodletting and simply divide into two countries. Back when the Civil War was being fought the North had a lot to lose by letting the South become a different country. Most of the lucrative agriculture in the country was located in the South, and England and France and other wealthy countries were poised to back the Confederacy if it would guarantee a supply of cheap cotton, and the U.S. wasn't the world power that it is today. Take away the South, and we were basically Canada under a different flag. I'm not forgetting the most important issue, slavery, which lots of Northerners opposed, and not just in their own back yards, but in general.</p><p> Everybody talks about how great it was that the North won and got the South back into the Union. But look how much the North was able to accomplish during and immediately after the secession of the South from the country! They got the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed, abolishing slavery, granting citizenship to Blacks, guaranteeing the Bill of Rights to all citizens at the state level, and giving Blacks (well, Black men at least) the right to vote. These major accomplishments happened either during the Civil War or immediately afterwards, when the South was being run by occupation Reconstruction governments. Had the country stayed together, <i>none </i>of those amendments would have been passed, because the Southern senators, and the Southern state legislatures, wouldn't have allowed it. These three amendments--the most important ones of the 19th century--were accomplished when the white South was either a different country or a disenfranchised bunch of losers, and while their original congressional members and senators were prohibited from participating in the governmental process in Washington. That's my point, and the one I'm leading up to in this posting: good things got done when the South was not part of the U.S., but once the country got reunited and the Northern occupation of the South ended, the Southerners did their best to ignore those three amendments, rather successfully, for the next hundred or more years. And they got their political power back in Congress, where they were able to obstruct progress for many years to come--all the way to the present day, in fact. Most insulting of all was the fact that, after freedom and citizenship were granted to formerly-enslaved Black people, the South got even <i>more </i>power than it previously had in the House of Representatives, because it was able to count <i>all</i> the former slaves for purposes of how many congressional seats it was entitled to, instead of the three-fifths it had previously been allowed, while still keeping those former slaves from exercising their legal right to vote and, basically, while continuing to treat them like slaves, only without having to feed, clothe, and house them.</p><p> So let's cut the bullshit and divide into the Liberal States of America and the Conservative States of America, or whatever we might wish to name ourselves. The red states, after all, don't really want to be part of the liberal U.S., nor do the blue states want to be lumped in with the backwater likes of Alabama and South Carolina. I mean, it's downright <i>embarrassing</i> to be in a country that contains states like Texas, and West Virginia, and, for Christ's sake, Idaho. Embarrassing and costly, since we have to carry their weight when natural disasters strike or COVID overwhelms them, because they're mostly too stupid to take the necessary precautions. </p><p> Now, doing this would make for a physically divided country, especially the blue part. When you look at the blue-red map, what you see is three reliably blue states along the west coast, plus Hawaii, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico. Then, heading east, a vast amount of solid red, in the middle and throughout the south all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, with a little cluster of blue in the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Illinois, and <i>maybe</i> Wisconsin and Michigan), and then another area of solid blue in New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Pennsylvania, well, who knows? The chopped up blue country would be reminiscent of East and West Pakistan after the partition of the Indian subcontinent when the Brits pulled out. But hey, today such geographic divisions aren't as serious as they once were, due to better air and sea travel. </p><p> Of course the blue states have more industrial, educational, and technological strength by far than do the red states. And as for natural resources and agriculture, I think we could hold our own. We'd have Minnesota and Illinois in the corn belt, and California, Oregon, and Washington for just about every kind of crop you can think of. As for petrochemicals, California and Nevada are net producers of oil and gas, not to mention the capacity for lots of solar and wind power, and Illinois has a bunch of coal, should it come to that. Minnesota mines iron, Colorado and Nevada mine silver, and California still has gold. And the Pacific northwest has most of the harvestable lumber. Besides, the blues will be much wealthier and could buy what they don't have from overseas, or for that matter, from the reds, if we deign to do so.</p><p> This is what they call a win-win situation. Neither side can stand the other anyway. Mississippians would be tickled pink not to have to be part of what they see as the mongrelized Yankee/Jewish conspiracy to deprive us of our freedoms. And Californians and New Yorkers and New Englanders could continue to ignore the existence of all those inbred red-state hicks. Sure, there would be issues to work out, like a time line, and a moment of decision by the purple states. Maybe we could have a two-year decision window, wherein each state votes by referendum as to whether it wishes to be part of the Liberal States of America or the Conservative States of America. That way the dumb fucks in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, who don't seem to know what's good for them, could make up their minds. And after those boundaries are set, we could give folks another two years to migrate to or from whichever country they do or don't want to live in, before the two become absolutely separate. I'd hate to leave the nonwhite people of the deep south stuck where they know damn well they'll be even less enfranchised than they are now. And should states like Michigan vote to go blue, the hillbillies in those states (of whom there are many) could hightail it for Indiana or Ohio or West Virginia. Fuck 'em. </p><p> During the transition period, the two future countries could decide whether they'll allow travel to and from (and over) one another. Each country would develop its own constitution and decide on its own immigration policies. The blues could decide not to have a Second Amendment, for example, or to ban capital punishment, or to make abortion on demand fully legal. Both countries would have the advantage of having lived under a constitution that, despite its shortcomings, could be a model for its future governance.</p><p> Naturally there will be many, many other issues to work through, such as the minting of money, the distribution of nukes (presently located, I believe, in both blue and red states in sufficient quantities to assure mutual destruction), the maintenance of armies, and the two countries' places on the world stage. We can learn a few things from the successes and mistakes resulting from the breakup of the Soviet Union. My guess is that most countries will want to cozy up to the blues, since our more progressive political philosophy would mesh better with those of the advanced nations of the western world, who today remain mystified by the strange behaviors of the red states. And the other large, nonwestern countries would wish to trade with us, too, because we will have more money. Canada will favor the blues. Mexico, which is fundamentally undemocratic and corrupt, will probably take a more neutral wait and see posture. The reds, because of their historically low wages and anti-union beliefs, might even become a place where more advanced nations will wish to have things manufactured, and might by that token become a net exporter of comparatively cheap goods and natural resources, sort of a redneck version of China, minus China's innate efficiency. And if the reds reflect the attitude of their most cherished recent leader, they will probably wish to remain politically isolated from the rest of the world, which they will consider to be distinctly inferior, but they'll suck up to Russia just in case. </p><p> The biggest payoff to the blue nation will be an opportunity to fulfill some of the cherished dreams of the Democratic party--cheaper higher education, more government medical care, gun control, pollution control, racial justice, and justice for the native peoples, to name just a few. The red nation never did care much for higher education, except as a backdrop for college football, and its medical care has always been rudimentary, at best. If the nonwhites are able to get out of the red nation while the getting's good, the reds will have fulfilled another of their cherished dreams--pure, unadulterated, Jesus-loving whiteness. Who they'll get to wait on them, slaughter their animals, cook their food, and shovel their shit will be anybody's guess. Probably they'll let more Mexicans in.</p><p> And so, onward toward a More Perfect Union. Bind up the nation's wounds? Sorry Abe, but hell, no. This time we amputate! </p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-19399400697088562702021-12-22T23:34:00.004-05:002022-02-15T18:28:35.902-05:00Bacon, Revisited<p>December 22, 2021</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> Reading the previous posting again, and making a few minor changes, as I often do, it struck me that I might have been a little hard on Judaism, and by implication, the Jewish people. After all, for the last couple of thousand years, they've been mostly victims. There's the diaspora (an incredibly complicated series of occupations and migrations), the expulsions from various countries, the Inquisition, the pogroms of the Cossacks, the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviets, and of course, God, who we have to assume, based on the very beliefs of the Jewish people, put all that in motion. Then, when the State of Israel came into existence in 1948, the Israelis had to fight against all the neighboring Arab countries that were arrayed against them, which they did several times, with great alacrity and well-armed efficiency, like Popeye devouring can after can of spinach. But as things stand now, they finally have someone weaker than themselves to pick on within their own borders, and in the semi-autonomous ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, namely, the Palestinians. </p><p> The Palestinians, as we know, are the Arabs who were sort of pushed aside to make way for the Jews who got the area we now call Israel in 1948. The Zionist Jews had begun to go back there in earnest at least fifty years before that, while it was part of yet another couple of empires, those of the Turks and then of the British. Today, to fast forward a bit, the Palestinians have, by dint of a relentless guerilla war that has killed many people and gotten many of them killed (rather akin to the same kind of stuff the IRA was doing in Northern Ireland), finally obtained, on a semi-autonomous basis, a couple of little pieces of land at the outskirts of Israel, from which they are sometimes allowed to come and go in order to function as the permanent underclass that serves the more affluent Europeanized citizenry of Israel. (I'm leaving out the Palestinians who live in Israel proper, and are citizens of that country.) Not that the Palestinians really own their little bits of land, or owned pre-Israeli Palestine, for that matter. That's the thing. The Palestinians were living there, but they were no more owners of the land than the Jews ever were, except for a few thousand years ago, off and on, and also of course on and after 1948. The history of the region is so complicated and so replete with occupations by foreign powers going back millennia, that it would take (and indeed has taken) volumes to discourse over it. The bottom line is that right now, for a comparatively tiny sliver of time--just over 70 years--the Israeli Jews have been in charge of the area, for the umpteenth time, and the Palestinians are not in charge, also for the umpteenth time. </p><p> The saying goes that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Actually, the saying originally was that possession is nine <i>points </i>of the law, which I'm pretty sure means about the same thing. And what it means is that if you possess land now, and haven't blatantly stolen it, and even if you have stolen it you've exercised control and care over it for some period of time, that reality gives you a bit of a leg up on anyone who claims the land should belong to them. I think it comes from the English common law, which I'll admit doesn't cut much ice with displaced populations, especially those that don't adhere to the English common law. (But even those that do, including for example the Welsh and the Scots and the Irish, don't care much for the idea that coming in and taking over a place confers certain proprietary rights, even though the Celtic ancestors of the Welsh, Scots, and Irish did pretty much the same to the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain way back when.) But what's indisputable is that the Palestinians and the Israelis each are <i>utterly and unalterably convinced</i> that they, and not the other ones, are the rightful owners and possessors of what we call Israel. There's very little wiggle room on that issue on either side. God gave each of them the land, they believe, and God is mighty and always right, and that's the end of it. So Fuck You.</p><p> I won't say much more about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict here, though. I don't think it's an easy issue on which to take sides, unless you're one of the interested parties. And I am not. I can afford to be more or less neutral. I don't want to see either side have to leave, but I would like to see the Palestinians treated with more compassion by the Israelis, considering especially that the Israelis should know better than to act like such dicks, considering how shabbily the Israelis were treated throughout European history. In exchange for being compassionate and accepting of the Palestinians, the Palestinians should accept that Israel is pretty much fully in charge, on the basis of that possession thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and also on the basis of another saying, namely, that Might Makes Right. It's sort of the way of the world, and unless you have your head pretty far up your ass, you shouldn't be thinking that Israel will suddenly pull up stakes, or that the Palestinians are going elsewhere either.</p><p> As I said at the beginning, I gave Judaism <i>as a religion</i> a bit of an unfair shake when I tarred it with the same brush as I did Islam and Christianity. Judaism doesn't want to try to make you convert. In fact, Judaism doesn't really want you at all, unless you're a Jew by birth. They'll take you, if you sincerely want to join them, but all in all they'd just as soon you didn't want to. Judaism, as far as I know, has never put anyone to the sword or the gun simply for refusing to join the Jewish religion. You can't say the same of Christianity or Islam. So there's that. </p><p> The Israelis who run the country of Israel, on the other hand, can be real pricks, and treat their Palestinian co-inhabitants like shit. Much of this goes back to the Jews' own bad treatment at the hands of practically everybody for a long time, which, bless their hearts, they migrated to Israel to get away from. But now they somehow can't avoid internalizing all that mistreatment. So they're as ruthlessly efficient and exclusionary as their own tormentors, and as disdainful of the Arabs as the Europeans were (and pretty much still are) of them. And it also dovetails neatly with the religious principles of Judaism, which seem to hold both past and future generations responsible for each others' actions. It's like there's no real passage of time within Judaism. They live in an eddy of repeated history--a constant state of travail, punishments, momentary victories, long-term losses, and above all, lots and lots of rules, with very little qualitative progress. It's as if they're caught in an episode of the Twilight Zone, where they wake up to the same thing every day, perpetually under threat from outside, bound by their own neurotic obsession for order, and lorded over by a nasty Father-God who won't give them a break.</p><p> And on top of all that, they can't eat bacon. </p><p> </p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-13842143755811038842021-11-30T23:51:00.008-05:002022-02-15T18:29:29.298-05:00Bacon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj7Jbsv4Cc-8EuN-6F46w9wjnVRZznpQmJgREXptuTw5kEBHgKdRnYJ35rVfmuTDplPdiYNxQCqi2aReIyUDGXR65hKcHcXFAOCRNFoRkUC83WucbacugymiCNOEBth5nUxJILwQKaM2iJwDQvA2RKxHm-MW2O-mo1JkdtE-7t4MerJOBE9-jE74WR_=s1900" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1267" data-original-width="1900" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj7Jbsv4Cc-8EuN-6F46w9wjnVRZznpQmJgREXptuTw5kEBHgKdRnYJ35rVfmuTDplPdiYNxQCqi2aReIyUDGXR65hKcHcXFAOCRNFoRkUC83WucbacugymiCNOEBth5nUxJILwQKaM2iJwDQvA2RKxHm-MW2O-mo1JkdtE-7t4MerJOBE9-jE74WR_=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>November 30, 2021</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> It's hard to know where to start. So many things are going on, in the world and in my head.</p><p> As I write this my hand is on the bible. Funny place for it to be, but I'll explain. When we moved into this condo last February, it was furnished--not merely with furniture, but with a number of items of, shall we say, "home decor." For instance, there were at least a dozen large clocks (some working, some not) scattered throughout the place. The previous owners also were quite fond of faux French stuff--wall hangings, serving trays, pictures, etc. Gay Paree, by way of Pier One. There were many artificial flowers, as well as containers for them, including all sizes of baskets, vases, and ceramic pots. And a few books as well, which they evidently didn't think enough of to take with them. We got rid of most of the aforementioned stuff, managing to sell quite a bit of it out of the garage via Craigslist (it's amazing how much artificial plants cost at retail, and how much people are willing to pay for them after the fact). Some things we simply had to chuck because they were too hideous for anyone, and some things we kept--a few of the better clocks, baskets, pots, etc. One thing that didn't sell for some reason was the bible, and I couldn't quite bring myself to shitcan it. Probably a superstitious holdover from my childhood as a preacher's kid. </p><p> Well, it turns out that my computer mouse doesn't work well on the glass-topped work desk where I'm seated as I write this, so I decided to use the bible as a mouse pad. A couple of days ago my wife and I happened to be listening to an episode of "This American Life" on public radio. It was the first-person story of a man raised in an orthodox Jewish family headed by an abusive alcoholic father. The narrator attended a yeshiva rather than a regular school, where he had to learn all about the innumerable arcane rules of behavior surrounding the Sabbath, as well as everyday life, for orthodox Jews. Among them was the puzzling array of blessings to be given, depending on what type of food was being blessed. Separate blessings for dairy, meat, things made of wheat, etc. All kinds of blessings. At school the kid was in a sort of "blessing bee" when he was asked to give the blessing for an ice cream cone. He knew the blessing for dairy, but didn't know what a cone was made of, so he was stumped, as I recall, and decided to wing it, with bad results. And for him, overshadowing all these bizarre rules, and exceptions to rules, imposed by Hashem and taught at school, was the terrible drunken behavior of his father, often ending with beatings. A poignant story.</p><p> After having listened to this, I was back at the computer, and it occurred to me that I hadn't opened the bible at all during the time I've been using it as a mouse pad. I keep it face down, with only the black paper back showing. The print is tiny, and well, I spent so much of my youth reading from the damn thing, and the content is meaningless as it ever was. But on a whim I decided to open it to the crazy Hebrew part (as differentiated from the crazy Jesus part, which takes up only about a quarter of the whole bible). I flipped to the book of Deuteronomy, which is a veritable mine field of rules for the poor Israelite shmucks who had to follow them, and in some cases still feel compelled to do. At random I read a single chapter, and man, talk about rules. What to do if your wife isn't a virgin when you marry her, and what to do if she <i>was</i> a virgin but got raped on her way to the wedding, and how many shekels need to be paid for various infractions, and when someone needs to be stoned to death. Also (and I can't overemphasize this) do NOT wear clothing made of both wool and linen, do not yoke an ox and an ass together, and whatever you do, don't have sex with your father's wife. And all this in the same chapter! A quick scan of the previous and subsequent chapters indicates that there is much, much more of the same.</p><p> I personally can't imagine being an adherent of a religion with so many rules--and not, mind you, rules about how to behave kindly and generously and justly to your fellow human beings, Golden Rule type stuff, but about things like where to tie up your farm animals and which ones to eat and which ones to burn as offerings and where to do so. There are some people some who just get a bang out of not only following the rules, but of quibbling about what the rules mean, for their entire lifetimes. To sort of paraphrase Al Pacino's Satan in <i>The Devil's Advocate</i>, the God of the Jews definitely comes across as a cosmic prankster, keeping his people jumping from one foot to the other.</p><p> Not to pick on Jews only, to be sure. Muslims basically follow that whole megillah of Old Testament rules, too, and in addition are heavily into putting the message forth with the blade of a sword or the barrel of a machine gun. And Christianity, even though it was ostensibly based on the teachings of a Jewish guy who in essence said, "Fuck all these rules, just be good to each other" and paid for saying so with his life, has incorporated all this Mosaic nonsense into its bible, the King James Version of which sits, face down, under my mouse. And it's those crazy, intolerant, misogynistic laws, not to mention the silly creation myths that begin the Old Testament, that get used the most by fundamentalist Christians as a bludgeon wherewith to pummel the nonbeliever, and one another, for that matter. For Christians, if you want to be generous and tolerant, you cite certain portions of the New Testament, but if you want to be stingy and nasty and intolerant, you cite portions of the Old Testament. Except that some of the intolerance of the Old Testament got included in the New Testament, mostly because of St. Paul, a Jew who converted to Christianity, who wrote a big fat chunk of it. It's quite a versatile religion, when you come to think about it. </p><p> All of which has me scratching my head, as I often do when I contemplate our sacred western traditions. Not being a Muslim, I can't explain the allure of a religion that wants you to bow down in a specific direction and pray five times a day; to make a pilgrimage to a sandy no-man's-land run by a bunch of sword-wielding medieval chieftains, where you walk counterclockwise around a massive cube; and to spend the rest of your time, if you're lucky enough to be a male, hanging out with other hairy men who act the same way. And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon. Not being Jewish, I can't really explain the allure of a religion that has no meaning outside of adherence to a lot of anal regulations and ceremonies imposed by a perpetually pissed-off God who claims he loves you, but when he's not having you sold into slavery or massacred by goyim, is inventing little tricky pitfalls to make you disobey him so he can punish you all over again, and who doesn't even bother to tease you with offers of paradise or threats of hell in the afterlife. Just, I guess, a chance to rest up for eternity from having to remember all those fucking rules. And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon. </p><p> However, I was raised a Christian, and the son of a clergyman, so I suppose I should be able to explain <i>that </i>religion, but for the life of me I can't. First, as noted, there is Christianity's brutal underpinnings--the sort of preamble to the religion--laid out <i>ad nauseam</i> in the Hebrew scriptures, with all their laws and kings and judges and prophets and people smiting one another and getting smitten by others. The last words of the Old Testament, in fact, are in the Book of Malachi, with God warning the Jews to behave, "lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." And really, that pretty much sums up the overall thrust of that section of the bible--God saying, Be good (which I know you won't) or I will put the shits to you (once again). I mean, really, why is this stuff even in the Christian scriptures? But it is, and shame on Christianity for including it.</p><p> The New Testament, on the other hand, offers a whole different kind of craziness. Here we are given to believe that Jesus was a direct descendant of old Abraham himself, as the very first chapter of the very first book tells us. Except not really, because his father Joseph wasn't really his father. Instead, his mother was miraculously made pregnant by the Holy Spirit and Joseph didn't have anything to do with it. Then, as things proceeded, Jesus became, first, a boy wonder, teaching his elders, then after that wandered around gathering disciples and performing miracles until finally the Jewish ecclesiastical authorities in Roman-occupied Judea (this occupation being another hurt put on the beleaguered Jews by their God for fucking up in some way) had had enough of his blatant disdain for their nitpicking rules and his claims that he was God's son, and had him executed for blasphemy against the Jewish religion. And that was a task the Romans were happy to perform, especially if it made the place easier to govern. Let's face it, if you're an empire and one of your otherwise fairly compliant imperial provinces is having internal problems, you do what you can to smooth things over. Okay, fine so far, and nothing particularly unusual. The Romans loved to crucify people. They really seemed to enjoy it, as much as the Jews enjoyed stoning people to death. It was just good fun.</p><p> If all this wasn't enough, however, Jesus appeared to rise from the dead after about a day and a half (or on the "third day," as Christians like to say, which counts the first half day, the whole middle day, and a tiny bit of the morning of the third day--the math here always puzzles me). Now, rising from the dead was not a bad trick, nor a particularly difficult one, considering that crucifixion was a deliberately slow form of suffocation by means of gravity and exhaustion, and wasn't meant to kill anybody right away. In fact, the average strong man could last for days up there on a cross, and sometimes died of starvation and thirst unless he was used for target practice by soldiers with spears or birds pecked at him too much. But Jesus played possum and was taken down after only a few hours and laid to rest. Small wonder that he recovered and got the hell out of the tomb, albeit with sore hands and feet and maybe a cut in his side. But really, only a wimp would die that quickly, and he seemed to be a pretty regular guy, physically. I mean, the son of God ought to be able to take a little physical punishment without croaking, don't you think? He carried that cross through town while being whipped, for crying out loud.</p><p> But that whole rising from the dead deal, along with Jesus's conception and birth that apparently had nothing to do with his father, are celebrated as the two Big Events of Christianity. Pretty thin stuff, if you ask me, and really no basis for a whole religion, which I guess is the reason we borrowed all the Hebrew stuff, to sort of fill in the gaps, and also made up a big city in the sky where the good people go and a lake of fire where the bad people go. If nothing else, heaven and hell have made for some good New Yorker cartoons over the years. </p><p> Then, we Christians had our turn at imposing our ostensibly forgiving and redemptive religion on everybody else on pain of death, just like our Muslim brethren have done and continue to do. Stupid doesn't even begin to cover it. But at least we get to eat bacon. </p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-90154971584419033642021-09-30T19:18:00.005-04:002021-11-22T16:02:50.055-05:00Too Many Assholes, or What We've Lost<p>September 30, 2021</p><p>Pentwater, Michigan</p><p> The other night I was watching a movie from about ten years ago with what used to be a familiar theme--the scrappy newspaper reporter burrowing into a scandal in order to take on and expose corruption within the U.S. political establishment. Movies along this line go back at least as far as the black and white days of Humphrey Bogart. Typically, the final scenes are of the reporter, after many travails, secret meetings with informants, and arguments with his editors, putting the final touch on the Big Story--the one that's going to bring down the crooks in city hall, the House or the Senate, or even the White House. I suppose this hard-hitting theme was best represented, and perhaps elevated to durable genre status for those in my generation, by the film <i>All the President's Men</i>, about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's exposing of the Watergate scandal.</p><p> As I said, that <i>used </i>to be a familiar movie theme, all the way into the second decade of this century. But as I watched it, I was struck by the thought of how little difference the exposure of the crooked political behavior, as bad as it was in the movie, would make today. Papers that used to be the gold standard of journalism--the <i>New York Times</i>, the <i>Washington Post</i>, etc., while still respectable and well-thought-of the world over, are now considered by a great big chunk of the American populace to be mere propaganda tools of the mythical "radical left," less believable than the <i>National Enquirer</i> or the shit they read on Facebook. That change has been so recent in the political history of the U.S. that it's almost a blink of an eye. Most of it has happened since the election campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 and his steady, relentless, and very effective efforts to undermine the credibility of any newspaper, television station, or social media platform that would dare to criticize him. Granted, there was some roll-up to the Trump approach by the Tea Partiers, and even Nixon hated the <i>Post</i> for its coverage of him, but the level of simple deniability of the truth of, well, the Truth, was perfected by that most recent King of Lies. </p><p> It's not simply that Trump is such a consummately compelling crook, which of course he is, with a political message that brings out the worst in so many people. Other presidents have done that and probably will do it again. It's much worse than that. The sea change that has taken place in the country in this tiny bit of time since 2016 has not been so much about the existence of the beast that Trump is, as it has been about the practical elimination of anything we might call the Mainstream Media (the papers named above and a few others from big cities, plus the original three TV networks and CNN), which the bulk of the public for the most part<i> believed</i> was the bearer of the more or less objective truth about things in general--earthquakes, diseases, murders, and so on. </p><p> Cynics will say that the Mainstream Media I just described never was really objective--it told us what the government spoon fed it most of the time. Maybe. The only departure from that was for a very brief interval from the middle of the Vietnam War through Nixon's impeachment, after which the Mainstream Media went back to reporting on things pretty much the way Washington told it to, all the way up until 2016 or so. Sure, there were political overtones, and you could always tell a Democratic from a Republican paper based on what it chose to emphasize about what was going on. But what, exactly <i>was </i>going on, whether it be a scandal or a hurricane, was pretty much reported the same way across the board. Yes, they were often government shills; for example, without the active participation of the Mainstream Media, the September 11, 2001 hijackings would not have been absurdly elevated to the status of Pearl Harbor Day, and the endless military adventure known as the War on Terror, including the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction, would not have been dignified with those names, as silly as they were. </p><p> Others will say that there never was such thing as the Mainstream Media, and that the media has always been politicized to some extent. For centuries in this country there have been Democratic and Republican newspapers, and they were a lot more partisan than they are now. These folks would say that the fact that we got our news for a long time from the likes of Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley, and later Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, and that they were deemed trustworthy by practically everybody, says as much about our gullibility as it did about their objectivity, and that furthermore, it was mid-20th century aberration. But today there's just a whole shitload more broadcast news time than there ever was before. Everybody knows that MSNBC unashamedly represents the slightly left of center viewpoint, while Fox News brazenly represents the deep red right. And for a long time most people saw CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC as falling pretty much in the middle of things, and hence more objective, if not more accurate. These latter outlets constituted the Mainstream Media, for what it was worth.</p><p> The trustworthy thing about that Mainstream Media was that it was viewed askance by both the left and right in about equal measure, which meant that it probably came closer to the objective truth than one might think. Okay, okay, it didn't promote progressive ideals very much or delve too deeply into the nuances of institutional racism or the military industrial complex or the triumph of the elite capitalist oligarchy that controls the nation's wealth, not to mention the vast social media data bases that have us all in their thrall. But it also did not lie outright, or shy away from the presentation of violence and unrest in the streets or on the battlefield, or misrepresent the right wing as the saviors of the American Dream. And most importantly, it did not preach. </p><p> But, as with any sea change, there was a <i>major</i> series of events that precipitated it. Trump of course always had a soft spot for Fox News, and early on in the 2016 campaign, when the more moderate, Mainstream, networks such as NBC and CNN began to call him out publicly for his blatant lies, he countered by calling their criticism of him "fake news." The irony of this was rich indeed, due to the fact that it was actual <i>pro-Trump</i> fake news--emanating mostly from Eastern Europe and making its way onto social media platforms such as Facebook, that began to emerge big-time during the campaign, spreading negative lies about Hillary Clinton and positive lies about Trump himself, replete with utterly outrageous <i>National Enquirer</i>-style bullshit like stories about the Pope endorsing Trump for president, Clinton harboring pedophiles in pizza shops, etc. </p><p> Then, as the Mainstream Media began to hector Trump even more, especially after he was elected, keeping track of how many lies he'd told that week, or doing then-novel things like "fact-checking" presidential statements, something hitherto considered unsportsmanlike for a news outlet to do to a sitting executive, Trump reacted by throwing a CNN reporter out of the White House press corps. That event, and the tensions that led up to it, with Trump criticizing CNN and its coverage, did a strange thing: instead of having the desired effect, from his point of view, it turned CNN into a bitterly anti-Trump network, and other elements of the Mainstream Media either followed suit, or continued to criticize Trump in a way that old-time Mainstream Media outlets wouldn't have done even a decade earlier. Tit for tat. Well, pretty soon after Trump took office newspapers like the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> were running articles with headlines like, "Trump Lies Again About [fill in the blank]." Refreshing, for those of us who hate Trump and possess the basic intelligence to see a pure lie for what it is, but also disturbing in terms of the necessity for such daily reporting.</p><p> The result of all this is that a significant segment of the public has pretty much abandoned the idea that they can get their news straight from the shoulders of the average national broadcaster. For the Fox News types there's no credibility in anything but Fox, and for the heavy duty Trumpers, even Fox isn't reliable, because that network has had the temerity to occasionally disagree with him. That would leave nothing but the <i>Volkischer Beobachter</i> to report the news to Trump's satisfaction, except that it went out of print with the fall of the Nazis at the end of World War Two. Conversely, for the MSNBC and other left-of-center types, there's hardly any truth unless it comes from the Here We Go Again wisecracking mouth of Rachel Madow, or the whiny wagging head of Bill Maher.</p><p> With the devaluation of the Mainstream Media has come the loss of interest in such a concept as nationwide objective truth. So what? you might ask. Well, here's what. The loss of even such a comparatively small thing as the distribution of more or less objective truth on a nightly basis has been the reason the few fairly consistent touchstones we have by which to run a decent society are under scrutiny. It's all well and good to have opinions on things--politics, music, entertainment, whether or not squirrels and pigeons are a nuisance, whether dark roast coffee tastes too bitter--and even fringe issues like whether God exists or if we have been visited by aliens. But there are some things on which we should NOT have differing opinions, even in a free-thinking society such as the one we imagine we live in. For instance, the benefits and the necessity for all people to receive a lifesaving vaccine against Covid 19 should not be up for debate. We shouldn't have differing opinions on how far inland a hurricane has gone or whether the polar icecaps are melting. And there's no room for disagreement about whether genocide or racism or child molestation or female genital mutilation are bad things. They simply are bad, period. And hell, I admit that the Mainstream Media don't always reinforce all the values they should, but at least they don't contradict them and try to say that bad things are good things, and vice versa. </p><p> The loss of a centralized source of more or less objective truth in favor of lots of individual smaller sources of polemics, baiting, and sometimes outright lies has encouraged the diffusion--the Balkanization if you will--of the news, and engenders a general sense of entitlement by EVERYONE to have their own opinions about nearly EVERYTHING, even things that shouldn't be up for discussion. There's an old saying that opinions are like assholes--everyone has one. But when we hold too many opinions on really nondebatable issues we risk having not one, but many assholes. That's essentially the problem we're stuck with at present--too many assholes. </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-24994233964842098632021-06-08T16:12:00.003-04:002021-11-22T16:09:59.126-05:00Well, well.<p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>June 8, 2021</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> A few months back I published a post entitled, "Well," in which I outlined my pessimistic view of the plight and status of Black people in America. At the end of the post I mentioned that I was about to read a book called <i>Afropessimism</i>, by Frank B. Wilderson III, and that I'd report back if any of the observations I'd made needed to be changed after having read it. Well, I don't think I'd change anything, except to say that Wilderson has deepened and strengthened my view that for the African American there is no reason to be optimistic about the future; the past and present have made that a certainty.</p><p> First, a few words about the book. It's part autobiography and part socio-political treatise, I guess you could say. The author is an academic and a strongly political person, having solidified his views, over years, into the philosophy he calls Afropessimism. (I'm not sure he coined the term.) He started, in the 1960s, as a radical, influenced by Marx, and then by the Marxist writings of Antonio Gramsci, an ill-fated Italian communist philosopher, and later by the writings of Frantz Fanon, a Black French colonial subject from Martinique, who became a psychiatrist and a philosopher, and eventually propounded a view of anti-colonialism that centers on the institutionalism of anti-black racism. That's a pretty superficial view of those people and of Wilderson's own ideas, but it's a start, especially for a guy like me who hasn't, and probably won't, read any of the people on whom Wilderson has derived his world view expressed in <i>Afropessimism</i>. His book is a patchwork of personal memories of key times in the author's life and a whole lot of jargon-laden political thought, filled with words you don't hear in everyday speech (unless, I suppose, you're an academic political scientist), like "hegemonic," "embrication," and "ontological." In that regard it's definitely meant to imbue the reader with a sense of the sound structural and historical underpinnings of his ideas, but I think the book is by far at its best and most poignant when it uses simpler language, accompanied by actual moments of narrative from his life, all of which tend to illustrate his points well. I don't require Frank Wilderson to prove to me that he's a serious, well-read, very thoughtful, and most importantly, legitimate, thinker, any more than he expects me to give him any approval. I accept that. But that's just me, and really, I'm pretty sure I'm not his target audience.</p><p> Unfortunately, I don't have the book with me in California, so I can't quote from it directly. But the thrust of the thesis of the philosophy of Afropessimism is that Black people are not and never have been regarded as human beings, much less as members of society. They exist to serve an important purpose, however, and that is to validate, by contrast, the existence and value of those whom society <i>does</i> regard as human beings. Blacks are the non-humans that prove the humanness of non-Blacks. Those non-Blacks include not just white people, but also non-Black non-white people, such as Latins, Asians, and Native Americans, all of whom Wilderson calls the "junior partners" of the whites. And, he says, much as it might suit the purposes of non-white non-Blacks to lump themselves in with Blacks as "persons of color," or whatever term you like, they are not the same as Blacks, and never will be. The important reason for that is that non-Black non-whites all have, or have had, something to lose, whereas Blacks have absolutely nothing to lose and never did. </p><p> Here I'm straying a bit from Wilderson's political narrative, but not distorting or changing it in any material way. Essentially, Blacks have nothing anyone wants, except maybe athletic and musical skills, and those things can be copied, and if necessary ignored, by whites. The property of Blacks, to the extent that they own anything at all, is nothing but the shittiest leftover parts of the shittiest places, which no one wants or needs. The jobs of Blacks are the lowest of the low, and can be done by others who come in new and are willing to work even more cheaply. The education of Blacks is negligible. Native Americans, by contrast, once had a great deal of property, which admittedly was taken from them, but which they now seek to take back in small bits. Plus they're allowed to build casinos, in order to at least steal back a little something from the white man. Latins bring with them ambition to succeed and rise out of peonage, and have economic value because they serve the need for labor at the absolute bottom of the barrel. Asians, God knows, have a great deal going for them, and a great deal to gain and lose. The white liberal fantasy played out by placing these non-Black non-whites together with Blacks and trying to unite them all as "persons of color," discriminated against by the white establishment in equal measure, besides being disingenuous, has profound limitations. One is that the non-Black non-whites are all, sooner or later, going to improve their lot. Though they may have been killed indiscriminately for political reasons, they have never been enslaved directly, never treated, <i>en masse</i>, as subhuman or nonhuman chattels, to be bought and sold at will by the whites.</p><p> Wow. No wonder he calls it Afropessimism. There's no real way out, and no lasting hope for the future. And that's about it. There is no "But wait!" and no light at the end of the long dark tunnel. We white folks who are sympathetic to the plight of Black people can try, at a personal and political level, to lend a hand, but we can't solve the problem, for the simple reason that it's unsolvable. But that doesn't mean that we should give up the idea of being decent. </p><p> Meanwhile, white supremacy, alive like a virus in us all in spite of the earnest wish of some of us to be rid of it, waits patiently to erase the pitiful bit of progress that has been made in the area of race relations. Thus it is now, just as it was after the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. Whatever good is accomplished will probably be erased. Frank Wilderson knows this, even if the rest of us refuse to believe it, because he understands why Black people exist. </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-87367386488720824612021-03-14T18:56:00.003-04:002021-12-29T21:32:08.725-05:00Revolution <p>March 14, 2021</p><p>Cathedral City, California </p><p> There was an amusing bit in the social media two months ago, in the aftermath of the Trumpist storming of the U.S. Capitol. It was a short film clip of a young woman weepily telling a reporter that she’d been hit with mace upon trying to enter the building. She seemed to be complaining about it, as if she thought she had a right to get in that had been abridged. At the end she said, by way of explanation for her own actions, “We’re storming the Capitol. It’s a revolution.” She said it in a sort of deadpan, plaintive way.</p><p> Besides being sad and pathetic, the young woman on January 6 bore signs of the same feeling of childlike disbelief people in my generation used to display at times similar to that—when they’d been tear gassed or beaten or whatever—while in the act of, say, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam or attempting to occupy the administration building of a university. Only in this person there seemed to be less of ideological vehemence and more of a whiney whiff of entitlement, minus any real political underpinnings.</p><p> All that got me to thinking about “revolution” as I’ve come to look at it in this country, and I got sort of peeved. Not at the thought of self-described revolutionaries languidly storming a building and temporarily occupying it, sitting in the symbolic seats of power, putting their feet up on desks, and so on. Hell, that’s old hat. My generation more or less invented that routine, although we thought (and I for one still think) that our causes—opposing the Vietnam war, institutional racism, and capitalism in general—were nobler and more just than preserving the presidency of an idiotic demagogue who wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit him in his fat ass. What bothered me was that I realized that I’d come to think of occupying buildings as being the rightful, even proprietary, province of the American left, not the right-wing proto-fascist bunch on display on January 6. I found myself saying, “Hey, YOU cracker shitheels don’t get to do that—WE get to do that. You get to drive trucks with big tires and honk the horn and fly the rebel flag and tote guns and all that cornball shit, but we left wingers get to storm the barricades.” I felt intruded upon, and somewhat upstaged. “<i>Aux armes, citoyens, formez vos bataillons</i>” just doesn’t go with people looking they just wandered in from a Civil War battle reenactment, where they played Confederate troops.</p><p> Of course, despite what we’re learning a little at a time, once they got in there they didn't really appear to quite know what to do, and in fact didn’t do much, other than to piss and shit and take selfies, and that was even without any really serious pushback from law enforcement. Oh sure, some of them had aspirations. Maybe that’s an indication of their lack of intelligence, generally, or maybe they were simply imitating their leader, who, never seriously having expected to get elected, didn’t quite know what to do once he got into office, and whose sole aspiration once he got there was simply to stay there. Likewise the Capitol stormers, once they got into the chambers and halls and indeed some offices, didn't quite know what to do. I’m not saying we won’t find out more in the months to come, or that the FBI won’t root out more sinister stuff about the people they’ve arrested (assuming we don’t just get bored with the whole deal in the afterglow of a new, more adult-like administration). But just looking at what they’ve fed us so far, it doesn’t seem as if anyone really had a plan, except in their own heads. Many who have been arrested will try to hide behind Trump's bulky torso, but they won't get to use that as a defense. Certainly they did a shitty job of coordinating with one another once they entered the Capitol. Again, chalk it up to stupidity, or the vast diversity even within the right-wing white-supremacist fringe, but for some reason they never pushed their advantage while they had it. They really could have chased down a Democrat or two and beaten him or her to death, perhaps thereby delaying the vote on the electoral college even longer, but they didn't. And once they "occupied" the building, they very soon got bored with the whole idea and ended up filing out instead of holding out. No one insisted on being dragged out by the heels or the hair.</p><p> I think my fear that the country will get bored with the re-hashing of the January 6 event will come true, especially after the CNN/Fox/MSNBC mini-series on it aired, in the form of the trial of Trump in the Senate. Okay, everyone will say, that happened. Now what? Meanwhile the people who have been arrested will eventually be tried, which is good, and will probably receive sentences of some kind. Nowhere near what they should get, I imagine, but something. They'll get some time in federal prisons, join the Aryan Brotherhood, and just keep on truckin'. And the real pity of all that is that they won't be able to conclusively establish that Trump was the inciter of insurrection, in a legally binding sense, so he'll slide on that.</p><p> Some revolution. </p><p><br /></p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-67175052877439242702020-12-28T19:33:00.006-05:002021-11-23T13:11:13.040-05:00Why I Don't Like Christmas Songs<p>December 28, 2020</p><p>Monrovia, California</p><p> For a long time I couldn't quite put my finger on why I dislike Christmas songs so much. I think it was difficult because it was one of those "let me count the ways" deals. There are so many reasons. </p><p> First off, there's the fact that they start playing them over the loudspeakers in stores by no later than Thanksgiving, and more and more, even before that. Halloween, really, marks the beginning of the Christmas season now, from a commercial standpoint, and one is likely to begin to hear a loop of Christmas songs at just about every store one goes into from November onward. Occasionally I will ask a clerk whether he or she gets tired of listening to these songs all day long, day after day, and since I ask it in a sort of confidential, friendly, commiserating way, I expect to hear what I <i>want </i>to hear. I want them to say, "Man, you have no fucking idea how maddening it is to listen to that shit over and over for two solid months." Instead, more often than not, they'll say, "No, I really sort of like the music," or "It's okay, because it helps me get into the holiday spirit," or "Actually, I kind of tune them out." That latter one I can understand and admire, especially because I'm not sure I'd be able to do that. The other reasons are downright puzzling, and although it does occur to me that they might be expressing their appreciation for Christmas music out of a sense of self-preservation (meaning that they're afraid to speak their minds to a customer because I might tell management), I am often afraid that they are telling the truth, and that they really do <i>like</i> the endless Christmas music, which means that they're on a wavelength so different from mine that we might as well be from different species.</p><p> At any rate, I find Christmas music to be depressing, or boring, or ridiculous, or a combination of those things. First, there are the secular ones, the Johnny Mathis/Andy Williams/Nat King Cole/Mel Torme/Bing Crosby-type songs. "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" is a big offender with the crooner set, along with "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." And of course "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is right up there, along with "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." Then there are the children's Christmas songs, like "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bells" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." All these songs are shallow and maudlin and covered by one singer after another, old and new--from the aforementioned tunemeisters of our parents' generation to Elvis to Bruce Springsteen to Beyonce to Christ knows who else, as if each different person who sings them can somehow infuse them with something new, when they cannot, and just make fools of themselves over essentially foolish songs. I swear, I wouldn't be surprised if Snoop Dogg did a version of "Here Comes Santa Claus" (and come to think of it, he might have done so). As pieces of music, whatever initial zing all these songs might have had as, let's say, dance interlude numbers in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, or Bing Crosby singles, or cartoon soundtracks, has been lost to the ages. Their initial limited appeal has evaporated like the oomph "Over There" must have had back during World War One, or "John Brown's Body" during the Civil War. </p><p> So much for the secular songs. And now maybe you're thinking, Aha! he's a purist--he only likes <i>religious</i> Christmas songs, since Christmas is, or once was, a religious holiday. No my friends, there you'd be wrong as hell. I don't like religious Christmas carols either, whether they're sung sanctimoniously by those same people I mentioned in the previous paragraph or by little kids standing in the snow or by hardworking, clean-shaven Norman Rockwell types standing up in a New England church or by, well, anybody. In fact, I dislike religious Christmas songs even <i>more</i>, because they're supposed to have more meaning than the secular ones. They're all about how the world was hopelessly fucked up until, lo and behold, a little baby was born in a barn in the Middle East, and ever since then everything's been SO much better. Oh yeah, big improvement. How's that working out for you, earthlings? </p><p> So yeah, the son of God was born, as weirdly idiotic as that sounds. I guess nothing proves the idea that man created God in his own image more than the utterly anthropomorphic way we describe the doings of the infinitely divine and powerful. Having a son, sacrificing a son, being a pissed-off dad, being a vengeful and jealous narcissist, etc. Mind you, the concept of a god impregnating an earth woman and having a child I do understand, because I am an educated person, and since it comes straight out of Greco-Roman mythology, where people and gods were much more interactive with one another, and it most assuredly had antecedents going much farther back than the Greeks and the Romans. But the operative word there is <i>mythology</i>, isn't it? Just So Stories. How the camel got its hump, and all that. And yet--and yet--and yet, against <i>all</i> reason, at least a couple of <i>billion</i> people on this planet--many dozen times the number of ninnies who voted for Donald Trump last month, and a far greater percentage of humans than has any right to think so--actually professes to <i>believe </i>that the creator of the universe had a kid, just like the average absentee father down the block. And apparently only one child, at that, which is even more mystifying to me. What'd he do after that, get a vasectomy? But, there it is. Ask the average guy on the street in Cincinnati or Mexico City or Warsaw whether he believes that Zeus came down to Leda in the form of a swan, fucked her, and that she gave birth to Helen of Troy, and he'd probably walk away shaking his head. But ask the same person if he believes that God came to the Virgin Mary as a dove and knocked her up with Jesus Christ, and he'd say, yeah, sure, of course. That <i>did</i> happen. That, my friends, is a real head-scratcher, and that, as the preachers tell us, year in and year out, is the True Meaning of Christmas.</p><p> I think my dislike of Christmas songs might all go back to my own father, who was a Presbyterian minister. Aha! You're saying again. So that's it! Some sort of father/religious rebellion deal. Nope, not at all. My dad was a good minister to his several congregations throughout his career, preaching almost every Sunday, visiting the sick, counseling troubled parishioners, baptizing babies, marrying couples, burying the dead, and comforting their survivors. All the stuff you'd expect a clergyman to do. And he did a pretty good job of it, from what I've been told. He was a traditionalist, in that he observed the two major Christian holidays--Christmas and Easter--and led a good steady bunch of ordinary folks in the obligatory weekly get togethers to, rather formally, praise God and look for ways to be better people. Being a Presbyterian, he wasn't particularly evangelical, as that term is used today. Though he did talk about Jesus quite a bit (from the pulpit, not at home), he didn't demand that people be washed in the blood, or personally testify to the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, or try to convert their fellow men. In fact, he looked down on that stuff. The demands he placed on his congregations, if you can even call them demands, were pretty simple: come to church regularly, give enough money to keep things going and to do good in the community and the world, participate as lay persons in the workings of the church, and have a good time. He was a fixture in the community, trying never to alienate anyone with his theological positions. He liked to hang around town with some of the local merchants, listening to or telling the occasional off-color joke (although his best dirty jokes came from his fellow ministers at their monthly get togethers), steering clear of politics outside our home, and just generally "being there."</p><p> The Presbyterian denomination is a part of the so-called Reformed, or Calvinist, branch of Protestantism. Some of its ancestors in this country included the French Huguenots, the Dutch Reformed folks who settled New Amsterdam, and, perhaps most prominently, the Puritans, who later morphed into the Congregationalists, now know as the United Church of Christ. Today the most liberal branches of Calvinism are the aforementioned Congregationalists and to an increasing degree the Presbyterians. Despite their rather strait-laced ancestors, Presbyterians are likely to condone, and even welcome, gay marriage, strong social consciousness, and other elements of "inclusiveness." The more conservative branches of Calvinism include the various Reformed Churches--particularly the Christian Reformed Church--and some even more recondite groups like the Netherlands Reformed Church. These remain fundamentalist in their scriptural teachings, exclusive, and in some cases, downright cult-like. Needless to say, they decry the way the world is going to hell in a handbasket today, which is code for the fact that they think the Republicans are correct and the Democrats are wrong.</p><p> All Calvinist denominations derive their theological underpinnings, like Protestants generally, from the rejection of the Pope as the head of the church. In addition, the Calvinists reject the idea of a hierarchical episcopal clergy (in other words, no bishops), and absolutely abhor the idea that the body of Christ is present in the eucharist, or anywhere else outside of heaven. They do, however, cling to the idea of infant baptism, like their Roman Catholic brethren, which separates them from the many groups that go by the name Baptist. And the Calvinists theoretically emphasize predestination over free will, although trying to explain that is far beyond the scope of this posting, and frankly more in the realm of speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Furthermore, they don't really seem, in the modern era at least, to give much of a damn about these theological niceties. </p><p> One thing Presbyterians, or at least my father, cared about when I was growing up, was people being part of the congregation, and not just part-timers. Oh sure, he was glad to see you even if you came only a few times a year, but he really liked the regulars, and was likely to make jokes at home about the once-a-year types. I suspect that pretty much all clergymen, of all denominations, feel the same way. The idea of there being just a couple of Holy Days of Obligation, like Christmas and Easter, when the faithful absolutely <i>had</i> to go to church, was more or less anathema to him, as smacking too much of Catholicism. Every Sunday was a day of obligation, more like the way the Jews view the sabbath. It was perhaps for this reason, then, that he regarded both Christmas and Easter as sort of religious amateur hours, although he didn't mind the extra cash that came in the collection plates on these occasions. Easter, of course, was always on Sunday, and was a good excuse to trot out the annual He Is Risen sermon, and at Christmastime there was The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us sermon. But he didn't believe in Christmas Eve services, and unless Christmas happened to fall on a Sunday, he didn't ever have a service on that day either. Christmas, he said, was a time to stay home with the family. And once Christmas and Easter were out of the way, it was back to business as usual, which I could always tell made him much more comfortable. We got our Christmas tree on December 21st, which was my parents' wedding anniversary, put up the usual lights, and did our little comparatively modest Christmas morning thing (unless, God forbid, Christmas was on Sunday, in which case we had to wait until afternoon), and had that tree out of the living room by New Year's Day.</p><p> Which brings me back to Christmas songs. From about the beginning of December on, my father knew there pretty much had to be a Christmas hymn at every Sunday service ("O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," etc.), but I don't think he was all charged up about it. And maybe on the Sunday after Christmas there would be "We Three Kings of Orient Are." And then, BAM. Christmas's ass was over, baby, and it was back to the standards, which for Presbyterians were mostly Psalms set to music. But at home? I don't remember much of anything in the way of Christmas songs. (Think of it this way. If your father was an insurance salesman, do you think he'd get a kick out of watching commercials for insurance? Probably not.) Maybe on Christmas Eve or Christmas day there would be some selections from Handel's Messiah on the record player, or Mahalia Jackson. But Johnny Mathis or Perry Como or Der Bingle? No fucking way. Chestnuts roasting? Making a snowman and dressing him up like Parson Brown? Sheeeeit. Not only were those songs profane, but also profoundly irrelevant. To sing an actual, bona fide Christmas carol, about the birth of the Christ child, you had to be an actual, bona fide Christian, which both my parents <i>knew</i> Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra most decidedly were <i>not.</i></p><p> So today, despite the fact that I am a complete and utter apostate, in the fast lane of the highway to hell, I retain within me what I firmly believe to be my clergyman father's contempt for all secular Christmas songs combined with his impatience about the religious ones. What it adds up to for me is a rejection of it all. </p><p> And don't even get me started on Easter. Oy. </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-60970050888785378242020-11-24T20:46:00.003-05:002021-11-23T13:16:19.518-05:00If I Were President<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicrh0tDxk6kZQ48kMp9YMS1hzMTe4jeQmiZMLXQUngyC5KUWZm_-9FFGYmifEzzNYBV-V3Q7_2jdS2gd9QUNsKfhkSO5aatK0Hf2YToCuyvLrpmyB9Cevkgn3qtin6uWJP-ErKIYehmO4/s226/seal.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="223" data-original-width="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicrh0tDxk6kZQ48kMp9YMS1hzMTe4jeQmiZMLXQUngyC5KUWZm_-9FFGYmifEzzNYBV-V3Q7_2jdS2gd9QUNsKfhkSO5aatK0Hf2YToCuyvLrpmyB9Cevkgn3qtin6uWJP-ErKIYehmO4/s0/seal.jpg" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>November 24, 2020</p><p>Cathedral City, California</p><p> If I were president, I would not pardon a turkey at Thanksgiving time. That's just stupid, especially when you're probably going to eat turkey for the Thanksgiving meal. But even if you're not having turkey for dinner, pardoning an animal that gets raised for slaughter is absurd.</p><p> If I were president, I <i>would </i>promptly commute the death sentence of any person convicted in a federal court. People's lives are more important than those of turkeys, and if you can't figure that out, you shouldn't even be walking around, much less be the president.</p><p> If I were president, I would not allow Mitch McConnell, or any other mealy-mouthed Republican senator or congressman, to set foot in the White House. I would arrange for them to meet with my staff in front of a landscaping place next to a porn shop, on the outskirts of Philadelphia.</p><p> If I were president, I would have regular news conferences, but at the news conferences my favorite thing to say would be, "That's got to be one of the stupidest questions I've ever heard. What are you, the fucking scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz?"</p><p> If I were president, I would not say "so help me God" at the end of my oath of office. It's not in the constitution, and I don't care if that revered old slave owner George Washington said it. I wouldn't place my other hand on the bible when taking the oath, either. I'd put it in my pocket. Also, I'd never end a speech with "God bless" anything at all. Fuck that.</p><p> If I were president I'd try to get "under God" removed from the pledge of allegiance, where it was put in the early 1950s during the Red Scare, at the behest of the Knights of Columbus--as if they should have any say in anything we do as a country. In fact, I'd discourage the use of the pledge of allegiance to the flag altogether. What's the point? If you make war against the U.S. or give aid or comfort to our enemies you're committing treason, and can be tried for it. Isn't that enough? Why make a kid, or anybody else for that matter, pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth? What is this, Nazi Germany?</p><p> If I were president, I'd try to ban the playing of the national anthem at sporting events. What a waste of time. They say baseball is too slow now. That would speed things up. What is this, Nazi Germany?</p><p> If I were president, the next time a vacancy came up on the Supreme Court, I'd nominate a mainline Protestant or a Jew or an atheist. We have more than enough Catholics there now, and they're systematically fucking things up. </p><p> If I were president I'd have the Treasury Department try to remove all images of slave owners from our currency. That means no more George Washington on the dollar bill and the quarter, no more Jefferson on the two-dollar bill and the nickel, and no more Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. I'd replace Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr. I'd replace Jefferson with Ma Rainey. Jackson was already supposed to be replaced with Harriet Tubman. Maybe we'd mix it up every few years--get some new blood on those coins and bills. </p><p> If I were president I also would try to remove "In God We Trust" from all our currency. That was the misguided idea of Abraham Lincoln, an otherwise fairly bright and decent guy. </p><p> If I were president, speaking of money, I'd try to eliminate the penny. It costs more to make than it's worth. Retailers accepting cash would have to round everything up to the nearest five cents, which shouldn't break their hearts. Credit card and bank purchases could still be recorded in odd amounts of cents, though. They add up. Didn't you ever watch <i>Office Space?</i></p><p> If I were president I'd instruct the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of any church or other religious organization that ever tried to get anyone to vote for any Republican, ever. (Political activities are already not allowed to be conducted by tax-exempt 501(c)(3) entities under the Internal Revenue Code, but I would selectively enforce this provision so as to allow Black churches to continue to host politicians, as long as they were Democrats.)</p><p> If I were president I'd have the Attorney General put the FBI on a mission to infiltrate and eradicate all right-wing organizations.</p><p> If I were president I'd propose to the congress that it repeal the second amendment to the constitution. Also the part of the first amendment that prohibits the government from making laws restricting the free exercise of religion.</p><p> If I were president I'd find a way to have Kid Rock and Ted Nugent locked up in Guantanamo Bay. </p><p> If I were president I'd issue an executive order making Tom Brady's birthday a national holiday. It's not that I like Tom Brady that much--actually he's a right-wing dick, as far as I know. But Tom Brady's birthday is the same as mine, August 3, and so as not to appear immodest I'd put Tom Brady up as the ostensible reason for the holiday. But then I'd call it President Teeuwissen's Day.</p><p> If I were president I'd deport Elon Musk to whatever country, or planet, he came from.</p><p> </p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-77097650318216452242020-11-15T17:22:00.009-05:002020-11-15T17:43:05.542-05:00Something <p style="text-align: center;"><b>In Memory Of</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>John Carbaugh, 1951-2020</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Loyal Blog Follower</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>And Good Friend</b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>R.I.P.</b></p><div>November 14, 2020</div><p>Cathedral City, California </p><p> Something really terrible happened in this country last week. No, not what you’re thinking—you all know me better than that. What happened was this: over 72 million people—the second largest number of presidential voters in the history of this country—CHOSE to vote for Donald Trump. Of their own free will, well over one-third of all the eligible voters in the United States voted for an unapologetically immoral, undemocratic, semi-literate, immature, utterly self-absorbed pathological liar, who foments racial hatred and bizarre conspiracy theories, panders to absurd religious beliefs, and rejects science and normal human progress in a way that would make a shit-covered medieval peasant in a Monty Python movie look like Einstein by comparison.</p><p> In so doing, were these 72 million plus people—more than one in every five humans who inhabit this country—voting to stop a Hitler from becoming president? Were they voting to prevent the next Stalin, or Kim Jong-Un, or Idi Amin, or Genghis Khan from taking control of our land and ripping our constitution to shreds? Were they trying to stave off the coming of the Antichrist or the naked evil of Satan himself? No; quite the opposite. They were, instead, voting <i>against</i> a man who has ably demonstrated that he is capable of occupying the office, and has never done much worse than to be rather repetitive and hokey, and at times (certainly in my book) a bit too bipartisan. Oh, and he's had some hair transplants and cosmetic surgery. They were voting to <i>reject</i> the standard-bearer for a political party whose platform calls for affordable health care, cheaper education, racial justice, fairer taxation of the wealthy, ecological responsibility, international cooperation and leadership, and a well-organized effort to end the worse pandemic to plague the earth in over one hundred years--all ideas that his opponent and his party either explicitly rejected or neglected to carry out.</p><p> Probably not since the days prior to the Civil War has such a large chunk of the American electorate deliberately opted to reject human decency and enshrine the degradation of human life. And that was at a time when neither African Americans, nor Asians, nor Indians, nor women of any race or color could vote. Just white men. You'd think, given that fact, that the onus for the recent display of horrible bad judgment on the part of this very large segment of the American people would fall primarily and directly on the heads of the descendants of those same white males. And you'd be mostly right, to be sure. If you took out all the white men who voted for Trump, you'd be left with a much smaller number, and a more lopsided victory for Biden. But a hell of a lot of white women voted for Trump, too. And they didn't do it while holding their noses. No sir. They did it with the full-throated enthusiasm of drunken Harley mommas.</p><p> The operative word in the analysis in the above paragraph, however, isn't "men," or "women," it's "WHITE." Already, due to a delay in vote counting and tabulation in several states, the news media are falling all over themselves to come up with new filler in the form of obscure demographic factoids and statistics meant to alarm us and challenge what, for most thinking people, should be a simple application of logic in the light of history. In part they are doing this in order to cover up for the fact that, for the second straight presidential election, they were substantially <i>wrong</i> in their predictions of the outcomes of the election. Oh sure, they backed the right horse, but they picked him to win by half a furlong, not by a length. And that, again, is because they were looking in all the wrong places for the answers--the keys, so to speak, to the situation. For instance, we're being treated right now to articles about how the Black vote isn't monolithic, and how a "surprisingly" large number of Black men, in particular, voted for Trump. But when you burrow into the numbers you find that the size of the majority of Black people, male and female, who voted for Biden was <i>enormous</i>--80-90 percent or more--far larger than the percentage of Latins or whites or Asians who voted for him. And, as John Oliver put it so well in his last show, these Black people weren't doing so in order to give the stamp of approval, a ringing endorsement, to the elderly white guy at the top of the Biden-Harris ticket. They were doing so for the best of all possible reasons, namely, pragmatism: given the choice between two old white guys (which, let's face it, is almost <i>always</i> the choice), they voted for the one less likely to deliberately fuck them over. Same with the Indians. And same, to a lesser extent, with Latins (about whom more in a later posting).</p><p> But quibbling about whether or not Black men, or Latins, or Asians, voted for Trump more than people might have expected them to is a big waste of time. And by the same token, quibbling about what might have motivated the overwhelming majority of those 72 million voters to vote for Trump is also a fool's errand, when the answer is so simple. Economics? Hell no. Trump didn't do jack shit for them economically, unless they were Wall Street sharks. Health and safety? Are you shitting me? They're dropping like flies from a disease that loves to eat the old, the fat, and the dissolute. No. The reason almost all those people, male and female, voted for Trump is that they are scared shitless of Black people, and angry at their attempts to assert their equality with white people. Trump voters voted for Trump because he validated their racism, their sense of white entitlement and supremacy, or, if they weren't quite white, their sense of entitlement to something more than Black people have ever had. </p><p> Assuming the transition of government goes as it should, people will soon be writing books, op-ed pieces, and high-toned magazine articles about what happened, and why. And they'll be coming up with some weird-ass theories. This is particularly ironic, because the only people literate enough or interested enough to read such things are the folks who voted for Biden, and they should already know the answer to why people voted for Trump. <u style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">HATRED OF BLACK PEOPLE</u>. Sorry, I don't think I can make it any more explicit. </p><p> Hillary Clinton put it best a few years ago when she was running for president--the people who favor Trump are a "basket of deplorables." She caught hell for that, because, folks said, it cost her the election in key states where such deplorables might have been more likely to vote for her if they hadn't been insulted. Well, first of all I don't believe that. And second of all, fuck whether they were insulted. Deplorables are deplorables. They proved it in 2016 and they proved it in 2020. For that matter, they proved it in the 1860s, and many other times along the way. These people are irredeemable. If you're thinking that we're going to "bind up the nation's wounds," and all that, think again. We might harass the organized far-right using the FBI. That would be good. And we might bring about some tiny measure of police reform. And we might teach ourselves more nuanced ways to look at the subjects of institutional and individual racism. That, also, would be good, but it won't reach the people who voted for Trump. We will never change their minds. The only end to their beliefs is the grave.</p><p>.</p>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-89491807945663190672020-08-22T12:37:00.002-04:002021-11-24T18:28:56.272-05:00NarcissismAugust 22, 2020<br />
<br />
Pentwater, Michigan<br />
<br />
It's pretty hard to ignore what a doofus our president is. His limited vocabulary and inarticulate ramblings and repetitions, employing the comparatively few words he does know, strike the reasonable listener each time they hear the guy talk (which for me is as seldom as possible). But because he's the president and because before that he was in the world of high finance, he is sometimes also credited with a deeper overall knowledge of things than he has. After all, we think, how could he have made, and lost, all those millions of dollars if he didn't have at least a little sense?<br />
<br />
And there's no punch line to follow that rhetorical question. He does indeed have some sense, some knowledge that others don't have, and the ability to make things happen. There's a certain grim charisma to the guy. Whether he's the lackey of the right wing, or its leader, makes almost no difference--he is certainly carrying out the Republican agenda with, for them, admirable alacrity. For anyone who doesn't already know it, the Republican agenda is, and has been for many years, the following: to promote the interests of big business at pretty much any cost. That's it! But you say, it can't be that simple. What about racism and white supremacy? what about pandering to the ignorant and superstitious religious people? what about keeping the attention of the country focused on illegal immigrants and slant-eyed foreigners? Well, duh, as they say. These things all promote capitalism, which needs to exploit the permanent underclasses and the profoundly ignorant among us in order to survive. First of all, get us all worshiping and drooling over the doings of the wealthy (like Trump, Bloomberg, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.), so that we not only expect them to be our saviors but also assume that their morality is superior to ours, and that therefore their ability to lead us is greater. This isn't anything new in this country, of course. Despite the "aw shucks" personae of several of our most prominent presidents, it was the patricians of the colonies--Washington and Jefferson, for instance--who led the revolution, and to whom was given the initial power. Why? Because they were wealthy, and thus inherently superior to the rest of us. <br />
<br />
But there's that niggling psychological aspect to Trump's personality, which the left-of-center media keeps harping on, and which they say separates him from the garden variety rapacious and soulless Republican. He's also a narcissist. Democrats say so. His bitter psychologist niece says so. Various eminent psychiatrists say so. And even some of his fellow Republicans are saying it, lest they be tainted by the Trump legacy after he's gone.<br />
<br />
So, is Trump a narcissist, in the clinical sense? In the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, which is the American Psychiatric Association's attempt to create a sort of Oxford English Dictionary of craziness, "narcissistic personality disorder" is defined to include 9 characteristics, of which a certified narcissist should possess at least 5. Let's take a look at these criteria as they apply to Donald Trump:<br />
<br />
1. A grandiose sense of self-importance; (check)<br />
2. A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love; (check)<br /> 3. A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions; (definitely the first part, but possibly not the second part, since he surrounds himself with idiots and ass-kissers, and his idea of a high-status person is Jeffrey Epstein and his idea of a high-status institution is a golf course)<br />
4. A need for excessive admiration; (check)<br />
5. A sense of entitlement; (check)<br />
6. Interpersonally exploitive behavior; (check)<br />
7. A lack of empathy; (check)<br />
8. Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her; (check)<br />
9. A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes. (check)<br />
<br />
So, the guy <i>really</i> aces this test. He needed a 5, but he got at least an 8 1/2. So why isn't he bragging about this score, like he bragged about passing his cognitive ability test?<br />
<br />
Why indeed. Really, it's an easy and cheap shot to call Trump a narcissist and leave it at that, as if he is the only narcissist who treads the polished marble halls of our nation's capital, or who has ever occupied the White House. So the guy's a narcissist, what of it? First off, none of his faithful give a shit, because narcissism is a four-syllable word and they don't understand it. And as for his handlers, the capitalists whom he serves, they couldn't care less either, because he gets things done for them--lowering taxes, deregulating every damned thing he can, and generally, to the best of his ability, making it easier for them to make a buck.<br />
<br /> I realize I'm pretty much preaching to choir. But here, ladies and gentlemen, is a truth that we might not wish to hear. Having a president who is a consummate, textbook narcissist just might be the very thing this country deserves. Just as individuals can have narcissistic personalities, so, I believe, can nations be narcissistic. As a nation, no matter <i>who</i> the president happens to be, we in the U.S. are convinced that we are the Greatest Country on Earth, and that our president is not only the Leader of the Free World, but the Most Powerful Person in the World. Maybe that's because of all the nukes we have, but I suspect that it's at least as much from our being utterly convinced that we are, as countries go, the cat's meow. Outside the warm context of our own feeling of self-worth, all this might sound a little like the pronouncements of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, but we repeat these "truths" <i>ad nauseam</i>, even when we're criticizing the president or ourselves as a country, e.g., the United States should know better than to ignore climate change, because we are, after all, the Greatest Country on Earth; our president should be a better person, because he is the Leader of the Free World. Even when we are forced to face our systemic police brutality and racism, we say, This is No Way for the Greatest Nation in the World to Behave. And by the way, no matter <i>who </i>the president or would-be president is, "God Bless the United States of America." Man am I sick of hearing that benediction. There was a time, even in my lifetime, when presidents didn't end every speech they made with those seven vapid words--words which, for all their supposed neutrality, scream out that we are God's Chosen People, despite how far off the track we may have strayed. <div><br /> But just to be certain about our national narcissism, let's look at those nine DSM-5 criteria again, and apply them to the good old U. S. of A. as a country:</div><div><br /></div><div> 1. <i>A grandiose sense of self-importance</i>. Well, if you have to think twice about that one, you haven't been paying any attention at all.</div> 2. <i> A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.</i> If there's anything we fantasize about, in fact and fiction, it's our success and beauty as a country. 3. <i>A belief that he or she (or in this case, it) is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions</i>. This defines us perfectly as a nation, and we make it a point to ally ourselves most closely with the other countries we deem to be powerful enough and most like ourselves in racial, economic, and imperialistic outlook. To hell with wasting our time with little weak Third World countries--what would be the percentage in that?<br /> 4. <i> A need for excessive admiration.</i> Let's face it, if we don't get our asses kissed by other countries, we're just not happy with them, and are liable to send in a few troops to teach them a lesson. <br /> 5. <i>A sense of entitlement. </i>Ahem, yes, to every damn thing there is, from food, fuel, fortunes, and fun to media, music, medicine, and munitions.<br /> 6. <i>Interpersonally exploitive behavior</i>. Hmmm. Have we ever tried to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, or tried to rape them of their natural resources? <br /> 7. <i>A lack of empathy.</i> Well, it's pretty hard to be empathetic with other countries when you're The Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth, and in the History of the Universe. What's to empathize with?<br /> 8. <i>Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her (or it). </i>We absolutely <b>know</b> that the rest of the world just wishes it could be us.<br /><div> 9. <i>A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes.</i> See all of the above.</div><div><br /></div><div> So wow!! For absolute narcissism the United States as a nation scores even higher than our current president does as a person! And aren't we proud of ourselves and our precious every-man-for-himself, gun-toting-libertarian, pay-as-little-tax-as-we-can "perfect" democracy? You bet we are. Just look at all the people who want to get in! If we were so bad, why would they want to? Well maybe it's because we are simply less bad than some of our global neighbors. But that doesn't make us better than all of them. Unlike many other countries, we don't offer universal health care, free or cheap higher education, decent worker benefits or vacations or leave time. Nor do we provide safety from guns and brutal police. We're like that one house on the block where the parents are affluent and don't give a shit what their kids do as long as they do it in the house. <i>Of course</i> the other kids want to come over, especially if their own parents have lots of rules, even ones that are good for them. And in the case of the kids whose parents abuse them and don't give them enough to eat, or are constantly fighting, yes, our house might well be the better choice. But it's not because we're a more responsible house, just a less restricted one. In the long run, we don't really take care of our guests, we just let them in. And when it's time for us to kick ass in <i>our</i> house, watch out! <br />
<br />
Let's not ever forget that we weren't founded by real revolutionaries--not ones who wanted to completely transform society or create a utopia to replace a dictatorship. We were founded by men who were tired of paying taxes--men who didn't mind owning other people, or at least condoning the practice in others, and who certainly didn't mind annihilating the people who were here before we came. "A more perfect union" my ass.</div><div><br /></div><div> But, you might be saying, aren't all countries narcissistic? Don't they all believe they are the greatest group of people ever assembled by God in one place? Some are, but not all of them. The Danish, for example, may love their little peninsula and their way of life, but they know they're not the absolute shit, on a worldwide level. Togo, I'm pretty sure, has a healthy sense of its own comparative lack of importance on the world stage. Vietnam wants to run itself and its people and secure its own borders from foreign invasion, but it doesn't want to rule the world. Even the French, for all their arrogance and general lack of interest in anything non-French, aren't, strictly speaking, narcissistic. They're very much in love with themselves, to be sure, but they don't give a shit whether the rest of the world loves them, because, after all, the opinions of anyone non-French don't count for much.</div><div><br /></div><div> Narcissism in individual human beings, like sociopathy, is incurable and irremediable, except by death. A leopard can't change its spots, or a zebra its stripes. Donald Trump will be exactly the way he is until he is no more. But it's worth bearing in mind that countries<i> can</i> transform themselves, or be transformed by external circumstances, without necessarily dying. With sufficient changes in leadership, and sometimes after receiving a pretty stiff dose of humiliation, countries can abruptly or gradually change. Germany is a good example from recent history. Even our mother country, Great Britain, is coming to understand that it's not the be-all and end-all it once thought it was. This could happen to us, and in some measure it is beginning to, in a curiously ironic way, even while we're being piloted by the worst narcissist in the history of our national leadership. After all, under Trump we've pretty much reverted to a kind of pre-20th century isolationism, internal capitalistic rapacity, and brutal social Darwinism. But what might help us to get over ourselves even faster would be some genuine humility at the top, engendered by the humiliation we have experienced worldwide during the past four years. We're going to have to bow our heads in order to re-enter the family of nations. That would be a good thing.</div><div><br /></div><div> May it happen soon.</div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div>
</div>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-45289152799675932552020-08-11T21:51:00.002-04:002023-12-05T20:50:18.006-05:00The Black Death<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw4myL_s5_gzK8DKJM7_EBInG7BDPAOOADhmpPfbozx-6lxEXTyZlbWdXMmBqMYawi49J_-PVApAhdaN8ljeUhADZsvSjdmzTJ2rkpSz_6Jl3d_5PSZ3bixPeOyHWRv6L23m-qGX69iz4/s1600/untitled.bmp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw4myL_s5_gzK8DKJM7_EBInG7BDPAOOADhmpPfbozx-6lxEXTyZlbWdXMmBqMYawi49J_-PVApAhdaN8ljeUhADZsvSjdmzTJ2rkpSz_6Jl3d_5PSZ3bixPeOyHWRv6L23m-qGX69iz4/s200/untitled.bmp" width="191" /></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZLrLVoS_0UB_5m8sLhMrjU7SI8LT4WQ4S0E3sxXmndpDXSJNpYAwmcPTf-4yVqrHcKQswSUzH9YPDdXLX-AINA42Ws1znFmy5aas4CIXAkypF8bo0pQ6Q06QKfWpEKQUC2vDwH2_ciY8/s1600/Grim-reaper.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZLrLVoS_0UB_5m8sLhMrjU7SI8LT4WQ4S0E3sxXmndpDXSJNpYAwmcPTf-4yVqrHcKQswSUzH9YPDdXLX-AINA42Ws1znFmy5aas4CIXAkypF8bo0pQ6Q06QKfWpEKQUC2vDwH2_ciY8/s320/Grim-reaper.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">August 11, 2020</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Pentwater, Michigan</st1:city></st1:place></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">[I am in the middle of my annual viewing of the five <i>Final Destination</i> movies, and it occurred to me that I already wrote a post about them, back in 2012. I re-read it this afternoon and decided to republish it, since it seems to resonate even more today than it did then. If you haven't watched the movies in question, you should. But in any case, here, with a few minor revisions, is The Black Death.]</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Some time back I mentioned the <i>Final Destination</i> movies. I’ve just finished watching the most recent of them, <i>Final Destination 5</i>. Twice, in fact, so I could see some of the most absurdly gruesome splatter scenes again. This series follows a predictable formula that goes like this: at the beginning of each movie one of the principal characters has a premonition of a disaster in which a number of people die in spectacular ways. In the first one it was a plane crashing on takeoff; the second featured a ridiculously complicated multi-vehicle freeway accident; in the third a roller coaster malfunctioned; and in the fourth the disaster took place at a stock car race where several cars went flying off the track and into the stands, which fell apart, but not before tires and miscellaneous car parts decapitated, crushed, and impaled people. In <i>Final Destination 5</i> we have the collapse of a suspension bridge due to high winds (similar to the real event that happened at the <st1:placename w:st="on">Tacoma</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Narrows</st1:placetype> in <st1:state w:st="on">Washington</st1:state> back in 1940) while a busload of young business types are on their way to a management retreat.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> After having the premonition in each movie, the prescient person “wakes up” just in time to warn others of what lies in their very near future if they don’t leave the airplane, or highway, or roller coaster, or auto race, or bridge. Of course no one believes that person, who nevertheless bolts from the danger spot. A few of his or her friends leave, too, just to see what’s wrong with their seemingly crazy companion. Then in short order the real disaster happens and dozens of people die, leaving only this handful of lucky survivors--the one who had the vision and the ones who went along out of curiosity or concern. They watch in awe and horror as people get burned, sliced in half, have their heads crushed like cantaloupes, and so on. Then they retreat, usually to the police station, to regroup and ponder their good fortune while grieving for those who didn’t make it. The cops in these movies are serious but fairly nice and nonviolent, in an imaginary pre-modern way. They don't pull their guns, and they don't even automatically suspect the token Black person in each group of survivors. After some skeptical questioning, they scratch their collective heads, try to figure out if they can arrest anybody, and ultimately let the survivors go. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> But here’s the thing. Death has been cheated, and Death is not happy. Why, I don’t know, since eventually Death gets everybody, right? Death in these movies seems rather peevish and lacking in the patience that ought to come quite naturally after so many eons of grimly and steadily reaping its harvest. What’s a few decades of life, more or less, where existential certainty is concerned? Anyway, Death is angry, we’re told, and it continues to stalk the survivors throughout the movie, taking them out one by one in a series of bizarre and imaginative misfortunes that more often than not require simultaneous failures of multiple mechanical and electrical systems and ask the viewer to forget that the circuit breaker and ground fault interrupter were ever invented. In several of the movies, Death’s relentless plan, and its insistence on gathering the succession of superficially lucky youngsters to its fold, is explained by a mysterious Black man. Usually he’s the local coroner, a person who apparently is quite well acquainted with Death in a professional capacity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> I mention the fact that the coroner is Black because in this movie and in the rest of the series there are few other Black people, but they tend to have a closer connection with Death, or at least a better understanding of the reason things are happening, than the white upper middle class teenagers or twenty-somethings who form the backbone of the cast, and who tend to take solace from the horror of their situation in trips to each other's houses, where they philosophically drink and talk and ultimately decide to live for today. Cinematically speaking, in general, it seems, when it comes to helping clueless people to understand the deepest of realities, it’s necessary for a person of color to do the explaining. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> The use of an African American character as the link between the world of insouciant white good fortune and the dark void of the unknown is part of a long tradition in the movies, which have consistently employed those of duskier hue to unite us with the most primitive and basic elements of human existence—fear, lust, privation, and death. One Black person, skillfully utilized, can do the duty of all of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, including the pale rider. Call it the economy of tokenism.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> In the 1930s, when cinema made no attempt at subtlety or fairness in racial matters (as if it does now), the Black seer was often the comical minstrel-show Negro whose big eyes glowed white and whose nappy hair stood on end as he saw a ghost, while the more suave Caucasians laughed at him and saw nothing. Black folks, it was understood, had a greater tendency to believe in the supernatural, in part perhaps because of their more "primitive" roots, and in part because there weren't a whole hell of a lot of earthly delights available to them, comparatively speaking. Sometimes the person with the enhanced vision of the inherent ignorance of the wealthy and carefree was somebody’s maid or wet nurse, with a bandanna tied over her hair, shaking her heavy head at the foolishness of the white folks and saying, “mmm, mmm, mmm” in a resigned singsong voice. Half comic relief and half Greek chorus, the darkies would generally tend to be right about the fact that something was wrong. Later, as we began to strive for cinematic and social "realism," we played on another image, that of the sexual threat inherent in the Black presence--sweaty muscular men and women grinding the night away on the sawdust floors of juke joints, drinking to excess, smoking dope, and gyrating in primitive ways that no decent, respectable W.A.S.P. would countenance. In any event, the Black folk were always a degree or two closer to the basic truth of things, even if they appeared to be merely shucking and jiving and clowning. They knew, down in their jungle souls, what was important, and it wasn’t martinis and starched collars and briefcases, believe you me. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Lest we think that the age of Buckwheat and Mammy and Mandingo is gone, however, we should take a look at the more recent past, and for that matter, the present. There is, and has been for some time, a stock character in American drama known as the Magic Negro. He or she is often a servant (what else?) or sometimes a sidekick or petty criminal, who seems to appear out of nowhere to help the white protagonist out of a jam with a combination of common sense and street smarts, and if all else fails, by laying down his life for the hero. If nothing else, this created jobs for black actors, sad as they might be. At the TV level, think of Jack Benny’s manservant <st1:city w:st="on">Rochester</st1:city>, of Starsky and Hutch’s underworld pal Huggy Bear, or of Maude's maid Florida. In the movies there are too many to list, but you’ll easily recall them. I’ll let serious students and critics of the genre, like Spike Lee, expound on this phenomenon and will only mention it here. Then again, often the Black person in a movie is the first to die, or be killed by the alien, or get sucked out of the airplane. Why? First, because he’s expendable and frequently has no mate, due to the still-heavily-enforced cinematic anti-miscegenation rule which dictates, in contravention of reality, that a Black man shall not have a white woman, only a Black or Hispanic woman, unless of course that Black man is already a criminal. (Here I should mention that this rule is not necessarily imposed without the complicity of both races; I once saw a woman on a documentary dedicated to Denzel Washington—an actor who fairly scrupulously adheres to the black-to-black, or at least black-to-brown, rule in his movies—rather pettishly claim him, as an African American, as “ours,” which was particularly odd because the woman who was making the claim was only about one-sixteenth less white than my own mother.) Another reason Black people die first is that generally the protagonists are all white, and the nonwhites are just there for variety. I will say, in defense of the <i>Final Destination </i>series, that one of the young upwardly-mobile survivors characters is always Black, and although he doesn’t have a love interest like some of the whites do, he does manage to outlive several of the other hapless characters. That's progress. You might say “big deal,” but in a sense it is just that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> </div><div class="MsoNormal"> And let’s not forget the miscellaneous voodoo priestesses, or the spirit mediums (Whoopi Goldberg in <i>Ghost</i>); or the other persons with the supernatural powers (Scatman Crothers in <i>The Shining</i> and the Black guy who could see ghosts just like the little kid could in <i>Stir of Echoes)</i>. Where there is something going on beyond the pale, so to speak, you can count on a Black person being there to personify it or at least explain it. It’s scary Mother Africa calling us all back to our pre-civilized roots.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal"> But in <i>Final Destination</i> the Black man, the scary coroner, is the messenger of Death itself, and he is still there at the end after the kids have all perished horribly, reminding us of our scant mortality. Also--and this can’t be overstated--the Black character is there to remind us of our Great National Sin, the institution of slavery, for which we all must pay and pay, both now and in the afterlife. The very subject I’m discussing here would have little meaning outside of that sub-context. Put a Black man in a Dutch or Swedish movie and people would just say, "Hmm, an African. Izhn't dat veerd?" But our national Black guy, our messenger of Death, was there when this country made its original bargain with the Devil, to exist half slave and half free, and he’s here now to help us pay the Faustian price. He'll be there shaking his head grimly and loading bodies into the back of his van when we’ve all been sliced in half by flying lawnmower blades, beheaded by shards of glass, immolated by carelessly stored chemicals, impaled by malfunctioning airbags and broken pieces of PVC pipe, and fried to a crisp in tanning booths gone haywire.<br /><br /> Call him the Black Death. </div>Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4139180752791601793.post-88841760283398796242020-07-27T15:27:00.002-04:002021-11-24T18:48:28.382-05:00Well,July 27, 2020<br />
<br />
Pentwater, Michigan<br />
<br />
I started writing this about a month ago, then got sidetracked by...nothing, really, except the everyday rhythms of my isolated existence, which isn't so bad, and not as isolated as all that. Just safer, and with a mask. Anyway, it's time to finish.<br />
<br />
Well, what's a poor blogger to do? The shit that's happening, on a purely objective level, beats anything I could say about it. And that's not even including the social media spins and distortions, the yammering by the all news channels, left and right, and the ostensibly more objective reporting in newspapers, assuming anyone reads those any more. It's a world turned upside down, and it didn't just happen when the virus started, or when the demonstrations against police brutality started.<br />
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Nobody knows, of course, how it's all going to play out. The virus has made a surge in the wake of the obviously ill-advised loosening of the social restrictions put in place a couple of months ago, led by no advice or bad advice from the top of the government. Will individual states finally unite to enforce the wearing of masks in public, probably the simplest, cheapest, and most effective way, along with social distancing, to limit its spread? Or will right-wingers, bored students, and "fun-seekers" simply ignore its existence and take their chances, putting millions more in danger. Who the fuck knows?<br />
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One thing I do know is that the demonstrations in the cities have begun to die down and become nothing but background noise and political talking points, all in just a few weeks' time. That's what always happens, because very little substantive change will come about from them. Sure, statues will come down and flags will change, which is great, but the disappearance of these painful and ugly symbolic reminders of the past in which we fought a civil war over white supremacy as an avowed national purpose will not erase the reality of ongoing modern white supremacy--politically, economically, and socially. People always forget these paroxysms of social outrage at the institutionalization of racism, and it rises and falls in waves. In the words of the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, "History teaches, but has no pupils."<br />
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We may take a few more timid steps toward improving our system of organized urban police brutality, but ultimately, nothing will be done to improve the lot of African Americans, because they are stuck in a kind of perpetual neutral gear when it comes to progress, and they're stuck at the bottom of the ladder. Let me repeat that: Black people (today the word "Black" is capitalized--again--as a weak token of respect) are STUCK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LADDER. And when I say Black people, I mean hometown, born in the USA, descendants of enslaved people. New people come into the country, get discriminated against, work their asses off, and start climbing that ladder. It usually takes a generation or two or three, but it happens. Irish, Jews, Central Americans, Asians, East Africans--you name the group, they've always improved their lot after a few years of tough going. But not the African Americans, no matter how hard they work. They just stay down on the bottom rung and get stepped over by others. <i>Every single time</i>. Right now the LAPD has at least as many Latin cops as white ones, and they're still just as brutal to Blacks as they ever were, and Blacks are still as unrepresented as they ever were.<br />
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This is awfully pessimistic, you might be saying. Haven't we made some progress since, say, the 1950s? Well, yes we have, of course. We got one decent, liberal, socially-committed Black justice on the Supreme Court, in Thurgood Marshall. That was progress. Then he died and was replaced by Clarence Thomas (because after all there can't be more than one Black person on the Court), a guy so conservative as to make most of his white fellow-conservatives look like progressives. And in the 1960s we got Black people on television playing characters other than maids and butlers and buffoons. We got Bill Cosby as a spy, and Cicely Tyson as a social worker's secretary, and Diahann Carrol as a nurse (still somebody's handmaiden, but what the hell), and a few other decent parts for Black actors. Then, as their presence became greater and more accepted, there arose another, more <i>obvious </i>role choice for Black actors, namely, being criminals. Suddenly in the 1970s parts for Black pimps, drug dealers, drug users, prostitutes, thieves, and smooth con artists became plentiful, and <i>continue </i>to be plentiful up to the present day. Hence, thugs as role models for all you Black boys and girls growing up out there in TV land. Hollywood said, in effect, "Here, Black people, here are your parts, come and get them," as if scattering dollar bills over a manure pile. Then, over the next several decades, there were a few Black cops, often bent, and a few Black laborers, and of course there was the Cosby show (with him, ironically, as an obstetrician), and Denzel Washington as a doctor on St. Elsewhere. But there was also the "reality" show <i>Bad Boys</i>, which featured cops taking down shirtless brothers trying to escape out the back windows. And there was that absolute gem of a situation comedy, <i>Good Times</i>, where a family of Black people in the Chicago ghetto was headed by a long-suffering, eye-rolling matriarchal mammy and a feckless put-upon semi-bread-winning dad, but whose lead actor was the goofy shucking and jiving son J. J., thus reducing a show ostensibly about the realities of Black folks struggling in a white world into an updated version of <i>Amos and Andy</i>. Oh, and let's not forget the succession of shows starring Black boy/men with medical conditions that kept them little and cute and harmless, while being adopted by wealthy white people. And who could forget the Black version of Archie Bunker embodied by George Jefferson? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, lest we have to suffer with the burden of thinking that only <i>white </i>men are bigots.<i> </i> All that added up to what white America really wanted to see--white altruism mixed with Black hopelessness, venality, and clownishness.<br />
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Okay, you say, but what about <i>Sesame Street</i> and <i>The Electric Company</i>, two shows aimed at young kids that sought to present Black people as positive instructors and role models. Yes, you're right, they were good. But eventually they were replaced by cartoons (among them the notoriously self-abnegating Fat Albert), because, after all, how much positivity about Black people can our culture endure without an offsetting adjustment?<br />
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Fine, you answer, but didn't we finally elect a Black man as president--not once, but twice? Yes we did. His skin was brown, sure enough. However, he was not the descendant of slaves, no sir. His father was a Nigerian graduate student who eventually went to Harvard then back to Africa, leaving his son to be raised by others, just as we would expect any Black man to do. His mother, who raised him, was as white as my mother was. We elected him because, well, it was time to get that issue <i>out of the way</i>, and, more importantly, because he could talk white to the whites, and with a little bit of studied slang, could talk Black to the Blacks. But would we ever elect a Jesse Jackson or a John Lewis? Would we elect a take-no-prisoners Stacy Abrams? Hell, no, not in my lifetime. Too Black. And following hard on the Obama years came the horrifying "offsetting adjustment" I mentioned above. Very soon, mark my words, the Democratic vice presidential candidate will be Kamala Harris, a woman who does indeed look pretty brown. But she ain't no Maxine Waters, no ma'am. She's the child of college professors, and she scrambled up from the mean streets of Berkeley, no less. Her mom is east Indian, for Christ's sake, and her dad is from Jamaica--probably the descendant of slaves, to be sure, but not OUR kind of slaves--you know, the ones who picked cotton for the massa down in Alabama.<br />
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Oh, and let's not forget the movies of the 21st century--the Century of Enlightenment. Here Hollywood has made some adjustments, agreeing, probably reluctantly, to give the Black folks some movies of their own, that might just teach whitey a thing or two. Take <i>Selma</i>, about the historic and terrible civil rights march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge, featuring the late John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. Out of <i>all</i> the American black actors available, and no doubt willing and able to take the part of King, who do they pick? A god damned Brit--an Afro-English child of the empire named David Oyelowo. And there are numerous other examples of this, where Africans or British blacks get the parts that should, by rights, go to African Americans. Coming soon to a theater (or movie channel) near you will be a biopic of Aretha Franklin, starring the lovely-voiced songbird Cynthia Erivo, handpicked by Ms. Franklin to play her. Is she from Detroit? Is she from Atlanta or LA? No, she's from London, and had to <i>learn</i> to talk like an African American, not for this part, mind you, but for the part of Harriet Tubman, which she also played. Sweet Jesus. Because, after all, there are no African American women out there who can sing and who need work in the movies. Hell no.<br />
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Are you beginning to get the picture? No matter how fucking hard American Blacks try, they will <i>always </i>lose out to someone else. In education, in employment, in stature as political representatives. Only in basketball and football and music do we allow them to exist, for our amusement. When whites eventually become a numerical minority in this country, probably in this century, it will not be African Americans who are in the majority. In all likelihood there will be no outright majority of any one group, but Latins and Asians will, if they choose to coalesce politically, be the dominant force. And African Americans will be right where they are today, taking shit, shoveling shit, eating shit. Do you think the Latins or Asians are going to treat them any better than the whites have just because the whites aren't in the majority? Will they give a shit about them, any more than the Cubans or Puerto Ricans care about their Black citizens, or the Latin cops of LA care about the Black folks there, except as convenient moving targets? And consider this: when this tipping of the ethnic balance happens, which group--the Asians, the Latins, or the whites--do you think will (still) have most of the money and the real power? <br />
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I've cherry-picked the evidence I've used here, but I challenge you to contradict it with anything hopeful to the contrary. There's a new book out by Frank B. Wilderson III, an autobiography called <i>Afropessimism</i>, in which he articulates this view, only on a worldwide basis, and with lots of personal information and suffering I'm not competent to convey. I'm going to read it, and if I need to modify this post, I will do so.<br />
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Until then, folks, don't get your hopes up,.Peter Teeuwissenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09036559818566294926noreply@blogger.com0