La Boîteuse

One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to. 

It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.

Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.

So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.

You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.

It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.

Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.

So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).

The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.

The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.

I'm all in, anyway.

Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)

One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.

Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.

But this is where the GQP is now.

What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.

Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.

Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.

You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."

No.

The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.

Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.

That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.

And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.

Well...shit.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble. 

I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.

A guy's got to have some line he just won't cross.

So I keep hearing from Republicans that the problem is that Joe Biden is a socialist and will completely destroy the wholesomely juicy capitalist goodness of the United States if elected.

Y'know what?

If Joe Biden WAS a socialist and ran on a platform to the left of Leon Trotsky I'd vote for him before I'd vote for Donald Trump. 

 If the Democratic nominee was the ghost of Leon Trotsky who promised to massacre all the wealthy I'd vote for him before I'd vote for Donald Trump.

If the Democratic nominee was a drag queen named Twinkles LaBarr who promised that if elected she would outlaw God, make every American share a single bathroom, and crown herself Dragon Queen I'd vote for her in a heartbeat before I'd fucking vote for Donald Fucking Trump.

Because I believe that a man just has to have some moral standards below which he will not sink.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

 Until now Ael and I have been largely disagreeing in the comments. But our disagreement is so fundamental to the issues we're looking at now - and, particularly, looking at in the light of the coming U.S. election - that I think it's worth taking a post to discuss them.

Portrait of the Artist Losing His Dainty Freshness, John Day, Oregon, 8/18/20

 

Ael summed up his salient point well in this comment on the "Election Eve" thread:

"...a return to Obama style "Hope and Change rhetoric and fuck all else" won't cut it.
There is rising anti-elitist anti-corporate sentiment in the land.
If a populist insurgency fails in the Democratic party, I am afraid of what it might become in the GOP."

 So, first; let me say that I couldn't agree more with his fundamental premise; that the social, economic, and political "playing field" in the current United States is viciously, irremediably skewed against anyone not in a two-yacht family.

The brutal fact is that we are effectively an oligarchy, or a plutocracy, if you will. The "people" - the mass of the citizens - do not, in fact, rule either in and by themselves, or through their elected representatives.

Things that the vast majority of the citizens of this nation like and want to be the things that shape their lives; equal opportunity, freedom from the terror of sudden illness or unemployment rendering them helpless, homeless, and hopeless...a more equitable society, in short...are always put aside in favor of the things that the wealthy citizens of the nation want and like.

The problem is that, right now, there's no way past or through or around that.

First, because the first-past-the-post electoral system always produces two large parties. Unless one of them is dying, as the Whigs did before the Civil War, a third (or more) parties simply splits the vote of that side of the political spectrum and allows the "other side" to win.

Second. because our electoral system is drowned, drenched, soaked in money. You cannot get elected in the U.S. without insanely huge amounts of money.

Which means that either you have to be insanely rich, or you have to court the insanely rich...or you have to mobilize literally millions of un-rich people to pay you and keep paying you.

The result?

The rich have access to political power in a way that everyone else does not.

That's why American politics never bothers to debate the value of tax cuts but has a conniption at the thought of using taxes to reduce inequity.

And that's baked in to the American political system.

Remember these guys?

None of them were poor. None of them were landless. None of them were Black or Asian or Latino or born to the tribes that had lived here before the Vikings (and, obviously, none were women).

They set the system up to over-represent rich white guys. And it's worked well that way ever since.

The story of this nation, the promise of the nation, was that although when they wrote that "all men are created equal" they didn't expect those other men - and women - to take them at their words. And that American history has been a long, hard, fight to make those lofty words reality for those "others".

For much of it's history, though, the United States has been what it is now; an open oligarchy.

Three periods were largely responsible to making some changes in that - the "Progressive" era, from roughly the turn of the 20th Century until the First World War, the New Deal era, from 1932 until the Second World War, and the Civil Rights era, from the 1950s to about 1980.

Right now we're embedded in a Second Gilded Age. The first one was disrupted - not ended, exactly, but broken up and forced to admit some of those "other" people - by the Progressives and the New Dealers. Those left outside by those movements - that is, non-white Americans - had to fight again in the second half of the Twentieth Century to try and gain some of that admission.

But the Empire struck back with the election of Reagan, and the country has been sliding back into economic and political feudalism ever since.

The coalition that frustrated the plutocrats in the first two eras - muckraking journalists, true Leftists - socialists and communists - and labor unions, and noblesse oblige aristos like the Roosevelts - is as gone as the Gibson Girl and the I.W.W.

Instead we're left with a dire dichotomy

The result of the hard graft of the wealthy to own one of the two parties has resulted in a GOP that is, frankly, irredeemable. Just lost. Gone. Entirely given over to everything from embryonic fascism to crony capitalism to really lunatic gabba-gooberosity, stuff like QAnon.

But the other big party is still largely in thrall to it's wealthy donors, and to the fear that if they move to hard to the left they will face the wrath of the now-massively-overpowered financial businesses, big banks, and corporate power.

And, frankly, the problem is that to dismantle the resurrected Gilded Age would, indeed, require what amounts to a revolution.

And that's not a metaphor. It would be, in fact, an economic and social (and political) overturn of the status quo.

Wealth would have to be massively taxed. Capital flight - the ability of large corporate organizations to move their wealth out of the U.S. - would have to first be viciously crushed and then policed with a savage intensity. Financial crimes would have to be investigated and punished with the dispatch and ruthlessness we now use on selling weed or sticking up gas stations. Prisons would have to bulge with banksters and grifters and other financial fraudsters.

In other words, the American public would have to start seeing the wealthy and "business" the way they now see government; as a large, unaccountable, dangerous threat.

And this would have to be done by a million tiny uprisings, tens of thousands of pamphlates, YouTube video after YouTube video, in classrooms and townhalls and community groups. The danger, frankly, is that a "populist" uprising is a fantastic risk of becoming either a dictatorship of the proletariat or a Man on Horseback. There's a reason that the French Revolution produced Napoleon and the Russian, Lenin.

The optimist in me wants to believe that there's a way this can be done. That there's a genuine way for the American people to reclaim those high-flown words written back at the close of the 18th Century.

The realist in me looks around and sees nothing but ignorant armies clashing by night. I don't see the American public as capable of that sort of patient, remorseless, brutally focused action, or as willing to make the sort of sacrifices that action would demand.

And, thus, I'm reminded again why I don't want to write about American politics. The way to political hell is already before us, broad and smooth; a descent into madness on the Right, a timidity and fear of violent revolt on the Left.

The way up is hard and narrow, and requires not simply one person but millions to be willing to walk it, to be willing to work and fight and suffer and, yes, perhaps, die, in that journey.

That's an immense ask.

And I'm not sure - not just if the American people are willing to answer, but - whether I even want to ask if of them for my dread that my worst fears will be horribly confirmed.

For me?

I'll fight.

That's what as a citizen I have to do.

But I fight without much hope.

COVID Blues

I was sitting at the kitchen table in the pre-dawn dark - as I do more often than not; my workday starts early and I can't reset my body clock on the weekend - when I realized that I was not just in the dark but in the Dark. My thoughts were unrelentingly grim.

I am living in the Plague Year, and there is literally nothing I can do about that except hide and hope to survive until a vaccine.

I also realized that my work is, frankly, a dreary grind of shitty development projects and doesn't look to be any different anytime soon...assuming that we're not decimated by the coming depression and I am jobless.

And I am living under the rule of greedy, stupid fools who are determined to ensure that the notional rules of the republic we are supposed to be living in don't allow me to defenestrate them, who are bound and determined to deal with this Plague Year in the worst, most dangerous and risky way possible. They will kill me if they can, and the political structures of my country don't let me give them the fucking conge' they deserve.

That's just...well, grim. I cannot sweeten it and I cannot lighten it. All I can do is grind on, doing what I can to make things better around me.

But what I want...well, that's another thing entirely. I'm furiously, incandescently angry at the way that 40 years of Republican malfeasance and liberal cringing have brought us to this. I want to lead the mob up the capitol steps, break down the doors to the congressional chambers and hang Moscow Mitch and Tom Cotton and every other treacherous Republican fuckstick from the Visitors' Gallery, and then on down Pennsylvania Avenue to drag the orange shitgibbon and his slimy pal Miller out into the Rose Garden for a picnic and auto-de-fe, with the two guests of dishonor as the barbecued main course.

But how can that help. We all can see what these bastards are doing. But it's not them. It's that four out of ten other Americans love it, and that just makes me loathe and despise THEM, too. And hating 40% of my "fellow Americans"? That's...not healthy.

So here we are.

Sometimes we just have to bend into the shitstorm and slog on forward. It sucks. It always has. But we just have to hope for better days ahead, and the chance to lay our burden down.

Update 4/14: And here's the really infuriating part.

It SO didn't have to be this way.

What's most appalling is that in this horrific disease Donald Trump and his GOP pals were effectively gifted the chance to be fucking heroes.

I mean that sincerely. They could have gone down in American history with the pantheon of men (and, unfortunately, they ARE all men...) who have saved the Republic. Washington. Lincoln. FDR.

All Trump had to do was what any sane, decent person would have done. Shut his piehole. Listened to people who knew better. Taken their advice to act quickly and competently. Spoken the words of comfort and care. Acted as Lincoln did in 1861 and FDR did in 1941. Mobilized the nation. Produced the tests, provided the ventilators, coordinated the response.

I know I keep saying this, but this was a fucking no-brainer. We've done this before, only it was Japanese, not viruses; we kick the federal money machine into action, start paying people to stay home instead of build bombers, businesses to stay shut instead of make tanks and helmets.

Freeze the nation in place until treatment, and then vaccine, came on-line.

That's it.

That's ALL.

He does that, and he's flying up there with the Greats. Twenty years after his enormous orange ass gets kicked into the hole his meatface is up there on Rushmore right next to Teddy.

But this goddamn fuckstick and his worthless fucking GOP pals couldn't do that to save their (and our) lives.

HE couldn't do it because he's a fucking rodent, and all his pizza-rat brain can manage is his own cravings; his craving for money, for power, to sate his ginormous ego.

THEY couldn't do it because they're fucking slaves, slaves to their bloated ideology where it's a Hobbesean war of all against all, where cash is king, C.R.E.A.M., baby, and it's all about punishing the darks and the bitches and the libs. They could no more act heroically than a dog could resist licking its ass.

That's just...sad.

Here these sorry bastards like to fap to their image of themselves as the latter-day Three Percent, the heroic fighting rebels who would be the first to jump to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the nation in time of trial.

And yet...when the trial arrived, all they could do was snivel, whine, try and grift the pandemic, punish the libs, and then celebrate by dipping their balls in the chocolate to enjoy the creamy texture.

And so here we are, ruled by the very worst among us, without any hope for reprieve.

Release SFC Kraken!

A friend of mine sent me a comment with the attached image that...well, it completely brought out the Army sergeant in me. And the more I think about it, the more it's so...well, so completely "me" that I had to post it.

So. Here it is:

"I'm not saying that these things can't be done. I'm saying that when Sanders says "we can't afford to stop fighting"...arrgh!

To give you an example; I got a call from the Oregon for Bernie Sanders 2016 people last week. The nice girl was asking me to come to some sort of "Rock Against the TPP" concert.

How did this do anything to stop the TPP, given that Congress isn't going to vote on it this year and the process is currently idle, but that Oregon's delegation (outside that rat bastard Walden) is already pledged to vote against it. Well, ummm, yeah, it won't, really. OK, says I, then how do we DO something to stop the fucking TPP? Ummm...I'm not sure, says the nice girl, but the Sanders meeting is Tuesday and I'll be sure to ask. OK, you do that, and here's my e-mail; you send me a quick note and tell me what they told you.

So far? Nothing.

That's my frustration. So far there's been no effort to unseat the bastard Walden and turn Oregon all blue. No efforts to secure the defenstration of the GOP in Salem. No efforts to galvanize the fucking rednecks in Clackamas County or propagandize the hicks in Gold Beach that they need to understand that public health care and a decent minimum wage and a return to the 90% top bracket will make the safer than another fucking AR-15. There's been NO LOCAL EFFORTS at all.

STOP fighting? When do we fucking stop TALKING and START fighting?

Tell ya what.

I'm gonna go to the next goddamn Sanders Tuesday night meeting and I swear to fucking God; Imma bring a piece of dimension lumber and wall-to-wall counsel those pie-in-the-sky fuckers about how you go in and win a goddamn knife fight.

I'll give you a hint: it ain't about going to a goddamn concert."

Sigh.

Sometimes the sergeant in me comes out at very inopportune times...

Tings Bruk Down, Part 2

I'm sitting at my desk here at work. Not working, obviously, but just waiting for the clock to run down. My Timbers are playing tonight and I'm idly wondering whether to go. I've been immersed in soccer lately. Copa America. EURO 2016. The local teams, Timbers and Thorns. As well as writing the Thorns for Slide Rule Pass. So I'm honestly torn. I'd kind of like to see the match. And I'd kind of like to go home and do nothing.

As I sit I'm reading the Internet. News, opinion, various blogs and websites I enjoy.

Every so often I check into my Facebook for good stuff like this:

Lee: I lost my electroporation virginity today - although my partner was electrifying, it was brief and shocking and I won't know for days whether I'm satisfied. ‪#‎scienceporn‬

Comments
John (a.k.a FDChief): I have this mental picture of you reclining on the lab table in nothing but a lab coat and cigarette holder while the device intones (in the HAL voice from 2001): "Procedure complete, Lee. Are you sure it was good for you..?"
Lee: That sounds like every day in my lab, John.
John: Well your work is a damn sight more fun that mine, Lee. WTF? GEOLOGY was supposed to be the place to major if your primary interest in science was primarily intoxication and reproductive anatomy. When the hell did you biologists get so lascivious?
Diane: Does HR know?
Lauren (Lee's daughter): I swear, you and John Lawes could write a book on things your offspring never want to hear
John: But not, alas, cooperatively. Apparently biology is the New Sexology and I appear to have completely missed THAT memo...
Lauren: You should ask her to recite her diatribe on pornographic pollination. I was scarred for life after that one. I swear, parents say the darndest things
John: That's the point. You get to be pains in our ass when you're little; we get to be pains in yours when you get big...It was worth the price of admission explaining to my daughter about puberty.
Lauren: My mom drew me a scientifically accurate diagram of the uterus and phallus. It was very educational
John: Knowing your mom...I'll bet. And probably pretty funny.
Lee: I don't remember any of that...

Some people give good Facebook. Some people post reams of fucking cat pictures and links to everything and nothing. It's like letter-writing. Remember those? Let me tell you; I could write a terrific letter. Most people? Not so much. That translates over to the electronic version of epistolary friendships, too, and I'll let you guess which is more enjoyable.

But here's the other thing I found on FB today:

"Democrats appointed to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee by Hillary Clinton and the party’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, defeated a ban on fracking on June 24."

This was from my friend (and commentor here) Mike's feed. Mike and a lot of the comments on the original post were, understandably, furious.

It just made me sad and sick at heart.

Because I just don't see that there's a real hope in hell of "doing something" about anthropogenic global warming (or "AGW" for short...) through our political process. And if that's not possible...well...I'm not sure what this planet will look like with a return of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and I'm not sure I want to.

That, in turn, got me to thinking about what look like very similar electoral situations; Great Britain's "Brexit" referendum and the people who wanted out of the EU, and the coming U.S. general election and the people who want Trump.

In both cases there seem to be a fairly good prima facie case for opposing both Brexit and Trump. Both appear to be based largely on rumors and lies and fed by nativist anger and racist rage. Both appear to be like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to swat a fly on your nose.

But in both cases there's the arguments my friend Mike and other lefty pals employ against HRC; that the "Remain" argument for the EU (and the "better than Trump" argument for Clinton) are, in effect, demanding your vote for something deeply flawed, something that rewards the rentier class that has effected a silent coup.

Mike and the Sanders supporters make good points about how the current system is horribly skewed against the "regular" Joe and Molly. How things like trade deals and crony capitalism strip people of jobs and wealth, and how people are sick of being "ruled", in effect, by unelected corporations and capitalists. I agree. The current economy isn't "good" for people like me, or my family.

The current system isn't "good" for the planet in terms of accelerating climate change. Both need to be changed.

But what bedevils me is...how?

Republics and democracies aren't good a big, radical changes. They're not good, either, at demanding that their citizens do things that they don't like to do in the short term to make things better in the long term. Remember when Jimmy Carter asked us to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater? The average U.S. citizen knows perfectly well that things like eating McDonald's rainforest-beef hamburgers, driving an SUV, and living in a 3,500-square foot house with a quarter-acre lawn in a city built in a fucking desert are bad ideas.

They just don't want to not do them.

And - short of war - it's hard to either make them or persuade them TO do them.

That's why I eventually bagged on Sanders. Because I'd read things like this:

"We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests.

We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade. Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour. We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.

We need to end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments.

We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels."

...and I'd think, yeah, you're right. That'd be great. That'd be awesome.

How the fuck would you do that?

I mean, how does President Sanders go to Congress...the same Congress that has a House full of shit-flinging flying monkey wingnuts and a Senate that has enough of the same to prevent cloture, remember?...and tell them, yep, I want to cut the Defense budget and spend it on solar and wind energy. I want to reform the tax code to prevent capital flight and return the top marginal rate to 90% like back in Ike's day. I want to cut CEO pay. I want to raise tariffs to prevent offshoring and job loss.

These are fucking people who think that the problem is that there's not enough oil drilling in fucking National Parks, for fuck's sake. These are people who are elected by even stupider people who think that the world was created 6,000 years ago and that Jesus wants you personally to have the full tank of gas that those dirty, smelly Mooslim people stole and hid under their deserts.

Add to that the people, like the people who voted "Leave", think that "international cooperation" means Brussels telling them what shape their bananas should be.

And you have to convince all these people; the good folks, the worriers, the activists, the goofballs, gomers, nativists, racists, ignoramuses, conspiracy-theorists, ding-dongs, and low-information knotheads to be patient, compromise...and to give up their styrofoam cups and cheap plastic crap from Wally-Mart and NASCAR and put down their Confederate flags and ride the fucking bus to work.

What president could do that?

Hell, Jesus riding on a velociraptor and carrying an AR-15 couldn't fucking do that.

That's what kinda drove and drives me crazy about Bernie. Yes, these are all good things. Now...how do you get them? How do you convince people or coerce people or force people to stop building suburbs? To stop driving to work? To stop buying disposable diapers? To stop living in McMansions? To stop voting for people who tell them that they don't HAVE to stop doing all those things because "global warming" is a lie?

I want to hear not an uplifting speech. I want to hear a plan. I want to hear an actual strategy. How are you going to beat down FOX "News"? How are you going to force-feed Michael Savage and Rushbo and Coulter and Malkin and Beck and every other talk-radio moron a nice, hot cup of STFU? How are you going to get people who don't want to accept the science of climate change to accept it and live the lives they need to live to help change things? How are you - in detail, now - going to get people to ask for more taxes and less cheap Chinese-made crap and more equity?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep working for this good stuff Bernie talks about.

I'm saying that by its very nature it's a ridiculously difficult, painful, time-consuming body of work. That you're going to get beat. A LOT. And that you're going to have to grit your teeth and work with people you don't like...like goddamn DLC triangulators and people who want fracking regulated rather than banned.

And that's fucking hard.

So hard that I'm not sure it can ever happen.

And that, in turn, really depresses the shit out of me. The worst are, indeed, full of passionate intensity. And the best...well, they're getting sick and tired of trying to roll that rock uphill.

I want to believe that there are ways. Real ways, practical ways, workable ways, to make all the good stuff that Bernie wants happen.

I just can't see anyone actually producing them.

On their behalf

One thing that used to kind of drive me nuts when I was a GI was listening to other GIs complain about "American society".

First, because half the time what they were complaining about was utter bullshit, the same sort of bullshit that GIs talk about money, alcohol, sex, and politics. It was based on stuff they'd seen on Fox News or Entertainment Tonight or heard on Rush or from some other bomb-throwing moron. It had about as much to do with "American society" as a picture from some girlie magazine has to do with a real woman.

Second, because it was almost uniformly complaining about how "American society" was soft and squishy, coddling criminals and giving money to poor people, worrying about sensitivity and kindness instead of being the sort of tough, hard-assed, "realistic" place that had hacked this country out of the howling wilderness with a jug of 'shine and a coonskin cap, goddamn it. The real problem with "American society" was that Americans weren't enough like Spartans, and I've already noted how I feel about that bullshit.

Anyway, this came up because one of the blogs I follow occasionally is written by a former USAF type. It's usually one of those "change from the inside" sorts of things, with the author trying to highlight things that he'd like to see change about the USAF. This week, though, he passed on some sort of screed from another wing-wiper that has supposedly gone viral. The blog's author says:

"His message struck a chord. At last count, it had been shared more the 23,000 times on Facebook and was popping up in news feeds prolifically. I had Grogan’s message sent to me privately by no less than a two dozen airmen in the last day or so, all encouraging me to share and comment on it."

The referenced "message" is an open letter to...someone - other servicepeople? The U.S. public? - as the writer ETS's from the USAF.

I won't give you the full text; you can follow the link if you want. But the TL:DR version is "You people are petty and soft. You're not worth my service." The message-writer complains that he barely makes $15 an hour and has deployed repeatedly whilst his fellow citizens "...give more attention and respect to stars and animals then we do to those who continue to give their lives for this country." He bitches about Caitlyn Jenner and Cecil the Lion, and that nobody remembers the names of the five guys blown away in Tennessee by "a terrorist".

You all know this guy. He's the guy at your VFW, or down at the local newsstand, or the bus stop, who will rant about "decadence" and "the homosexual agenda" and "political correctness." Tell me you haven't heard this from one of these guys before:

"If we as a society don’t toughen up and grow thick skin then we will definitely lose the battle to those who wish ill will upon us. Perception is reality, and right now we are more scared of speaking our mind and hurting someones feelings versus doing the right thing."

So. Yeah. This guy ETSed...because his fellow citizens are more obsessed with "Dancing With The Stars" than their troops lost in imperial cabinet wars most of them barely understand...or are barely understandable, period? Because "society" isn't tough enough? This guy's problem with taking Sammy's paycheck is that the society he serves isn't a stern, hard, ruthless society, hard as Krupp steel.

Let's remember that this guy was serving in the most powerful military on the planet, one capable of putting a "warhead on the forehead" (as he himself describes his work for the USAF) of an individual mook a gajillion miles away from the shores of North America. That seems plenty "tough" to me. If the public that funds that armed force could give a rat's ass about it because they want to know more about the Kardashians or Cecil the Lion that seems more like a testimonial to the civil peace that armed force has brought rather than a warning that the society needs to become more spartan.

Do we need soldiers? Sure. "Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf", Orwell said. But one of the things that sometimes drives me fucking nuts is that those violent men sometimes forget that their violence is not an obligation on the peaceful sleepers to be as violent as they are. We've seen those sorts of societies, and they are very unpleasant places indeed.

So that's basically what this comes down to; a guy who haz sadz because his country is frivolous and nonviolent. Who is ready to stop taking a government check because of all the fluffy bunny sensitivity around him, who longs for Sparta. His country can afford guns, butter, and "sensitivity" and driver training, that pays him a decent wage to serve all the above - and between pay and allowances he was doing a hell of a lot better than someone working the downstairs at Jiffy Lube part-time - and this dude don't like that?

Wow, sorry, guy.

Cry me a river.

I guess there's always Jiffy Lube.

Burning Down The House

One of the reasons I no longer post much about politics and political issues is my growing sense that 1) doing so is utterly pointless except as a means of bloviating, and the reason for that is because 2) pretty much everyone on the bulk of the two sides has no intention of making statements or taking action because of any sort of actual evaluation of the evidence. A perfect example of this is the recent "controversy" over various aspects of what let's call the "Illegal Brown-ness" problem.

As they have for the past hundred years or so, people born in the nations of Central and northern South America are trying, and in many cases, succeeding in entering the United States. They do this for as many reasons as there are people; ambition, poverty, restlessness, greed, fear, hope, despair, foolishness, criminality, boredom...and in all probability a mixture of all or much of the above.

This is troublesome on several levels.

It is troublesome for their home countries, who often lose the very people that might help those nations grow; the people who are motivated by their existing conditions to do something about them rather than sitting around with their thumbs up their asses and their brains in neutal.

It is troublesome for the region, in that it increases disruption, secrecy, and chaos; among the migrants, in their native lands, the places they pass through, and their destination - where they are "illegal", by definition a challenge to the common law.

It is troublesome for the United States as it brings home the vast disparity in political stability and economic wealth between the migrants, their home countries and their destination. The northern part of the Western hemisphere is a geopolitical conundrum unlike anything I can think of in history; an incredibly wealthy, politically stable empire connected by an immense, nearly indefensible land border with an incredibly impoverished, politically volatile congeries of semi- and nearly-failed statelets with which the empire is not openly at war by attempting to either physically subjugate or suborn.

Not surprisingly, these troublesome conditions have produced a group of U.S. domestic political "solutions" that can be roughly divided by the hue of their proponents.

U.S. "conservatives" - or radical reactionaries, to give them the name befitting their actual politics and policies - being the party of the old, the white, and/or the wealthy lean towards punitive ideas that can be summed up as "wall 'em off, hunt 'em down, ship 'em back" since those walled, hunted, and shipped are presumed to be so overwhelmingly young, brownish, and poor that the sorts of people who make up the current GOP cannot imagine how any of that could ever harm them and the current ideology of the GOP can be summed up as "Fuck you, Jack, I've got mine!".

To me this is nonsensical, trying to hold back the incoming tide. The political and economic disparity is too great, the attraction of El Norte too strong, the deterrent of punishment too weak because the expense of actually walling/hunting/shipping would be astronomical if enacted.

U.S. liberals, being the party of who-the-fuck-can-figure-out-what but typically younger, browner, and poorer than the typical GOP constituent is kind of all over the shop about this but tends more towards accomodating at least some of these migrants with options; towards becoming citizens eventually, and up to that point reduced harrassment and pursuit for the crime of existing inside a country not of their birth.

To me this is craven, ignoring problems because that are "too hard" or wilful denial of the problems inherent in the existence of people who are in but not of a republic, residents but not citizens of a democratic state. First, because a polity that cannot control its own borders controls nothing else worthwhile. And, second, because the problem of allowing a large population of people in one's nation that exists outside the law and its formalities is that this group must work to eat, and, because it has no legal protections, will and does work for pittances. This, in turn, acts as a boat anchor for the wages and conditions of the rest of the society's working people. If I can replace you with someone who cannot and will not strike or otherwise protest when I abuse them for fear of being deported...where is your protection from my abuse?

I will admit right here; I don't have a "solution" for these problems simply because I think that the problems are too complex for "a solution" and I suspect that the solutions, assuming that there are any realistic ones, involve a level of difficulty and expense for the United States that I honestly doubt my nation and its citizens are willing to suffer. The last time I wrote about this - in 2010 - I said the same thing I said the time I'd written about it before, in 2007:

"Perhaps because (we) don't want to remind (ourselves) that governments who build walls between peoples often find themselves building walls and barriers against their own people. Or that even the most fearsome barrier can and will be overcome if the people trying to cross it are desperate enough and brave enough.

The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.

So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything will be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by "Real Amurikans" (that is, legal citizens) who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbour's house is on fire."

What makes this frustrating is that I've been saying this same thing for seven years now. It made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now, and from what I can tell not a fucking particle of that fucking sense has made its way into the public fucking debate on this fucking subject.

So here we are. Again. With people showing up on the southern border because their house is burning down, and our collective reaction is anger and hatred from one side and despair and resignation from the other, and nowhere to be seen is anyone willing to say what I've said above.

Or listen to me saying it.

So I might as well blog about fucking kittens.

Out of the barrel of a gun

I won't kid you; I've been actively avoiding posting here for a while now.

Part of this is purely the pressures of work and worry. I've had a damn busy month and it's not getting less busy. The Boy is being a trial and so there's work to be done at home as well, and there's my own entertainment, ramping up now in anticipation of the World Cup.

But a huge part of this is also just not really having anything to say other than my usual grousing about the fucking Himalayan mountain massif of Stupid that seems to ever more characterize my country.

I could begin with the New Gilded Age and go from there, but, frankly...all it would do is raise my blood pressure and for what?

If you're here reading this you know what I'm talking about. And if you don't agree, I'm not going to convince you.

Take, for example, these fucking nimrods. In The Great Penguin's own words:

"At which point the Open Carry Texas web site sums it up as, “our intent is to make people as comfortable with guns as gay pride parades made people comfortable with gays.” Uhm. I’m not aware that gay pride parades have ever killed someone. Unlike chain saws. Or guns. Just sayin’.

The Stupid, it is dense in these people…"

To begin with, just the sight of these their-brain-cell-is-lonely idiots' rifles leaning unattended with the magazines locked in place?

Makes my hands itch for a nice, juicy piece of dimension lumber and a room with thick walls and a sturdy door so I can do a little wall-to-wall counseling. You're one of my troops and you do that shit? You'd best thrust your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. And that's a trained troop, not some fat bastard whose "weapons training" consists of snarfing down a Whopper with his rifle slung over his back.

These fucking people...and the thing is, this "democracy means that my ignorance is the equal of your knowledge" seems to extend to every damn topic under Heaven. Prisoner exchanges. Climate change. Tax and tariff policy. Health care.

It's piling Ossa on Pelion, and I have no idea what the hell I can do or say to change anything. For example. Nobody with a functioning hindbrain could look at the U.S. electoral system circe 2014 and conclude the the "problem" is that rich people can't influence the political process enough, rather than the brutally obvious fact that the entire magilla has been captured by malefactors of great wealth. And yet the consensus is that the sad little attempt to change the process back closer to that of a less-oligarchic United States is fucking doomed.

The Stupid seems to be dense...well, everywhere.

My "fellow citizens" seem content with their bread and circuses or whatever as their nation literally burns its way through the atmosphere, sqanders blood and treasure in idiotic foreign advantures, romps back to the social, political, and economic tenor of 1890...and all the while seems fixated on who's fucking whom and how, and Jesus-pestering, and homos. This seems to be the "Will of the People" circa 2014. I know that the Public has always been an Ass, but...

The fuck..?

And that brings me back full circle to the goddamn guntards.

Because here's the thing. That rifle is a tool, but less of a tool that the person carrying it if that person is all hopped up abut their "need" to wander around in the peaceful public square carrying it. I've talked again and again about how an armed society is NOT a "polite society" but the functional equivalent of a lawless society, with every armed citizen being, in effect, the ultima ratio regis. Being armed in a civil society makes you the dangerous arbiter of any sort of public dispute, and forces me to arm myself if I have a disagreement with you or face the reality that you will always have that ultimate argument to use against me.

And as a tool, it's not a really useful one. It's useless for hunting unless you're hunting people, and it's useless for "defending yourself" unless you're walking around with a round in the chamber ready to flick the selector lever to "fire" at the slightest hint of danger, in which case I don't want your paranoid ass within 450 meters of me and mine.

And in terms of an "armed citizenry resisting tyranny" it's useless, too. Bob Farley has a pretty good summation of why, on this week that an UNarmed citizen held up a column of tanks on their way to Tianenmen Square twenty-five years ago:

"The thing is, Tank Commander is far more dangerous than Tank Man. Tank Man can simply be shot; most seem to believe that Tank Man was later executed, far out of sight of the international media. The regime survives if Tank Man dies, even if the death of Tank Man isn’t the optimal outcome. The regime dies, however, if Tank Commander refuses to run over Tank Man. Eisenstein used the Odessa Steps to demonstrate the corruption of the Czarist regime, but the regime didn’t die until the soldiers refused to shoot the demonstrators. The successor regime didn’t die until Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in August 1991. While there’s some mystery as to the fate of Tank Man, I don’t doubt that the CCP found Tank Commander and put a bullet in the back of his head at the first opportunity."

I can tell you - you and your pissant little rifle? A wet spot under my tank treads. There has never been a rebellion in history that survived suppression when the suppressor didn't run out of money or the regime troops didn't turn on it. What comes out of the barrel of a gun has typically been oppression, not freedom.

And trust me; you're better off armed with a couple of shopping bags, like Tank Man. If I catch you a rebel in arms you're toast, my friend, and don't think you'll have a chance to die gloriously. If not me, My Little Droney will fly over you and drop some ordnance on you in the dark. Ka-blooey. Game over, thanks for playin'...

Now. That was a nice little rant. If you're out there reading this sucking the muzzle of your AR-15 like a little black metal binkie, is it going to change your mind? Did I tell you anything you probably don't really know, if you were willing to stop fondling your rifle for a moment and admit it?

Of course not. Because none of this is really about "facts" or "knowledge" but about that some people just want cool rifles n' shit, and are more than willing that some other poor sonofabitch is gonna die because in order for one person to have cool rifles n' shit another person - some utterly fucked up bastard - has to be able to get one, too.

So - no different from my going on and on about Citizens United, or offshoring and outsourcing, or the hypocrisy of sending other people's sons to war and then roaring and bleating when they're ransomed by releasing some raggedy-assed Afghan POWs. I just don't want to try and swim upstream against this tide of rancid stupidity. If the people backing this moronity, or the people backing the morons, can't see what this is doing I can't save them and I can't change them.

I've watched from afar as my friend Labrys drives herself slowly bugnuts getting spun up about this shit, and I've told myself; not going there. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time and energy battering the ignorance and carelessness of fucktards.

So I'll be back in just a bit with some more reminesences of Panama and this month's "battle", the Philippine Sea in 1944. And maybe some kiddo and family stuff.

But politics? Why would I want to jam my intellectual dick into that meatgrinder? Again?

I've really got better things to do.

Fierce, and bald, and short of breath

This post over at the Girl With The White Parasol (who's pretty amazingly terrific about movies, by the way, if you like the movies) got me thinking.

Because it's about movies (no, duh!), and actors, and acting, and, in particular, the acting of Marion Robert Morrison, who you probably know better as "John Wayne".

I have an odd sort of relationship with John the Wayne.

I loved his flicks when I was a kid, in part because the ol' Duke looks a lot like my father the Master Chief. Plus, well...he was the tall-in-the-saddle guy. The hero. The Ringo Kid, full of decency and strength.

It wasn't until I grew up, and joined the Army, that I began to have problems with the Duke.

Aubyn at TGWTWP sums up those problems thusly:

"Wayne knew that he owed all his success to his audience and he believed it was his responsibility to live up to that image. This belief would cost him plenty. Although he played the soldier many times onscreen, Wayne never served in World War II and this failure ate at him, fueling the macho militarism he would express later in life."

But I think The Problem of John Wayne is bigger, and goes deeper, than just that.

Wayne didn't just "never serve" in the war that defined his generation. In 1941 - possibly with the aid of his studio, but possibly not - Wayne was assigned draft status "3-A"; "deferred for [family] dependency reasons." At the time he might have had good reasons for staying out of the fight. Although we now think of him as a big star of the Forties he was a big star - of the LATE Forties. In 1941 he'd just had his breakthrough role as the Ringo Kid in Ford's Stagecoach. He was still a "struggling young actor" with a toehold in the studio system in '41, and spending three years on a destroyer might have 86ed his career and his family's shot at security.

But that wasn't the end of Wayne's curious lack of ferocity for actual fighting.

Wayne worked his way up the studio ladder quickly in the early Forties. By the last couple of years of the war he was a made guy; he could easily have volunteered and never lost a real shot at a movie career. He is supposed to have sent in some p-work to John Ford's Naval Photographic outfit but never followed through on it. There was always another movie to make.

Wayne was reclassified "2-A" in 1944 - "deferred in support of [the] national interest." for his war film work. After a month the Selective Service decided to revoke many previous deferments - remember, by '44 the U.S. manpower well was running dry, the bodies were piling up in France and the Pacific, and even old married guys and war-plant workers were getting their draft notices - and reclassified him 1-A. Wayne's Wikipedia entry states:

"Wayne did not attempt to prevent his reclassification as 1-A (draft eligible), but Republic Studios was emphatically resistant to losing him; Herbert J. Yates, President of Republic, threatened Wayne with a lawsuit if he walked away from his contract and Republic Pictures intervened in the Selective Service process, requesting Wayne's further deferment."

But...this is John the Wayne we're talking about! Mister "Green Berets", the embodiment of Sixties and Seventies superpatriotism! How come the young Duke didn't insist on doing what so many of his studio counterparts were doing and joining the Good Fight? As for the story about Yates, in his biography of Wayne Gary Wills notes that no other studios took action against their actors - many of them stars such as Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, and Jimmy Stewart - that joined up. Frankly, that sounds as lame as the old "football injury" story about Wayne that is a Sixties fabrication to explain his lack of wartime service.

"Cecil Adams" at The Straight Dope has an entertaining theory about why the future COL Kirby wasn't so eager to take on the Japs or Krauts:

"Nobody really knows why; Wayne didn't like to talk about it. A guy who prided himself on doing his own stunts, he doesn't seem to have lacked physical courage. One suspects he just found it was a lot more fun being a Hollywood hero than the real kind. Many movie star-soldiers had enlisted in the first flush of patriotism after Pearl Harbor. As the war ground on, slogging it out in the trenches seemed a lot less exciting. The movies, on the other hand, had put Wayne well on the way to becoming a legend. "Wayne increasingly came to embody the American fighting man," Wills writes. In late 1943 and early 1944 he entertained the troops in the Pacific theater as part of a USO tour. An intelligence bigshot asked him to give his impression of Douglas MacArthur. He was fawned over by the press when he got back. Meanwhile, he was having a torrid affair with a beautiful Mexican woman. How could military service compare with that?"

Actually, I wonder if even at this point, even while all this fawning and torrid Mexican womanizing was going on, that Wayne didn't get some small sense of how this failure to put himself at risk might become an issue later on.

William Manchester talks about Wayne getting the bird from servicemen in WW2, an incident that I knew about long before I read Manchester's actual account of it:

"After my evacuation from Okinawa, I had the enormous pleasure of seeing Wayne humiliated in person at Aiea Heights Naval Hospital in Hawaii. Only the most gravely wounded, the litter cases, were sent there.... Each evening Navy corpsmen would carry litters down to the hospital theater so the men could watch a movie. One night they had a surprise for us. Before the film the curtains parted and out stepped John Wayne, wearing a cowboy outfit...He grinned his aw-shucks grin, passed a hand over his face and said, ‘Hi ya, guys!' He was greeted by a stony silence. Then somebody booed. Suddenly everyone was booing. This man was a symbol of the fake machismo we had come to hate, and we weren't going to listen to him. He tried and tried to make himself heard, but we drowned him out, and eventually he quit and left."

You would think that the sort of man who had lived through something like that would have become, if not reticent, at least a little more ambivalent on the subject of war and fighting, military service and patriotism, than the man Wayne grew to be.

The Wayne I remember as a man was the Wayne of the Sixties and Seventies, and that Wayne was so virulent a "patriot" and "American", so much a symbol of fake machismo as to be almost a parody, one of Sassoon's scarlet Majors.

Here's The Rockford Rascal quoting him quoting Wayne on the subject of killing the native inhabitants of North America:

"I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them [the Indians], if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

You can practically hear Wayne's thoughts...all that good land and all those wholesome Europeans wanting it, who the hell were those damn redsticks to keep US out, those selfish bastards!?

When I watch a film I try to see the character not the actor. But for me, with Wayne, it's very, very difficult. He so often plays "John Wayne" that it's hard not to see Wayne the man, not Wayne-the-actor-playing-a-Civil-War-cavalry-officer.

What doesn't help is the place he has come to hold in many other American's minds. I had a roommate in Panama who really, really luuuurved him some John the Wayne. He'd watch any Wayne movie, even awful shit like The Green Berets, even ridiculous, endless, tedious tripe like The Alamo. And get him started on the man himself? Seems that for SGT Meany John Wayne was the living embodiment of America. "A great American, a hero", SGT Meany kept calling the Duke.

I would look at him slantwise.

"You do know that ol' Duke never really did all that stuff, right? Never fought in a war, didn't defend the Alamo, wasn't ever a cop, wasn't ever a pilot, or a cowboy, or a DA. He was an actor, a guy who made his living pretending to be things he wasn't."

I might as well have been speaking Lithuanian. To this guy Wayne was the real thing, a hero, as much as symbol of America as a flag, or an eagle, or an NFL football.

Since my childhood I've run into a lot of other people like my old roommate. Many of them seem to be as politically conservative as Wayne was, and you can't shake them from the idea that the guy was some sort of ginormous American "hero"...and I wonder how much of that goes back to Wayne himself and his "legend", the image of him as he appeared on the screen; fighting man, American soldier (or sailor), patriot, going into harm's way to serve his country.

Only...he didn't.

Not only that, when he had the chance to do, and be, all of those things he chose not to.

I don't begrudge him that choice. Any man who can choose peace over war is a wise man. But, having made that choice, such a man would do well to remember that choice and have the grace to refrain from loudly encouraging other young heroes to hasten up the line to death.

Wayne did not, and for that reason I still find myself uncomfortable with his portrayals of military sacrifice.

The guy made some hellacious fine movies, and did some fine work on-screen.

But the man's self-forged patriotism clangs so fiercely, the trumpet of war he sounded is still so loud and so brassy that I can't forget the man often enough to appreciate the work of the actor, and that, to me, is a damning thing.

Acta est fabula

I was saddened to read not long ago that a blogging sister has decided to hang 'em up.

"I really feel I’ve lost heart for it." she concluded.

I know how she feels.

I've tried to interest myself in posting about the rampant idiocy of the Paleolithic Right, of the profound indifference of my "fellow Americans" as the blunt reality of torture and secret policemen and oligarchs make the fine words on the 18th Century parchments more and more ridiculous and even louche. Of the seemingly endless concatenation of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that constitutes the public "news" (the World's Worst Newspaper just downshifted itself yet again, going to a tabloid format that contains less than a page or two of actual local "news" with the remainder the usual wire stories and sports or "entertainment" filler) sources.

I've tried to work up the ire I felt when the idiot Bushies were sending my Army brothers to fight, die, and return in bags or forever marked from a pointless land war in Asia about the idiot farkling about in the lesser-paved parts of the world by the Obamites.

I've tried to regain my antipathy towards the elites whose rapacity and blind greed have helped put us in this handbasket, at the Cliven Bundy sorts of greedy, grifting morons whose blind hatred of the Commons has blinded them to the fact that they themselves are the cows, culled, outsourced, downsized, laid off, crammed down, and eventually ground down by their masters, the very "job creators" they idolize.

I've tried to work myself into a spitting fury over what may well be the single biggest disaster of the Human Era, our own unwillingness to accept that we are changing our very climate. As Chesterton said about Christianity; it is not that trying to restrain climate change has been tried and found difficult, it has been found difficult and never tried.

And after all that trying I keep coming back to the realization...what's the point?

If you're here reading about that you know about it; I can't tell you anything about it you can't find better expressed over at Charlie Pierce's place. I can match Driftglass' incisive spleen, or Krugman's clinical exactitude.

If not politics, then what?

I can turn this into some sort of Daddy-blog, writing about home and family. And don't get me wrong; those things are important. Vastly important. Top-gallant delights and keelson depths, but both utterly central to my life.

But yours? Why should you care whether the Boy is being happy and cooperative or (as is the case at the moment) a sulky young mandrill in desperate need of some corrective action. If he was eight years older I'd be on the verge of wall-to-wall counseling, myself, but you can't do that with ten and expect good results. Or not going to jail.

I could write about what I love. Soccer? You guys hate that and, besides, I already have a place where I can write about soccer amid the applause of dozens.

Well, a couple of people, anyway, then.

Military history. Poetry. Some of the more topical, funny, or curious family stuff. Random musings about men and women, people in general, places.

In short, I haven't come to where my friend Labrys is.

I still like the sound of my own voice enough to continue writing and posting here. But I suspect that I, too, will spend less time on the rostrum shouting at the crowd that passes by deaf to the sound of my most impassioned oratory.

Touch of Gray

I've been having a difficult time working up the energy to blog lately.

A hell of a lot of it has to do with what my friend Labrys discusses in this post.

"At a certain point, one wonders, if opinion — expressed in writing to friends, the public, elected officials — reaps no positive result, why bother? What is the use of participation at that point? To keep inundating myself with the horrors happening around my country is maddening; this IS the sort of thing, with no relief in sight FROM government that makes people go a bit loony."

It doesn't help when the first thing I come across in scanning the Intertoobz is stuff like this: "Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever."

After tanking the global economy. And walking away whistling. Except when they whine that people talking all mean about how they managed to fuck up, loot, pillage, and burn, and still get paid waaayyyyy too much.

Fuckadoodledoo.

The world outside my little house and my home city just seems eaten up with idiotic dickishness, and this small forum seems utterly inadequate to deal, or even comment on, the vast wasteland of appalling dickitude on display; everything from gigantic, existential threats like anthropgenic global warming to this, a silly pair of articles about men and women.

This was the first I came across, a wife's blogged reply to attacks on her husband's confession that he had begged her to keep dyeing her hair dark because he "...didn't want to be married to the Queen of England."

Putting aside the insanely immense skweechieness of imagining sex with the zillion-year-old-royal-sourpuss Elizabeth Windsor-nee'-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the rest of the guy's rant is fairly standard. Gray is old, I'm not old, I don't want you to look/be old, because then it will mean that I'm sticking my dick in old and then I will be old and that's fuckin' horrible and scary!

Read it if you want. Meh, same old, same old dickish whine that every guy has whined ever since he looked around and realized he wasn't as rich, or as powerful, or important, or fucking the sleek girl he thought he deserved.

The wife's reply, though, is kinda sweet and kinda stupid, in my opinion. She starts by noting that many of the readers of her husband's original piece commented that he sounded like a jerk and a narcissist.

(And for the record, if you're married to a smart, funny, active, sexy woman and you're pissing and moaning because her hair is gray? You are a big ol' fuckin' narcissistic dickish jerk. Just one man's opinion.)

She goes through what a nice guy her husband really is, not objecting to her wearing ratty old sweats and a T-shirt to bed and generally being a Nice Guy. She concludes:

"The dyeing or the not-dyeing is ultimately irrelevant to my point, which is that it’s okay for one member of a loving partnership to care about looking attractive to the other, but in the end, the decision belongs to the one whose body it is. May we all be honest and kind to each other, not necessarily in equal measure, but in the exact right proportions for marital bliss."

Which is the summation of both the sweet and the stupid part of her take on this.

Sweet, because I think she genuinely loves this guy and sees him as "caring about" how she looks.

Stupid, because, frankly, this screams to me (as a kinda-dickish-late-middle-aged-white-guy) as another very-dickish-late-middle-aged-white-guy getting all dickish about sex and death and the death of sex.

He's looking at his wife's gray and inside there's this guy-siren shrieking "Warning! Warning! Incoming Grannie Panties! Sexual Shutdown Imminent!! Warning!"

He even admits to thinking what we all try and pretend we don't think; that while we see your every line and wrinkle, your every sag, droop, and softening we look at ourselves in the mirror and our brains sort of airbrush away OUR sags, wrinkles, and bloat. "Dammit, I'm still a fine figger of a man!" we dickishly preen to ourselves, while looking at the slight loosening at the top of your thighs and thinking...aaaagh! Old Queen Bess!

That thought isn't far from, as the dickish saying goes, "breaking a forty for two twenties" and is pretty solidly behind the whole dickish business of trying to pretend that the women's bodies we're intimate with are not supposed to get older because even as old men we don't want to have sex with old women.

It's a dickishly bad attitude, and I don't think this woman gets how corrosively dickish it is, and, yet, there she is not seeing that this dick is probably going to dump her for some sleek barista with a nose stud and a tramp stamp because he's a dick who is scared to pieces by his own inevitable death.

And that's just one couple's domestic business.

Don't get me started on the destruction of the world for fun and profit, the serfening of the world's workers (though I highly recommend the Economic Penguin's recent series on the whole business of how the 99% of us are in the process of being bent over as an inevitable function of how our current crony capitalist system works), and the overall boneheaded political and economic dickishness of human beings in general and in the modern U.S. "conservative movement" in particular.

So, as I told Labrys...I just find it hard to work up the give-a-shit enough to write political posts anymore. Or economics.

The critical mass of dickish stupidity, greed, and indifference seems so huge that I just don't see what there is left to say.

That the Public is an Ass?

That the rest of us are going to hell in a handbasket because a critical mass of our fellows are dickishly unconcerned about anything outside their own groins, or religious delusions, or hates, or prejudices, or greed to look around and fucking see that?

That about a third of our fellow “citizens” appear to be perfectly happy to left the Radical Right turn the 21st Century U.S. into a bad parody of the 1890s only with more domestic spying and blowing up random foreigners? That we’ve dug ourselves into a ginormous global-warming hole and can’t even work up the concern to agree that we have, much less actually DO anything about it? That we can’t get the same 27-percent-toxic-stupidz to agree that taxes are the price of civilization, that, no the Zombie Negroes are not coming to Take Their Stuff, that more guns doesn’t = more Freedom, that you can't kill enough brown people to make the survivors love (or fear) you unless you kill a kajillion of them?

Lots of people who are smarter and better read and have bigger fora than we have have been banging these drums for days, months, years, decades, and what the hell have we got to show for it?

I still enjoy writing about things I enjoy and the small incunabulae that please me.

Nature. My family. Soccer. History. The Army I knew. Current-event-oddities and silly humor.

But politics, or economics, or the current State of the Union and the World?

No.

All it does is get me pissed off. Pissed off realizing how utterly fucked we are and pissed off realizing that there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it that won’t end up with me either dead or in prison.

All the more when I write about those issues I just feel very old and tired and sad, and it's not helping me write anything here that I don't end up hating even as I write it.

I'm sorry, but there it is.

Rise of the Machines

This is the kind of thing that worries me in the long run.

From Brad DeLong:

"My friend and coauthor Larry Summers touched on this a year and a bit ago when he was here giving the Wildavski lecture. He was talking about the extraordinary decline in American labor force participation even among prime-aged males--that a surprisingly large chunk of our male population is now in the position where there is nothing that people can think of for them to do that is useful enough to cover the costs of making sure that they actually do it correctly, and don’t break the stuff and subtract value when they are supposed to be adding to it (emphasis mine - FDC).

​That is a problem that human societies have never faced before. Larry thinks it may be that we are starting to see the thin edge of the technological wedge in male labor force participation trends over the last 30 years--which I point out is not matched at all by female labor force participation trends. Women were even very briefly at a premium on the job market in the last recession--even given the extraordinary extra share of childcare and household production labor that they do.

​It’s plain that the next time there is a recession, there will be more females than males working outside the home again. It's a worry. It’s a scary worry for our grandsons and great-grandsons, and perhaps for our great-great-great-granddaughers as well..."

I think the DeLong isn't actually being pessimistic enough.

In the short run, sure, we're worried about things like the Lesser Depression, offshoring, and income inequality. And I'm not saying that those aren't anything to worry about.

But they are, most of them, issues of political choices and our failure to restrain our oligarchy from pushing us towards a new Gilded Age.

What this DeLong rumination dredges up is my worry that we are looking at something much more fundamental and, for those of us in the industrialized world, more worrisome.

For the greater portion of human history you needed human muscle and brainpower to make things and make them work, from stone tools to combines, from atlatls to digital computers. Just having people, smart people, people who knew how to do things, was considered part of a tribe's or a nation's "wealth"; it was even called things like "human resources" when we got around to thinking of it in modern industrial terms.

But I think we're seeing not just a change in politico-economic philosophy - though the transfer of wealth to the very wealthy IS a change, and you know how I feel about that. But this isn't about relative wealth, but absolute wealth.

What I think we're seeing is a genuine shift in how human society works; we can now produce everything from foodstuffs to finished products with fewer - much fewer - humans that it took to produce those things a generation ago.

So human brain and muscle is no longer a straightforward "resource" anymore. As DeLong's friend points out; in many industries the cost of employing humans exceeds the benefit.

But...what are those people to do?

And...if they can't find anything - or, more to the point, anything that will allow them to be anything more than a menial laborer, a geriatric ass-wiper or the equivalent of a squeegee man - what the hell fo we do with them?

And lurking behind the arras is the intractable problem of what happens to a society that gets too small.

A larger one attacks and absorbs it; simply stated, in war quantity does have a quality all its own. A high birth-rate society has the capability to accept enough casualties to overwhelm a low-birth-rate society that is much higher on the technological ladder...

Mind you, the United States is in the unique position of being defended by two oceans. Much of the rest of the industrialized world doesn't have this problem, so any attempt to adjust to this imbalance by reducing the sheer number of people to match up with the actual work available puts them in danger of external threat.

So. I won't kid you; I see this as a very difficult long-term problem. Rebellions and social disasters aren't often engineered by hopeless peons and downtrodden serfs. They're fomented by people who see opportunities denied them, or, even worse, see themselves losing what hopes and possessions they once had.

The real downside of a New Gilded Age is not just that you would have new millions of match girls and breaker boys, but the combination that those boys and girls would be children of a vanished middle class...

...and that an AK-47 is ridiculously simple to operate.

I really fear that my children's century is going to be a very, very turbulent one.

Li Rwè, li Lwè et l’ Liberté !

I found this a curious and interesting combination of news and history; apparently the Belgians are getting a new King.

"Filip/Philippe will be King of a country that is divided between a part of the population that is deeply attached to the Belgian unity, and part of the population (mainly Flemish nationalists) who prefer regional independence. The Belgian king has always played a crucial role in keeping the different parts of the country together, and the question is whether King Filip/Philippe, who is said to have less emotional and social intelligence as his father, will be able to fulfill this role in the same way as his father did. Journalists keep asking, up until today: “Is he ready for this role?”

The connection here is that Mojo and I dropped in on the Bazi Bierbrasserie on Hawthorne last weekend to enjoy a lovely evening out and celebrate Belgian independence day;

The Belgian brews were appropriately robust and floral, and the stoemp was damn fine; I've got to try making that around here, tho finding the mergeuez sausage here in Portland might be a bit tricky. We enjoyed a truly peaceful and intimate evening ending up at the Heron Haus B&B where we spent our honeymoon night eleven years ago this October.

One of the subjects of conversation that evening was "what is a Belgian", and the whole business of Flemings vs. Walloons came up. Several of the patrons and staff at Bazi had their own opinions, but the general consensus seemed to be that there would always be a Belgium.

But it got me thinking about what makes a "nation", how its citizens (or in Belgium's case, "subjects", although the idea of a tyrannical House of Brabant oppressing its subjects in 2013 seems rather ridiculous no matter how loathsome the colonial record of the second Leopold might have been.) And what a curious beast an "American" is, being defined (at least in theory) not by language, or race, or heritage, or "culture", or really even geographical location but intellectual and emotional attachment to a slew of political ideals about self-government and the relationship between government, its citizens, and society.

And I'm not quite sure what I think about that, especially given the great changes in the U.S. between the society I grew up in - which was founded largely on a social compact defined by the New Deal - and the U.S. of today (and in case you think I'm romanticizing the New Deal a large part of that compact specified excluding the darker-colored citizens of the U.S. and the changes wrought by the Civil Rights Era had a hell of a lot to do with the subsequent changes and the breakdown of that social compact...).

I can't honestly say that I see Belgium's political and civil issues as vastly greater than those I see around me right here. But I do know that I might be a teensy bit concerned if my country depended on the political and social skills of one guy said (in the comments section of the article I found) to possess "the intellectual and political skills...of a cabbage".

The stoemp was damn fine, though.