Can We Try Cowboys And Sharks Next?

That would kind of rock. Or maybe Snakes on a Spaceship. I'm actually kind of enjoying the mashup movie playground, and to be honest, Cowboys and Aliens was, if somewhat derivative, at least not an actual fucking reboot. There were no Smurves, the A-Team did not show up, and Harrison Ford's character's kid was absolutely not Indiana Jones redux.

It's easy to get snotty about a movie called Cowboys And Aliens, but it was actually not a bad movie, and anyway, anyone who thought Firefly was fun needs to aim their contempt a little carefully.

The thing with the hat kept annoying me unreasonably though my partner did not notice it at all, and I honestly still don't know why, even after having it explained to me by the movie and by reviewers, the aliens were bothering to abduct people and experiment on them to find their weaknesses. Because on a planet with no sattelite technology, avoiding the humans would probably have been easy enough, and as far as I could tell the only reason anyone tried to fuck with the aliens at all was to get back the people they abducted. So, yeah, there was that, but a movie where the aliens come, mine gold from barren deserts, and disappear without a confrontation is probably pretty boring, so I'll give them a pass.

This is not necessarily a spoiler, but I will note that the aliens seem to take a fairly unsystematic approach to investigating the weaknesses of humans. After you've established that your disintegration ray disintegrates them, you may not need to start exploring the potential of The Pointy Stick. Disintegrating them kind of seems like you've solved your problem ("How can we get rid of these stupid human things?") and further messing about with poking holes in them seems like busywork.

The woman next to me appeared to have been unprepared for the possibility that there might be blood, and made louder-than-necessary "EEewewwYuuuuCK!!!!" noises every time someone got, you know, shot, or hit, or whatever. In her inner landscape, apparently, cowboys don't have guns, and she was apparently expecting them and the aliens to sit down and negotiate a settlement. Or maybe she stumbled into the wrong theater by mistake and spent an hour and a half wondering why they'd decided not to make them blue after all.

Almost everyone dies who you would expect to die, everyone lives who you would expect to live, the special effects were not terrible, and if you're plunking down fourteen bucks to see a movie called Cowboys and Aliens, you pretty much are getting what you are paying for and if you think it was a terrible movie but you were not paid to go see it, then you are an idiot because you cannot possibly have been expecting something else.

And I'm too lazy to look into it and see why this has suddenly become A Thing, but I would have found the "Depictions of characters smoking are not intended to make smoking look cool" end credits disclaimer somewhat less sad if there'd been an accompanying one about shooting people.

Happy Voluntary Homelessness And Finger Amputation Day!

Okay, between the migraines and the paranoia, I'm not the target audience for fireworks. I admit that. Growing up, getting stung by bees seemed like just something you had to put up with in summer, but burning yourself on a sparkler? That's just evidence you're an idiot. So, yeah, fireworks, not my thing.

But assuming you are totally into things that go bang and shit, I do have to wonder about the mindset of some of our neighbors. Two fire trucks go screaming by? Maybe you should put down the fireworks for, say, twenty minutes, just to not jinx yourself. Because, really? You're that secure in the mercy of your loving god? Even if I thought my gods were totally cool with everything I had ever done--which no one who believes in a deity should be--I'm not that convinced they don't enjoy a little entertainment enough to fuck with a fuse at that point. If you watched someone fall off a cliff, wouldn't you take a few steps backwards? Wouldn't you grab your kids and pull them back too? Apparently there's a stupid cluster in my neighborhood, I don't know. Something in the coffee.

And even if you lived in a world entirely free of irony, wouldn't common fucking sense say "Hey, the fire department is busy right now putting out some other idiot's fire. Maybe I should wait till they're back at the department before I risk having a house fire of my own." You are always risking that they are too busy to get to you fast, but in this case you know for a fact that this is the case... and you pull out the lighter anyway.

You know what? Maybe Darwin was wrong after all.

Evil or Stupid: Second Round!

I watch a lot of CSPAN. Like, a lot. I probably spend more time watching Washington Journal ("Where People Who Haven't Mastered The Telephone Yet Tell You How Often They Vote") than I do sleeping, and this is not coincidental what with me being on the coast that apparently does not exist as far as programmers are concerned. (Suck it up, East Coasters, you know damned well you're convinced you run the world's clocks.)

Anyway, Washington Journal is CSPAN's call in show ("You'd Be Amazed At The Correlation Between People Who Want To Talk About Fiat Money And People Who Forget To Turn Down Their Televisions"). Three hours of a host and three phonelines (Republican, Democrat and Independent), about half the time a guest. Brian Lamb used to read the newspaper at us a lot, and in fact someone just mentioned how much he missed that. I assumed it was some sort of chemical imbalance on my part. Nowadays people tweet and email comments as well. This is clearly one of those arenas where the char limit on Twitter is a good thing, if you've ever heard an Informed Voter try to explain about the Pan-America World Order. Frankly, if you can't explain your feelings on The Gold Standard in a tweet, you aren't trying. I'm almost positive those views have reference numbers by now.

So this morning they opened with "Tell us what you think the most important story of the day is". Which gets pretty quickly to my biggest complaint about CSPAN: Even screamingly egregious disinformation is almost never corrected by the hosts, and you have almost no chance of calling in to explain why the person who just explained that Most Homosexuals Are Pedophiles is a twerp before the end of the segment. This morning, Francis/Frances from Ft Lauderdale wanted to share with us, as the most important news story, that Planned Parenthood doesn't even do mammograms! They're an abortion factory!

This shit makes my head hurt, and not just because it was not one of the "most important story" choices. Honey, this is sandwich board and streetcorner territory, not Washington Journal ("Can't You At Least Wait Till The Sun's Up Before Screaming Invective At The TV?") fare.

Anyway, the second segment had the Grand Chancellor of PBS Totebag Technology or something on. Don't get me wrong, I love PBS. But holy shit are their executives and spokespeople boring. I assume on purpose. In fact, I assume for the same reason that WJ hosts respond to "We should just ship all the Muslim people back where they came from" with nothing more confrontational than "And we'll leave it there, in the papers this morning..."

Apparently they were deluged with tweets asking more or less the same thing two callers said, which was, I swear to God almost word for word, "Besides William F Buckley, can you name even one conservative you have ever had on PBS? Ever?"

The third time around, we were informed that "David Brooks doesn't count". Because I guess he's Silly Party or something.

Thing is, all of these callers and tweeters and emailers were awfully confrontational and clearly somewhere on the far side of annoyed though only one seemed to be actually angry. (That would be the guy who demanded to know "Where are your Tea Party voices?" He was reminded that before he went to Congress and started explaining that Postcards From Buster is theft, Rand Paul spent a good deal of time on his local PBS station ranting about runaway nanny-state government. This did not suffice.)

Don't get me wrong, fuck knows I spend a lot of time angry at CSPAN myself ("This weekend on Book TV, guy-you've-never-heard-of will be asking if Barack Obama wrote his autobiography, The Thing About My Dad."). PBS, not quite as often but it happens. Actually, I can answer both that question and the question of the day with four words: Tucker Carlson. (Oh, you're gonna go math on me? Apparently you don't mutter "That Prick" under your breath every time you say his name, and I think the problem here is your common sense, not my math skills.)

All of this is basically my long form version of asking if these people, vibrating with apparently sincere outrage, have actually not noticed, in their blind rage and persecution complexes, the other conservative views in the media, or if they're just gaming the ref. Because every time they said something like that, the Archduke of Non-Caillou-Related Programming explained that he felt conservative voices were represented but that he wanted and expected more of them in the fullness of time.

Me, I'd have just laughed. But I suppose there's a reason I'm not the Mayor of Sesame Street.

So, Conservatives: Self-Martyred or Disingenuous? (Both is an acceptable answer.)

Probably Just The Moon

My partner watched Casino Jack. I was interested, as my partner is no political junkie.

"It was totally unrealistic! There was this creep named Grover something. What kind of name is Grover?"
"That would be Grover Norquist?"
"I dunno. The only Grover I know of is a Muppet."

This at-least-partly-tongue-in-cheek conversation is my way of getting into the weeds of what happened in Tucson. I think everybody worth listening to agrees that it's horrible. It is admittedly disturbing how many people aren't worth listening to.

There's a lot of "He read this book" and "He sounded like this guy" and "He said this thing" speculation going on on the internets and talk radio and Washington Journal, where of course, even sane people gather to say crazy things in the name of the First Amendment.

Reasonable People are sticking to their "Both sides say awful things" centrism, coupled with the "He was just a nut" Just-Sos.

The media, typically, is running with their "It's time for an ethics panel!" theme.

As Doghouse Riley points out--and if you're wasting your time here and haven't been there yet you probably need more than just a link, but at least there's that--pretty much no one is bothering to ask how a nutjob legally got ahold of a gun, because, you know, it's Arizona, and beyond that, pretty much any of us could get a gun with only a little fudging of the facts, if that.

Hacks of all stripes are industriously exploiting this: I just watched* a public talk radio and TV figure hold up his book on CSPAN and point out that he wrote a book about why we should all stop saying such awful things, followed immediately by the panel host reading an email from a random person asking who shares blame for this and who might find this an opportunity to advance their agendas. He's not the only hack by any means, hell, he isn't even the only hack on this segment, but man was the irony stark.

Anti-government types, whether they are anti-government in general or specifically anti-this-Administration, are attempting to distance themselves from it, because, really, the second most prominent feature of this guy is that he is anti-government. (Probably more the former than the latter, but people who are anti-government do tend to oppose more strongly the party that is painted as Big Government.) I can understand the desperation to distance, because the most prominent feature that can be observed about him is that he's fucking crazy. As a fucking crazy myself, and the type of fucking crazy that is usually fingered when this shit happens, a paranoid schizophrenic, admittedly one of my first thoughts was, Oh, shit, I hope this wasn't one of us. It wasn't my first thought, but it was shamefully not long in coming. So if I were a fan of firearms, or an avowed enemy of government, or if I'd ever said anything bad about this particular Congresswoman, or I knew the guy, or I shared a name with the guy--if there was any other point of commonality between me and a killer, I'd be distancing myself on that grounds too.

So I can sympathize with that impulse, it was one of mine too. I don't think it's going to work, though, not for all of us. Even without the "You'd have to be crazy to do something like this" assumption that we all sort of make, it's reasonably clear the guy is mentally ill. Well, a lot of people are, and this is not the same as "not responsible for their own actions", so I'll just let that sit there for a minute without trying to feel either guilty for or persecuted by the mental stability of a killer, because if nothing else, it's an awfully fucking juvenile reaction and lacks class.

More practically, I think the "First Amendment" vs "Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater" argument has some merit. We believe, as a society, that the messages we broadcast have an impact on people. We recognize certain types of people as more susceptible to these influences, children for example, and yes, the mentally ill. So there's even some merit to the media reaction of navel-gazing editorials proclaiming everybody does it and everybody's to blame. Which is not to say that hacks aren't exploiting that to advance their agendas, sell ad space, or distance themselves from past instances of incivility on their own part.

But beyond that, maybe there's something deeper going on. And this is something I think Doghouse was trying to say, so go back and click on that link and read his take if you haven't already. The non-reptile parts of your brain will thank you for it anyway.

So, maybe this is what happens when we start to regard politics as entertainment, as a spectator sport, as something like pro-wrestling with winners and losers and sponsors and spectators, where everybody knows it isn't real and no one is really affected, where sometimes people just get carried away and do crazy things in the stands.

An awful lot of this stuff is described as "throwing red meat to the crowd", or "pumping up the base", and I often get the impression that no one is expected to take it seriously. In fact, I often get the impression that no one *is* taking it seriously. We're told who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and the outcome of any election may affect who gets more money and bragging rights, but everyone knows politics isn't *real*.

And let me stop now and address the people with the excuses. I don't know if you're listening to me, but maybe there's some version of cosmic osmosis. I do know people read here, and maybe some of them will find a way to make the point to some of you in ways you'll hear:

Politics is real. That's not just something the Meet The Press version of a soccer hooligan believes. It *is* real. Everything in politics affects real people. Three hours of talk radio ranting about "tax and spend welfare state liberals" isn't just a pep rally, and even if it was, that's bad enough. Because getting people to believe we're none of us responsible for or to one another, getting people to vote as though they believe that, that's not good. It doesn't just mean tax breaks for you and the people who contribute to your campaign or buy your books or listen to your radio show or watch your channel. That money has to come from somewhere. And pretty often, especially with so few things to take the money from anymore, it comes from programs that care for the people among us who most need help. Just as an example, it comes from the sorts of programs that provide care and medication and therapy and concrete help to people who are mentally ill.

So even if you want to pretend that the the hateful talk doesn't influence the mentally ill, even if you want to pretend the shooter was a left winger, even if any of your excuses are remotely valid, I'm still laying this at the door of the people who say these things. Because you spend so much time telling us we're not responsible for or to each other, and when people start to believe that, civilization breaks down.

You can't pretend you're being civil, you can't demand the other side be civil, while you're helping to destroy civilization.


* Okay, it was over twelve hours ago now, but beyond the fact that it can take me hours to write a blog comment, much less a post, I thought it might be a good idea to let this sit and reread it later to make sure I was saying what I actually meant to say, to the best of my ability. By now, of course, it's all been said faster and smarter and better by others, but if you're only blogging for an audience rather than saying what you have to say, you're probably in for a rough road on the statistics alone.

The Political Class

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog points to Frank Rich's "The Good Germans" column and asks if Rich is blaming the victims. It's a good question, and I think he is.

It's easy enough to blame Americans for the actions of their government. We are, at least in theory, a representative democracy. If our elected leaders don't do what we want them to do, or worse do what we don't want them to do, we can put pressure on them using our various civil rights, and we can simply replace them.

In reality, it's more complicated that that. Exercising your civil rights may tend to get you thrown in jail, from which anything could happen. And corporate and lobbyist money so corrupts our system that voting out your elected officials is problematic at best. It can be done, but the odds of accomplishing it are depressingly low.

But even that overlooks the initial problem, which is the media. Frank Rich doesn't get a pass here, either. I'm sure he'd say he didn't suggest he was any less culpable than the rest of us, but if we're getting into collective responsibility, to what extent is he more culpable?

The free press is supposed to be serve the valuable function of anti-propaganda. It's supposed to give us the information we need to know when we're being lied to, and maybe even what we can do about it. But too much of it's been captured by propaganda, and now it lies to us about what's happening, and lies to our elected officials about what we believe and want.

I probably don't have to recount the NYT's specific faults leading up to the Iraq war. While Rich himself may not be individually at fault for their gullible reporting and their belligerent editorial stance, is it fair to ask exactly how responsible the average American is, as well?

I tend to think not so much. It's not that Americans don't care, it's that they don't know. And they don't know because they're not supposed to.

I'm sure they've heard about Abu Ghraib by now, but it's like global warming--they're deliberately being fed the sort of "fraternity prank" storyline that allows them to at the very least be uncertain as to what actually is going on. I can't even tell you how many people I know who honestly think no one died, so how bad could it have been? People did die, of course, but you wouldn't necessarily have known that if you weren't paying attention.

And that's what it comes down to. Americans, for the most part, are in a permanent state of exhaustion and panic. They're falling behind financially and they know it, and they know even more that this makes them moral failures. Because that's what they're told. The Frosts are freeloaders, and so must you be too if you need assistance with anything. The economy's going great, if your budget isn't stretching, it's your fault, you just need to work harder.

The news you get says the war is going fine, or it's not, there's horrible shit going on, but war is hell, right? and you have twenty minutes on the bus to sort out the actual story from the conflicting news on the way to your second job, while you're worrying about bills and the kid's cough and your boss who keeps grabbing your ass.

Personally, you'd rather be worrying like hell that you don't have decent childcare while you work, but apparently the terrorists might at any moment blow you to hell, or so the government keeps telling you.

And this isn't to mention all those other jangling-panic cues Americans are routinely fed: E. coli, pollution, global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, the housing market collapse, the possibility your kids will be shot at school or picked up by rapists online, and Jesus Christ, you'd better hope to God nobody gets seriously sick.

Meanwhile, you have no idea what you're even supposed to feel guilty about, but you know there's plenty. In addition to the war, there's hoping like hell your nephew doesn't enlist for the college money because all you know is people are getting killed over there. And there's other things like global warming, which you don't have time to understand, you've heard talk about genocide in some place you haven't heard mentioned often enough to remember, and now they're talking about war with Iran, or was it Syria, and what the hell is going on in Afghanistan still?

That's just global anxiety. The domestic situation is a mess, too, and it hits you on a lot of even more personal issues. There's work, and rent, and school's back in and all you can afford for your kid is Chinese-made clothes from Wal-Mart, and you know that's not good on so many levels, but your options are? So you buy the probably-sweatshop-produced shit at Wal-Mart and you feel guilty and worried, on top of everything else, including how much gas it took to get there and you realize the kids are getting fatter and that apparently makes you a failure as a parent, at least according to the story you heard on the radio as you were late to work again through the worsening commute.

On top of that, so many of us are literally sick all the time. We don't have insurance, we don't have good insurance, we can't afford the out of pocket or the time off and it's impossible to get an appointment and getting to the doctor's is a pain too, so we just suck it up.

I don't think guys like Rich realize how desperate most of his fellow citizens are from day to day. They're exhausted. They're nearly frantic about the future. They're constantly in pain, and you'd better believe that takes a toll. And then they're blamed for not carving out the sheer volume of time it would take to get through the propaganda they're deliberately being fed by Rich's employers.

Can you blame them for wanting not to have to think about it? Can you really even blame them for wanting to believe the reports that say nothing's wrong rather than the ones that say it's all an increasing disaster and there's nothing we can do about it?

It's really, really hard to care about something so remote you can't imagine it, and that you really have no clear idea what's going on through all the conflicting reports. It's even harder to care when you have no idea what you can do about it and your own life is awash in disasters and near-disasters you have at least some idea how to solve, even if it's not working very well.

So, yeah, as Steve observes, we care more about dead American soldiers--because we knew them, we know their parents or friends or wives.

The Iraqis? Aren't they terrorists who blew up the Towers? Weren't they going to use nuclear bombs on us? Didn't we want them dead?

I really don't mean to be a callous asshole, and I honestly cannot fathom people who voted for Bush in 2004, knowing what we did at that point. But I also know that we have made it very difficult to pay attention, let alone to figure out the truth, not to mention figure out what to do about it. And calling those people "good Germans" is not helpful, nor is it especially fair. What the fuck does Rich expect them to be doing? Get arrested in massive numbers? Is he going to take care of their kids and pay their bills and explain it to their bosses?

None of this is as awful as what's happening to victims of our invasions. But the less power you have, the less right anyone has to call you a "good German" over not fixing it. Especially when you have no power by design, by the design at least in part of the people who pay Rich.

There really is a political class in this country. It consists of people who have the time and the resources to figure out what's going on and what to do about it. The average American does not belong to the political class, but people like Rich do. Even people like me do, and that's a pretty scary thought. I'm unemployed, and have plenty of time to sort through the lies Rich's industry feeds us, and even I don't know what the hell is happening most days let alone do I know what to do about it. And if even our Congresspeople can't stop what's going on in Iraq, is it remotely reasonable to blame people who barely have time to even vote?

And if you got the Frost reference, you belong to our political class too, and what are you doing about it? And why aren't you doing more, why haven't you gotten it stopped yet? Frank Rich wants to know.

Absolutely we should all be trying harder, but working-class Americans are not exactly the top of the blame list, and Rich's industry needs to stop making it harder for them to get the facts and get involved before he or anybody else gets to blame them.

Yes, people who ignore this stuff, or even support it, make me mad. but when you talk to them, you realize they're largely not bad people who want others to suffer. They're mostly decent people who have been told so many lies they don't know where to look for the truth. We have to fix that before we can expect more from them, let alone blame them for it.

Of Sharks And Men

So as many of you may have heard, it's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

The whole thing aggravates me, mostly because every year I look forward to it and it never lives up to the hype, disappointing in predictable ways year after year. Their host is generally annoying, often they have some supermodel or other celebrity bimbo who puts on a thong and jumps into a tank with baby sharks, you rarely get more than ten hours of new programming a year, there's a distinct emphasis on great whites, and really, the whole week is probably best described as Shark Attack Week.

Sharks are beautiful and diverse creatures, more than 350 species not including rays and skates. The average size of these sharks is about a foot and a half to three feet. While all of them are carnivores, the biggest, whale, basking, and megamouth sharks, are near exclusively filter feeders and in far more danger from humans trying to swim with them than humans are in danger of being attacked by them.

Something like twenty species have been known to attack humans aside from idiotic incidents where they bite some careless home aquarium owner, and fewer than ten have killed humans, only about four of them have done so repeatedly and without provocation. For the most part, a shark attack, incredibly rare as it is to begin with, is really more of a shark incident, and generally approaches the level of a pelagic squirrel mauling. You are more likely to be killed by a peanut allergy, or a dog, or a lightning strike, or falling in the shower, or tetanus. They kill five to ten people a year, they attack fewer than a hundred.

Meanwhile we're killing, according to many estimates, between forty to seventy million sharks a year, mostly for their fins but also because the occasional random teenager breaks into a public aquarium and stabs and beats juveniles to death with plastic pipes. And this is a heavy toll on a group of animals that mature slowly, live a long time, and pup in small numbers, not to mention shark fin soup and shark cartilage pills do nothing for humans, and we're not even sure how the things are reacting to global warming but apex predators tend to take the loss of the food chain badly.

The list of things we don't know about sharks is incredibly long and includes stuff like why don't they get cancer much, how do they navigate oceans, and, just as a basic thing, how many of them there are and whether various identified species are actually different populations of the same species or, come to that, just a bunch of individuals that travel farther and faster than we ever imagined.

All of these facts are duly recited by the Shark Week host every year, during breaks in the four of the seven or eight new shows each year that recount actual stories of great white attacks on humans or allow celebrities to prove how brave they are by swimming with great whites.

Now, I'm not the world's biggest fan of humans. I freely admit this. And I love sharks, though I'm going to have to say flat out that I'd prefer an annual Mola Mola Week or an Octopus Week or a Riftia Worm Week, or probably a lot of other things. And at least one program a year is pretty good, one year they had Ray Troll talking to paleontologists about extinct sharks. Another year they had Mike DeGruy show us his favorite ten or so sharks under five feet. We got a Mythbusters Jaws special one year, and another year the guy from Dirty Jobs did a couple of hours of shark-related jobs. And I could watch some of these guys all day, though I'd be happier if they'd ditch the supermodels and the actor celebs.

Nonetheless, despite all these incredibly predictable annoyances, I look forward to this every year. This year started off at heights of creepy unreached since the year they programmed exclusively re-enactments of shark attacks on humans.

And this too was predictable, and yet they surpassed my every expectation.

Night One began with a two hour show called Ocean Of Fear, about the Indianapolis. You can probably guess that they would begin this show with the boat scene from Jaws in which Quinn tells the story of the Indianapolis, and you're right, that's exactly what they did. For an added element of flippancy, they let Richard Dreyfuss, who played marine biologist Matt Hooper in Jaws, narrate.

In brief, if you don't know, what happened is this: At the end of July in 1945, the cruiser USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea. About 1200 men on board, three hundred died in the attack and the sinking. As they say in Jaws, nine hundred men went into the water, three hundred came out.

The details are interesting, and as it turns out very few were killed by the sharks as they floated at sea for four days or so, mostly they died of dehydration and drowning and drinking salt water and exposure and their original injuries. They were at sea so long, as the program is at pains to point out, because the Navy, while realizing that the ship was late and having heard chatter about a sub captain sinking a US ship, concluded that in war these things happen, the sub captain was either lying to look good or maybe it was a trap to ambush rescue ships, and the Indianapolis was probably just delayed somewhere, so nobody bothered to go looking. The ones who survived were really only rescued after one of them managed to get the attention of one of a series of planes they'd seen fly over them for days.

The program also takes time to note that the life rafts contributed to their problems, since to save space on ship, they were basically just inner tubes with grated floors hung from them by ropes. This means they were low in the water and harder to spot, it also means they were submersed in water the whole time, even those few lucky enough to get to a life raft, and the sharks could basically nose their way between the ropes and attack pretty much anybody.

The program goes on to note that the Navy court-martialed the Indianapolis' captain against the protests of the survivors, and that he eventually committed suicide, only to be cleared years later.

Other relevant details are brought up, the central point of which is that this was basically a clusterfuck in which at least some of the dead were eaten by oceanic whitetip sharks. The first point is made in recognition of the obvious, the second in deference to the fact that this is, after all, Shark Week.

Bored yet? Well, I'm getting around to my point. As I've mentioned, I find the emphasis on sharks eating people to be annoying, and I find this program to be particularly questionable. I own literally dozens of movies in which sharks eat people. I enjoy even the truly awful ones, and okay, most of them are.

But watching this show, I am creeped out beyond belief by a number of factors, the most prominent of which is the serious blurring of reality and fiction. Quinn did not survive the Indianapolis. Quinn was not real. He was a character in a book and a movie, but one they decided to start off this account of real survivors with, and which they keep echoing with their choice of narrator. Dreyfuss is a fine man, I'm sure, nothing against him. But his presence seemed to raise the whole thing out of the realm of a tragic, horrible incident that killed nine hundred young men and into a work of storytelling art.

And I'm not comfortable with that. I'm even less comfortable with the fact that they did the majority of the thing as re-enactments. Young men--young actors--pretending to die as men much their age did sixty years ago in a time of war partially at the hands of a Navy that didn't want to be distracted by their absence. It's worth noting that these young actors are all of service age, and I wonder if any of them as they pretended to be these dying sailors considered that they could just as easily be dying in Iraq instead of on a Discovery Channel show with the prospect of safely going home and drying off and having maybe a drink and a nice dinner and a good night's sleep at the end of the day. I'm not suggesting that I'd be happier if these guys were dying in a desert, and I'm absolutely not calling them cowards since I don't actually think anybody should be dying in Iraq, including Iraqis. But I have to wonder if it was at all as surreal an experience for them as it seemed to me, just watching.

To blur matters even further, the actors' lines came, in many cases, directly from the statements given by the survivors long ago. Their shark expert interviewed a couple of the survivors who remain, and then went to the Memorial, again these are real people, not just a script.

And maybe it's my schizophrenia which admittedly makes this kind of line-blurring quite common for me, but this all seemed profoundly surreal and in some hard-to-pin-down way disrespectful. It was at best a vicarious experience for the education of viewers, and at worst a voyeuristic little peep show for the entertainment of viewers.

I'd like to pretend that I'm different from the rest of the viewers who more or less were invited to regard the whole thing as two hours of wild animal snuff, but I watched it all with a deep fascination, like it was a car wreck, though I do have to say I deliberately don't watch those because probably the last thing the victims need is an audience. But in the privacy of my own home I could, and did, gawk like everybody else, and I'm not proud of that.

But it even got worse than that, and more to my mind disrespectful of the actual victims of this tragedy. This year's host is the man who does the Discovery Channel's Survivorman series. He's a guy who goes out into the middle of nowhere with a camera and eats live animals as he tries to stay alive, which would be fine except that it's voluntary subsistence living. He could be sitting in his living room eating a TV dinner, he doesn't have to be biting the feet off toads, and someday I expect to see his ass hauled before a judge for polishing off an endangered species for dinner in front of his camera. This show too is profoundly voyeuristic, more so when you consider that half the commercials during airings of it on The Science Channel are for diet pills and programs, mobility devices, and high tech beds for a more comfortable night's sleep. These are not people--and I say this as one of them--who are ever going to need this information, and if they ever did they'd be dead of a dozen less controllable factors long before they found a turtle to dash its brains out and boil in its own shell. This show too is no more real than a prime time drama, except for the animals killed, for whom it's pretty real albeit briefly.

But, hey, he's been dumped at sea and forced to fend off oceanic whitetips or something, so hell, he's practically empathetic here, except that he's not a nineteen year old Iowa farm boy, and he's got a choice in the matter, and also he lives.

So in breaks in the show, we'd watch Les step in to tell us all of the facts cited above and urge us to do our part to save the lives of sharks and also not to be scared of them. It was beyond weird.

But not as weird as some of the actual commercials. The US Military wants you to go to Iraq, it seems, though they didn't put it quite that way. Mostly what they said was that they wanted to teach your teenage son how to fly cool planes and look you in the eye when he talks to you. I find the appealing-to-the-parents recruitment commercials to be in poor taste to begin with, as to my mind a parent is probably often the only sort of safeguard a kid dazzled by a recruiter's lies has. How many high school boys do you know who understand global politics, or who think there's a possibility they will ever die? So where there actually are parents in place with the wisdom and inclination to display some judgment, I would like to see them do so in the absence of hard sell propaganda.

In particular, though, I wonder about this marketing niche. "Hey, moms and dads, even though you're spending a couple of hours watching us abandon young men to the elements and the sharks because, you know, we were busy, and just because we scapegoated the admittedly heroic captain into suicide, and just because we are more than capable of turning a disaster into an overwhelming tragedy, we promise if you give us your kids we'll just, you know, teach 'em to stand up straight and stuff and then send them off to college. We promise we'll... take... good... care... of them. Really."

And that strikes me as not only creepy and disrespectful, but also as astoundingly stupid. And I imagine that at least one parent got the picture and is spending the week convincing their kid there might be better ways to pay for college. And I have to wonder if any of those dead men would consider the possibility that this may have inadvertently saved another kid over half a century away to be in some small way a fitting tribute.

And I'd like to end this on an uplifting note by saying I think they might, but that's probably fiction too. I say probably, because at least some of these men were heroes in the ways they were able to be, and because they had signed up to go to a war rather than, say, taking up acting, it's not unreasonable to guess that some of them understood they might be sacrificing themselves for the lives of others. On the other hand, they were scared kids, left to fend for themselves, and they died. Whether or not there's anything after this, they're still dead. And we who didn't know them, over half a century away, have no place saying what they might feel about anything.

It Always Looks Like So Much Fun When They Do It

Please allow me to present the voice in my head that is apparently Bill "Culture Warrior" O'Reilly's biggest fan, and the Watch It Like A Wingnut movie review, crossposted at No More Mister Nice Blog, where I can't even keep my fonts straight.

Wow! We finally got to see the Transformers movie, and it just goes to prove everything I've believed all along! But first, a confession. My partner and I went to the theater in our brand new car, which is a tree-hugging hybrid, and a foreign car at that. I'm pretty sure this means my partner is a traitor to the idea of America. I'm so ashamed. And I was even more ashamed after seeing the movie because it is, quite simply, the most American movie… ever.

For starters, it's very pro-military. And even better, pro-defense spending. If we hadn't been pouring all that money into military research, we would never be able to defeat the evil alien robots, so thank God for that, and also for the NRA, which helps us all defend ourselves from evil alien robots.

The movie also makes the point that an alien invasion would establish the president's legacy as a take-charge, leadership, kicking-ass kind of guy. So I'm pretty much rooting for that now, since really, if you think about it there was very little collateral damage, so the president wouldn't even have to go to any funerals, and besides it just looked cool.

Now, there was a recruiting ad for the Marines before the movie, but that's okay because the movie itself proves what I've been saying all along: You don't have to enlist to fight in the War on Terror! The main character, some skinny nerdy guy whose name I can't remember, doesn't do that. Instead, he buys a car. A gas-guzzling, American car. Which turns out to be a cool alien robot who's both his bodyguard and a really good way to get the chick the guy wants. And with the help of the chick and the car robot and the other good robots (all of whom, I note, were good American cars and trucks, big ones, too, and none of those lame hybrids.) and a couple of military guys who were just sort of hanging around and a couple of hackers, the nerdy kid manages to save the world. How? By buying a car! And also by memorizing lines from cartoons.

Even the hackers helped save the world, so now when your mom tells you you'll never amount to anything just sitting in front of the computer eating Cheetos all day, tell her she's wrong. If alien robots come, you'll be needed to save the planet, which is way more important than sitting in a kiddy pool in the desert somewhere with all those other guys who got basically blown up when they weren't expecting it and none of their weapons helped very much, so you have to stay here and make sure you're safe, because if you enlisted and got your arms blown off, for example, the whole world would be destroyed when you couldn't type anymore. It's like that thing Spock was always saying about the good of the many. And anyway, one of the robots gets killed and another loses his leg, so it's not like we're not all on the frontlines in the War no matter where we are.

But, okay, at the beginning, in the opening credits, there's something about the movie being produced in association with Hasbro, and the whole audience started laughing, because Hasbro is a pretty funny word. And then there are the military guys in a helicopter, and one of them keeps speaking Spanish, I guess, which annoys the other guys because they don't and they know he speaks good English, so why is he doing that? He might be making fun of them, and how would they even know? So they keep yelling at him to speak English, which makes sense, and he won't, and I think he gets eaten or killed or something or maybe it was some other guy, I couldn't really tell them apart.

Anyway, at some point the military guys end up in an Iraqi village, and they yell at some kid's dad that they need a telephone, and he just points to it, so everybody in Iraq speaks English well enough, too. I think this just proves how stupid the Left is when they say things like, oh, but we should keep the Arabic translators, even if they do keep being gay. Clearly they just want to use the military as a social experiment to integrate the gays. Which is pointless because we don't need them anyway. I mean, even the robots speak English.

I won't ruin the movie for you, because you should totally go see it instead of giving your money to Michael Moore to see his stupid hypocritical movie (If he was really interested in health care, he'd lose weight!). But I want to tell you a few other really cool things about the movie. At some point the Secretary of Defense tells some weaselly guy who looks kind of Arabic to me that he should do what the military guys want because "Losing is not an option with these guys" or something like that, and the whole audience just cheered! So those polls about how Americans think we're losing in Iraq, I don't know who they're polling, maybe they're just calling up the offices of CounterPunch and The New York Times or something. Because where I was sitting in that theater, everybody thinks we have no choice but to win!

Also, and I don't want to ruin this, but I don't know how they did it, they made the perfect argument for pardoning Scooter Libby—sometimes you have to defend your friends or family out of loyalty, and it's not right that you should have to have a criminal record just for being loyal. Loyalty is supposed to be a virtue, after all.

I also want to point out that the movie makes a great point that you shouldn't go around destroying dams just because the fish-huggers think you should, because they might be there for a very good reason, and it would endanger us all if the government had to explain why they needed to leave any dam where it is. We should just trust them, since they know more about this stuff than we do. And while we're at it, it's clear evidence that Hollywood has finally rejected that failed "theory" of evolution—the aliens are cars, not dinosaurs!

And, really, I think the whole thing is basically an analogy for Iraq—part of it is even in Iraq—where the Autobots are America, and the Decepticons are Al Quaeda insurgents, and Optimus Prime is Bush. Because the Decepticons want to take over the planet to get something from us—just like the oil in Iraq—and they also think humans should be killed because they don't deserve freedom. So the Autobots have to fight them because they think that Iraq, or in this analogy the humans, should have freedom. So, really, the Megatron guy just hates us for our freedoms, which is what the president has been saying all along.

Finally, I just want to encourage everybody to go see it. At last, at long last, the liberal secular progressives who control Hollywood have given us a movie that's not about hating Christ or about loving anal sex, but is instead about patriotism. I haven't been this proud to eat American theater popcorn since Independence Day came out and proved that guys with computers can defeat an alien invasion. Booyah!

I Wasn't Done With Thursday Yet!

My partner is considering getting me a toolbelt to keep my zombie-poking spoon in.
"Hey, if you're going to invite Crazy in, you might as well let it sit down on the couch and offer it some lemonade."

In that spirit, today's random ten: Be What You Are, Even If That Happens To Be Crazy edition.


Crazy Mixed-Up Kid, The Smithereens. Album, Especially For You.
Yeah, yeah. I should have taken a mulligan, I suppose.
"I guess she's just a crazy mixed-up kid."

Tunnel of Lungs, The Minus 5. Album: I Don't Know Who I Am (Let The War Against Music Begin Volume 2).
I have to say, this song sounds like a migraine.
"It's not all right, it's never okay."

So Long, It's Been Good To Know You, Woody Guthrie. Album, in this case, a compilation called That's Why We're Marching, though I have it on others as well.
"I've sung this song but I'll sing it again."

Worthless, The Young Fresh Fellows. Album, Because We Hate You.
It's like this. There's a special place in my heart for Scott McCaughey, California-born but Seattle-famous songwriter with the world's worst case of ADHD. I'm convinced he's a shark, if he stops moving he'll die. But I own nearly everything he's ever done in various guises (and a lot of what people he's done stuff with have done with other people), and he's the guy behind The Minus 5 as well, including a vinyl more-or-less bootleg of the YFF doing a charming piano version of "Shake Your Love", I'm not making this up so stop looking at me like that. Anyway, few people turn a phrase as slyly as he does, and I love him for it. This is maybe not one of his better efforts, however.
"I don't know why I should try to explain a thing."

Whistling in the Dark, They Might be Giants. Album, Flood.
This might be some kind of euphemism. Or it might just mean what it says. Hard to tell, with them.
"Be what you're like, be like yourself."

Emergency, The Tragically Hip. Album, Day For Night.
Not my favorite song here.
"Things we say here stay here forever, amen."

Crazy Love, Volume 2, Paul Simon. Graceland.
This came up last week, too, I note.
"I have no opinion about this."

It's Only Me, Barenaked Ladies. Album, Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits.
"It's just natural, it's only me."

She's Got A Problem, Fountains of Wayne. Album, um, Fountains of Wayne.
My partner thinks this song is hilarious for some reason.
"She's gonna do something dumb."

All of a Sudden (It's Too Late), XTC. Album, English Settlement.
"Life's like a firework, you're only lit once, you must stand and radiate correctly."

You are cordially invited to leave your own in comments, or to just tell me ten songs you like, or anything else you want. I'm pretty easy.

Second Best

Over at World O'Crap, there's a discussion going on prompted by a post made by Ace of Spades, and I'm not linking there because I don't actually give the faintest fuck about him. It's the discussion at Wo'C that's got my interest, in particular the comments by Hysterical Woman and by Bill S., who has been an extraordinary voice in the wilderness on this issue for as long as I've known him.

In essence, California is now allowing conjugal visitation for prisoners who are gay. This seems like only common sense, to me. Regardless of what their system is, it should be applied to everyone.

This has prompted Ace of Spades to remark, in an incredibly callous manner:

"Eh, why not? They’ve been allowing involuntary shower-room gay conjugal visits for hundreds of years."

followed by the cute little joke,

They should stop calling it "prison" and start calling it "The Most Wonderful Place In The World."

Blogger Scott at Wo'C, and the commenters there, are justly appalled by this. Rape jokes are comprehensively revolting to begin with, but most people either understand that, or at least accept that other people will regard them as creeps for making them and keep it to themselves.

There are, it seems to me, a couple of distinct attitudes underlying a comment like Ace's. The obvious one is that people deserve what they get. This is a pretty standard view among conservatives and libertarians. If you're poor, it's because you haven't worked hard enough, rather than outsourcing or disability. If you're in prison, it's because you're guilty, nothing to do with selective enforcement of laws or a justice system that favors the wealthy. If the bologna you gave your family caused food poisoning, it's your fault for not cooking it first. The general assumption there is that luck plays very little role in how your life unfolds, or at least that you can overcome bad luck well enough to achieve as much success as those who started out with better circumstances.

So if you're in prison being raped, it's because you deserve it, and I'm not in prison being raped because I don't deserve it. So there's really no need for empathy, and no basis for it. I don't have to wonder what it would be like to be that person, because that person is fundamentally different from me. There is no circumstance under which I would need to be defended against this, so there's no need for me to defend anyone else from it. They're getting what they deserve, and I'm getting what I deserve, and why should anyone interfere with that?

Well, perhaps we should because people don't go to prison exclusively because they are guilty. There is no legitimate way to dispute the fact that innocent people go to prison, and even guilty people go to prison for crimes that are greater than those they actually committed. But that's easy--up until about six years ago, it wouldn't really have occurred to me that a significant portion of my fellow citizens would feel anything other than outrage for a wrongly-imprisoned innocent person. Now, of course, I know that a lot of my fellow citizens think it's perfectly acceptable to torture the innocent, but in general it takes a certain level of cruelty to feel no compassion for the wrongfully imprisoned.

What's harder is the notion that even the guilty, and even those guilty of truly vicious crimes, even those guilty of, for example, child rape and murder, have not been handed a sentence of rape, torture, and possible eventual death by disease. For whatever reason, this isn't a sentence we hand out, and it seems like we have an obligation, therefore, to make sure it doesn't happen. Even people who absolutely do deserve to be imprisoned are at the mercy of the society holding them captive, and when people are at your mercy there are rules about how it is acceptable to treat them. Rape as a routine feature of imprisonment is a human rights violation, and it is so for a reason.

As with torture, it's something we do not, or should not, sanction because of what it says about us, what it does to us, even more than what it does to our victims. I've been raped. I have no empathy for rapists. I don't even have much in the way of empathy for rapists who have been raped. There are some people I like to believe I could cheerfully kill, and over whose death and suffering I do not grieve. But to say, as some people do, that rapists deserve what's coming to them in prison, strikes me as a way of doing to them what they did to us, even if only by proxy. And having been a rape victim, I am not willing to be a rapist, even in a technical way.

I could say they deserve it, but I won't. Because all rapists think their victims deserve it, and will come up with any necessary justification to make it not their fault but that of their victims. And sanctioning prison rape as some sort of "Well, they should have known not to go there in the first place" bonus deterrent is not in any significant way different from "Well, she should have known not to go there in the first place".

The other underlying attitude I sense in Ace's comment is a view that homosexuality is not about love, or that rape is. I'm not going to guess at which one is in play there, and people far smarter than I have spent a lot of words trying to deal with the attitude that rape is a compliment paid by someone who finds you sexually attractive.

But there are an awful lot of otherwise well-meaning people, not to mention a lot of assholes, who don't seem able to understand that a sexual relationship they don't find appealing is, consent being present, equal to their own. There's a tendency to dehumanize anything that is not a straight relationship. A tendency to believe that since you could not personally be attracted to a specific type of person, nobody normal could.

So gay relationships are linked in the public mind with pedophilia, or bestiality, or when the Freepers really get going on the subject, chair-fucking. The conclusion there seems to be that at least one of the participants is not a real person, and that there couldn't possibly be any sort of genuine love there, but only a mental disorder that results in a pathological sexual attraction to dogs, or to children, or to teddy bears.

Needless to say, this is a horribly offensive thing to say to anyone about the people they love. Not just offensive to say that you are a pervert for loving them, but that they are not, somehow, fully human. Personally, I'd rather people called me a pervert than suggested my partner was the moral equivalent of a blow-up doll, but these statements inextricably do both, and are all the more cruel for it.

It is, nonetheless, a very common attitude. Gay sex isn't love. It's just a mental disorder. And therefore, is there really any difference between gay love and gay rape? You might think I'm going too far with that interpretation, but at least one of the "ex-gay" organizations explicitly makes the point that gay sex is mutual rape, and nothing to do with love even if the participants are delusional enough to think they love each other.

So as far as I can tell, that's what Ace is saying here. Not just "Ha! Suffering is funny!" but also "Rape, sex, what's the difference to a pervert anyway?" And I'd like to contend that in a world less founded on a complete lack of empathy towards other humans, that either of those views would not be acceptable.

History is Made by Stupid People

Phil Nugent had some thoughts on defunding the federal government this weekend, you are encouraged to read them. The man's an amazing ranter, and I mean that with absolute respect. But it sent me off on a tangent of my own, and about the time I realized that my comment was going to get truncated over at No More Mister Nice Blog's place, where Phil crossposted, I decided perhaps it'd be better over here where a smaller audience might mean no one points out my various and prominent flaws in logic. (Unless you feel like it, in which case, have at it.)

For some reason, I'm pro-government. Always have been. People who say things like "Government doesn't solve problems", or "Name one good thing the government's ever done", or "Capitalism can do that better" baffle the living hell out of me.

Give me a few minutes, and I could name at least three dozen government programs that are important enough they need doing but that capitalism isn't capable of, or interested in. Let's start with orphan drugs. People with rare diseases, for which drugs aren't available because any given company can make more manufacturing Cialis than something maybe a thousand or so people across the US take. Unless we're willing to just write these people off, telling them, well, yes, a cure exists, but you can't have it because there's not enough profit in making it, taxpayer subsidies seem like a good solution.

Rural electrification, there's another good one. No for-profit company is going to string wire all the way out to some tiny hamlet in the Ozarks for the sake of a few hundred people. For that matter, no for-profit hospital is going to spend much if any time treating the indigent in their ERs if they're not made to. For-profit schools is another good way to say "MacDonald's Training Academy", and no kid is going to learn literature or citizenship or art there. Anybody want to explore the concept of capitalistic fire departments? Remember, your non-covered neighbor's housefire can very quickly become yours, and even if the fire department saves your home, you'd have less damage if they put out the fire when it was still two houses away. Road building, police departments, prisons, the military, you want to see what happens when they go capitalistic, Iraq is rather instructive.

There's an awful lot of stuff I'm perfectly happy to pay taxes for so everybody can use, and so no one person or group controls how it gets used. If civil courts are replaced with the sort of arbitration my bank tells me is my only option if we have a disagreement, those of us who aren't hiring and paying the arbitrators will never see justice. If the roads are maintained by auto companies, you can just keep your bike in your garage. If Microsoft is the only source of funding for the local aquarium, you can expect to have to wait outside with the field trip kids while they hold their monthly employee banquet. When the Wall Street Journal gives PBS more money than anybody else, you can expect to see programming where some B-list columnist quizzes guests as to whether the economy is going "great" or "really great".

So government can absolutely solve problems, and paying taxes is how we have a government with an interest in and an ability to solve problems that are important, rather then just profitable. And right off the bat, I have an adversarial stance toward anyone who tells me smaller government is inherently better--which is not to say I'm any happier with those who propose that larger government is inherently better. It's not the size, as they tell us, it's what you do with it.

The thing is, I don't actually know anyone who goes around saying that big government is inherently good, unless you count the walking pathologies we've come to refer to as "authoritarians", and even they aren't really arguing for bigger government, just more powerful government. And even that only in certain, narrowly constrained areas (like, "any part of the law that will control the behavior of people who aren't me"). So when I find myself arguing about the appropriate role of government, it is almost exclusively with republicans, and usually with the drown-it-in-the-bathtub sort.

I will continue to contend that a big part of why we have Bush is that we let Clinton get away with pretending we had a "budget surplus". I know, I know, we really only did it because it made the GOP's Congressional witchhunters look bad to be going after a guy who accomplished the budget restraints they were never capable of, etc. I was never a huge fan of Clinton, and a couple of his noteworthy policies still strike me as unnecessarily vicious, which is not to say, as they do, that he might not be entertaining to have a beer with. But even so, I found myself defending him in conversations with people who still regard The Clenis as the Antichrist. And defending him frequently. I suspect it was probably pretty common for liberals to have a few policies with which they agreed with Clinton, and to defend him on that basis to people who thought calling Hillary a "dyke", Chelsea a "dog", and Bill a "scumbag" was the height of wit.

So the budget thing came in handy, especially to jab at republicans and conservatives who advocated balanced budget amendments all the while venerating Reagan. But it was pretty predictable the sort of problems that would come from letting it be framed as a surplus. Especially it should have been predictable after we got a good look at what Dubya had done in Texas, though surprisingly few people seemed to regard it as any sort of valid indicator of anything.

So we had this money that was theoretically unspoken for, and the GOP, as they do, announced that the government was stealing your money! More than it needed! Because that's what governments do! And it is only justice--justice, I say--to return it to the people from whom the government stole it! And thus the grand GOP experiment of bribing the voters with their own money--and never delivering anyway--brought us to Dubya, Worst President Ever.

The worst part of allowing him to bribe his way into the White House with that money is, it damned well was never a surplus in the first place. It was the money we'd promised to all sorts of people and programs that we cut during the Reagan/Bush years, and, yes, during the Clinton years as well. We took the money out of schoolkids' mouths, we took it away from health inspectors and teachers and hospitals and research and civil servants in all those boring but necessary positions.

The reason at the time was that we couldn't afford it, not with these huge budget deficits. So we cut right back to the bone all the social stuff that helps hold the country together, and when we had the money again, instead of going back to re-fund those programs, we pretended it was a surplus. We pretended, for example, that teachers were doing just fine on smaller classroom budgets, or that poor families had learned to go elsewhere for food, and that these were solutions that were workable for the long term.

Regardless of whether every poor family found a non-governmental solution (and I can promise you a lot of them didn't), it's pretty close to obscene to have pretended that if they weren't objecting loud enough for us to hear them, then there was no problem. (Meanwhile, we made damned sure they couldn't get anywhere near any sort of position from which to complain.)

But the minute people started referring to that as a "surplus", rather than "finally having the money to meet our obligations", the GOP candidates were all set up to start yelling about how we needed to give all that extra money back to "the people who paid it". (Or at least those whose major tax burden was income tax, which is not the case for most people.)

That was predictable. And it was predictable that a whole lot of idiots would buy into it. And now we have Bush, and we're struggling to meet even the already grotesquely inadequate budgets for our social programs--and will be doing that for the foreseeable future.

Life sucks, and sometimes you have to make choices. If Junior drives the family car into the neighbors' living room, maybe the family has to talk to the dentist about making smaller payments while they do something about the mess. But if it turns out the damage wasn't quite as much as it was expected to cost, the family doesn't continue to skip dental bills and instead buy a big screen TV with the money. They sure as hell don't triple Junior's allowance with the money they're keeping back from dental bills.

Personally, I've never for the life of me been able to imagine why we let the GOP control the government when they don't seem to understand what the point of it is. Phil's got me a little closer to understanding it, and it was worth the read just for that.

(The title of this post, for the record, is an Arrogant Worms song.)

On Hope, Zombies, and Rogaine

Brief update. I've decided to start pretending the zombies are Bigfoot (Bigfeet? Bigfoots?) and seeing how that goes. Of the various possible Big Hairy Monster types a Bigfoot could inadvertantly transform into, I figure I'd like all of them a lot better than the zombies. So now I'm staring at them and envisioning them with fur. Who knows, it might work. After all, I turned them into zombies in the first place.

For the record, I just spotted a couple of them shambling down the hallway towards the housemate's room, but as I'm almost positive they're not real, I have elected not to do anything about it. I might regret that later, but on the whole probably not.

Additionally, please note the blogroll over there. Those of you who are there may now start anticipating the extra server capacity you'll need to accommodate the new .00003 hits you'll get a year from my blogrolling you. You're welcome. I may get around to sorting it eventually, but that's at the moment a pretty good representation of sites I hit every day that have little or nothing to do with origami, paper models, or fish. I kind of strung them together from my bookmarks list, so odds are good I skipped over a couple that I didn't mean to skip over. If you can think of something I missed, or something you think I ought to be reading, feel free to let me know. Also, if you're there and don't want to be associated with me, feel free to let me know that, too, and I'll remove you.

On Hope, or a Reasonable Facsimile Thereof

Today I've got the sort of migraine that makes you want to break things, so let's talk about that, shall we? I assume you know me well enough by now to know there will be diversions along the way, and that they'll sort of end up being the point to the extent that there is ever any damned point to any of this.

I took 300 mgs of imitrex a couple hours ago, and needless to say it's not helping much. I'm aware that 300 mgs of Imitrex falls into the category of "Simple Retirement Plans, Involving Oak Boxes", but there are moments when it doesn't seem like that big a drawback, assuming I don't get reincarnated with the headaches and end up like that otter on my sidebar. I've also taken three Tylenol and 50 mgs of Promethazine, which is an anti-nausea agent, because combining them sometimes helps.

I first took Imitrex ten years ago, it was the first triptan drug we tried after realizing that the ergotamines didn't even rise to the level of placebo for me. It never worked too well and it didn't even not-work-very-well for very long and within two years I was onto Maxalt. I'm cycling through them all again, having used and discarded each of the available triptans without a good deal of success. I'm going through them faster this time, but with luck, and with the new preventative regimen, I might be able to hold out for another five years and we'll hope that they come up with something new before that ticks out.

In the meantime, and for the last several years, I've been using a variety of things which logically have no chance of doing anything useful, and which I know don't help, but then, you could say the same thing about the Imitrex, which actually is supposed to help. Compared to Imitrex, which is about fifteen dollars a pill to my insurance company and five bucks a pill to me, topical mint oils and gel patches and Bach Flower Remedies and homeopathic migraine pills and mint gum and sour candies and cold compresses and icy water and aromatherapy and cucumber peels and blue ribbons and a variety of folk magics are at least cheaper as they don't work at all.

Right now, on the desk beside me, I have three tubes of Head-On. The company claims the useful ingredient is white bryony, which is an herbal preparation often used for headaches, though in my experience it doesn't do much more than, say, Amerge. But the actual active ingredient is menthol. Menthol is about three quarters of what makes Vapo Rub smell like that, and what it does is provide a cooling sensation by aiding evaporation, something like that. Personally, I don't care if the company claims that it works because an endangered species once peed in the stream that runs by the parking lot of the place where the guy who invented it used to buy his soybeans. The fact is, it's a convenient topical menthol in a container that doesn't "look like a test tube", and is therefore unlikely to get me subjected to additional scrutiny at security checkpoints in airports and government buildings.

Does it work? About as well as a cold washcloth, or indeed the old folk magic remedy cucumber peels, which works on the same principle--something cold on your forehead. But it's easier to carry around, and it's pretty cheap compared to the fifteen dollar roll-on bottle of mint oil and gunk I got at Crabtree and Evelyn, or the ten dollar tubes of cream from Earth Therapeutics that turn runny after a few months, and the ten dollar spray bottles from Nature Well, and the ten dollar roll on tubes of MigraStick you find at health food stores in which the oil turns brown after a few months, and which as I mentioned, "look like test tubes".

Why do I bring this up? Partly to bitch, and partly because I'm angry. I read a bunch of blogs, where I don't always comment because I tend to not enjoy having my ass rhetorically stomped by people who are smarter than me or better at arguing than me, but it doesn't mean I haven't still got things I'd like to say. So, anyone who's reading this has probably already spotted the blog and the comment in question, and has now put two and two together, because, let's face it, I'm outclassed by my own commenters, too. So we're not going to go back to that, but I'm just going to see if I can make a couple of points here.

It's easy to look at people who buy Head-On as fools, since the active ingredients don't really do anything, and are at homeopathic levels of dilution anyway. Clearly these people are throwing their money away, and are stupid, and are to be regarded as suckers. And by that same token, people who buy lottery tickets are suckers, too, especially if they're poor. If you know it's not going to help you, why are you throwing your money away? There are, after all, some people you just can't help.

The thing is, you go in for the lottery tickets, and the Head-On, when there's nothing else that *can* help you. It's very easy to discount the power of desperation. If you're poor, in this country, you have to be aware that you're very likely to always *be* poor. If you're working poor, you're already working as hard and as long as you possibly can, and statistically and practically, you will never be any closer to The American Dream than you are now. The only financial mobility you can reasonably expect, in fact, is downward.

Your chances of winning the lottery are virtually nil. But they're still the best chance you have.

I've never been that poor by necessity. When I haven't had somewhere to live, it's been by choice. But I've worked with an awful lot of people who are, and I've watched them buy lottery tickets, and tried to argue them out of it. Eventually, I figured out that these were people who were buying hope to dull their desperation, and who's to say that's not a good use of their money? It's the same thing I do every time I buy another box of B&T Headache Relief or grapefruit aromatherapy oil, or for that matter refill my Imitrex. Who am I to call them suckers?

If there's someone to blame for this, it's the system that keeps poor people poor no matter how hard they work. Anything else, it seems to me, is blaming the victim through a complete ignorance of the nature of desperation.

That said, I'm going to go take a hot bath with lavender gel, and there's no logical reason for that to work either, but there's really nothing else that will work any better. Sometimes, all you can have is a workable placebo, or a little false hope.

When That Third Strike Comes Out Of Nowhere

Anybody up for another Don Imus thing? I promise not to cry if you skip it. In fact, let me offer you something else to do: Go make fake paper sushi.

Okay, musing forward. Nothing especially coherent, no moral. Just some observations. You've been warned.

It's kind of an interesting thing to watch, though. I mean, Imus probably doesn't, sincerely doesn't, think he deserves all this. And in a way he's right. It's not the most important way, in the most important ways he's absolutely wrong.

But I'm sure he really doesn't think he's a bigot. I'm sure it's never crossed his mind that he might be racist. And not in the way that Confederate flag wavers don't think they're racist but just think they're defending their culture from the minorities the government is giving special privileges to. He probably just doesn't think he's a racist at all. He probably is convinced he likes black people and gets along with them fine.

Why? Because no one's ever told him this before, at least no one with the power or voice to make him listen. So I imagine he sees this all as hitting without warning, and I bet he thinks it's unfair. I know he's supposed to have said he saw this coming, but I bet he hadn't a few days ago. I bet when he said it it didn't even occur to him that there was anything particularly objectionable about it, he sure wouldn't have thought it would cost him his job.

And that's where he's sort of right about it being unfair. He's said this shit all along, and so have all his colleagues, and aside from screaming and yelling from the "special interest groups", which are almost by definition people nobody in power takes seriously, there's been no consequences to it.

So it probably never occurred to him that there ever would be, and now that there are, he might be wondering where the hell that came from? This isn't an argument for not treating these things as serious because we don't uniformly do that. Limbaugh getting a pass doesn't mean Imus should. Rather, Imus having to deal with the reaction to his behavior means that Limbaugh should as well, and Savage, and Beck, and all of the rest of them.

It also means maybe the rest of us need to take a fresh look at our own assumptions about ourselves. Am I a "good person"? Would anyone tell me if I wasn't? Or do I wake up one day and realize that what I assumed was a tolerable sort of low-level assholism has suddenly landed me in a lot of hot water and, not incidentally, hurt a lot of people I didn't really mean to hurt.

I suppose it's just a human thing, or maybe I just like to think so because I've already had more than a few of those moments. Where you go from them probably has something to do with whether you can look back and realize that you *did* have some warning, and whether you recognize that you should have seen it, or instead just blame others for not making you listen.

I don't know that I would say Imus is blaming others for what's happened, but he sure seems to be regarding himself as something of an innocent victim who was just having some fun.

Missing The Point

Someone seems to be, anyway. I'm not ruling out that it's me.

Common Dreams has an editorial up by a Theo Stein, who I'm not aware of having heard of, which is my fault and not his. I tend to agree with most of it, the premise of which is that the Bushies are a bunch of fuckups who couldn't organize a two-person parade to the end of the block with a compass, a map, and a yellow brick road. As premises go, this one is fairly inoffensive to anyone who still has half the wits they were born with (and is not in some way income-dependent on this administration). Hell, even I agree.

But at the end of it, Mr Stein has this to say:

Can’t these guys do anything right?

No, and that’s the point, gleeful liberals and progressive bloggers are saying. The Bush administration’s mighty implosion is the logical, inevitable result of entrusting ideologues who abhor government with the responsibility of governing.

It’s like handing the keys to your new car to a demolition derby champ and wondering what the heck happened when your ride comes back missing its bumpers.

Conservatives would have a tough time arguing government is the enemy of the people if Republicans actually made it work, they argue. Thus, this snarky take goes, Bush has been an extraordinary success.

Well, that's certainly an argument made by some snarky liberal bloggers. (You know who you are.) He goes on to say, however:

Count me among those who are hard-pressed to accept the notion that conservatives live in an upside-down world where spectacularly incompetent governance is a mark of success.

But these cowboys sure make you wonder, don’t they?

Which is where the missing of the point comes in. Either I'm missing it, which I'm not prepared to rule out, or Mr Stein is. Mr Stein, have you met Grover Norquist, by any chance? Mr Norquist, a leading thinker of the right--a group that admittedly considers Newt Gingrich a Man Of Ideas--has some interesting theories about the role of government in America's future. I believe Mr Norquist considers the Bush response to Katrina to be not inconsistent with success.

All of which actually seems to be rather beside the point. Snark aside, the people who make this point are generally making a slightly more subtle point, or at least I know I am when I say things like that.

The reality here is not that this administration, or any other going back at least as far as Reagan who governed under the theory that government is not a solution but a problem, actively goes out of its way to fuck up. They don't have to. People who don't believe that government can--or should--be used to help people do not go into government to make it help people. Which leaves a limited range of motivations: power is the biggest one, though running close apparently is "creepy Oedipal issues".

But it is not unreasonable, if you believe that government cannot be used to help people and you also believe that government is innately corrupt and wasteful, also articles of faith among the GOP, to figure that some of that money might as well come the way of you and your friends. It probably seems positively benign to use the power and money of government to pay back the people whose favors and money got you where you are. After all, it's either that or the money will just be thrown at poor people, which, apparently, is bad for their character.

So that's, to my mind, the driving dynamic of republican politics. It's all basically cronyism, though I suspect they'd object to the pejorative nature of the word and suggest that all politicians bring their friends with them and use appointments to return favors. Which is probably true, but I think it's fair to expect that people be selected for competence or expertise when it comes to positions where peoples' lives are on the line. FEMA is the obvious illustration of this, Defense, the Justice Department, CDC, and Homeland Security would be others. I'd consider things like OSHA to be too important to play with, too. The commission for overseas peanut butter marketing, feel free to appoint your lazy brother-in-law.

So I don't think I would seriously attempt to make the point that Bush has installed people in key positions with the expectation that they would fuck up and he could argue that government doesn't work--if only because he absolutely doesn't argue that. In fact, he says that whatever happened was pretty much the best possible outcome, and then backslaps and heckuvajobs and passes out medals and promotions like Mardi Gras beads.

Instead, I would argue that he simply doesn't care if the people he installs are incompetent and bad things result. The fact that conservative thinktanks can then use those bad results to argue that government doesn't work, and suggest that privatization would be the solution, is a benefit, but probably not the intent.

On the other hand, if we ever, God help us, elect Grover Norquist, I would expect him to install people he trusts and outright instruct them to fuck things up enough that anarchy starts to look like kind of a good idea. I think he's willing to take a hit to his legacy in favor of his friends with their pathological aversion to paying taxes. Bush? Not so much. He likes his rich friends and patrons well enough, but he likes himself most of all. It's sickening to contemplate, but I suspect he really does think he's doing a good job--at least for the people who matter.

Which, just for the record, isn't us.