Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Maybe We Will

    I did not stay up for the speeches.  I waited.  I just now watched Obama’s acceptance speech.

    Not a victory speech.  An acceptance speech.  There is a difference.  He hasn’t really won anything.  Yet.

    I cannot remember the last time I felt a tingle run through me at the words of someone with a vision.  I always listen with a salt shaker at hand.  But my word, I felt it this time.  I am cautious, but just maybe we will see something new.

    To all those who have already declared themselves ready to oppose Obama and all he stands for, to the Limbaughs, the Ingrahams, and the Hannitys:  you are small souls, stunted in imagination, and cynical in disposition.  You have lost the ability to imagine.  You cannot set aside your aversion to change, or your denials of hope for the time it takes to find out if someone may be honest and honestly intended.  You are the Ellsworth Tooheys, the James Taggarts, the Joseph McCarthys, the Pat Buchanans, and your role models are Timothy McVeigh and Oliver North and, iconographically, J.P. Morgan and Henry Frick.  You so cherish your power to sway people with charred words and bullying bombast that you cannot do the one thing that an Obama quite legitimately asks—set aside differences, come together, work for a future.  You have decided in advance that you do not wish to live in that future, that its shape and size and the decor of its rooms will not suit your taste.  And if it turns out to be a fine future, well-furnished and abundant, you ahve already decided that the people who will live in it do not deserve it.  The maggots of cynicism have shredded your minds and there is no redemption for you from without.  You must save yourselves, but please, don’t do it at our expense.

    I wonder truly just what it is you fear.  What is it you think you will lose?

    Maybe you’ll figure that out as time goes on.  Or maybe we will, and learn to live without you.  You are, in the words of Milton, Blind Mouths.

    Kindly stay out of our way.

  • The Morning After

    I didn’t sleep well last night.  I do not usually watch the election night circus.  Generally, I have an attitude of “It will be what it turns out to be” and either read a book or do some work, going to bed early.  Last night I started watching, though.

    I would never have believed how anxious I’d become over this.  I really did harbor the sinking fear that McCain, somehow, would win.  That the majority of my fellow citizens would actually vote another Republican into the White House, with all that such a move implied.

    I couldn’t stand it.  I saw that early lead, flipped from station to station, watched the South started rolling over for the Republicans once more, and just couldn’t stand to watch.  It wasn’t the kind of popular landslide I wished for.

    What did I hope?  I’d hoped people would wake up and realize that, no matter what their aspirations, fantasies, private dreams, or desires might be, most of us are not wealthy and never will be.  And with that realization the fact that voting for the best interests of the CEOs of GM, Ford, Exxon Mobile, ADM, et al is not the same as voting in your own best interest.  Those folks did not grow rich by extending their largesse to the Common Folk.  They got that way by maximizing the flow of cash into their own pockets.  That’s not a stereotype, it’s a business model.  And to suggest that recognizing that fact is somehow Class Warfare is to misunderstand the nature of Class.  They are not a Class, they are an aberration.  They will cut each other’s hearts out and eat them just as readily as sacrificing the best interests of the general public if it served their individual need.  There is little solidarity among them, other than the kind one might find among a group of Mafiosi, who join forces when expedient, but turn on each other in moments of weakness.

    I’d hoped people would realize this, and that they really didn’t have to worry about their own futures by denying the existence of common cause with such people.  (The classic canard that higher taxes and regulations on wealth act as disinventives for entrepreneurial aspirations needs to be debunked once and for all—the highest period of economic growth of the 20th Century was the Fifties, a time when taxes on wealth were so high trhe jokes were common currency high and low, yet people still struggled mightily to “make it big” and created a land of prosperity unparalelled in history.  If you make so much money that you slide into a higher tax bracket, you have still nonetheless made a lot more money!  And for the most part, you get to keep it!)

    Clearly that didn’t happen.

    The Republicans have since the Seventies managed to convince us that when someone says he’ll raise taxes on people making over $250,000 a year, he means we’ll all pay such taxes.  As if we all make that kind of money.

    Let’s be real for a moment.  Donna and I do all right—we’ve done better, we’ve done worse—but we’ve never been anywhere close to six figure incomes, singly or together.  We’ve never even been in the upper five figures.  Most of the people we know live in the middle five figure, and of those most are below 50K.  That’s the reality for most of the country, I think.  When I listen to politicians bandying figures around about what constitutes Middle America (where is that I wonder?) I scratch my head and puzzle about who it is they’re talking about.

    To be fair to voters, once you make your way up into those higher income brackets, a kind of amnesia takes hold and you forget from whence you came.  When some of our more well-to-do friends complained about their taxes going up under Clinton, they spoke with us as if it happened to us as well.  They were utterly dismayed to hear that we’d gotten tax cuts.  How’d we manage that? they asked, as if there were some kind of trick to it.

    We don’t make as much as you do.

    Anyway, we turned off the tv and went to bed.  And failed to sleep well.  Donna got up at three, wandered into the living room, and turned on the radio.  I lay there for a minute or so, then followed her.

    She looked at me with encircled eyes, perched on the edge of the couch.  “I think maybe,” she said, “just maybe…”

    Then we heard it:  President-elect Barack Obama.

    A switch opened in my head and a flood of tension seemed to flow away.  I went back to bed and slept deeply.  Overslept.

    This morning I checked the news services for the statistics and saw the national map, red and blue states marked.  Missouri is still too close to call, as are one or two others.

    340 plus electoral votes, to McCain’s 160.  More than 2-to-1.  Not to mention the gains in the Senate and House.  Yes.

    But I look at that map and damned if the stereotype just doesn’t hold still.  I live in a part of the country that, according to that map, is still Republican.  The exceptions are striking.  Obama took New Mexico and Colorado.  He took Florida and, to my utter dismay, Virginia.  Florida isn’t really a “southern state” as such and the rest of The South went for McCain.  Why?  Because he’s Republican or because he’s white?  Who knows?  I can guess, but it would be an opinion that could only be confirmed piecemeal, and inaccurately.

    Some of the poorest states went with McCain.  I do not understand.

    It’s curious that I felt such concern, because in a way Bush’s eight years touched me very little.  My life hasn’t changed much in any way that I could attribute to his policies (or lack thereof).  I have no relatives in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’ve never been censored, I have not been directly impacted by anything but the sharp rise in gasoline prices (which could have happened under any president, though his economic policies certainly did nothing to ameliorate the problem).  I’ve been able to go where I want to, say what I want to, pretty much buy what I want to, read what I want to.  It has largely been an intellectual problem for me.  I chafe at the attitudes.

    My point is, that in many ways we are natural subscribers to Republican policy.  We’ve been responsible, kept our personal debt very low, in fact we own our home, and until last week had no car payment, we’ve saved whenever possible, and lived within our means.  I do have problems with people who blithely live as if consequences never adhere to ill-considered actions.  We have no children, though, a conscious CHOICE which does run counter to Republican rhetoric (though I wonder how many of those red-staters who vote to overturn Roe-v-Wade and ban sex education from the schools themselves have more than one-point-six children and use contraception as if it were a natural-born god-given right).  I believe entitlements are poorly-conceived and ill-managed…but that’s not the same as condemning them outright as somehow morally evil.

    Point being that on the surface, we look like Republicans.  It’s so profoundly superficial as to be laughable.

    Yet clearly my sense of moral outrage has turned me into an anxiety-ridden anti-Republican, no question.  It is the outrage aimed at those who actually don’t seem to Get It.  They don’t see why we should extend considerations to foreigners, or rights we take for granted to those who don’t meet our model for ideal citizens.  They don’t see why Being Strong is not the same as being a bully.  They don’t understand the nature of problems, only want to call an exterminator when one crops up.

    I feel that the country has been on a bender in a bad part of town and now we’ve all woken up on the morning after and in the full light of day have a chance to see just what it is we’ve gone to bed with.  We have a choice, now, to see it as having been a really bad idea.

    But it seems a lot of people woke up and thought “Hey, it don’t look so good, but the screwing was awesome!  Let’s do it again!”

    Fortunately, they can’t stay for breakfast.

    Oh, and it might be a good idea to make a doctor’s appointment and make sure we didn’t catch anything, you know, fatal?

  • A Few Thoughts On Election Day

    This morning we got up at four so we had time to drink coffee, wake up, and get to the polls early.  I thought the lines would be long and neither of us have patience for standing around waiting.

    Our poll is within easy walking distance.  Often, in local elections, we take Coffey, and she can get all enthused and friendly greeting people coming and going.  Not this morning.  We arrived at St. John’s Catholic Church and entered the basement of the school.  Six others had beaten us there and they all sat on a pew outside the actual cafeteria space where the voting machines were still being set up and adjusted.

    The first gentleman in line was elderly and had till this year been one of the poll workers.  “But they kicked me out this year,” he said.  He didn’t seem bitter about it and maybe there was good reason—he wasn’t getting around too well—and proceed to tell us some stories about back in the day.

    More people arrived, including a young woman with two small children, one in a carrier.  Conversation was friendly and quiet.

    No one talked about the election.

    This was the first year Donna had not received her voter card in the mail.  I checked with the Secretary of State’s office on the web to confirm that she was still registered (I thought she was, even though I’ve heard all the rumors of purges and so forth—this was just a mailing snafu) and everything went fine.

    By the time we left the line was at least a hundred and fifty people long, shortly after six.

    I complain about the politics of this country a great deal.  I complain about the people I know who express occasionally absurd opinions.  I worry that we won’t get our collective act together until too late, whatever “too late” actually means.  I don’t like us being a laughing-stock in much of the rest of the world.  I am as incensed over the policies of the last eight years as I have ever been in my adult life about politics.  I have found myself able to say the good word or two about Reagan, Bush Sr., even Nixon, but I have found no redeeming qualities in the present resident of the office.

    But I do love this country.

    Anyone who has the temerity to question someone’s patriotism because they disagree with a course of action either has no grasp of what it is they’re defending or is commited to a vision of this country that runs counter to everything good about it.

    Bold words?  Perhaps.  But think about it.  The characteristic trait that marks our national policies since 1789 is that we can change our direction.  We can rethink and then act to alter a course.  We can try something out and if it doesn’t work discard it and try something new.  We can remake ourselves as a nation.

    That is what is happening today.

    Things have gone wrong with our home.  Termites have gotten into the wood work, and it’s time to clear them out and rebuild the damaged parts.  And we will do it without bloodshed.  We will do it without throwing out the parts that still work.  We will do it out of the stuff that truly informs our identity.

    Americans confuse people elsewhere.  We seem at times to have no standards, no principles, no sense of commitment.  We are fickle, reactionary, often foolishly adolescent in our choices of what to do next or where to go.  We adhere, it seems, to no single idea of right.  We make claims for being committed to freedom and then from time to time do things that demonstrably contradict that claim.

    And yet.

    And yet when we go wrong, we right ourselves.  We went wrong in 1787 by not dealing with slavery.  In 1863 we corrected that.  In 1832, we erred in the person Andrew Jackson by declining to pursue economic policies that would unify currency and stabilize the internal money system.  It resulted in years of instability, fast-moving currency decimations, and laid the ground (partially) for the Secessions of the 1860s.  We corrected this.  By the end of the 19th Century, we were a nation dominated by monopolies.  We dismantled them and began the long battle to end the virtual servitude of American labor.  Ther 20th Century is marked by a series of innovations aimed at establishing the kind of egalitarian society envisioned by Jefferson and others, culminating in the correction of race relations encapsulated in the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act of the Johnson Administration.

    We could go on.  These back-and-forths came out conflict between interests that, while having certain broad characteristics in common with their predecessors, quite often sprung from disparate groups that seemed to have little in common.

    Except the will to do better.

    What is better, though?  Is it the same thing today as it was a hundred years ago?  Hard to say.  It’s an ongoing discovery, with the added complication that “Better” for one person may not be for another.  We end up, then, in constant dialogue.  Things get bad when we tire of the debate.  We had a massive debate in the Thirties about what had gotten us into a Depression.  While it took a world war to get us out of it, the scaffolding we built during ten years of constant dialogue remained and proved what we’ve come to call the Safety Net—and it worked.  In the Sixties we had a bitter argument with ourselves over the limits of power and the morality of labels.  We exhausted ourselves by the Seventies, and a tired nation stopped paying attention while the forces of retrenchment and privilege undid much of what we thought we’d won.  We’ve been in the midst of another debate since the mid-Nineties, the shape of which was tragically bent by 9/11 and the hysteria that followed.  We seem to be getting back to it now and today may mark a turning point in our quest to determine what it is we mean by Better.

    There is no single label for the core principles of Americans.  Nor, really, should there be.  BY definition, it will mean something slightly different for everyone.  We have managed in over two centuries to—not without difficulty, sometimes ugliness—learn to accommodate that diversity.

    Tomorrow, regardless who wins the election, we will once more be neighbors.  Some will be very disappointed and they will no doubt express it, be angry, and some will try to work to change it.  After all, when you get right down to it, what is a president?  He’s an employee.  He works for us.  Later.  Meantime, we are friends.  There are other things that bind us more thoroughly than elections.  We will laugh and love and try harder to do better.

    We’ll talk.

    Mostly.

    I look forward to it.  That’s why I like it here.  That’s why I can say, without a splinter of embarrassment, that I love my country.

  • Celebration

    Come do this if you can:

    Poetry and Truth

    You’ll be glad you did.

  • The Age of Euphemism

    I’d like to do a bit here on language.  Primarily on how we have seen it distorted over the last few decades.  According to George Lakoff and Geoff Nunberg, the Right has seized the rhetorical high-ground and driven Liberals into defensive postures by altering or subverting the meanings of certain words and phrases.  I tend to think that, yes, they’ve done that, but that also the people who are swayed by such verbal gymnastics are by and large pre-sold on the message.  Many of us out here never did buy into it.

    But the effect of making those the Democratic Party has fielded to oppose them look weak did happen, even for those of us who could see through the bull shit.  Once you get someone to start backing up and apologizing for what he or she believes in, the game is over.  This happened to Kerry.  It’s happened to many others.  Republicans have manage to turn “Liberal” into a dirty word, which is bad enough, but the fact that Liberals respond guiltily by admitting, well, yeah, I am, or used to be, but I’m not really anymore, I’m more of a Centrist…

    Bull shit.

    The problem is that people tolerate euphemism in place of truth and after long enough it gets difficult to cut through it.

    For instance, when Obama becomes president, I would like to see a reinforced Truth In Advertising policy.  It has escaped no one’s attention that we are having a bit of a problem with the economy.  Have been a long time now, ever since we realized that consuming happens faster when things are cheaper and cheaper things usually aren’t made here.  We have gradually become more of a service economy than a manufacturing power and this has frankly hurt.  Look at the automobile industry.  Good heavens.  (Let’s not even talk about shipping!)

    I think it would be useful to start calling certain things by what they really are.  Chiefly, I am tired of financial institutions referring to things like loans and so forth as Products.  You hear it all the time on television and radio.  “We at the First Institutional Savings and Loan have many new and exciting products for our customers.”

    No, they don’t.  A product is something you make.  A refrigerator or a stove are products.  A car is a product.  The computer I’m writing this on is a product.  (You could stretch the point and argue that the words I’m writing are a product, but I think that’s stretching things too far.  My thoughts are not products insofar as they don’t actually do anything anyone else can buy and use until they are translated into an Object you can take home and use.  Ergo, a book is a product, but the ideas therein are not.  Maybe that, too, is stretch, but we’re talking about the economy here, not philosophy.)

    Shuffling paper around in different arrangements is not a product.  All they do is take something that has already been “made”—other people’s money—and package it for other to people to spend.  They have not made anything that is intrinsically useful by itself in the way that a can opener or a television or a barbecue pit is useful.

    I bring this up because by misusing the term Product in such a way, it kinda sorta looks like banks are on some level manufacturers.  Instead of a service.  You might ask what real difference is makes, and that would be a good question.  Here’s a good answer:  when enough people begin to think and act as if those shuffled bits of paper possess the same kind of intrinsic value that a real Product has, they start swapping them around as if they were cars or lawnmowers, as if profit were something attached to these pieces of paper in the same way.  It leads to an economy of pure motion of money with nothing to base the presumed value of the money on—i.e. Products—and at some point the emperor’s nakedness becomes too evident to ignore and we have an economic meltdown.

    Hmm.  Sounds familiar.

    So enough of that, already.

    I would also like to strike the term “He/she failed to disclose/report/act etc.” from legal language.  It gives the wrong impression.  So we don’t want to say “The Senator lied” because that’s rude.  But altering the phrase to “The Senator failed to disclose his tax returns (or the new house a contributor gave him)” makes it sound like the Senator tried to do the right thing, but just somehow couldn’t manage to do it.  It makes it sounds like it wasn’t really his fault, just, well, he had a bad day.

    Bull shit.  The Senator lied.  He didn’t fail to do anything except not get caught.  He tried to not get caught and, gosh, here he is testifying, so I guess he failed at that.  But what he is accused of?  No, he didn’t fail to do the right thing, he didn’t even try.

    Such euphemism debases the public discourse.  That’s a fancy way of saying that it erodes public trust.  Gradually.  Slowly.  Which is worse than a quick shock, because slow erosion might not be noticeable until the whole system starts sliding into the swamp.

    Centrist is another term I’d like to do away with.  By however one defines the issues, anyone can be tagged as a Centrist.  What does that mean?  It means you’re so afraid of pissing people off that you waffle on important issues.  It means that if a problem requires a fix that is either very rightwing or very leftwing, you won’t talk about it unless you can leach out all it’s vitality.

    How does this hurt?  Just look at some of the big pieces of legislation passed in the last 20 years in, say, education.  The problem is that we abandoned (or never had) the ability to offer education to prepare students according to their abilities in favor of a system that slots everyone into a college track, whether it’s right for them or not, and rewarding those who get through college with job opportunites they may still be unprepared for and casting those who either didn’t go to college or didn’t get in to begin with into the neverland of dead-end service jobs.  (Essentially, it is a paper shuffle, like the aforementioned banking practice of offering “products”.) The entire system needs to be revamped and probably more federalized than it is now.  Certainly local school board have become in some cases nothing but ideological battlegrounds…it doesn’t work except for those who are already predisposed to learn and needs to be trashed.  What do we do instead of telling the parents of the land that, in at least half the cases, your darling son or daughter ain’t never gonna be no Einstein no matter what school we put them in and acknowledging that some students, no matter what their I.Q., just ain’t never gonna give a damn about certain curricula and might be better off in shop classes learning to (wait for it) Make Products!  (What? Blue collar education for my little genius?  How dare you!)?  We make the teachers give endless tests to try to get total average scores up and pretend that those scores actually reflect what the kids actually know.  (Paper shuffle!)
    Centrist bull shit.

    (Likewise I think we should do away with Right and Left in all such debates, because these labels do nothing.  Once we allow that labeling is somehow constructive, actual constructive discourse is in danger of fleeing.)

    Also in advertising I would like to see the use of the claim that “You can save money by buying this today!”  This is one we’ve been living with since television came around and it has always annoyed me.  Let’s be clear—you do not “save money” when you buy something.  You may spend less this week on the same thing than you would have last week, but you’re still spending.  This is ad-speak nonsense that twists things around to convince you to part with your dollars.  You may get a good bargain, but you  haven’t saved anything, they didn’t deposit the difference in your bank account, and you probably didn’t put it in the bank either.  This is perhaps a minor quibble, but it is part and parcel of American’s lack of understanding about the dynamics of market-based economies.

    Which leads me to…

    I would like to see the phrase “Let the Market decide” stricken from the language entirely.  I know this will never happen, because language doesn’t work that way, but really, what a load of horse hockey.

    The Market decides nothing.  Never did, never will.  The Market does not have an intellect.  The Market is an effect pool, wherein the decisions of individuals vying for competitive advantage cumulatively result in an outcome.  But like the weather, these outcomes are feral, sporadically predictable, and never—NEVER—altruistic.  Letting the Market decide is like letting your car go where it wants without putting your hands on the wheel or taking your foot off the gas.  Occasionally it actually might get somewhere you want to go without killing someone in the process.  No one bothers to ask where the Market got its education.  No one bothers to ask who pays for “adjustments.”

    This is a phrase used by people who want very much to be allowed to screw over anyone they think they have to in order to secure their presumed slice of the pie.  The assumption is that such avarice will be checked by competitors who will stop them because that would limit the competitor’s ability to get his slice of the pie.

    Few ever really triumph in this game, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that those few are the ones who decide what the Market will do—it is not a natural phenomenon, is very hands-on manipulation by private citizens for their own benefit and to the detriment of those who can’t compete.

    I don’t actually have a problem with that as such.  It does drive many of the plus-direction economic benefits of our economy.

    But it leads to excesses and abuses against people who have absolutely no way of defending themselves from the consequences of market collapses—which happen cyclically and occasionally catastrophically, like hurricanes.  It is absurd to argue that something that is essentially brainless has the right to be left alone by regulatory entities.

    Damn, people, the government is part of the Market, if for no other reason than by virtue of being a Customer.  To argue that it should stay out of it and let it run free is absurd.  (The free enterprise fans don’t let it run free—they do everything they can to manipulate it.)  And since the government ostensibly represents us, then it follows that such regulations as it may apply to this wild and mindless beast in order to protect our interest are not only prudent but essential.  We don’t let wild tigers roam free in city streets, do we?  Why would we be so gullible as to believe the Market, left alone, will look after our interests?

    But the phrase gives full voice to the nonsense notion that there is a master plan, an overmind, a naturalistic intelligence that we must not cage, that the Market is somehow alive and should have rights.  It dumbs us down with a false image and lulls us into a false state of helplessness.

    Controlling the Market is not Socialism, it’s common sense.  People who make a lot of money do not have a right to so at everyone else’s expense.

    In that vein, I would like to do away with the term “CEO Compensation Package.”  I have no problem with the older term “Bonus” because they imply different things.  A bonus is by definition a reward for success.  A compensation package is a negotiated arrangement that is completely independent of performance, and judging by the way things have been going for some time now, clearly there is no relation between reward and success anymore.  I would prefer to call it Pillage.  In many instances, it is simply theft.  Calling it a Compensation Package renders it innocuous, with no real causal links to the destruction of a company.  It is a lie of effect.

    I’m looking forward to a change in the way things are talked about.  I would like to limit the attempts of the corrupt in politics and business to hide what they do behind phrases that have legalistic or pseudo scientific auras about them that make them somehow less nasty than what they really are.  We don’t fully appreciate what language does to us when we accept it uncritically.  And it certainly wouldn’t hurt anyone to have things called what they are.

    Well, it would hurt some I suppose.

  • Some Thoughts On Our Next President

    Maybe there’s something wrong with me.  I am not enthused about the coming election.  I hope Obama wins, but only because I have had enough of the Republicans and their wistful, “wish it were 1952 again” attitudes, and the ideological leech they’ve been carrying around since 1980 that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy.  The fact that the Constitution actually does permit us to successfully fight that possibility doesn’t mean we can’t grow very, very tired of the effort.

    But I’m not a huge Obama supporter.  I like a lot of what I see and hear, but I’ve learned to discount that.  Politicians, even when they tell the truth, are seldom capable of delivering on promises—the system is too complex and fluid—and I’m never sure where the gravy will go anyway.  What I have admired is Obama’s refusal to be pinned to the wall.  He seems to know that the most important thing is to keep one’s options open, because as much as he thinks he knows now about what’s going on, it has been clear to me that once someone wins the election, the subsequent “orientation” sessions coming into the White House must be hair-raising.  They hear things they had no idea were going on, things which doubtless change whatever they thought they were going to do.

    Whoever wins will have three big foreign policy problems to deal with, as well as the ones that have become fixtures.  Pakistan, Iran, and China.  (Yes yes yes, Palestine, Russia, and the chaos that is Africa—but those are constant, always there issues.)

    Pakistan is a problem because, despite the fact that it is a democracy, the ruling class has never—NEVER—considered “the people” worth considering.  They act like most such quasi-dictatorships and relegate the public to some category of irritant that must from time to time be molified.  This had led to a severe gap in aspiration between the two elements, which is why Pakistan can’t do much about the Taliban camped out in its western provinces.  They have been on the brink of an Islamic revolution for 20 years and unless something is done to rectify the dysjunction between The People and The Government, it will happen and it will cause us no end of grief.  Never mind Iran, Pakistan already is a nuclear power.

    Iran is the biggest bully in the Middle East right now, but they are fragile.  We keep paying attention to Akmadinijad (sp?) and his rants, but he actually doesn’t run the country.  It may be possible to cut a deal with those who do, but it must be done carefully because they had pushed their people to the brink of another revolution, albeit one which may be less volatile than Pakistan’s.  Iran has a very modern-thinking population of young people who chafe under the Islamic rules imposed from above.  With this global financial collapse, Iran is actually teetering on the brink of insolvency—despite having huge oil reserves, they have no refineries to speak of (they buy gasoline from abroad) and their budget is stretched thin on any number of fronts.  They depend a lot on China for revenue.

    Speaking of China, they have been buying debt.  Which for a while made them look like they were poised to start gobbling up markets and becoming some sort of financial superpower.  The problem is, debt is solvency.  If the debtors can’t pay, you have nothing but a promise.  And if we can’t service our debt and cut back on imports, well, China will find itself in a very difficult position.

    But they are also flexing their aspirational muscles in other directions.  China is building its first aircraft carrier.  Very expensive and one must ask Why?  They have never been able to sustain foreign military adventures.  They do not have the logistical know-how to extend themselves militarily past their own borders.  We’ve seen this time and time again.  Vietnam, Korea, Russia.  So why an aircraft carrier?  Prestige?  Who would they target?  Or defend?

    Taiwan, of course.  Stay tuned.

    But getting back to the financial issues for a moment.  China has been attempting to buy its way into international markets for a long time now and has been filling in the gaps left by other financial powers, especially in Africa, but also int he Middle East.  Given the way the markets have been going, we have to ask what happens to all those new money roads they’ve been building if they suffer a collapse.  Whole economies are becoming dependent on Chinese investiment.  Chinese fragility is coupled with an absolutist self-serving protectionist viewpoint (much more severe than ours) and in times of crisis, they’d just abandon their commitments.  Where does that leave those parts of the world?

    I have no answers, but I believe these will be the biggies for whoever inherits the Presidency this time, and they will have to be dealt with sooner than later.

    Domestically?  Well.  Health care is, I think, primary, for many reasons, and it’s clear that McCain wants to get the government out of the health care business.  It’s going to implode and he doesn’t want government involvement at any level.  But that’s not realistic.

    The problem neither candidate has addressed yet is the shortage in G.P.s, which is accute.  It won’t matter what you do to shift payments around if the price keeps going up because doctors over-specialize.  So-called primary care physicians are getting scarce on the ground because (a) medical school debt is HUGE and general practitioners don’t make the coin to pay for it and (b) malpractice insurance is distorting all other costs.  Both factors need to be addressed before costs start coming down.  Preventative medicine is the way to go, but saying that doesn’t help anything if there aren’t enough consulting physicians  at the lowest level to counsel well care.

    CEO compensation packages must be addressed.  I am loathe to see any kind of legislation limiting how much money a person can be paid, but it’s not the actual sums that are at issue.  It’s what those sums are paid out for.  If CEO pay was tied exclusively to improved performance, then the problem might correct itself, but if you pay someone that much just because the company didn’t do as badly as expected, then you have a fundamental disconnect.  That disconnect is exacerbated if while slowing the failure of a company is done while paying stockholders higher dividends from increased revenue from monkeying with the books, then you have a recipe for total collapse.  CEOs should only get bonuses while their companies are in the black and improving that way.

    Alternative energy sources.  Another biggie and this one has probably the thorniest public relations problem.  The first thing we need to do is start telling people the truth about bio fuels and energy expectations—but that ties into education, which also needs reparing.  No Child Left Behind must be scrapped.

    Just a few things that occurred to me while I was sitting here this morning.  And why I am not enthused about Obama.  He may well be the one to handle these issues, but I’m not going to put money on him being able to.  If anything, he has my sympathy.  No, I’m much more concerned about the congressional elections.  That’s where the power of this country really is.

    Anyway, I just wanted to share some of these thoughts.  Have a good day.

  • Palin

    She is rather insulting to the feminist ideal, isn’t she?  That said, look what she’s done so far.  She has served as a huge distraction from John McCain.  She’s been able to say things McCain now knows would be risky for him to say—all that stuff about Ayers and questioning Biden’s sincerity about running with someone he voted in opposition to in the Senate and so forth—and for a few weeks, everyone was talking about Sarah Palin and wondering just what was McCain thinking?

    We have, of course, seen this before.  Spiro Agnew was the first I remember of second bananas who could fling turds at the opposition while the pres himself floated above the fray.  The question of qualifications and skeletons in closets was overlooked then, too.  The benefit of the distraction was enough.

    Palin would be a terrible president, though, and this is worth thinking about.  Besides the obvious flaws, she’s an End Timer—a christian who believes the advent of rapture is right around the corner and we’ll all see Jesus in our lifetime.  (When people ask what is so dangerous about mixing religion and politics, this one is a deal killer for me.)  Bush has been advised by such people.  His cabinet has been advised by such people.  The Republican Party has been advised by such people.  But there has never been one actually in the White House.

    What would prompt someone like this to actually do anything that looks to the future?  If you really believe the Rapture is that imminent, would you negotiate with people?  Would you bother with environmental stewardship?  Would you even concern yourself with Health Care issues?  Since we’ll all be about to go either to heaven or hell, who needs a secure national health care program?

    I don’t actually have an answer to these questions.  I know what I think, but it’s an opinion.  But I do know I don’t want to find out.  Not through a road test.

  • SEX!

    Another repost from ’04. Once again, because we’re nearing an election, and once again certain Topics will and have become part and parcel of the political debate, I thought it time to put this back up.

    Did you know that the last week of October is national Protection From Pornography Week? Yes, indeed, signed into law by our illustrious president, Mr. Bush back in 2003. I for one had no idea I needed to be protected from it. How reassuring to know that we are being defended from dangers both real and imagined by the ever watchful gaze of our very own homegrown clerics.

    We’ve spent tax dollars on this. Here is the link to the official White House proclamation.

    Seems innocuous enough, even homey. All that stuff about the destructive effects of porn on children, who can argue?

    Has it occurred to anyone throughout the last two decades (beginning, in my opinion, with Ed Meese—anyone remember him?) of the war on pornography that—like alcohol and tobacco–pornography is simply not for children? It seems a ludicrously simple idea to me—it was never intended for them. We manage to have reasonable laws about things not intended for children. We don’t let them drive cars (except at amusement parks, in specially constructed rides), we don’t let them drink booze, we don’t allow the sale of tobacco to minors. They can’t vote, either, because we presume to decide on their level of intelligence and ability to make political statements. That one may be arguable, but…

    We don’t allow children to sign contracts. We don’t let them in to see “R” rated movies without a parent or guardian. Technically, children aren’t allowed to have credit cards, but sometimes that one slips through the cracks.

    Point being, we manage these other prohibitions quite handily. Occasionally something goes wrong, but we have a system for dealing with it that doesn’t require a national week signed into effect by the president. I mean, we don’t have a National Protection From Contracts Week detailing how contracts have debilitating effects on families and children (especially children, oh, those poor innocents who cannot defend themselves from the deprivations of over-zealous loan officers and contract litigators!).

    The other side of this is, however, perhaps a little more contentious. We don’t allow children to participate in all this stuff, but we make an assumption that adults may, can, and that there is, for the most part, nothing wrong with it!

    So why do we need this Protection From Porn Week?

    Well, it’s not aimed at children. With all that child sexual exploitation is an evil thing and no sensible adult would allow that it’s not, the target here is not to protect children. It’s not even to protect. The target is Sex.

    Since the Sixties there has been a war going on in this country about the public function of Sex in our society. I won’t here detail that war—we sell products with it, but we can’t actually sell the thing itself (except in certain places under strict licensing etc.); we all like to be sexy, even when we don’t admit it, but we don’t necessarily want to follow through on the implications, i.e. have sex commensurate with the degree of sexiness we like to pretend to; sex is one of the most wanted things we have, yet there is a perverse urge to deny it to others when we deem it inappropriate (or even when it is appropriate, just public). The war has taken on all the canny subterfuge and annoying intangibility of the worst aspects of the Cold War, which I think is an ironic if apt comparison. After all, the Cold War was as much about ideas as about actions.

    Attorney General John Ashcroft spent $80,000 on a curtain to hide the tits of Justice so television viewers wouldn’t be offended.

    Who really was? We’ve been looking at public nudity like that for two centuries. Except for a few extreme crackpots, I don’t know of anyone who ever seriously complained—because we have all made the distinction between nudity and sexuality in these instances. I mean, no one seriously gets turned on by the nakedness of Justice. Do they?

    Now, with another far right, religio-obsessed appointment to a position which requires a far more Libertarian attitude than one comparable to Sir Charles Lamb or Carrie Nation, we get closer and closer to the core program of the faction this administration represents.

    Just what is it about these people that they cannot stand other human beings having orgasms which do not lead automatically to child-birth?

    As a statement of principle, let me be up front. I think sex between mutually consenting individuals is a wonderful thing. Under any circumstances. Sex itself is one of the best things we can offer each other. Sex is beautiful, sex is great, sex is a thing to be sought and had and indulged. I have always thought restrictions on it between mutually consenting people were silly if not obscene.

    Having said that, look at what I said. “Mutually consenting individuals”. There’s a lot of substance floating beneath the iceberg tip of that phrase. What it implies is profound.

    No one should thoughtlessly indulge sex.

    No one should have sex under inequitable circumstances.

    No one should violate another’s individuality in order to have sex.

    In order to mutually consent to something, we presume a kind of level playing field. You have to know why you’re there, know yourself, know what you’re getting into, and know what you think you’re getting out of it. You have to UNDERSTAND what’s happening.

    Which is what makes all forms of sexual coercion ugly and condemnable. Which is why “No means No” has to be adhered to utterly. Which is why, for all you frat boys, jocks, and hapless wannabe Don Juans (of either gender), getting someone drunk or stoned in order to screw them is a crime.

    It’s also an act of cowardice.

    Equitable conditions is a little less concrete, but in the instance of children it’s absolutely clear, and you can use that as a starting point. There is no way a child is the equal of an adult in any practical sense. Adults having sex with children can never be anything but abuse because of the fundamental disconnect in status and knowledge and experience. There is no possibility of “mutual consent” in this case, because the basis on which such consent is given is absent.

    That shouldn’t be too hard to understand. Other bases of inequity are slipperier but no less real. Financial inequity is a biggie. When the boss threatens job loss if sex is not forthcoming, this is an inequitable circumstance. Of course, this is a power game, and sex should be devoid of power games in order for it to be right. (Unless power is part of the Game, in which both participants are agreed in advance, but that’s not coercion.) Unfortunately, in this society, it goes beyond such simple—and prosecutable—examples as that. Despite our ardent political illusions to the contrary, we do have a class structure, and that alone tilts the scales into inequitable exchanges. Money always shifts the balance. Who you have sex with and why all too often has less to do with sex itself than with other factors. We make jokes, always have, about “marrying money” and “trophy wives”, but the basis of those jokes is not a laughing matter. Coercion goes both ways, depending on circumstances.

    So you see, when I say Mutually Consenting Individuals, that is not a carte blanche. It never was, even though we treat it that way more often than not. Two people are over 21, they can vote, they should be able to do what they want with and to each other.

    Is it ever that simple?

    But aside from these considerations, if conditions of mutuality and consent are met, where does anyone get off suggesting it’s wrong to have sex?

    And just to be clearer, I don’t mean sanctified sex-for-procreation. Nature has pulled a nasty trick on us, in my opinion, by linking sexual pleasure with procreation so strongly. It makes perfect sense in terms of Darwinian necessity, but the contents of our minds is not from that part of nature and is a separate thing from the urges of basic DNA.

    It’s a cliche, of course, but still powerful, that in this society we have no problem with people going to the theater to watch a film in which people kill each other in many and varied and devious and painful ways, but if two people are naked and mutually indulging each other carnally, we try to get it banned. At least limit the audience. Heaven forbid we give our children the idea that sex is good and all right and that maybe violence is bad.

    Which is a curious thing. We raise children to gradually (in theory) learn how to manage the controls of their lives in just about everything—we teach them (supposedly) about cars and traffic laws, about politics, about finances, all gradually over time, so that when they reach adulthood they have some grasp of what all this stuff is about. Except when it comes to sex. We try our best to pretend in front of them that it doesn’t exist, that it’s something they should not know anything about, and then expect them at 21 to all at once comprehend the complex and rich world of sexuality. That’s how it seems anyway.  (And if any proof of this proposition is required, just ask yourselves why this ludicrous Abstinence Only sex ed policy has not been torn to shreds by outraged parents who actually want their kids educated?  I think more parents than not are quite content to assume their children aren’t learning anything that would embarrass the parents to acknowledge.)
    Now we have politicians getting in an uproar over gay marriage. They’ve been in an uproar over abortion since Roe V. Wade, and I do not believe that for most of them it has as much to do with fetuses as it has to do with sex. Notice, almost uniformly all prolife groups refuse to consider a broader, more comprehensive birth control education and availability program. Randal Terry, the former head of Operation Rescue, has stated that all forms of birth control, to his way of thinking, are abortion, murder, and immoral. No, it’s not the morality of abortion, it’s sex. Abortions represent women having sex without consequence (which is a fatuously wrongheaded way to look at it, so self-servingly puerile in its refusal to see any other possible explanation than their own). I would be less inclined to despise the Prolife Movement if they were out there encouraging people to use condoms, the Pill, or sterilization. That they condemn these things almost on par demonstrates that the issue is, really, sex.

    And now we have a White House appointee with exactly these attitudes. (I don’t care if he’s a gynecologist––if I were a woman and his patient, I’d change doctors now––that obviously doesn’t make him sane on the issue.)

    Let’s not kid ourselves. True, there are economic considerations to all these things, but the bottom line here is a public aversion, even hatred, of sex. It’s effective because even people who disagree with the programmatic side of this campaign find it too difficult to stand up and argue the opposite. They get squeamish. After all, it’s personal, it’s private. Of course it is, so why is the government involved at any level other than the FDA approving new contraception?

    It’s a control issue. I’m being a bit Kafkaesque, now, a bit Orwellian, so fair warning that some of what follows is just me thinking out loud and very broadly.

    Something to consider. Traditionally, those in power who work to oppress sex—who enact sodomy laws, or things like the Mann Act, or marital status laws, or laws regulating pornography, or who condemn people who indulge themselves in sex without guilt—the leaders who condemn immorality, who tell us that society will collapse to anarchy if we don’t control our sexual urges, who try to lock us in prisons of fear or guilt, who turn sex into property and then legislate it as such, those people have always indulged themselves, from popes to presidents. Those who are most aggressively anti-sex in public have usually lived private lives drenched in it.  (One need look at the Republican/social conservative roster of hypocrisy to see this.  Not that Democrats don’t cheat on their wives, the it’s more often a hapless thing, not tied to a vociferous Family Values political record.  Dole divorced his wife to marry his mistress.  Gingrich served his cancer-stricken wife divorce papers in the hospital so he could marry his mistress.  McCain divorced his wife to marry his mistress.  Foley campaigned against pornography and worked to stop Gay marriage and has been caught propositioning male pages.  It goes on and on.)
    And they could, because they have the power to condemn those who they coerced. The ultimate inequity. The ultimate abuse.

    Not all of them, mind you. I have no doubt that our current president is faithful to his wife. In our present media-invasive climate, if he weren’t we would all know soon enough. But those who benefit from his position, those who support him, those who sycophantically proclaim their loyalty, those who donate money and give favors. There is always a cadre, a circle, around such leaders who do get to have what they want.

    What is distressing is that this is a button so easily pushed. We seem as a collective incapable of arguing back when our leaders tell us we need to oppress sex. Maybe if we stopped acting like sex is something we “get away with” every time we have it, stop acting like the children we claim to be trying to protect—in short, collectively pull our heads out of our posteriors and deny the politicians any right to tell us what is or is not appropriate private behavior, then we could begin to rationalize the discourse and subsequently the panic-driven legal paroxysms we seem to be going through.

    Many—possibly most—people behave quite reasonably about sex. But their voices are not the ones dominating the public discourse. Instead, the discourse is driven by those who wish us to be ashamed of arousal, of touching, of orgasm, as if civilization will perish if we collectively admit to enjoying it.

    Of course, if we did take this approach, then maybe we could also start addressing the real problems we have with it—the inequities in our relationships, the abuse that happens every day, the real disconnects we have between law and practice.

    In order to protect children from it, we should first grow up ourselves, instead of acting like children who’ve been caught with our hands in the cookie jar.

    Until then, we have present-day puritans dictating morality. And we let them, even when we know that what they’re doing is wrongheaded, because we don’t want to admit…

    What? That we like sex? Or that maybe we don’t really know how to deal with it?

    Start with what I suggest: Mutual Consent means a great deal more than just two people saying yes.

    Protection starts with self-knowledge.

    Or maybe we should just wait for the presidential “Protection From Arousal” week.

  • Ignorance Rampant

    The following is a quote lifted from Charlie Stross’s blog and is pretty much In Full.

    We. Are. Not. Going. To. Die. On. Wednesday.

    The maximum energy the particles generated by the LHC (7TeV) get up to is many orders of magnitude below the maximum energy of cosmic rays that hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere from space every fricking day. None of them have created black holes and gobbled up the planet, or turned us all into strange matter. Nor have they done ditto to any cosmic bodies we can see, such as planets or stars. Therefore the world isn’t going end when they switch on the LHC on Wednesday. QED.

    Joking is all very well, but please, can we not be spreading the FUD and scaring people needlessly? The current climate of superstitious dread with respect to the sciences is bad enough as it is …

    As everyone knows we have a presidential election coming up. The two combatants are flinging accusations at one another as to why the other guy isn’t fit to lead. According to McCain, Obama is not only another tax-and-spend Liberal but one with no real experience. McCain is claiming to be an agent of change, despite a record that really doesn’t reflect that. To be fair, he’s been on board with a few bits of legislation that took on some of the more egregious problems in our country, but by and large he’s pretty much just another tax-and-spend Conservative, but one with a lot of experience.

    I quoted Charlie’s post for a specific reason. You can search the blogosphere and find many of these sorts of posts, all done in the face of a minor upswelling of panic among those who don’t know any better claiming that the LHC would cause a major event precipitating the End of the World.

    My question, simply, is this: why would anyone believe this?

    This bears directly on the election. We have many organizations—like FactCheck.com— that take on the rather onerous and often thankless job of vetting statements made by political candidates. Anyone can go look to see which statements are true, false, or exaggerations. There are other sites, like Project For the Old American Century, which have a tally of the abuses of the Bush Administration, with links to sources. The record is there for anyone to go look for themselves and see.

    But people don’t. Well, some people do. But I suspect a lot of people rely on the ads and the occasional televised interview to develop their information about the candidates, which is a pretty useless way to do it.

    I know a woman in her 40s who does not know that women in this country did not always have the right to vote. When I pointed it out that women didn’t get it till 1920, she was incredulous. She didn’t believe me. I pulled out some history books to show her. Her eyes glazed over.

    Next time I spoke to her about it, she had defaulted back to believing that we were the only democracy to guarantee women’s rights from our inception.

    The obstinacy of false beliefs baffles me unlike anything else. I recall some friends who supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, said laudatory things about him, but when I bring it up now they look at me as if I’d sprouted a second head. They have rewritten their own history to disclude this embarrassing bit and will not cop to it.

    Charlie’s post about the idiocy of people’s fears is very political. Remember the Alar issue over apples? The panic that this substance was on all our apples and that it would kill us spread so fast that and regardless of efforts to provide the truth, there were orchards and packing plants that went out of business because of the resulting boycott of apples that would not have hurt anyone because the substance washed off easily.

    People do not understand basic science. Beyond that, there is a lack of understanding of basic logic. Why? Well, for one, it has always been assumed that Common Sense was a natural attribute—and in some small way, a particularly natural attribute of Americans (!) —and needed no assistance from the educational system, when nothing could be further from the truth.

    In the introduction to his study of the history of rational thought, Uncommon Knowledge, Alan Cromer states: “I believe that rational civilization, with its science, arts, and human rights, is humankind’s greatest hope for nobility. But like Jericho, it’s but an oasis in the midst of a vast desert of human confusion and irrationality.”

    Nancy Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer and often took the predictions offered as grounds for forcing changes of itinerary for her husband while in office. Who knows what else might have been effected as a result?

    People like easy answers and quick fixes. The present financial crisis we see engulfing Wall Street is not mysterious. It could be seen coming years ago. Loaning money to people who cannot pay it back obviously will lead to illiquidity of the lender if indulged at too great a level, and that is what has happened. To be fair, many borrowers were openly lied to, the mortgages in question misrepresented. The only thing that might have halted the bleeding would have been if the borrowers, en masse, had had the intellectual tools to see bull shit for what it is. Many did not. Many others did not possess the capacity to differentiate between Need and Want. Of course, that obfuscation is a desired quality in business—many industries make their living on the inability of people to make disciplined distinctions. They would hate it if basic economics were taught in grade school on.

    But everyone is acting surprised—and panicked. We are in bail-out mode because big houses, like AIG, are about to go under, and the truth is such institutions, that have been allowed to have tentacles into many areas of the financial garden, are so intertwined with our basic economies that we see it as to our benefit to keep them afloat.

    And we do not understand how we got here.

    Why not? Do we not understand that all the pseudo-Libertarian talk about Free Markets is nonsense?

    No, apparently not.

    On the reverse side, people are being driven by panic. The Stock Market lost 500 points. Omigod, that’s a disaster!

    500 points out eleven thousand. We have lost our sense of proportion. That is less than five percent of total volume. By contrast, the Crash of 1929 saw the Stock Market lose almost 40% of its value in two months.

    Let me quote from the Oxford Companion to United States History:

    The crash did not cause the Great Depression of the 1930s. To be sure, the losses sustained by investors and the greater diufficulty firms had in floating new issues depressed the economy. But the Federal Reserve stepped in quickly, lending freely to member banks and thereby confining the crash to the financial system. During the 1930s, congressional investigations uncovered a number of unsavory practices by the essentially private, unregulated stock exchanges. In response, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Security and Exchange Act of 1934, inaugurating active federal regulation of the securities market.

    Sound familiar? And why did we need regulation? Because stupidity combined with avarice results in collateral damage to those not involved with these matters. Officially, we had 24% unemployment during the Great Depression. It was probably, judging by how the numbers get fudged today, more like 30%. We have 6% now and we feel that we are in a major meltdown.

    Granted, for those out of work or on the losing end of investments, the pain is real and not to be scoffed at, but for the rest of us, our overreactions do us little credit. Sound solutions cannot be agreed upon in an atmosphere of panic, and such an atmosphere is fomented by those who have traditionally sought to lead us by the nose for their own benefit.

    The regulatory system put in place in the 30s was designed to prevent something like that from ever happening again, and it worked. Why then would we dismantle it?

    Because we did. We let Reagan’s cronies undo much of the regulation that had previously protected the country as a whole. We’re paying the price now for Free Market advocates getting their wish. They have turned out to be just as irresponsible as in the 20s and 30s.

    But we have been frightened by accusations that regulation somehow equates directly to Socialism, and we have been convinced that Socialism is evil. The arguments which have been used to keep us from being sane and rational about such issues are tissue paper obfuscations, easily seen through by anyone with half a brain, but we as a people buy into them every time. Either we possess profound ignorance or equally profound cupidity. Probably both.

    What Reagan began, Bush has all but finished. He has mounted up a debt so high that we must look far down the road to see it reduced to manageable levels, and yet he is lauded as a Conservative by people who ought to know better by virtue of the fact that they are losing their savings and their children’s future to rising costs.

    Why would they believe it? It is, simply, the same mentality that leads them to accept the Chicken Little warnings about the Large Hadron Collider without question. It is easy to go find the answers to these questions, but answers are not sought. Because it seems that as a people we are trained not to look or, worse, not to trust a rational explanation. It is easier to live in constant panic-mode and hope the next guy in office will fix it all, so we can go back to our thoughtless lives.

    When I was a little kid I remember looking at the exhaust from a factory and asking my dad where all that smoke went. “It just dissipates into the atmosphere.”

    “But won’t the atmosphere fill up some day?”

    “No, the world is too big for that.”

    I was four or five. I accepted the answer, because I trusted my dad. He was an adult, after all, and adults didn’t do stupid things like children did. Now I look on that and see that my innate curiosity and skepticism was at work even then. His answer never satisfied me, but there were other things to do, so I trusted him and let it slide.

    Collectively, we tend to be that way. Occasionally we ask “What about that?” and some “adult” pats our head and tells us not to worry, everything will be fine.

    I grew up expecting adults to be rational. People did stupid things in the past, but supposedly we had learned not to do those things. I was too young then to realize how stupidity clings to people.

    Forgive me if I use words like Stupidity and Moron. I am 53, almost 54, and I have lost all willingness to cut people slack anymore. When I walk into a convention hall filled with dealers in books and movies and jewelry and the fake ephemera of fantasyland (I’m talking about a science fiction convention now) and I see someone purporting to take pictures of your “Aura” (as in Kirlian Aura) with a device that supposedly “spikes” the aura by electricity shunted through one’s body while seated in a chair resembling a bad device from a Frankenstein movie, I get annoyed. When I see people lining up to buy said photos, people who really, I think, ought to know better, I get angry. The charlatan makes a living, the public is gulled, and the one who points out the bull shit is reviled by all.

    We have no patience, it seems, for reasoned discourse, for examination of issues, for anything that would prompt us to take responsibility for our own ignorance. I speak collectively now, for I do in fact know many people who do not see the world this way, but it seems they are always and everywhere too few.

    If the LHC had been built in this country, I fear that some court injunction would have been placed to prevent it from being turned on by some group convinced that it would result in a hole right through the Earth. We are saved from such silliness because the device is in Europe, where the courts, at least, seem less willing to entertain the hysterias of ignorant people.

    So it comes down to which set of lies we will believe. We always end up hoping for the best. So far, the only thing that has buffered us from any truly cataclysmic harm is the sheer size and wealth of this country. But unless we start doing a little rational thinking and start seeing things for what they are, that will not last long.

    I beg your pardon for expressing such pessimism.

  • One of the Pink is Gone

    Richard Wright is dead.

    Pink Floyd was unbelievably influential on me as a musician, even though I have never been quite able to define why.  Perhaps that’s not important.

    I always thought something had happened that set Wright back on his heels, because the work he did within the band kept growing thinner and thinner.  Compared with the gutsy soloes of Gilmour or with other keyboardists in weaker bands, after Dark Side of the Moon he simply failed to stand out to my ear, but the ability was clearly there.

    In its own way, this is as significant as the dying of the Beatles.