Mark W Tiedemann

Blog

  • Pot, Kettle, Emails

    I just have a couple of thoughts on the whole Hillary email thing.

    The FBI has recommended no charges be filed.  Which boils down to, “She did something perhaps stupid, but given all the circumstances, this isn’t worth pursuing.”  Obviously this is going to scratch the craw of a lot of people who were hoping for a body in the landfill moment.

    This seems to be the case throughout the Clinton’s public life.  Allegations, something’s there, oh never mind, not what we thought or hoped for, but wait there this other thing!  It has backfired this time in the embarrassing assessment that Hillary is, by a few points at least, the most honest of the candidates running.  (I know, I was a bit shocked, too.  Career politician, etc.  But remember, Bernie is also a career politician, he’s just figured out how to not let the label stick.)  With all the resources available to the Right, you would think by now that if there were anything—anything—to any of the longed-for malfeasances, misdemeanors, and mistakes, something would have stuck.

    I’m sorry, but no one—no one—is that capable of dodging that many bullets.  I have concluded that, regarding that landfill, there are no bodies.  Not buried by Hillary.  Or even Bill, for that matter.  The only thing they managed to come close on with him was lying about a blow job.  After how many millions spent trying to indict him on something else?  (And then only to find that Mr. Starr has his own problems with sexual misconduct.  Isn’t that just special?)

    So here is what I think happened.

    The FBI found that she was violation of the principle of certain rules.  Nothing harmful came of it.  They couldn’t even link it to Benghazi, which has turned out—several times now—to be its own kind of hellish nothing.  So the best they can do is wag a stern finger at her and say naughty naughty.

    Why not prosecute on the principle?  Because in testimony the defense would reveal dozens upon dozens of others who have done exactly the same thing.  Colin Powell has already alluded to that fact and apparently Condi Rice did the same thing.  A door to endless review and the subsequent tarnishment (?) of reputations those who want to Get Hillary would rather not tarnish.

    Secondly, given Edward Snowden, if I had been Hillary—or any of them—damn right I’d have my own private server.  Something a bit more reliable than a digital colander.  That way any mishap would be entirely on me (or her) and not the unfortunate consequence of a poorly protected government server.

    Thirdly, someone, somewhere, must have realized that as this question has never come up before, it is primarily a Get Hillary mission and were she anyone else it would not have been raised.  Putting her on trial would risk putting a system on trial certain people still hope can be salvaged to their benefit.

    Hillary is (a) a Clinton, (b) a Democrat, (c) a feminist, and (d) a woman.  She’s about to be president.  Everything certain folks on the other side of the aisle cannot abide just because it does not conform to their preferred view of the world.

    Will she be a good president?  How should I know?  She’s qualified.  She’s demonstrably competent.  She leans in directions I rather approve.  But everyone thought Obama, for good or ill, was going to completely overturn and transform everything.  He didn’t.  Like any president, he will leave office with a mixed legacy.

    But you know what, it doesn’t matter.  Not to me.  As I’ve said before, if the make-up of Congress is not changed, a reincarnated Abraham Lincoln couldn’t do much.  Given that, I would rather have her there than just about anybody else who has a glimmer of a chance of winning.

    As for all the Hillary Haters, you may have grounds.  But they’re the kind of grounds you could dig up on any candidate, some more than others.  That doesn’t explain the hate.  Maybe you ought to ask yourselves why this particular candidate is on your shit list.  Some of you may have good answers, but I’d bet most of you just don’t like her and have no idea what she’s accomplished.

    That’s my opinion, anyway.

    Have a pleasant election cycle.

  • …and a couple more

    AfterstormBeak To Glass, 2016

  • New Toy

    A pause in the somewhat draining labor of watching the global political landscape turn itself into a Cubist exercise in sharp lines the never quite match up.  I bit the bullet and got the new Photoshop.  I have a lot of learning to do, but as is my wont I dove right in.  Sample of first efforts.

    Classic Blue (1)

  • Embracing Stupid

    I’m hearing from some folks about Brexit and by and large what I’m hearing says this is a calamity.  The idiots “broke the U.K.”

    There were plenty of people explaining what would likely happen if they did this, but hey, what do experts know?

    Well, quite a lot, actually, but that fact alone makes them unpalatable to the voters who actually cast a Leave vote.  We see precisely that kind of—what would we call it?—“learning fatigue” here.  Who do you think supports Trump?  People who know little or all the most useless things when it comes to politics and economics and quite adamantly do not want to know, because knowing would contradict the fantasy world in which they stand forth at weekend keggers loudly proclaiming positions that might hold some value in a Game of Thrones episode, but since the folks they’re holding forth to know just as little or less, no one challenges them and they feel justified in clinging to their ignorance.

    This is the same crowd whose collective eyes glaze over when you start talking about the mechanisms of trade deals, the dynamics of boom-and-bust cycles, or the pathology of bigotry.  People who can’t seem to think outside of very broad categories (i.e. Radical Islamists are Muslims therefore all Muslims want to kill us) and feel empowered whenever someone gets up on a podium and tells them they’re right to be terrified of boogeymen.

    So a lot of people, and by the demographics a majority of older British voters, decided that leaving the EU is the same as getting rid of the immigration problem (and somehow they’ll be safer, even though they ought to know better because of past history, namely the IRA, but they at least were white) and that all their money, which will now disappear at an even greater rate because of the catch-up homegrown institutions will have to do to replace EU systems (either that or just let people die, which may happen anyway), will magically reappear in their private bank accounts, and anyway they didn’t understand a lot about what was going in Greece much less down in the Levant and they’d rather not know, as if removing themselves from a source of information somehow eliminates the problem.

    Look, knowing things is hard.  Not only is it a bit of work to find out in the first place, but it can be difficult to know what to do with what you’ve learned, and often enough knowledge has the consequence of making you feel responsible.

    And that, I think, is where much of the problem is.  People are past exhausted being told to give a damn.  And the less they know, the easier it is to be confident in dismissing problems that don’t seem to have anything to do with them.

    But of course, problems always have something to do with you.  Maybe not directly or even tomorrow, but somewhat and eventually, and left ignored will grow.

    Isolation is a guarantee of eventual extinction.

    I’ll let that sit out there for a while.  More later.  But think about it.

    Isolation is a guarantee of eventual extinction.

  • Come Again?

    The evangelical embrace of Donald Trump is, to my mind, one of the most bizarre aspects of this election cycle.  The pretzel logic by which these endorsements come defies Oedipus.   If there had been any doubt before that the Christian Right (which is in substance neither) is dedicated to any program that will see the established order overturned to make room for their brand of idiocracy, this would be it.

    Because the only way this makes sense is to see Trump as the prophesied  Anti-christ who will bring about the Apocalypse and prepare the way for His return.  Back when Bush was in the oval office, it came out that a umber of “advisors” were pushing his Middle East campaigns because it comported with their view of biblical fate.  Whether Bush himself bought into this is a matter of conjecture, but some of the people whispering in his ear did.

    So whatever the evangelical right claims to believe about Trump, on its face  they can only hope to gain one thing—the demise of the secular state, either through mismanagement, revolution, or the intervention of heavenly hosts.  Trump, if his rhetoric is to be believed, will bring a wrecking ball to the office of president and, lo, chaos shall follow.

    Jerry Falwell must be grinning in his grave.

    I listened this morning to such a booster on NPR describe in glowing terms how he “knows” Trump and sees a man ready for repentance.  Wouldn’t that be a feather in their cap, to convert a man like this?  And his serious ineptitude is a bonus.  This is a flawed, fallen soul who will fail and in failing come to the lord and all these sycophants will be waiting with prayers and possibly militias behind them to move into the gap left behind by broken institutions.  Trump, they must imagine, will preside over the end of the secular United States, thus bringing on the Last Days and the salvation of the world!

    Because such people say “Jesus” every third or fourth sentence, people are loathe to see them for the empty suits they are.  Well, some people.  I suspect most people find them…odious.  But it’s hard sometimes to condemn the mouthpiece without being seen to condemn the apparent message.

    On the other hand, if, as might be possible, Trump has been playing the part of the Big Guy in the ultimate reality show, and is doing all this in order to bring the vermin out of the woodwork and completely disrupt the Fundie poison that has been sickening our republic since Reagan brought the Moral Majority into mainstream politics, then these fatuous rubes are playing into his hands with the wide-eyed fecklessness of a kid at Christmas, participating in what could be their ultimate loss of any political credibility.  Trump is making them all look like the fools they seem unable to understand.

    Moderate Republicans, if any actually remain in the Party, have been scratching themselves, trying to get the funk off, seeing what is nothing less than the distillation of everything the GOP has been moving toward, supporting, and embracing since 1979 rise up out the swamp and shamble toward the convention.  Because of the Tea Party, because of the Christian Right, because of the supposed constitution fundamentalists—because, really, all these elements have been bought and paid for by the moneyed interests who would love to see the federal government either completely emasculated or safely conjoined to Wall Street—and the unholy growth of the thing Eisenhower warned us about back in 1960, the GOP is a caricature of what it once was.  It has become a haven for the intolerant, the small-minded, the regressive, the xenophobic.  Perversely, I think, not because they actually hate but because protecting the rights of the marginalized, the other, the outgroup requires a strong government dedicated to civil rights.  And they have set themselves in opposition to a strong government purely because it is strong.

    And the Religious Right has cheered them on because they see, whether admitted or not, a strong government as a barrier to their preferred template for the country.  If the government says you may not discriminate against anyone based on their religion—or lack thereof—then they have no real power to aggressively convert.  When you let people make up their own minds, many, maybe most, will do things you just don’t like.

    It’s been a close-run thing for them all this time.  They had to couch their intentions in rhetoric that played well to an audience not wholly sympathetic.  They couldn’t just come right out and say what they wanted.

    Till now.  They think they have their shot.  Trump’s their guy.  So the gloves are coming off.

    I think they’re in for a serious shock.

  • Phobic Identity

    Here’s a the thing.  If you need someone to be in some way “less” than you in order for you to feel good—or even adequate—about yourself, you have a problem.  It’s not their problem, it’s yours.

    This “pastor” who spewed all over Twitter that we shouldn’t feel bad about the Orlando killings because they were “perverts” is a prime example.  If he’s really a pastor, a religious leader, there is no reason for him to say any of that unless he’s just trying to assert superiority.  Which is entirely not the point of Christianity, as I understand it.  The point is to embrace the commonalities among people, not sort them out into boxes labeled “Preferred Types” and “Types To Be Condemned.”  No, he’s just indulging in bolstering a shaky self-image by dumping his own head full of crap on a group he finds personally—

    What?  Offensive? Incomprehensible? Or simply indifferent to his beliefs.

    But, then, how would he know?

    People who try to make themselves feel better by denigrating others have always been among us but they have never been so able to broadcast their inadequacies so loudly and regularly and they have found each other and formed support groups. I can’t imagine a gloomier or, frankly, duller forum.

    I have found that prejudice rarely survives real knowledge.  Actually knowing someone makes it very difficult to shove them into a category and hate “just because” they are a particular “type.”  Oh, it’s possible.  I have heard all manner of tortured rationalization to continue hating a group while embracing individuals from that group as friends.  But that requires, I think, a profound myopia. (And I have to wonder how much of a “friend” they can be.)  Generally, once you know someone, I believe it becomes harder and harder to categorically judge and hate them and those like them.

    Which is why much of this hatred is based on ignorance.

    But a particular kind of ignorance, one based on identity.

    After 9/11 we saw people who suggested we learn more about Islam condemned as some species of traitor.  How dare you suggest we learn something about this group that just hurt us so badly!  How dare you suggest that we can’t programmatically cast all of them into the same box and deal with our pain by blaming them all and hating them!  How dare you suggest that more knowledge will benefit us!

    It was a spasm of national smallness.  “I know who the enemy is, don’t tell me more about him or I might stop hating him.”

    Reality is always more complicated.

    People who feel squeezed by circumstance, unable often by virtue of their own ignorance to make the decisions necessary to get themselves out of their own cesspools of anger and frustration, seem to contract into themselves and put up a wall to keep out any ideas or facts that might tell them they are in error.  They end up hating, many of them, and you see it all over, with signs that are not only wrong-headed but in too many cases suggestive of poor education, illiteracy, and parochialisms that reinforce a siege mentality that grows daily more dense and difficult to penetrate.

    No, sir or madam, “they” are not the problem.  There are conditions and circumstances that make for a toxic situation and someone has told you that “they” are the cause, the consequence, and the catalyst, all rolled into one, and if we can just be rid of “them” then you will stop being afraid.  Whoever told you that lied to you, probably because in so doing they have made themselves feel (falsely) more in control of their situation or they have a power agenda that depends on you buying into the lie.  It certainly depends on you never asking deeper questions.  Easier to just target and hate.  There, the shots have been fired, the bodies are on the floor, “they” have been dealt a blow.

    Then why don’t you feel any safer?  Why can’t you get past the hate?

    Why must we now shift aim to yet another group you know nothing about except that they don’t look or sound or act like you?

    Too many people in this country harbor and nurture identity hatreds—we know who we are because we hate those people over there, who are different.

    While you’re feeding on that, someone has been stealing your soul to use for purposes you’re too busy hating gays or Muslims or socialists or single parents or blacks or Latinos or Asians or Liberals or Democrats or anyone who knows something you don’t know or has an education or a vocabulary or anyone who reads or supports birth control or feminists or accepts evolution or advocates tolerance or the group of the day to notice.

    On some level, along the way, inside, you are one or more of these very things. Hate them, you hate yourself.  And if by so doing you define who you are, then you have created for yourself a prison, with bars on the inside, through which to look and resent a world of which you have little understanding.  Because you refuse to.

    And that pastor?  He’s one of the wardens.

  • The Anxiety of Innocence

    I have too many reactions to what has occurred in Orlando. They clamor for attention, shove each other aside, roil and ripple. Fifty dead, and why?

    Because a man decided, on his own, to “do something” about homosexuals.

    Why?

    I don’t think anyone will ever have an satisfactory answer to that, but it would seem to stem from the same impulse that drives certain men to beat their wives, to terrorize their children, to post hate-filled screeds on social media, and then, once they have done all these terrible things, go arm themselves in anticipation of the inevitable storm troopers they expect to come silence them.

    And when those storm troopers do not show up?

    They have the weapons, they might as well carry the fight to the enemy.

    An enemy they have created, for themselves, to give shape to the loathing inside that dominates all their waking hours.

    It must. Everyone has a bad day, gets up with an antisocial cloud around them, from time to time. Snapping and snarling, nothing working right, stumbling through interactions that do nothing but abrade.

    But we don’t kill people as a result. We solve the problem, get some sleep, be with friends, and the mood or whatever passes. To get anywhere close to this kind of insane reaction, you’d have to live with the brooding ugliness day in and day out, for months or years, until you can’t even see other people anymore, only the threat they represent. Until you can’t carry it anymore and you have to Do Something.

    But where does that come from?

    That someone can get to this point does not dismay me. It saddens me.

    That others goad him on, cheer him, then in cowardly support behind the anonymity of a faceless mob fistpump the air when the bodies have dropped—that enrages me.

    One post I saw applauding his actions was glad that he’d “taken out” the perverts.

    It’s that question of innocence that seems to underlay so much of this. Protecting the innocent, dealing with the guilty. Somewhere back in the 1980s Reagan dropped a remark, late in his presidency, about AIDS victims after visiting a hospital ward with infants and children: he didn’t know “innocent” people could die from this disease.

    Innocent.

    We hear this in so much. Innocent people.

    Who are they? Why aren’t we all?

    More to the point: who the hell are you to say who is or is not?

    We feed on hatred, vampirically. It drips, intravenously, daily. Most of us seem immune to the worst effects, but some embrace it.

    Omar Mateen thought They were out to get him. They must have been, he hated them, it only makes sense that they hate him back. And we helped him do the hating, every microcerebral homophobic lapel-pin patriot goading him on, ranting about the state of the country, posturing and pissing in the ocean, venting frustration as if it were a holy cause, listening to professional demagogues who peddle bigotry to meet their bottom-line who delight in the slaughter because it makes their irrational squeelings seem somehow prophetic, and then the rest of us who are polite or incapable of separating common sense from ideology or want to believe we do not enable the broken and malign, who are so terrified of losing a presumed right that we hand over our humanity in exchange for a safety we refuse to believe can be had by better means.

    Because when our bitter uncle or our next-door neighbor starts ranting about how They are ruining the country, we demure, we don’t want to make a scene, we don’t want to wreck the day. Worse, we may not be so certain they’re wrong, because who, after all, among us is innocent? Maybe…maybe…it might be…well, I don’t know…everyone is entitled to their opinion…who am I…?

    And then one day we wake to the news that the monster has fed. We’re shocked. We condemn. But maybe we helped. Not directly. No, we didn’t give him the gun or send him to the address or—

    We just never challenged the sickness.

  • Placeholder

    Working on fiction and just…working…so for now, enjoy.

    Swirls Around Stone, June 2016

     

     

  • Nature’s Flags

    For the day at hand, no polemic, no politics, no studied responses. Just…these…

    Japanese Maple Leaves, May 2016Larkspur, May 2016Larkspur 2, enhanced May 2016

  • Petals

    For whatever reason, this spring we’ve had some very cool blossoms int he yard, all seeming to know how to pose. For myself, I’ve bestirred my bones to take the camera out early to capture the light through textured membranes and…

    Iris Cave 2, May 2016 Iris, Profile, May 2016, b&w Peony & Dew, May 2016 Iris Petal, May 2016, b&w Sun Through Iris and FGence, May 2016