John McCain is…

1.) Ignorant on the economy. And see here.

2.) Ignorant on foreign policy. And see here.

3.) Ignorant on birth control.

4.) Ignorant of the truth. And see here and here.

5.) Ignorant of what’s important to veterans and votes against veterans.

6.) Ignorant of the laws of our sovereign allies (or just doesn’t care!)

7.) Ignorant of what constitutes torture.

8.) Ignorant of how to show up and vote as a United States Senator. And see here.

9.) Ignorant of the campaign finance laws of the United States. And see here.

10.) Ignorant of what is an “elitist.” And see here, here, here, here, and here.

11.) Ignorant of how people who steal drugs and other people’s property should go to jail. And see here.

12.) Ignorant of loyalty and love to the mother of his first children who suffered a terrible car accident and took care of his family while he was a POW.

13.) Ignorant of how to control his temper. And see here.

14.) Ignorant of the wholly radical and extremist views of persons who he seeks to endorse his campaign, or McCain is an anti-American, anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim bigot. And see here and here.

15.) Ignorant of key environmental issues, sometimes voting against important legislation and later trying to take credit for its passage. And see here and here.

John McCain has attempted to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans. McCain’s plan cannot be succeeding because what we hear from him now is the standard KKKarl Rove attack message juxtaposing Senator Obama with two white blondes.

America cannot afford to have anyone so monumentally ignorant as President.

John McCain is too ignorant to be President of the United States.

Superlatives aside, I think everyone can agree that we have one those Major Elections coming up that are purported to mark Turning Points in History. We’ve seen many so touted that weren’t. It may be that the presidents involved in those Non Major Elections went on to be remarkable due to what transpired under their administrations, but that doesn’t turn their elections into something that could have been recognized as Turning Points. In a smaller sense, all presidential elections are turning points, because by the nature of our system we can mark shifts in historical currents handily under the heading of who is in the White House when the hairpin switchback came on us. But the fact that a given president was elected as major turning point? You have to look at what was actually at stake before the vote was cast and ask, in the context of the times, how much change was actually anticipated that would not occur had anyone else run and been elected.

That narrows it somewhat. By that definition, JFK qualifies—based on his youth and Catholicism, and one can debate which was more telling—as does Carter, based on a rejection of Nixon’s Imperial Presidency, since people stated clearly that an appointed Vice President represented too big a shift in our perception of acceptable politics to be tolerated.

Before that? Hayes, because of the national jerrymandering that resulted in his ascendancy. Lincoln certainly, since his election split the Union, and everyone knew that was in the cards.

In my opinion, most elections, in spite of the rhetoric, do not hinge on epoch-making change. Finer points can be argued, but the perceived good or bad of the candidates usually hinge on personal views of which of two roads leading in much the same direction is the better. The direction is not that different. FDR picked up and enlarged policies Hoover had already begun—recovery from the Depression was the issue and both candidates agreed. Distinctions of method did not inform the electorate, only matters of which candidate the people trusted to Do Something. As it turned out, FDR’s presidency did alter the national landscape, but the promise of such alterations did not inform the election. And in the case of Kennedy, people expected the country to change profoundly—positively or negatively—because of his election, but in fact it really didn’t change that much. Not due to the president, at any rate.

What we have before us now, though, is such a pivotal election, and one that has its roots in ideological perceptions ranging across the spectrum.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the divide has grown clearer by the decade between two camps that seem more and more irreconcilable. They differ profoundly over basic ideological concepts concerning economy, religion, foreign policy, science, and civil liberties. Not that the presidential candidates have differed all that much—both parties have striven to nominate candidates acceptable to the broad middle ground that exists between these camps—but the ideals and interests that drive people to the polls are more and more extreme, both sides struggling to find a candidate who will embody some kind of overwhelming choice, a fulcrum that will lever the country onto one path or the other, and in this debate those paths diverge profoundly.

Until Hilary Clinton lost finally to Barack Obama, is appeared that the race would be between candidates who pretty well embraced that ethic. Oh, certainly the fact that Hilary is a woman would have made this a Major election, but her politics conform to the “least offense to the greatest number” ideal that has been informing party choices for a long time. Obama is arguably not in that mold. Agree or disagree with his stated ideas, he does not really fit that description. He’s young enough to believe differences can be made, basic changes can occur, and a better road can be built. Whether he’s ultimately allowed to do that is another question. But people perceive him to be an agent of change that is legitimate and sincere and potentially effective.

I don’t actually believe John McCain is his equivalent, but the fact is he is perceived by his supporters as such. It doesn’t matter. He embodies 20th century policy programs. He is of That Era. Maverick or not, his “independence” serves a vision of the United States that would be recognizable to someone facing the Kennedy-Nixon contest. He’s still arguing over the New Deal and the Great Society and whether or not it’s in our best long term interests to “give money to people who don’t work for it.” He probably still has some vague attachment to what has become a cliched envisioning of an Arcadian America, Traditional Family Values, and that while he wouldn’t himself advocate stripping women of their current rights and freedoms, maybe he believes it wouldn’t be so bad if women stopped “trying to be men” and went back to being wives and mothers and give up the struggle for equality. (Why else would he, the Maverick, embrace a Pro-Life policy, which if fully implemented by those who push it most fervently would lead to a regress to exactly that, overturning not only Roe v Wade but also Griswold?) Maybe he has some vague understanding that the future belongs to a changed global interaction and energy will have to come in new forms, but he stills understands such things in terms of oil and corporate hegemony.

His selection as the Republican candidate is a lukewarm repudiation of Bush, not because Bush was ideologically wrong, but because Bush failed. The reasons for his failure do not seem well understood by the Right. Talk of tactics and strategy avoid the harder analysis of basic direction. But McCain looks new.

Obama, whether his ideas would work or not, is new. Not, perhaps, as radically as his detractors suggest, but…

Even so, the election itself will not hinge on that. What it hinges on is what we as a polity will find it acceptable to conceive in political terms. It makes comparisons to Kennedy all the more telling and relevant. What Kennedy’s election said was that this country, after 180 years of anti-Catholic sentiment, could conceive of the notion that all the horror stories about papists and religion were wrong, and that is would be possible to trust a Catholic to set his Catholicism aside and be a secular leader. It said that we as a country could embrace a new perception at the highest level.

I think this boldness on the part of the electorate carried us through the Sixties, changing one damn thing after another, until, exhausted at the terminus of the Vietnam War we faltered and found ourselves persuaded that all that change might have been in error, and at the end of the confused Seventies we embraced someone who suggested we could have The Good Old Days back. It was this shift in national mindset that Kennedy embodied that was important and made his election a Major One—a paradigm shift that we still carry with us. In the end it didn’t matter what Kennedy did, it mattered what we did.

So it will be in this election. Obama represents a paradigm shift—not that he would in any way be sure of fulfilling it, but insofar as we as a nation would elect him. It suggests that we are about to make a bold statement as a people about the 20th century and the Olde Time Crap that is currently crippling the Republicans.

But it is also the first election in a long, long time that cannot be predicted. Until the votes are in, there is no basis for making predictions.

What has been happening in many districts on the local level for years now is a curious malaise setting in among Republican voters. They are experiencing what Democrats were up till now—if asked, they state their support for this candidate or that, but on the day it seems in many places they’re just staying home. The majority of Democrats now in congress can be to some degree attributed to this. The Republicans are exhausted. I think many of them are also disgusted. I think many of them are just as weary of the right wing jeremiad as the Left is. The trouble is, it makes polling totally irrelevant.

As does Obama’s race. Odious as it made sound, it’s possible many people are telling pollsters that they support him, but on the day, standing in that booth, the decision before them, many of those same people may decided that they really aren’t ready to have a black man as president.

I would like to think I’m wrong.  I hope so.  But it renders all polls problematic.

We won’t know till the count is in.

It may also be that the paradigm shift I mentioned has already occurred, and that just the fact that Obama is taken seriously and there has been as little racial flavor to this election as there would have been in, say, 1984 (and yes, the New Yorker notwithstanding, there really has been damn little race-baiting so far) means we’ve already moved past something we’ve been struggling to get over since Brown v the Board of Education.  (Yes, the same can be said of Hilary being taken so seriously.)

The vote in November may well be a turning point, not because Barack Obama might win, but because by winning we will have made a statement about which road to take.  That makes it a Major Election.  Obama therefore doesn’t have to be the equivalent on past great presidents—he doesn’t have to be Kennedy (who wasn’t all that great) or FDR or Teddy.  All he has to be is a clear signpost as the fork in the road.

The chamber, flickering by massed candle light, is stuffy and just a bit noisy from all the shfting fabric and heavy breathing, muttered comments and borborigmi. The couple in the opulent bed seem annoyed, but they’re forcing themselves to play along and be jolly. He manages—he’s been through this before, of course—but she is having difficulty with the idea of being unclothed before an audience.

“We must do this quickly and have done,” says he, “then they will leave us to our bliss.”

She eyes him suspiciously, then nods curtly, hikes up what little she has around her hips, scoots down, and spreads her legs.

Ponderously, he rolls atop her.

A minister, a member of Parliament, two servants, and a Duke move closer to observe.

“A little to your left, Highness,” says the Duke.

Everything slides home. The woman winces visibly (it doesn’t really hurt, but there is the expectation of virgin ritual to fulfill).

“It is done,” the minister says, whereupon the Master of the Chamber begins shooing everyone out of the room to leave the newlyweds alone.

Macabre? Loosely, we’ve just witnessed the wedding night of Henry the VIII and…well, one of the six. It was a State Affair, the First Time, and required witnesses. The realm must be assured that the king’s thing shot home into the queen’s vagina. All is well, the security of the state is assured.

This obsession with where penises go—or whether they go somewhere at all—has, you may rightly agree, no place in a democracy where the provenance of royal spoor has no bearing on state matters (unless one is unfortunate enough to stain a dress with it). In Henry’s day, however, the royals had far less privacy in the matter than the commoners. You would think we’d have learned by now that, really, where what part fits when and with whom is totally irrelevant to anything, well, National…

Not so. California has legalized Gay Marriage and some of its citizens are Up In Arms about it. So much so that they are trying to enact an amendment to ban it. Of course, they’re a bit embarrassed about it as they are now suing to remove the current wording from their Proposition 8, which is one of the more truthful and straightforward such ballots I’ve seen. It states currently that by voting for Proposition 8, the right to marry and be married will be removed from homosexuals—who currently enjoy that right in California. The proponents of Prop 8 call the wording “inflammatory” and want it changed. The problem is, that is exactly what Prop 8 will do.

So why the fuss? Well, they’re afraid such wording will cause people to reject it. It’s too rough, you see.

Personally, though, I think they are also just a bit embarrassed, because underlying this desire to strip gays of the right to marry is this same old pesky problem of where all those penises are going. We can’t crowd into the bedrooms of all these folks—especially since it looks like domestic surveillance might be curtailed again under the next president and Alberto Gonzales is no longer in the Justice Department to make sure our search for terrorists can also be used eventually to root out, you know, perverts—so the next best thing is to try to make sure what Those People are doing is in no way protected by law.

A stretch? Well, take a look at this from Osron Scott Card. I pick on this because Card is an excellent fiction writer who seems to have the ability to empathize (in his fiction) with those he does not agree with. In fact, a read of his novel Songmaster would lead one to expect a profound level of tolerance for alternative perspectives. And yet, compartmentally, he seems incapable of extending such tolerance to, well, reality.

But it is his claim that such legalization of gay marriage is a threat to democracy that I think is interesting. This is another in the long conservative argument over Legislation from the Bench—which they hate when liberals do it, but then they do it themselves all the time in the guise of Strict Constructionism. So this would be great for them—enact a constitutional amendment which would bypass legislative bodies and allow a conservative court to strike down majority mandates based on constitutional law that can be construed as Founding Intent.

It is such a tortuous road, though, for such a silly prejudice. Do people really concern themselves with what other people do with their parts? Does it matter where someone else’s penis goes as long as such use conforms to laws that apply to everyone (statutory rape, forcible rape, etc)?

Maybe it is does. I know it concerns me where mine goes. But I always thought that was a strictly private matter. Maybe I’m wrong.

In case you’ve been out of touch, a student in Florida took Our Lord Jesus Christ hostage a few weeks ago. He walked out of church with a consecrated communion wafer to show to a friend, rather than promptly eating the true flesh of the 2000 year old man. Ignoring the question of whether Jesus really did say, “Eat Me”, this little event became big news. First, the college and the church denounced and eventually impeached the poor kid. Demands that he be expelled and/or excommunicated flew. (Orlando Sentinel summary article).

Then famous rationalist and biologist PZ Myers got into the act. He published a post in which he suggested that those incensed need to get a reality-based life: “It’s a frackin’ cracker” said he. Myers even suggested that someone should procure for him one of these blessed wafers, so that he could personally desecrate it.

Then the spam hit the fan. Thousands of comments and emails and demands for his expulsion and his firing and even death threats followed. Well, back and forth over several posts. One woman made international news for being fired for using a company computer to send her death threat.

Finally, Myers posted “The Great Desecration” beginning with “It is finished.” He discusses the way the church has used just the allegation of wafer misuse in history to spur mobs to mass murder (with specific examples). He posts a few of the more lucid (and publishable) denunciations of his proposed desecration, with commentary. And finally, he shows a picture of the desecration itself. Not only does he drive a rusty spike through the cracker (wondering in print if Jesus has a current tetanus shot), he nails it through the Koran and into one of Dawkins’ books, then artistically covered it all with the traditional banana peels and coffee grounds.

Desecrating the Koran was a suggestion made by many of his Catholic detractors, who suggested that he didn’t dare offend the Muslims, but only picks on Catholics (the group from whom he received the most death threats) because they are so kind and forgiving.

Desecrating Dawkins is to point out that he is not selectively suggesting that the Biblical injunction against worshipping images be used only against Judeo Christian churches. But that all icons be examined from the point of view that the symbol is not actually the object. Or to quote Korzybski, “The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing”.

Consider this comment regarding Barack Obama by Joan Walsh of Salon.com:

The only downside I can see right now is Obama being depicted as enjoying the adulation a little too much. After the speech, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that he spoke with Obama this morning, and that “he seemed very up, very confident … He was bragging a little bit about sinking eight out of 10 three-pointers when he was with the troops this week. He even said he felt a little sorry for John McCain this week.” Alter is an Obama admirer, and presumably meant the Democratic nominee no harm, but I winced as I listened.

I was startled when I read this quote. Did Obama really say that he “felt a little sorry for John McCain? I know that Obama was speaking frankly. A lot of us who know that Obama would be a much better President have also felt a little sorry for John McCain, who is working the system hard in a rather pathetic way. Almost daily, he is making factual mistakes indicating that he is way too ignorant about how the world works to function as a leader. His approach would be to impose his limited view of the world upon the governed. It would be world-view largely unsupported by evidence, quite similar to what we’ve had for the past eight years.

Back to Obama’s quote, however. Daring to feel sorry for a white man is a battle cry for many bigots. I’m afraid that Obama’s comment is going to stir up a lot of people. Hearing it reminded me of a key line from the trial portrayed in the movie version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

It was during that trial that Tom Robinson (a kind and decent black man who was being tried for rape and assault) had blurted out that he “felt a little sorry for his accuser, Mayella Ewell a young woman who had been beaten by her drunk father, who had transparently set up Mayella to lie in court to deflect blame from him to the innocent Tom.

Here’s an excerpt from the screenplay. The scene is (the innocent) Tom Robinson being, having just denied his involvement, being cross-examined by the state prosecutor:

Prosecutor: How come you so all fired anxious to do that woman’s chores?

Tom: Looks like she, she didn’t have nobody to help her. Like I said, she…

Prosecutor: With Mr. Ewell and seven children on the place? You did all this choppin’ and work out of sheer goodness, boy? You’re a mighty good fella, it seems. Did all that for not one penny?

Tom: Yes, sir. I felt right sorry for her. - She seemed…

Prosecutor: You felt sorry for her? A white woman? You felt sorry for her?

Led by the conniving prosecutor, Tom’s heart-felt comment instantly inflamed the jury of twelve white men. How dare a black man think of himself as so uppity that he dared to feel sorry for a beaten, poor, desperate white woman! After a brilliant argument by Atticus Finch on behalf of Tom, the jury nonetheless found Tom guilty, but it wasn’t on the basis of any evidence.

I hope American has moved on and that Barack Obama’s comment doesn’t inflame the far right (any more than it is already inflamed). Then again, it sometimes it doesn’t seem as though a lot of America has grown up much since the 1930’s. Based on some right-wing comments I’ve heard over the past year, there are only a few things bigoted people hate more than a black man, and one of those things is an uppity black man, one who dares to feel sorry for them, even when it is heartfelt.

Tonight I watched “It’s Bad For Ya,” George Carlin’s final nationally televised performance. The entire show is available on YouTube (Below is Part I of VII). The show was broadcast live on March 1, 2008, only a few months prior to Carlin’s death (due to a heart attack, on June 22, 2008).

[I'm having some trouble with this YouTube link.  If the above viewer doesn't work, click here].

Carlin opened the show by announcing that he was 70 years old. In Parts I and II, he speaks bluntly about society’s failure to deal frankly with death. It’s impossible to watch this performance without feeling the irony. At one point, he states:

So don’t be afraid to get old. It’s a great time of life. You get to take advantage of people and you’re not responsible for anything! You can even shit in your pants!

He dissects many other topics, including law, religion, children, education and national pride. He shows no patience for the way our culture handles any of these issues. His performance gets especially dark when he asserts that there is essentially no hope for us, ecologically speaking—he predicts that in 40 or 50 more years, the entire planet will be a massive ball of pollution. At many points in the performance, it’s not easy to tell whether Carlin retains any personal optimism. Is his performance intentionally injected with hyperbole or is this really and truly what Carlin thinks. I suspected the latter, but I don’t really know.

I heard many gems during the performance (meaning that I heard many things with which I agree wholeheartedly). Here’s my favorite, this one delivered during the topic of society’s often-stated goal that “we should teach our children to read.”

It’s not important to get children to read. It’s much more important to teach children to question what they read. They should be taught to question everything. Everything they read and everything they hear. They should be taught to question authority . . .

Amen.

Have things changed since 1966? Those of us alive back then (I was ten in 1966) might need to think back before answering yes. Things must have changed since then, but in what ways? Let’s see . . . there were no personal computers. Color TV was a luxury. No astronaut had yet walked on the moon. People lived in much smaller houses closer to city centers.

I was at a courthouse in St. Clair County, Illinois, today when it hit home in another way. Take a look at this photo of the membership of the St. Clair Bar Association in 1966 (I took a photo of a big photo). Notice the total lack of women. Notice the almost total lack of any lawyers other than those who were Caucasian males.

It is so incredibly different now. Now, approximately half of all law school students are women and more than ¼ of all practicing lawyers are women. Currently, about one law student in five is non-white.

I’m not trying to pick on St. Clair County. I’m certain that the demographics of lawyers were similar in many other places back in 1966. Back then, no matter where you lived, being a lawyer almost guaranteed that you were a white male.

I’m 52 now, yet 1966 doesn’t seem like a long time ago. By the time I entered law school in 1978, it was no longer unusual to see women and minorities in law school classes. Things have changed dramatically, but it wasn’t an obvious change while it happened. In the case of the demographics of lawyers, it is all for the better.

Incremental change can be statistically dramatic, yet invisible.

We like to believe, as Americans, that this country is a meritocracy. The idea—Horatio Alger, Thomas Edison, McGuyver, all emblematic of this notion—that the best qualified rise to the top, that those who can display and apply ability, skill, and intelligence are the ones who are selected—either by themselves or through the recognition of society—to do important jobs and that this, as opposed to elitist canards like family or school affiliation or looks or race, counts for more in this society. We like to believe that we judge people by their competence, not other things. It’s a driving national myth.

We like to tell ourselves that such people are Heroes.

Like most myths, there’s an element of truth to it. It is certainly the case that the opposite of such ability gets derided once exposed and the people who are less capable lose whatever consideration they’ve received. Eventually. Under the right circumstances.

But we all know that as a guiding ethic, merit is like anything else, and does not hold universal sway over our sentiment.

Perversely, many people display what can only be described as fear of people who are genuinely competent and talented, depending on the circumstances. All one need do is look at the condition of regard in which science is held by many people and the way professionals are often mistrusted and we’ve all seen instances where the person at the party who actually knows a thing or three—and dares express that knowledge—often as not ends up not invited back.

It’s a complex and contradictory attitude Americans have toward ability. We admire and respect it—until it contradicts a long-held belief or runs afoul a prejudice or makes us feel, in ourselves, a bit stupid.

It is probably more cloyingly and illogically represented in our general attitudes toward race.

Let me put it as bluntly as possible—in American history, how often has genuine merit been rewarded if the potential recipient is not white? Or male?

This is largely rhetorical. Most people very well know the answer—seldom, and often when such a person does stand out, attempts are made to diminish his or her achievements. We have been persistently whittling away at this problem for a long time now and we may be forgiven if from time to time we seem to feel it has been solved. It takes a shock to remind us how far we have yet to go.

In fact, part of the aftershock ought to be a recognition that this is a problem somehow wired into human nature, and that if we solve it for one group, it will simply move to another.

What kind of shock am I talking about?

Let me point you to this from John Scalzi’s Whatever. Go read it, then come on back here.

A couple of things I note—one, the reporter in question is herself clearly a minority. So one wonders why she would be duped into reporting this in this way without being outraged. The other is, the unattributed assertions made in the report.

But the main problem goes back to the merit argument.

These two people—Barack and Michelle Obama—are representative of our mythical Competent People ideal. They’ve Done It. They are deserving of our respect for their achievements and therefore deserve to be considered on their abilities.

However.

They seem to be of the wrong group. Hmm. How did that happen?

Wrong group? Do we still think that way?

Well, you know, maybe not, but we have this other national ideal that tends to undermine the first one, and that is Winning Is Everything. We talk about fair play and sportsmanship and all that, but we don’t believe in it, not when the possibility of losing is in the mix, and this is a presidential race. In politics, all the stops get pulled out, and if one of the weapons is to be race, well, then, perhaps the engineers of such tactics are not themselves blatant racists, but they have no qualms about using discredited tactics in the all-important attempt to win, merit aside.

Because you really don’t see people very often graciously stand aside for the better qualified. It would be nice if you did, it would say so much to the next generation about what is important. But we’ve debased that coin for 200 + years.

Equally important, though, is the question of why those who put this out there would believe it would have any impact.

Because it will. Because a lot of Americans, though they might never say it, still fear the ramifications of such a possibility.

Which is why I will believe no poll this year. I believe people will be ashamed to admit their prejudices and tell pollsters that they will support Obama, but once they’re inside the voting booth will stop and ask themselves if they’re really ready to see a black man as president.

Unfortunately, this is America. We may surprise ourselves. Or we may see the upcoming election one in which the next president is the one who simply lost least.

Joanna Russ, a teacher and science fiction writer and savvy thinker, published a book in 1983 called How To Suppress Women’s Writing. It is a lucid textbook on cultural oppression. The subjects are women and writing, but the methods and tendencies she lays out apply to virtually any sub-group and occupation. It is worth finding and reading. It delineates the subtle—and not-so-subtle—ways in which we as a culture steal merit from those we don’t wish to see possess it. In the prologue, she writes:

In a nominally egalitarian society, the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the “wrong” groups have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can’t. But, alas, give them the least reall freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so’s will do it anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the “wrong” people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.

Some will do it well, and then you see the tactics of disenfranchisement take a few steps up the scale of panic and ugliness. Never mind that Hank Aaron actually broke Babe Ruth’s record, he’s black, and shouldn’t have been able to, but since he was about to anyway he had to be prevented. Death threats ensued. Washington Carver was a brilliant chemist, certainly, but look what he did! All his research was based on, well, peanuts. What can one expect from a black man? (It wasn’t, but even so, the denigration ignores the achievement.) Frank Yerby was a brilliant novelist, but he was fluke, the exception that proved the rule that blacks couldn’t write anything other than about themselves. He moved to Spain finally to get away from the racist belittlement of his work.

The list goes on and on. Add now this absurd, obscene attempt to paint Michelle Obama as exactly the same as every white bigot’s worst fear of a welfare queen sitting in the White House.

Merit is ignored. Ignored long enough and thoroughly enough, and it cannot shine through.

At least, so such purveyors of intolerance wish.

It might not work this time. If it doesn’t, it would be nice to think that, for a change, merit counts for more. But it may also be that further attempts like this will trigger another American ideal, that being our almost reflexive sympathy with so-called underdogs. If that puts Obama in the White House, well, goody for us. But it would also be success that ignores merit. It will be a serendipitous achievement based on our national dislike of bullies.

What then will be learned from it all?

If we were, as we would like to believe, concerned with ability and competence above all, then it is inconceivable that George W. Bush could have been elected, even in the first place. Both his opponents are by any measure his superiors in ability.

The truth is, we value comfort more and Bush, in his own way, is comforting to many people. He’s not our better. He’s “just like us” in presentation and, sadly, ability. He doesn’t make us feel inferior (by now, probably, quite the opposite) and he doesn’t challenge us to rise above mediocrity. With Bush you could share a beer and talk about baseball. With Obama? In truth, you probably could, but more likely if the subject moved on to something real—like taxes or foreign policy—most of us likely couldn’t keep up. He understands these things in a way that most of us don’t.

Not because we can’t. Because we have neither the time or patience to really understand them.

How can I say that?

Well, the evidence. If we did understand such things, we wouldn’t have had to put up with Bush for eight years.

And we wouldn’t be afraid of Obama.

What’s with white people?  If you’d like to know, check out this Salon interview of Christian Lander, creator of Stuff White People Like.

Here’s an example of Lander’s sharp sword: “The presence of an improper apostrophe on a menu can ruin an otherwise delicious meal for a white person.”  As you can probably already tell, when Lander uses the term “White People,” he’s actually referring to a specific sub-category of “white people,” namely,”left-wing, upper-middle-class.”

At his blog, Lander weighs in on quite a few consumerist tendencies of “white people.”  Here’s his riff on bottled water:

It’s all about ranking. It’s essentially a contest. It used to be that bottled water was a status symbol. You drink Evian, or you drink Fiji, or what is the most expensive water.

But advanced-level white people, the higher-ranking white people, realized that they were creating a lot of waste, and so they switched over to the Nalgene bottle. That also reminded them of going camping. So then they could take a stance of superiority over the people who were drinking bottled water. And then, that whole story came out about Nalgenes leaching I don’t know what the exact toxin is [Bisphenol A]. So then super-advanced white people went even further and got those metal Sigg bottles, and now you have this really solid hierarchy and ranking of white people of commercial bottled water, Nalgene bottle and either the glass or metal, twist-top bottles.

[This example fits well with many of the consumerist critiques on this site].

Bottom line, if you want to keep up with “White People,” you now know where to go.

Today we biked over to see the 2½ hour long gay pride parade. “You’re here, you’re queer, we’re used to it.” About 40,000 other people came to see the parade along the edge of my neighborhood today.

You can see the crowds looking down Grand Boulevard. Many people were festively dressed. There were many couples of every gender combination, and many pets and some children.

See Mayor Slay at the head of the Gay Pride parade, waving under a mural of Jesus on the Messiah Lutheran school.

Did you ever notice the yellow lilies in the median on Grand? Here, the throng standing on the southbound side watch the bees in the northbound lanes.

And it is no surprise to have a heavily cheered and well attended block of Obama supporters in this parade.

Yes, there were beads, beads, beads!

And the scattered showers failed to scatter the crowds:

Even unsheltered riders in the parade were undeterred by the rain:

And the rain passed, and a good time was had by all:

And after the parade, there were the stage shows and the booths. Food, drinks, finance, churches, travel, home improvement, wearables, and more.

It was a colorful day in one of our landmark parks, this 28^th annual Gay Pride Festival in Saint Louis, Missouri. On the eastern edge of this “red state”.

In 2006, Norman Solomon wrote War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. His book detailed the information tactics the American government uses to launch wars.

War Made Easy has been such an influential book that it has now been made into a movie of the same name. You can view it here or you can order a copy of the DVD here.

I was able to attend a viewing of “War Made Easy” last Saturday night at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis (NCMR2008). This crisply edited movie was narrated by Sean Penn. Much of what keeps this movie engaging are the dozens of carefully chosen news media clips generated during various American wars for the past 50 years, including large numbers of videos clips from the Vietnam war and the Iraq occupation. The magic of “War Made Easy” is that the directors carefully edited and arranged these clips to show us that nothing much has really changed: If an American president has decided that he wants to go to war, the watchdog American media is likely to become a lapdog and we will inevitably go to war.

Following the screening of “War Made Easy,” I attended a discussion of the movie led by media critic Norman Solomon and the co-director and producer of the movie, Loretta Alper. The following morning, Ms. Alper granted me the opportunity to interview her further regarding the making of “War Made Easy.”

Whenever we Americans go to war, we get there through a well-documented series of stages. As I watched “War Made Easy,” I saw better than ever that these stages are entirely predictable in the context of America’s warmongering ways.

Perhaps this characterization of America sounds too shrill, but just look around. The evidence is everywhere that war is a sport in America just as sports are warlike. Our TV shows and movies overflow with violence as a first-rate method of dealing with conflict. The toys we foist on our boys extol violence as the most obvious way of settling disputes. We challenge each other with statements like “support the troops,” no matter what those troops are doing (and see here ). We are all too ready to invoke the word “war,” because that word triggers a ready-made conceptual frame for freely and guiltlessly expressing ourselves with bullets, bombs and blood. In America, this frame of war is such an incredibly effective filter that we proceed to consider only the “benefits” of war and we ignore the massive damages inflicted on both war-zone civilians and upon millions of Americans (and see here).

For most Americans, it is difficult to see that we are truly a nation of warmongers. After all, we are so absolutely used to being the way we are that even the most obvious things have become difficult to see. As George Orwell once noted, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Before seeing “War Made Easy,” I was already familiar with the FAIR study documenting the manner in which our media rolled over rather than risk being accused of being unpatriotic. How much does the media roll over? So much so, that Americans see only an extremely filtered set of images representing the war. We see pictures of happy soldiers shipping out to “do their duty.” Pictures of dismembered civilian children are much too inconvenient for American patriotism, however.

Yes, Americans have become warriors looking for wars. America is a place where the thinnest of excuses will get the whole war machine revved. It is one of the points made by “War Made Easy” that America is gasoline needing only a small spark of an excuse to get us exploding off to war. Almost any excuse will do, it seems, and it doesn’t matter whether that excuse entirely false. In the 1960s, all it would took was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an incident which never actually happened at all (based upon a recently declassified NSA document and other evidence). Nonetheless, the claim of the Gulf of Tonkin incident opened the floodgates to the American military buildup in Vietnam.

In 1993, all it took was a few well-placed public officials to stir up worries about “weapons of mass destruction” that didn’t exist. At that point, the confirmation bias and the herd instinct take over. How warped has our national perspective become? Whatever any perceived outsider does, we will see in the worst possible light and we will make damned sure that every other American becomes equally xenophobic. When this level of dysfunction occurs in an individual, we call that individual mentally ill. When it occurs nationwide, we call it “patriotism.”

The above observations are necessary prelude to my understanding of “War Made Easy.” I needed to consider these issues because of a question I had trouble getting past: Why isn’t going to war easy for most countries other than the United States? One obvious answer is that most other countries have not invested in a massive military infrastructure. The U.S. is physically able go to war at the push of a button, while most other would first require a long-term military buildup. The next obvious question, though, is why most other countries have not invested in their military might to the same extent as the United States. My unfortunate conclusion is that the U.S. has a warmonger mentality. When the President of the U.S. says we need to go to war, the citizens are already half-primed to agree. This would not be the case with, for example, the Prime Minister of Norway.

“War Made Easy” is an illustration of the predictable steps that will occur as soon as the spark of a false threat hits the gasoline of American militaristic exceptionalism. We see this same pattern over and over. Here are some of the predictable steps that occur when an American president presses for war. All of these are well substantiated by “War Made Easy.”

I. Public dialogue becomes simplistic. Consider Pat Buchanan’s warning that “When the war begins, the debate ends.” The media clips offered by “War Made Easy” substantiate the claim that once war is under way, there is no more media coverage for the rationale for the war, but only for the progress of the war. Once war is under way, it is produced like a TV show. The information from the war zone is tightly controlled by the government. The media does not protest this tight control, because it desperately craves the access and the market share. Therefore, whatever labels the government gives to a battle or a war (e.g., “Shock and Awe”), the media readily embraces it.

II. The President’s case for war is always built upon deception; the official story is false or it omits numerous key facts. Instead, the case is made primarily upon spin.

III. Americans are portrayed as “reluctant fighters.” We’d rather not go to war, but circumstances are allegedly forcing our hand. (more…)

I was reading my daily dose of blood pressure spike (creationism news) when I found this tidbit on TheConservativeVoice.com:

It is my strongly held belief as a conservative, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-family, pro-creationism vs Darwinian Evolution believer that there is no way in God^‘s green earth that that old white guy, who would make history as the oldest first term President if he proves me wrong, can beat the young, inexperienced, eloquent and charismatic black man named Barrack Obama if his life depended on it, and it may because 72 year olds drop dead everyday of much less rigorous stress than running for President.

I’ve said before on this forum that it seemed that the Republicans felt that they had a chance against Hillary, but feared to run against Obama.

He continues:

African Americans who do not care about his socialist, anti-baby, pro-Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender agenda will come out with great hope and pride for the first African American who has aspired to become the most powerful man in the world. And, if not for my social and religious convictions, I would not blame them one bit for voting for one of their own. America could withstand eight years of Bill Clinton and we can withstand four of Barrack Obama.

Personally, I think we could withstand a term or two of return to fiscal responsibility, getting the government back out of the bedroom, and removing White House obstruction to sciences.

Can We? Yes we can!

This is a fascinating video, which I learned of at Daily Kos.

Now that we’ve dragged some of those wacko preachers out into the limelight, maybe it’s time to focus those cameras on the bigots.  Sunshine is great disinfectant.

According to the AP, George W. Bush recently did a good and honorable thing:

President Bush is backing legislation to prevent people from losing their jobs or health insurance based on genetic testing.

Bush on Wednesday signed into law an anti-discrimination measure that drew enormous support in Congress. It forbids employers and insurance companies from denying employment, promotions or health coverage to people when genetic tests show they are prone to cancer, heart disease or other ailments.

He also did a good thing in 2003 when he signed into law the National No-Call list. Here’s that story:

President Bush on Tuesday signed legislation creating a national “do-not-call” list intended to help consumers block unwanted telemarketing calls.

I want to make sure I recognize that, for the past 7 years, George W. Bush has accomplished two things of which I approve. It’s important to take the time to recognize the accomplishments of people.

So there you are: two good things in seven years.

It’s my opinion, however, that virtually every other thing President Bush has done for the past seven years has been incompetent, dangerous, ignorant, dishonest, bigoted, divisive, corrupt and damaging to the reputation, economy and way of life of those living in the United States. Hence, I agree with this post.

My friend Russ sent me this link to an article in our local paper entitled, “Cowardly hypocrisy of Darwin fish displays”. The title does a good job of strongly framing a weak argument. After I read it, I decided to post my response here:

The article begins by framing anything interpretable as anti-Christian as equivalent to Muslim extremism; Jihadism. It illustrates the modern use of the ancient bi-stroke alpha as a covert Christian identity symbol in a repressive Islamic region.

Because of this still extant use in remote locations, the article advocates eschewing these tongue-in-cheek parody icons in the name of political correctness. It equates mockery with intolerance. The article never explains what makes it “cowardly” to openly display a Darwin fish. In the face of such hostility from the majority faith, “brave” seems a more apt term.

I do grant that Christians are a persecuted minority in a few places. In those places, Evolution is generally accepted as a Christian plot to weaken faith in Allah. In those places, a Darwin fish car would be bombed more quickly than a Jesus fish car.

Darwin fish aren’t generally mocking Christianity as a whole, but rather the Flat Earthers, Young Earthers, and Geocentric Universe sects. Most Christians actually believe in the (thoroughly proven) naturalistic explanations of nature, while firmly believing it to be God’s work. But there is a high correlation between the anti-scientific congregants and car fish.

We live in a country in which Christianity is by-far the dominant religion, one in which polls show that faith in virgin birth is more important to general health than the roots of modern medicine. With rationalists comprising a slim minority, and those openly admitting to it in public a small part of those, I don’t see how these icons can do any harm. A slim minority of Christians may well take offense. But they have the power, and therefore have nothing to fear.

I also give fish cars more room, as I do with cars driven by old men in felt hats. Call it profiling, if you must. But I trust drivers who believe there is everything to live for here, rather than those who openly proclaim that the point of life is to reach an idyllic eternity.

The disturbing part of this story is the reactions of so-called medical professionals to this couple’s situation and decision.

Now there are two ways to look at this. The one that might make more sense (though certainly no more palatable) is that these physicians et al are concerned with Insurance issues. What’s covered here? How does malpractice potentially enter into it? And while these folks are relatively well off and can carry their own expenses, what kind of precedent might be set here that will spread to the uninsured or Medicaid?

Unpleasant, but it would give a dimension to it that we could wrap our disgust around.

The other way to see it is as an example that, much as we might as a society wish to see ourselves as maturing, getting beyond such primordial reactions (namely—”Ugh! You different! You die!”), it turns out not to be true. That what we have is a facade and as long as no one really tests it, we can be what we think we are, at least to ourselves.

My reaction to what this couple is doing was initially (and continues to be) “Wow, cool!”

But I may well be in the minority.