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Ethereal Innocence

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Jon Stewart, Formerly of The Daily Show

Jon Stewart, Formerly of The Daily Show

Intellectuals have this little problem: They just cannot understand those who aren’t intellectuals. Irony and sarcasm will not do the trick. When we think that Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert have produced some withering putdown of someone on the other side of the culture wars, the only response from the other side is, “Consider the source. Who cares what a libtard has to say?” After all, they have their own information sources which Liberals have disdained to meet head on.

It’s roughly equivalent to “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.”

Looking back at the Presidential Election of 2016, it strikes me that humorous sallies are not a replacement for engaging with Red States. One has to confront, listen, and respond. Barack Obama did this in 2008 and 2012; Hillary in 2016 did not.

I am currently reading a book of essays on G. K. Chesterton by the Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. In a piece entitled “On Becoming Inhuman out of Sheer Humanitarianism,” Schall writes:

In the summer of 1926 (July 3 and 10), Chesterton wrote two essays in The Illustrated London News on literature and novels. He began with some advice that I recall my old professor Rudolf Allers had also given some years ago, namely, “read even bad novels.” Allers’s point was that you will likely find in lousy novels some rather accurate insight into how people are thinking or acting that you will not find in good literature or in your own experience. It is not easy to imagine all of the silly and wrong things that we might perpetrate on one another, yet we need to know this if only to save us from a certain naïveté or ethereal innocence. [Italics mine]

Maybe someone has to listen to what Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are saying if we are serious about countering it. Even if what they have to say is unadulterated horseshit.

The “Saturday Night Live” sketches about the last election were brilliant: Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon couldn’t have been better. Yet millions of voters weren’t listening. They were tuning in to Fox News or Jesus or Breitbart.

Because the Democrats have failed to engage all the voters, we are resigned to waiting for a new Reichstag fire to be set.

Voting Against the Creepy Clown

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It Was Worth It!

It Was Worth It!

Despite all my strong feelings about the upcoming election, there appeared a real possibility that I wouldn’t be able to vote. I could wait for the sample ballot with its attached absentee ballot application, but there was a better than 50% chance that I wouldn’t get the absentee ballot in my hands before I boarded my plane to South America.

So I called the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters and asked what I could do. They said I could vote in person by going to the County Clerk’s office in Norwalk. Foolishly, I took the 105 Freeway to Norwalk and got stuck in a behemoth traffic jam. It took me all of two hours to drive the 30 miles to the County Clerk’s office and only 15 minutes to vote. Fortunately, I took a better route home (the Golden State Freeway over to the Santa Monica Freeway).

This election matters a great deal to me. I know that California will not go for Trump—even Republican ex-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to vote for him—but I have to be able to face myself when I look in the mirror. I have to act on my beliefs, or what am I?

You can bet that the Creepy Clown did not get an X in his box on my ballot. I can go to Ecuador now with a good conscience.

Defiance Is Everything

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Wearing It Like a Badge of Honor

They Wear It Like a Badge of Honor

I know I said I would shy away from politics in this grim election season, but I could not avoid writing about what troubles me to the base of my soul. And that is the fact that people persist in backing Donald Trump despite the horrible behaviors that he is admittedly guilty of. At one point, he even said he could shoot some innocent down in the streets of New York without impacting his political base. Now I think that perhaps that is true.

The United States does not matter to these people. All that matters is expressing their defiance of all things relating to Obama, Hillary, liberalism, and political correctness. I keep thinking of Sly in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew:

Y’are a baggage, the Slys are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles—we came in with Richard [sic] Conqueror. Therefore, paucas pallabris: Let the world slide! Sessa!

Yes, but once one wakes up from a drunken stupor, one has to face a world that is irretrievably broken. What then? Another impeachment trial?

This is the first election in the history of this young nation in which a large number of voters just want to scuttle the ship and sink it, even if they themselves drown in the process.

I am so exercised by this state of affairs that I’m going to drive out to the L.A. County Clerk’s office in distant Norwalk to pick up my absentee ballot for fear that, in the normal course of events, I won’t have it until after I leave for Ecuador. I know that Californians will reject Trump, but now, more than ever, I feel that my vote is personally important.

Consider it my own act of defiance.

Ideo-Bursts and Promisoids

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The Whole Medium Is IMHO Suspect

The Whole Medium Is IMHO Suspect

About a year ago, I signed up for Twitter. But then, when I found out I was supposed to “follow” three existing Twitter accounts, I suddenly lost interest, so I never finished my application. About once a week, Twitter e-mails me to finalize my application … but I never will.

Why? A certain Prezidenchul candidate has adopted Twitter as his preferred method of communicating with the world, and I suddenly saw what was wrong with the whole setup. Standing at the microphone (broken or not), Donald Trump thinks in limited bursts of thought that are compatible with the character limit on tweets. He jumps from one tweet-length position to another. This effectively prevents him for discussing such nasty things as details that may substantiate his short ideo-bursts.

On the other hand, these same tweets endear him to his fans, who are not into such mundane things as facts. They are, if anything, practitioners of identity politics: Trump re-connects with his base, and since they identify with him, that connection is all that counts.

When you go into details, you could wind up betraying your base. So, the idea is to just skip around, making short promisoids without pinning himself down on any one of them. Promisoids good, facts bad!

So I think I will never complete my Twitter application process. And here, in considerably more than 140 characters, is why.

 

Kayfabe

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The Term Comes from Professional Wrestling

The Term Comes from Professional Wrestling

The word kayfabe is new to me. I learned about it from reading Nathan Rabin’s 7 Days in Ohio: Trump, the Gathering of the Juggalos and the Summer Everything Went Insane. According to TVTropes:

“Kayfabe” is a carny term thought to have originated from the Pig Latin for “be fake,” possibly originally by pronouncing it backward (“kay-feeb”). Professional Wrestling adopted the term as a reference to the standard Fourth Wall features of separating the audience from the action. It is meant to convey the idea that, yes, pro wrestling is a genuine sport, and yes, this is how people act in real life. It is essentially Willing Suspension of Disbelief specifically for pro wrestling.

Back in the old days, though, kayfabe was much more; it was pro wrestling’s real life Masquerade. Wrestlers, promoters, and everybody else involved with the business alike resorted to any means necessary to guard the secret that wrestling was rigged, from wrestlers roughing up any reporters who dared ask, “It’s all fake, right?” to (alleged) death threats towards anybody who threatened to expose the secret, through contacts with the Mafia and other organized crime. Heels [villains] and faces [heroes] weren’t allowed to travel, eat, or be seen with their “enemies” in public, and changed in separate locker rooms. Wrestlers lived their gimmicks 24/7 and those playing Wild Samoans or Foreign Wrestling Heels could not speak English in public if their characters didn’t. There are even rumors that some wrestlers would lie under oath in court to maintain the illusion, and some old-time heels tell stories about carrying guns for their own protection from those fans who took it just a bit too seriously. To get an idea of just how important kayfabe was, it’s interesting to watch shoot interviews with old-time wrestlers filmed in the modern era, even decades later when everyone knows that wrestling is fake, they often start speaking as if various angles and feuds were real and tend to dance around actually saying that wrestling is staged if pressed….

Now the only concept of kayfabe fakery is highly transferable to politics. In the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald Trump is obviously the heel. But the parallel breaks down somewhat with Hillary Clinton, whom Trump is trying to portray as the real heel. Using the language of kayfabe, this is one election in which there are no faces.

Quisquilian Diversivolence

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The New Face of American Politics?

The New Face of American Politics?

The term come from a Futility Closet posting entitled “In a Word.” “Quisquilian” means worthless or trivial. “Diversivolence” is the noun form of an adjective meaning desiring strife. Those two words together pretty much summarize the 2016 election—most especially if you add Hillary’s phrase, “Basket of Deplorables.”

Obviously new terms are welcome, if the standard old ones put us in the mess we are in. Since the news media have signally failed to make any sense out of the this grim period, we need new ways to describe the, uh, situation.

I will attempt to search out new terms and bring them to your attention. Perhaps it will entertain you as well as add new shades of meaning.

American Moralist

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Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges

You are not likely to see him on television unless you get RT, the Russian-owned English-language news channel. There he has a weekly show called On Contact, during which he conducts interviews with economists and social and political figures.

He has a way of looking as if he were fiercely uncomfortable. During his interviews, which are excellent, he rarely laughs or even smiles.

Before he cut loose from the corporate-owned world of news media, he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio. He traveled around the world such global hot spots such as El Salvador, Lebanon, and Bosnia.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Chris Hedges aimed to follow in his father’s footsteps, but found that the reality of Christian charity in the slums of Boston’s Roxbury ghetto was affecting his own survival. But he never forgot what he learned at Colgate and Harvard Divinity School about morality, personal and political. One effect was to make him a confirmed pacifist. When he gave an anti-war graduation address at Rockford College during the gung-ho days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was heckled and booed by the “patriots” in the audience.

Hedges is the author of some of the most painfully truthful books about life in our time. The titles below which I have read are marked with an asterisk (*):

  • War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002)
  • Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America* (2005)
  • American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007)
  • I Don’t Believe in Atheists* (2008)
  • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle* (2009)
  • Death of the Liberal Class (2010)
  • Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012) with Joe Sacco
  • Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (2015)

You can find a weekly column by Chris Hedges at Truthdig.Com, whose politics are very close to my own.

 

 

 

 

 

Stymie the Pollsters!

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It Would Be Nice If This Election Unified Us, But....

It Would Be Nice If This Election Unified Us, But….

We’ve all had it up to here with the damnable Presidential Election of 2016. I think it’s time to throw some monkey wrenches, particularly at the work of political pollsters. When they call you in the evening (it’s always in the evening), politely but firmly decline to state your preferences or, in fact, to answer any questions at all. Just tell them it’s in violation of your religion.

Let’s face it, more than half the polls are abominations, but even the ones that aren’t deserve to be stymied at every turn. Until the candidates themselves lose all faith in the polls, the horrendous campaign meat grinder will continue to burn money and patience until we are so disgusted as to consider renouncing our citizenship.

Whether its Cheeto-Brain or the Great Stone Spouse who wins, no one will be particularly happy. We are in a period that resembles the Roman Empire after the Antonine “good” emperors, when Rome had one ruler after another mercifully assassinated by the Praetorian Guard, until the reign of the truly dreadful Elagabalus from AD 218 to 222 .

The Man Who Destroyed Yugoslavia

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Slobodan Milošević

Slobodan Milošević

He was the 3rd President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1997-2000), 1st President of Serbia (1991-1997), and the 14th President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia (1989-1991). I am referring to Slobodan Milošević, the leader who took his country down a rat hole, was responsible for thousands of deaths by genocide (which he called “ethnic cleansing”), and died while awaiting trial at the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague.

Although he initially ruled a nation of Serbs, Croatians, Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, Muslim Bosnians, and Hungarians, in the end he was only interested in changing diverse Yugoslavia into a Greater Serbia. Most of his crimes involved his preferential treatment of his fellow Serbs, mostly in the Yugoslavian Republics of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, where forces under him or allied to him committed devastating massacres of men, women, and children, including large scale rape and torture.

I am currently reading Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little (New York: Penguin, 1997). Although twenty years have passed since the first edition came out in 1996, the book still reads like today’s headlines.

It shows what can happen when the elected leader of a democracy decides to take sides on behalf of a particular population and, at the same time, act prejudicially against others. (That’s one of the reasons I am so against a political party being responsive only to, say, angry white males.)

The United States is a diverse country very like the old Yugoslavia. It wouldn’t take much effort to break the country into warring fragments. That’s what happened in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot decided to persecute or kill city dwellers. Also Hitler’s Germany with its antisemitism and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s persecution of Christians and Baha’i. And, needless to say, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh’s attacks on Christians, Yezidis, and non-Sunni Muslims of the approved flavor.

 

Things I Don’t Really Want to Write About

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Subject A

Subject A

It is difficult for me not to write about certain subjects, especially when I am so upset about them. But then, I have to think about you, my readers. However strong I feel about certain things, what if I really don’t have anything to add about what has already been said?

Anyhow, on to the list, in no particular ordure [SIC]:

  1. Presidential Elections. Let’s face it: Even the pundits whose job it is to opine on the political scene either have nothing new to say, or else they are in the business of influencing opinions.
  2. Donald Trump. You know what I think about the Cheeto-haired beast. ’Nuff said!
  3. Awards. Whether it’s the Oscars or the Nobel Prize for Literature, it’s all about politics, usually who hates whom.
  4. American Conservatism. It seems to be segueing into National Socialism (Nazism).
  5. Police Violence. Black lives do matter! All Americans matter!
  6. Terrorism. Everything we do emboldens the terrorists, so let’s just get on with our lives.
  7. Guns. Since when does a “well-regulated Militia” mean that crazy people get to play with Bushmasters?
  8. Ecology. Even if the Earth is on the point of being irretrievably poisoned, we gotta dig coal and chop down trees, no?

There are probably a handful of other subjects which aren’t worth ranting about, mostly because of the seemingly irresolvable split between the Union and the Confederacy. Occasionally, I will still blab out a post when I know I should keep my mouth shut. Please forgive me in advance!