All posts by Joseph

When Losing starts to mean winning, we lose

August 19, 2022 Joseph

Democracy is always an approximation. The countries we describe as being democratic have systems that exclude some voters, make it hard to participate in one way or the other, and are otherwise imperfect. That’s to be expected. We don’t aspire to imperfection, of course. In many countries, people try to do the best they can with what they’ve got. In France, it’s the fifth republic. In Britain, constitutional monarchy. And right here, we have the U.S. constitution – penned by rich white men, for rich white men.

During the Bush administration, people around the president were fond of saying that the the constitution isn’t a straitjacket. (Of course, they were mouthing those words in defense of torture.) Still, we are kind of locked into certain interpretations of it, and as such remain firmly under minority rule – just as the founding fathers envisioned it. I know others have said this, but apart from 2004, the insurrectionist party (formerly called the Republicans) lost the popular vote in every presidential race since George Herbert Walker Bush was elected in 1988. And yet they “won” 3 out of those seven races. Minority rule.

Narrowing the halls of justice

It goes beyond just the raw numbers of presidential terms served. Republican presidents have had far greater consequence than their Democratic counterparts over this period. Nowhere is this truer than with respect to the Supreme Court. Between Bush Jr.’s two terms and Trump’s term, they have appointed five of the sitting justices – Democrats only three. And we are seeing the results in the form of more and more draconian decisions being handed down by a court majority that is openly contemptuous of the public will.

We are being forced, as a nation, to accept an extremist view of abortion, gun rights, regulatory agencies, and others things. The Supreme Court is like our version of the Supreme Islamic Council in Iran or the old Soviet Politburo. But really, more like the former – they tell us what laws will stand, which will not. They tell us who is a person with full rights and who isn’t. They are aggressively unelected and unconcerned with prevailing sentiments. And there really isn’t much of anything we can do except wait for their next decision. Sure, we can push for court expansion and other reforms, but we have to do so within the constraints their decisions establish, and there are many.

More election drama

With the fall elections approaching, one wonders if the results will be broadly recognized. You can bet that, wherever Republicans do badly, there will be challenges, particularly in states with GOP dominated legislatures and GOP governors. I would like to think that people on the leftward side will take this election seriously and show up in unprecedented numbers, but we shall see. The pro abortion rights vote in Kansas certainly came as a surprise, especially since the ballot measure was designed to be confusing as hell. But even with a massively lopsided majority, Republicans are forcing a recount.

This is what we can expect. We have to be willing to fight back, non-violently (though I understand the need for self defense in oppressed communities). Honestly, we have to get this right. Allowing them to continue to claim victory whether or not they win races is just a recipe for authoritarianism. We know where they want to go – they keep telling us. Viktor Orban is the model they prefer. We need to believe them when they tell us who they are.

Keeping your options open

I would admonish you to vote, but I’ve done that before and look where it’s gotten us. Suffice to say that I am voting, and I encourage you to do the same (and to encourage others to do the same). If only to keep the option to vote open for the years ahead.

luv u,

*Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.*

Usual Rubbish

Even the colonel gets more mail than us

August 12, 2022 Joseph

Did the mail come in yet? Oh, right. Looks like bills and solicitations. Again. Not a single handwritten missive in the entire pile. What was the name of that short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? “No One Writes to the Colonel”, or something like that? Well, somebody best tell the colonel that we’ve got him beat. When it comes to postal neglect, we’re number one, amigo.

Hey, you know what they say, right? Every complaint is really about something else. So if we’re complaining about our lack of fan (or hate) mail, what we’re REALLY complaining about is the heat or somebody’s sore toe or the price of sorghum in Madagascar. The sorry fact is, we wouldn’t know what to do with fan mail if it was dropped on us via helicopter. It’s been so long since we opened the mail bag, I doubt that any of our current readers even remember that that was a thing. Hey, newbies – that was a thing!

First tune, then play … the tune.

Part of what makes people cranky around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is the lack of creature comforts. The furniture in this joint is literally either made of bricks or fashioned crudely from surplus hammer handles. Looking to get comfy? Just stuff an old burlap sack full of grass and you’ve got yourself a pillow, dude. And when it gets hot here in upstate New York, well, you just open up a window. Or wave a fan or two. (You see? You knew I would steer it back around to fans again, didn’t you?)

That said, we have our tasks at hand. One of them is keeping Marvin (my personal robot assistant) from setting the mill on fire with his greasy cooking. The other is rehearsing for our next album, which we are doing remotely through one of those Zoom-for-music apps. That’s right – Matt’s on one end of the hammer mill, I’m on the other, and we jam over the internets. (You gotta problem with that, huh? HUH?) It’s mostly a process of Matt showing me a half dozen more tunes that he wrote since the last time we talked. Me? I’m chipping away at one, maybe two.

Subject matter experts

The thing with Big Green, you see, is that we get onto these jags. This is particularly true of my illustrious brother, Matthew. I’ve written before about his tendency to deeply explore a topic through the medium of pop song. Hell, he wrote about eighty songs on the subject of Christmas, probably a hundred about Ned Trek, at least 25 about Rick Perry. Now he’s on to human interrelationships, so it’s relatively unbroken ground. I mean, who can you think of who has written songs about human emotions? Hell, no one I know.

I don't think that's the colonel Garcia Marquez was talking about.

Anyway, I’ve got a notebook full of handwritten chord charts that say we’ve got an album on the way. Though, as with the Ned Trek material, it may actually be more than one collection. You musicians know what we’re grappling with. Do you make three mediocre albums, or one really, really, really bad album? Such a hard creative choice to make. We probably need a focus group to help us untie this knot. Where the hell is Frank Luntz when you need him? Having a sandwich? Okay …. don’t bother him, then.

Right, but when the hell …

Okay, so if we actually DID get fan mail, one of the first questions would probably be something like, WHAT THE HELL IS TAKING YOU SO LONG WITH THIS STUPID ALBUM? Well, dear fake reader, I know it’s been nine years since our last release. And I know that release was really lame. But bear in mind – our technology is from the stone age, carving music from living rock. We’ll keep chipping away at it until we’ve knocked off everything that doesn’t look like a new album.

Political Rants

An unhealthy dose of imperial fetishism

August 12, 2022 Joseph

As I’ve mentioned more times than I should have, I have had very low expectations for the Biden foreign policy since the beginning. By “the beginning”, I mean well before his election, when you couldn’t find foreign policy positions on his campaign web site for love or money. Biden’s fifty-year track record on foreign affairs is not a particularly good one. I remember him saying he was “ashamed” of Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy towards apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s. Um …. that’s about it.

These past two weeks have done little to change my mind on this. The drone assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader, prompted a lot of fist-pumping on the part of mainstream Democrats and some never-Trump Republicans. A similar amount of jingoism accompanied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, as well. I’m not certain what the expected takeaway is for either of these decisions, but it the point was to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current Democratic leadership is well vested into America’s imperial enterprise, they certainly succeeded.

A child of bad policy

Ayman al-Zawahiri was a terrible person, there’s no question. I think, though, as we are the one global super-power, it’s probably a good idea to consider how our policy may have contributed to his no-goodness. Al-Zawahiri started down the road to al Qaeda when he was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, where he and his fellow prisoners from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were tortured, killed, and otherwise abused. Egypt, I will remind you, has long been a major recipient of U.S. aid, far beyond what nearly every other nation has received from us. If Egypt’s notoriously brutal prison system contributed to al-Zawahiri’s radicalism (which it most certainly did), we bear considerable responsibility for that.

Secondly, there likely wouldn’t have been an al-Qaeda for him to join up with if it hadn’t been for (1) the Afghan CIA operation during the 1980s, and (2) the first gulf war in 1990-91, when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia for the first time, remaining there long after Iraq was driven from Kuwait. Again, these were policy choices, not forces of nature. Without multiple interventions in the middle east and southwest Asia, America might not have been such a big, attractive target for these people. Can’t be sure, but …. might have been worth a try.

Worst of the worst?

Then there’s the question of how many lives were lost at the hands of al-Zawahiri. I would argue far too many. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last week, he had a long history of planning terrorist actions, including being one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and so on. So, thousands of live lost. Not a nice person, right?

Now, there should be some reckoning as to how that record stacks up to the record of his pursuers. All killing is intrinsically bad, so I’m not suggesting that the rapacious policies of the United States somehow lessen the severity and the cravenness of al-Zawahiri’s attacks. But if it’s bad when he does it, then it’s bad when others do it as well, right? And if others do a lot more killing than he did, well … that makes them particularly bad, right?

Let’s just stick to the wars that followed 9/11. How many people died as a result of our actions? Was it less or more than the number of al-Zawahiri’s victims? In all honesty, America’s victims through this period run in the high six-figures to perhaps seven figures. Several countries were destroyed essentially beyond recovery. Fist pump, anyone?

Unfair comparisons

Okay, I know …. it’s really not fair to compare nation states like the U.S. to non-state actors like al Qaeda or individuals like al-Zawahiri. Nation states have international obligations, responsibilities, and should at least formally be accountable to their populations. Terror networks are kind of a law unto themselves, though international law does bear on them. But honestly …. shouldn’t we expect more out of our own government then that they should be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of times the number of deaths caused by our most ruthless enemies?

Seems like kind of a low bar.