All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

Big words.

No time to think, less to write, so this is right off the top of my head.

Food Fights. Those are the words that come to mind when I think of this year’s political campaigns. I remember 2006 being similarly acrimonious, but honestly, this year is worse. It seems like there are nothing but attack ads. Even the nice-nice “Hi, I’m blankety-blank and I want to be your blank” ads have a poison pill embedded in them for the opposition. The California gubernatorial race has descended to an exchange of “He’s a liar!” and “She’s a whore!” in something reminiscent of my junior high lunch room. The New York race is, if anything, even more surreal in its nastiness. I’m anticipating a crush of toxic direct mail in the closing weeks – lookout, mailbox!

Imperial Prerogatives. There has been a lot of reporting on Pakistan the last couple of weeks. Their military closed a crossing to U.S. convoys on the Af-Pak border in response to a range of disagreements, not least of which are disputes over U.S. and NATO (essentially U.S.) incursions into Pakistani national territory. There is a kind of impatience to the reporting, communicating the administration’s and the military’s frustration with Pakistan’s failure to adequately support their seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. It’s reminiscent of the official line during the Vietnam war, when American officials would complain about “sanctuaries” in Cambodia and Laos, while they confidently flew devastating bombing runs out of their own “sanctuaries” in Thailand and elsewhere.

This week starts our tenth year in this war, and we seem – if anything – farther from the end than we were when it started. We are more than seven years into Iraq, and now appear to be fighting in Pakistan. Where does this end? Does anyone still think that we are accomplishing anything besides investing in generations of people who hate our guts? That fact is already manifesting itself in Iraq, where the new legions of Al Qaeda fighters are internal refugees, disaffected and ready for revenge. Our dismal performance in the wake of Pakistan’s recent disastrous floods – barring refugees from the sanctuary of one of our air bases; failing to press our military helicopters into disaster relief operations; and some say worse – will gain us the love of very few survivors. This war itself is a disaster, perpetuated by us. And it is one we have the power to end.

Summers Out. Larry Summers is off to make more millions consulting for the investment banks he defended in the White House. High time, too.  

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Lunch plus 5.

No sandwich? No matter. Open another can. Try one of those square ones. What’s inside that one? I’ll be damned. We must have taken the wrong cans. Domage!

Okay, so we don’t have any Domage. What the hell are we supposed to eat up here in the middle of nowhere? NO MORE CHESSE-BASED SNACK FOODS! I’VE HAD IT WITH THAT GARBAGE! (Hopefully the Cheese-It people don’t read this blog – I’d hate like hell to loose that endorsement money.)

Well, as you can see, we are bobbing through space in our rented space craft, foraging for sustenance, flipping through superannuated star charts, hoping for a break in our navigational quandary. Sadly, Big Green didn’t have the budget for a proper navigator, so once again, we have pressed Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, into the pilot’s couch. (Stool, actually. As I said, this is a cheap rental.) Our first destination? Neptune. Back to Neptune once again, where the bars are always open, the streets are always molten, and the sun is always obscured by deadly clouds of methane gas. Kind of like L.A., actually.

Okay, so here I am in deep space, sitting back, strumming on my beat-up Martin, waiting for someone to open a can of something edible, and I start hearing alarm bells. My first thought is, “Meteor storm!” The very thought sends Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the automatonic version of cardiac arrest. He scrambles to a random control panel and starts throwing switches. Expecting the worst, I don the nearest empty beer ball and hold my breath. The alarm sounds again. Out of the galley walks Lincoln with a microwave burrito. Cancel red alert. I SAID CANCEL!!! Thank you.

Well, I apologize. I may be a bit space happy. (Or space not-so-happy, more likely.) Our destination is a small, white dot that gets a wee bit larger with each passing hour. That’s potentially a good thing, depending upon what that dot becomes when it’s large enough to see in detail. Will it become Neptune, or perhaps a white dwarf star? I know not. Ask Matt, he knows. I … know … not.

Man oh man, I hope one of these cans has a sandwich in it. I’m about to freaking pass out. Try the triangular one – it might be one of those automat egg salad jobs.

Political Rants

Stranger than.

Here is what I’m thinking about this week. Nothing too much out of the ordinary, frankly.

Another lie falls flat. Just listened to a harrowing story on Democracy Now!, about ten days old (I listen to the podcasts up here in nowheresville). Amy Goodman was talking to the wife of an Iraqi detainee – a partially disabled ex-general who’s been locked up by the Iraqis for about a year, tortured hideously, without charge or any prospect for release. The story is sadly familiar in its contours – you can find similar ones in practically every country we’ve ever “helped”. Listening to it, I could only think of one of the many justifications for the invasion of Iraq; that of protecting human rights, ending torture, etc. There will be no more rape rooms, George W. Bush promised to the Iraqis as he announced his unilateral, criminal war in March 2003.  Well…. there are rape rooms. Another lie bites the dust.

Not your monkey. It’s the economy, stupid, to be sure, but what about the economy? If a generalization can be made about the past three decades in U.S. economic history, it’s that the rich have done extremely well and the middle class and poor have lost ground… lots of ground. Someone no doubt has shouted “class war!” already, but friends, there has been a class war underway for thirty years now, and it’s being waged on us. And frankly, we’re losing. Part of the reason for that is that we are atomized, disorganized, and at war with one another. We are encouraged to be so from the moment we become aware of the world around us.

Look at the media / pundit reaction to the massive protests across Europe in opposition to austerity measures (to the extent that they’ve been covered, that is). Over here, the narrative is that these are spoiled workers complaining about nothing. Unspoken is the fact that, here in the land of the free, it is literally against the law to call a general strike (see: Taft-Hartley). What those folks are doing across the pond is something we are not allowed to do, with our constitution, bill of rights, etc. That’s because they’ve hung together and fought to hold on to their rights, whereas we appear poised to allow the true party of corporate power (rather than the second-choice party of corporate power) to run the game again.

When will we stop losing this class war? When we finally stand up and tell that top 3 percent that we’re not their monkey anymore.

luv u,

jp