Political Rants

Mass panic.

There’s a lot that can be said about the Senatorial special election in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, and I’m not going to say very much of it. (You’ve probably heard most of the political post-mortems already.) Looks to me like the good people of our neighboring commonwealth have seen fit to hand Ted Kennedy’s old seat to Mitt Romney 2.0, a slight upgrade from the original model (this one, at least, confirmably anatomically correct). As far as his political positions are concerned, it’s a mixed bag – a little angry anti-bank populism (People are mad, damn it, and so am I!), a little love for waterboarding, some tin-foil hat-ism, and the usual measure of running away from his most inflammatory comments, like passively questioning president Obama’s origin as the son of two legally married individuals. (Smooth.) There’s also the listing from political side to political side as needed, like voting in favor of Mitt Romney’s statewide health insurance system in Massachusetts, but opposing the national version.  He should blend in nicely with the G.O.P. caucus, though poor Jim DeMint will have to forfeit his crown as the party’s Senatorial winged Adonis. (Sad. Very sad.)

Indeed, his greatest political impact may indeed be the effect his election is having on the Democrats, who have been rending their garments, flagellating themselves, etc., ever since last Tuesday. One gets the impression by listening to heavyweights like Bart Stupak and Evan Bayh that their strategy moving forward will be something like stand quietly at the back of the chamber and hope their constituents will elect them by default. Even my own home district Congressman Mike Arcuri is sounding a little timorous, perhaps because the Republican fool who nearly unseated him in 2008 has announced his intention to try again this year (a mere day after Brown’s election) and local tea-party freak Don Jeror (a.k.a. Mr. “You are LYING to me!”) has said he is looking for a conservative Democrat to challenge Arcuri in the primary. (Jeror has been making the error of using modern human language in his search for an electable caveman. He should use grunts. Try it, man!)

Tin-foil hats aside, I’m beginning to think the hyper-conservatives have been right about the Democrats all along: bloody hell, they ARE surrender monkeys! In all seriousness, I think this has just given them the excuse to openly channel their inner Republican (to the extent that they haven’t been doing it up to now). Of course, with this week’s Supreme Court decision removing any restrictions on the flow of corporate cash into political advertising, any Democrats who maintain a less-than-congenial relationship with Exxon-Mobil, Google, Cargill, or any other firm with deep pockets will likely find their districts flooded with attack ads, paid shills, and every kind of legal sabotage money can buy.  Yes, folks – George W. Bush and his reactionary predecessors are truly the gift that keeps on giving. The 5-4 decision to sell our electoral process to the highest bidder was advanced by two Reagan appointees, one Bush I appointee, and (crucially) two Bush II appointees. Is it too late to say, we should have kept W out of the White House?

I am afraid it may be too late. Score one for the corporatists. We’ll need to work on how best to fight this.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Sound off.

Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. What can I tell you? You’ve got to roll with the … hey…. put the gun down. Put it DOWN!

Oh, hi. No worries, my friends, no worries. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have a trigger finger, but it’s not supple enough to squeeze off anything like an accurate shot. Sometimes he gets worked up enough to wave that old revolver our militant former neighbor Gung-Ho left lying around the mill so many years back. (He dropped it in mid-stride during some imagined emergency, if I recall correctly. It was his side-arm, and he was firing his principal weapon randomly at the time. Those were the days!) I know, I know… I shouldn’t lecture my mechanical companion, but sometimes it’s hard to resist. The fucker gets so disappointed sometimes, you’d think he was, well… human, or something capable of even greater whiny-ness. I guess attendance at his opening night performance of the Wizard of Oz (in three acts) was less than expected. In fact, I think the only people there were some of the school’s nighttime janitorial staff and some of our local downtowners who were trying to get in out of the cold. (Poor tin man.)

Can’t believe this is his first taste of rejection! What a sheltered life these automatons lead. Even root vegetables like the man-sized tuber have experienced the dusty flavor of defeat. (Or perhaps that is just dirt from the garden from which he was plucked.) Yes, his fortunes have turned since his salad days, if you will, but tubey’s life has been far from a bed of roses prior his election to the local municipal mayoralty. (We bear some responsibility for that, of course. Yet another mea culpa. I’m thinking of changing our band’s name to mea culpa. What do you think? Hmmmmm?) And we human members of the Big Green complement have taken a few lumps over the years. Hell, just look at the two Lincolns. Are you looking? Well, if you are, then you know… they look like HELL. Just like it, I tell you! But I digress…

Of course, Marvin is a machine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But let us face it, his problems should not be thought of as permanent. Why, with the right kind of attention and the requisite skills, his disappointment may be programmed away and replaced with joy. A talented machinist could give him an extra arm with the power to throw a javelin at escape velocity so that it sails through deep space and pierces the moon (or “the” Mars). His inventor Mitch Macaphee could power him down and set him on a nuclear timer of some kind so that he would restart in 1,000 or even 10,000 years – he would know the future! (Lord knows, he has already seen the past. As have we all….. right?) The sad fact is, though, that Mitch could have saved him even this childish disappointment he has encountered of late. He could have given Marvin a new set of pipes, or more terpsichorean robot legs, so that his Wizard of Oz (in three acts) performance would have brought the house down and dragged audiences in from distant cities and even the microscopic hillside hamlets that dot our countryside.

Well, is that the time? Got to get back to my Mexican stand-off. All right, Marvin…. you’ve had your fun. Step away from the revolver.

Political Rants

Geography.

What can one say about the misery, the sheer horror, of what is happening in Haiti right now? It is as if the planet itself has seen fit to kick them in the teeth when they were down. I don’t want to write even five more words before encouraging anyone who reads this blog to donate to relief efforts in any way you see fit. (My personal recommendation would be to support Partners in Health, but choose whichever means you prefer.)

Aside from the devastation and massive human suffering, the most impressive element of this catastrophe is the hypocrisy demonstrated by people in the United States who have been primarily responsible for the immiseration of Haitians over the past few decades. President Obama is correct when he describes how Haiti is “tied” to the United States historically, but he might more accurately have used the term “chained” – a sickening litany of occupation, subjugation, and sabotage that stretches back to the dawn of that nation’s independence. Just to focus on the most recent phase of this ugly relationship, it is important to remember that the Bush I administration supported the 1991 coup that ousted Haiti’s first popularly-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and ushered in a reign of terror marked by unspeakable brutality on the part of the Junta and paramilitary organizations like FRAP.

While Clinton is credited with returning Aristide to power, his administration turned a blind eye to fuel shipments to the coup regime of Raoul Cedras while insisting that Aristide return under conditions that would result in deeper penury for the Haitian people. That was a bitter pill for the Haitian people, who had taken great risks in very dark times to organize the Lavalas political movement that brought Aristide to the presidency in the first place, and subsequently paid a high price at the hands of the U.S.-sanctioned coup regime.

Ten years later, after Aristide had returned to power and had begun steering Haiti away from the neoliberal model that had been strangling it for decades, the Bush administration supported yet another coup, staged in part from the Dominican Republic, that brought a kleptocratic business-based elite back to power which, once again, looted the nation and persecuted Aristide supporters. More help from Uncle Sam. With a severely weakened government, by 2008 there were food riots, and now Haitians live on something like $2 a day.

It sickens me to see the crocodile tears of politicians in this country over the misery that they helped make possible. An even greater nausea comes over me at the thought of W. Bush and Clinton coordinating relief efforts.  But, for the nonce, we can only try to help as best we can, by supporting those groups who will help Haitians not only recover but build their social institutions back up again.

luv u,

jp

Weird ass music since 1986