Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog, page 84

It's Friday

So it is.  I've been crunching away on line edits all week and having a good time.  The weather has been pleasant, at least compared to last week, and a couple of mornings I've been able to turn off the air and open the windows while working.  I loaded up the CD changer with classical—Respighi, Strauss, Grieg—and did fresh ground coffee.

During breaks, I've been playing with pictures again.  You know, you make damn near anything fascinating, even beautiful in a dark, bizarre way, with enough patience and mods.  For instance:

Someone pointed out that in the past something like this would have taken a dozen Kodalith masks and posterization steps.  There are about fifteen or so steps in this image and I think it could be a bit better.

We'll see a friend tonight, go to a really cool party tomorrow night, and Sunday join our reading group to continue Canto X of Dante's Paradiso.  Maybe I'll get together with some musicians Sunday afternoon to rehearse a couple of things.

Walk the dog.

I'm ignoring the politics going on right now.  Just too pathetic to contemplate.  Maybe next week.

For now, just relax and chill and enjoy the moment.  That's my plan.

If the above image is a little too weird, let me leave something here a little more normal.  But not too normal.  Have a good weekend.

Pathological Hypocrisy

I thought I might leave this alone, but some itches are too difficult to leave unscratched.  Others have posted about Rick Santorum's unbelievable hypocrisy over abortion.  You can read the article here.

Basically, Mr. Santorum has it in mind to use the law to prohibit a medical procedure his wife had to go through in order to save her life.  As the piece makes clear, in October of 1996, Karen Santorum underwent an abortion in the 19th week of pregnancy in order to save her life from an infected fetus.  She had a 105 degree temperature.  She would have died without the procedure.

Santorum would make that option illegal.  Basically, his position seems to be that sacrificing his wife for the fetus would be his choice now.  This overlooks the fact that had they not done the procedure, the fetus would not have survived, either.  He would have lost both.  Sacrifices to his conscience, which seems incapable of the kind of triage humans must make all the time.

Well and good, some people just can't go there.  But this man is running for president.  He intends that his personal inability to cope be made a national policy of denying anyone the choice of coping.

I've written about my views on the anti-choice movement before, mainly here.

I have also written before about Mr. Santorum, most notably here.

So maybe I've said as much as I need to say.  But he keeps coming back, making his self-avowed moral arguments, presenting his program as if somehow this would be good for anyone, so maybe saying things just once in opposition to what seems to me to be a kind of morbid obsession and the consequences of seeing this as the guiding principle of the nation is a poor idea.  Whatever the case may be, I can't leave this alone.

It has been consistent with Mr. Santorum, this problem he seems to have with matters of sex.  Consistent enough that I don't think it has anything to do with studied principle.  The whole bit about his bringing the dead fetus out to show his living children smacks of profoundly skewed inner landscapes.  Whatever it may, I know one thing in my bones—I do not want this man making laws for this country, not about this certainly, and probably not about anything else.  He does not speak for me.

He shouldn't be seen as speaking for women and here is where I have the deepest concerns.

This is simple in my mind.  I am a man, I cannot become pregnant.  But I also have an imagination and perhaps sufficient empathy to put myself in the position of a woman who has a choice to make.  Hormones are a big deal, certainly, but I can state unequivocally that something as important as procreation must be entirely in the hands the one most viscerally concerned, and that—whether certain people like it or not—is a woman.  And I ask myself what I would want for myself were I female.  I can't say with absolute certainty that I would not want to be a mother, but I can state absolutely that I would want that decision to be absolutely mine.  My body, my life, my future.

No, I do not consider a fetus a human being with all the rights of someone who can sit across from me, breathing on their own, capable of independent action.  Certainly I do not agree that such a being's presumed status trumps mine.

We are hypocritical about this.  Save the fetus, then after it is born, let circumstances dictate everything else.  Poverty, developmental disorders, the lack of any future, the whole list of negatives that could be somewhat addressed if the same political will the anti-choice movement exercises in preventing one woman from deciding for herself whether or not to procreate were exercised in the cause of social progress—which many of these same people, Mr. Santorum being a prominent example, are just as actively opposed to.  "You made your own bed, you lie in it" is an old adage that speaks to the harshness of life when unfortunate choices are made, but these folks have added a twist—"We will make sure you lie in the bed you made."  No choice.  Basically, if a woman has sex and gets pregnant, she must, by their lights, have the child.  And if she herself is a child, or the victim of rape, or too overburdened to take adequate care of another, there will be no help coming from the self-appointed guardians of imposed moralism.

Because underlying all of this is an old, thoroughly Protestant, Puritan ethic—you fuck, you pay.

Now, one might ask the question, "What if it is human?  How can we know?"

Very simple, as far as society is concerned—if the mother says it is, it is.  Until then, it is none of anybody else's business.  We assign status constantly.  With all manner of things, and who's to gainsay us when we do?  This is no different.  Which is why I have no problem with the idea that someone can be guilty of murder in the death of a fetus and still demand choice for women—because it is the mother who says.

That's perhaps not very tidy and certainly difficult to codify in law, but it is a functional reality—clearly there are people who never accord their children the status of human and abuse them and sell them and often kill them.  The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, I think, was thinking something along these lines with the three trimester test—that as time goes on, the state has more and more interest in the fetus, because clearly by default the mother has decided, after five or six months, that it is a human.

I grant you many people may not be very comfortable with that, but the whole point of the law is that it's not up to People, it's up to the woman.  The individual.  She has to live with it.

And in this instance, "live" is the operative word.  Late term abortions are rarely elective in the way that first trimester abortions are.  The anti-choice movement has simply lied about that.  Doctors have an interest in the welfare of their female patients and for this reason, this procedure has never been illegal.  Never.  To save the life of the mother has always overridden any presumed rights of a fetus—which, in almost all such cases, will not survive anyway.  So this is criminally stupid to argue this point.

What Mr. Santorum seems to be suffering from is the fact that he and his family had to make a harsh choice and it traumatized them.  He wants never to have to make that choice again—and who can blame him?  But he's carrying several steps further—he wants to eradicate the possibility of that choice of being made, not only by him or his wife, but by anybody.  He perhaps can't live with the choice he made and his penance is to take it away from everyone else.  He's trying to exorcise his demons through public censure and legal flagellation.  It will cost people their lives.

Jocelyn Elders, one-time surgeon general of the United States, said once that America needs to get over its love affair with the fetus.  I agree.  If we don't, we will love it to death and many, many women along with it.

If I were a woman, you bet your sweet ass I would want the choice.  Anything less is a diminution of status.  The state telling me I may not live my life because others have discomfort with certain choices.

Teach the Controversy (!)

I wasn't sure I'd do this, but I'm really pissed off.

This morning I opened my front door to find a flier lying on the porch.  I thought it was another local contractor ad or announcement of a barbecue-and-rummage sale, so I scooped it up to glance at it before dropping it in the recycle hopper.  Instead, I find in my hand a vile piece of unconscionable poison.  And it seemed like it would be such a nice day!

I'm not going to dignify this crap by citing the source.  The header of the two-side sheet reads: The Holocaust Controversy  The Case For Open Debate.  What follows is a putrid example of revisionist nonsense designed to suggest that six million Jews were not systematically slaughtered by the Third Reich.  In tone, it is reasonable.  It does not make many strident claims with exclamation points, just calmly asserts one bullshit "fact" after another (plus a photograph of an open pit containing the skeletonized remains of concentration camp victims labeling it a photo of typhus victims) to lay the groundwork for the claim that the Holocaust didn't happen, that it is all a Big Lie assembled by a Zionist conspiracy to advance the cause of sympathy for stateless Jews in order to get them a state.

I will cite one piece of twisty nonsense from the flier.  In one paragraph, the calim is made that in 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum revised the old claim of four million murdered down to one million.  It then goes on with a list of (uncited) claims of further numeric reductions, not by the Auschwitz Museum, but by "a French scholar" and "another mainstream Holocaust scholar" all the way down to half a million.  The wording is slippery.  I advise you to go to the link provided, which is directly to the museum, and read the detailed history.  The paragraph I mention in the flier leaves off with the suggestion that only a half million people were "actually" killed in total.

The Nazis murdered eleven million people, systematically, with calculation.  Nearly six million were Jews (the number vary above and below by a few tens of thousands, but they come from testimony given at Nuremberg, from eye-witness accounts, estimates of populations before and after the war, and many other methods of tabulations, not through "best guesses," which is what the sheet of propaganda left on my porch would have one believe), but there were five million others—gypies, homosexuals, slavs of various nationalities, and political undesirables such as communists, socialists, social democrats, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, and people accused of being "asocial" or of "socially deviant type."

This is not disputed by any credible authority.

Nor is Hitler's obsession with the Jews, nor is the history of virulent antisemitism in Europe, nor are the claims made by various members of the Nazi regime, nor is the physical evidence of the camps.

Over a million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz.  It was a large camp and has become the symbol for all the others.  But bear one fact in mind before you quibble over numbers or intent: the Nazis built 20,000 of these camps.

Not all have ovens, not all had gas chambers, but all of them were forced labor camps and all of them were in the business of killing the inmates.  Conservatively, all you would need is a hundred deaths per camp to bring it up to two million.  Five hundred per camp and you get ten million.

People were worked endlessly, underfed, disease ran rampant, mass graves were common.  We have seen this kind of barbarism in our recent history, in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia.  And yes, Stalin killed millions more.

The offensiveness of this shit is profound.  Yet here is this scrap of paper suggesting that, like the nonsense over evolution, we should "teach the controversy."

Fine.  Here is the controversy I would teach.  The controversy of denial, that people would try so hard to say this never happened or, as is more likely of late, that it wasn't "as bad" as has been stated.  The controversy that continually puts Jews under the spotlight, which is the same germinal thinking that resulted in this horrific bit of substantiated history.

I've had lengthy conversations with people who believe this.  The hallmark of them is that they managed never to directly address any evidence put before them.  Direct them to the Nuremberg transcripts, they say something about not having found "those" records.  Direct them to eyewitness testimony, they haven't had a chance to validate it.  The snake-slithers of obfuscation and refusal to confront is incredible to behold, but the question that boggles my mind is this:

To what end do you wish to exonerate Hitler and the Third Reich?

Is it that you can't imagine Europeans doing this?  Look what we did to the Indians.  Is it that you simply cannot bring yourselves to believe the word of anyone not a Christian?  Look at the lies spread in the name of Christ, up to and including the abuse of children by priest (and the fact that in Rwanda there were Catholic priests leading the charge in some areas to slaughter).  Is it that you can't believe people could be that evil for no reason?  I can see that as a problem, because if they could do something like that, then so could you.

Here's the ugly truth—circumstances permitting, most people can be that evil.  Just look at Rwanda.  That was over religion, birth rates, and water tables.  Cambodia was over ideology.

Oh, but those weren't white people?  Europeanized, educated, civilized whites?  How could the home of Kant and Beethoven, Goethe and Mann harbor such vileness?

That's the controversy.  The fragility of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps us "above it all."  How easily is it stripped, broken, thrown away if we feel threatened.  (We just extended the Patriot Act another four years, a rather blatant violation of Constitutional liberties, and all just so we'll feel "safe.")

I shouldn't have been surprised.  There are Nazis in my neighborhood.  But it does shock me, every time I find it.  Turn over a rock you always thought was harmless and even pretty and there are the maggots of the soul…

Holocaust Revisionism is evil.  It may be on par with the Holocaust itself.  "Oh, don't pay attention to the screams behind that curtain—it's not what you think.  Besides, isn't it a fine curtain?  Do you really think the people capable of creating such a lovely curtain could be monsters?"

Got one word for you:  Wagner.

Have a nice weekend.

Pathetic

Representative Andrew Weiner has admitted that the now-famous snapshot of cock-in-shorts really is his.  I have only one reaction:

What the hell is wrong with these people?

I am a photographer.  I photographed all sorts of things, even naked people, and I have taken more than a few photographs for laughs.  But I was never tempted to mail any of them to someone just on a lark!

This is beyond juvenile behavior.  Sorry.  It's not even so much that boys will play with their toys, but there must be something about being able to tweet that scrapes a few I.Q. points off.  I don't tweet.  Maybe if I did I'd have to enter a 12-Step Program to stop myself from doing really stupid shit with it.

Really, though.  I thought this man was smart.  I love his rants on the House floor against the inanities of the Right.  He is lucid, he is informed, he is on point.  If I had his phone number right now I'd call and say, "Andrew!  What the hell?  This is the kind of stupid shit Republicans do!"

Not all Republicans, obviously, and not even the majority, but the ones who seem to blow the hardest and screel the loudest about FAMILY VALUES have a track record of this kind of embarrassing private nonsense.

Oh, well.  Weiner says he won't quit.  Let's see if that will work.  This will likely really damage his effectiveness.

Come on, you guys…grow up.

Will 'E Or Won't 'E?

Mitt Romney has declared his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination.  I don't have a lot to say about him, other than about his declaration at the same time that one of his priorities (it's too early to tell if it's number one or just one of the top three or four) is the repeal of Obamacare.  My reaction:  How's that going to get him elected?

See, Mr. Romney put something in place for Massachussetts that is virtually identical.  The main difference is, you know, he—a Republican—did it, not someone else, a Democrat.  Oh, and it's a state thing not national.

The other potential candidates are even now working out strategies for putting Obamacare front and center as the biggest issue so they can by extension eviscerate Romney.

Which will blow up in their faces so bad!

Because…well, Republicans are big on states' rights.  So why would something done at the state level by one of their own be a target for Party displeasure when at the same time Romney is talking about removing the national program?  Oh, right, it's socialism.  I keep forgetting that.  But even so, how do you claim the states should have the right to decide how best to deal with these sorts of things and then denigrate the choice one state has made?

You might think this is a straw man issue because none of the other potential candidates have actually gone after Romney's health care legacy except obliquely, but that misses the point.  The entire GOP is on record repudiating Obamacare because it's socialistic (they claim), so they are opposed to such measures on ideological grounds.  They have to repudiate the same thing on the state level lest they risk looking obviously hypocritical.  They can't give Romney a pass on it because they've spent time, rhetoric, and Party effort on denouncing the idea of such a plan.  They have set themselves up to necessarily go after one of their own.

Which leaves them with a real problem should Romney emerge as the only one able to effectively challenge Obama.  They will have spent time and energy denouncing him.  But if he gains the nomination they'll have to pretend they think he's great.

Of course, that will only be a problem if Romney does win the nomination.  The GOP has other problems with him.  Like he's more or less a moderate.  Not nearly red meat enough to go against the incumbent moderate.

And also of course all this depends on whether Romney can make the charge stick that Obama has "failed America."  I don't think he can.  Obama has only failed the self-identified Left wing of the Democratic Party because he hasn't followed through on may of his campaign promises—promises which, had he followed through on, would have made him an easy target for the Right.  Instead, he's so center (and occasionally center right) that the GOP actually has some difficulty getting traction on him.  He actually hasn't failed the Republicans, he just hasn't gone as far as they would like.

So if the idea that Obama has failed is to  have any credibility, then it will only be a matter of pointing out who he has failed and how to show that the GOP actually doesn't have anything to offer that's much different.

What?  Deregulation?  I suspect they will have to tread lightly on that one after 2008, since—often ignorant though the American electorate is—most people recognize that our problems then arose from deregulation.

But even so, if that's their main thing, then we come back to Romney and the presumed state prerogative to act in its own best interest.  Part of the GOP (those collectively known as the Tea Party wing) are on record as repudiating the very notion of regulation, so what would make it any more palatable on the state level rather than the national level?  Regulation, as everyone knows, is simply bad for business.  To hell with all the things that may need protecting from business—like the environment or education or, well, health care—what we need are jobs.

Well, yes, but that's another fly in the pie—all that outsourcing?  Business did that.  It might be argued that they did that to avoid regulation, but that's kind of a hostage approach.  The threat of job loss to forestall measures that, in bulk, protect.  It looks snotty when you get right down to it.  Besides, most of the job loss through outsourcing occurred during twenty years of the greatest deregulatory period we've seen since the 1920s.  Reagan, Bush, then Clinton couldn't deregulate fast enough—and still all the ills we now suffer just grew and grew.  The coup de' gras came under Bush Jr., who continued the deregulatory trend.  So who's kidding who about the cost of regulation?

Yes, it's going to be an interesting election cycle this time around.  The GOP will have to either change their policies or we'll be watching them eat their own in public.

Memory Day

It's Memorial Day.  Lot's of flags flying around the neighborhood, most of them made in China.  Barbecues will permeate the air with the hunger-inducing aroma of charcoal and burning meat, the pop-spritz of cans opening will mingle with the sounds of conversation, laughter, and portable stereos pumping out classic rock or C & W quasi-patriotic gunk.

We bought a push mower this morning from Home Depot.  Go green.

I would like to take a few moments to tell you what I feel and have felt about this country.

I grew up on a steady diet of John Wayne and wanting very much to make my dad proud.  He's very much a patriot, in his own way, although he's also a fair man who tries to understand other points of view, something I didn't quite realize when I was a kid.  This made little difference until I entered high school.

I was 14 in 1968, one of the most contentious years America has ever experienced.  Literally everything America stood for was called into question that year.  Our involvement in Vietnam and the fall-out from the Civil Rights movements culminated in riots, the breakdown of social order, rampant anti-authoritarianism, and rifts opening at dinner tables.  I was affected in what now seems a peculiar way, because I went into high school very much my father's son.

I wanted to write.  The logical thing to do was to join the school paper, which I did.  What I found was a collection of students who had more or less fully embraced the various left wing political agendas of the day, which made me the odd one out because I came into this group espousing the conservative viewpoint.  I stood out because I was in a very singular minority.  I thought what we were doing in Vietnam was just (because we were fighting communism); I thought hippies were scuzzy, soft-headed losers and like many people failed to differentiate them from the anti-war movement, who I considered a bunch of cowards; I bought the Love It Or Leave It ethos of blue-collar America; and I thought we were the greatest country on Earth.  Ever.

People who know me now may be very surprised by all this.  I look at that list now and I'm surprised.

Very quickly I acquired a reputation and a nickname from the assorted long-locked lefties of the Roosevelt Rough Rider—-the neo-nazi Polish warmonger.   (After a couple of years of being quite visibly without a girlfriend, the label "frigid" was added to it.)  After years of being bullied in grade school, I came out of my victimhood with a do-or-die attitude that pretty much embraced the Fuck You ethic of resistance to ridicule, so I basked resplendent in my isolation as the lone Right Winger in a coven of communist-leaning radicals.  At assembly, when the Pledge of Allegiance was recited, I was the only one of the bunch who stood up and put my hand on my heart and spoke the words.

The clarity of my thinking!

But, you see, I was very much my father's son then.  It was not so much that I believed all the America The Beautiful stuff I spat back at the others, but that he did, and night after night we talked about it, and I did not till later realize that I actually missed the whole point of his nightly Socratic engagements.  I was taking his views to school and loading them into my rifle and shooting them at the pigeons who kept flying up in front of me with what I now understand as far more thoughtful and considered arguments than mine.

On my eighteenth birthday I had to register for the draft.  This was 1972 and Nixon was about to be re-elected and he had promised to wind down the fighting in Vietnam.  I didn't give it a lot of thought.  I didn't particularly like the idea of being drafted, but if I were I would pack my stuff and go and be a good soldier.  The only lottery I was in, though, my number was very high and shortly thereafter the draft ended, so I never had to go.

Other things caught my attention and pulled me along, so it never occurred to me to enlist.  But something was changing by then.

I'd worked on enough stories with the others on the Rough Rider and had enough conversations with them and done research for history classes (especially world history, which was a nightmare, but made me work harder than I'd ever worked before in a class because the teacher hated me) that some rather uncomfortable notions had begun floating around in my skull.

When I finally looked into the full history of the Vietnam Conflict, I could not maintain the illusion that we were justified being there.  It was a civil war.  Before that it had been a war of independence, a French colony that wanted its own identity back, and try as I might I could not continue to ignore that direct parallels with our own revolution and desire for independence.  It still took years before I could sit across from my father and say "No, we were wrong.  We should not have been there.  It was an immoral war."

But I certainly didn't learn that in school.

What I did learn in school, most vividly, in my freshman year, was that speaking the truth can get you in serious trouble.  My American history teacher, Mr. Maurer—a kind, sincere man with tremendous affection for his students, who had not yet been soured on the idea of public education and believed in open discourse—let a discussion go on in his classroom about the true nature of the American Civil War in which a strong argument was presented that it had nothing to do with the slaves, because Lincoln himself had said if he could preserve the Union and maintain slavery, he would do it.  (We did finally conclude that the War had been about slavery but not necessarily about the slaves, a view I still more or less hold.)  It got contentious, but for that week we were an engaged classroom.

Unfortunately, during that week, one of the administrators came, twice, to listen, and suddenly Mr. Maurer was in trouble for not following the syllabus and for causing disruption in his class.  Basically, the line was that you stick to the text and don't bring in anything that might call into question the program—like facts not in the book.  It was a profoundly chilling lesson for us to see a much-chastened Jack Maurer return and shut down the whole discussion on the Civil War and then by-pass Reconstruction altogether and go on to the Gilded Age.

When you look at the reality of America's wars, you find they don't conform to the image we like to believe.  They don't.  I'm sorry, but we have not as a nation been very nice.  The Revolution was what it was and in the end we should feel proud of that.  But the War of 1812 was a picked fight that we nearly lost because we wanted a piece of Canada and possibly cut Britain out of the Caribbean.  The slave trade was being interfered with and certain Southern interests supported a war with the idea of pushing British warships out of the trade lanes.  There were other reasons, but the stated reasons—unwarranted impressment, harrasment of American shipping, and the vestiges of an alliance with France—were being settled diplomatically.

The Mexican-American War was a simple land grab on our part.  We refused to control our borders, Mexico complained, started doing something to eliminate the presence of illegal immigrants (us) and we went in and took Texas and New Mexico and California.

The Civil War was a political war that resulted from a unpleasant compromise at the Founding.

The Spanish-American War was pure imperialism and you don't even have do any creative interpreting to understand that, they stated it right up front.  The European powers all had colonies, we ought to have some, too, and we picked a fight with Spain.

World War I was a pointless exercise that undermined American credibility at Versailles and led directly to World War II.

World War II has been called the Good War, and it's almost impossible to argue that we had no choice and that we were really fighting true evil.

The Korean War was in support of treaty promises and to support the infant United Nations.  We should feel okay about that one, though it is often overlooked.

Vietnam was a thorough-going debacle.  We were suckered in by France, kept there by a combination of Catholic interest and cultural misunderstanding, and hoist on the petard of our sense of being the World's Policemen.

Oh, and the ongoing Indian Wars—almost completely an exercise in imperialism and genocide.  We wanted their land.  This becomes obvious when you look at such things as the Cherokee migration of the 1830s as a result of the Indian Removal Act.  We had said for decades that if the Indians would settle down and stop being nomads and hunters and develop their land according to our practices, then everything would be fine.  The Cherokee nation did that and were removed anyway.  We wanted the land.  Period.

I won't even get into our current messes.

The mistake made in the contentious Sixties was spitting on the troops.  It was not their fault.  The idealists of the anti-war movement expected them to abandon everything they believed in, break their word, and refuse to fight.  There is a very tangled culture in this country of keeping reality out of patriotic discourse.  Be that as it may, a soldier gives over a promise to serve those duly elected who are obligated then not to abuse or misuse their sacrifice—which has happened more often than my conservative mindset in high school could comfortably absorb.

I said my father is fair and tries to understand other viewpoints.  Years later, after I had decided that my politics in high school had been bankrupt and ill-considered and I had more or less become sympathetic to the Left, we revisited the arguments of the Vietnam era.  He did not understand me when I told him that had I been drafted, I would have gone, not because of my patriotism, but because it would have been easier.  Go along to get along.  Belonging is a powerful inducement to deny principle sometimes.  But he declared that had I run to Canada, which many did at the time, he would have hunted me down.

"What good would that have done?" I asked.

"That's just the way I am.  You don't run away."  And before I could say another word, he added.  "If you believed the war was wrong, you stay and fight—I'd have paid for the lawyers."

My head spun around at that and I realized my whole perception of his attitude was skewed and he just skewed it again.

You don't run away.

So from all that, I can say what it is I believe is good and worth preserving about America.  It is all in the Bill of Rights, but often we misconstrue the point of that document.  We assume (and technically this is correct, but it's more than this) that these are principles laid down to restrict and constrain government.  We forget that they are also principles to live up to, that this reflects who we want to be.  We want to be tolerant, we want to be able to conduct our own lives, we want to be honest and unashamed, we want to treat our fellow human beings with dignity.  That the history of this country is one battle after another to convince many of us to live up to these standards does not diminish them, nor does it detract from the idea of America that we have to continually press the argument.

We don't run away.

Right now we are in a period of uncertainty, where what it means to be American is a mix of guilt and pride and misdirected zeal.  We are being bought by sides in an fight that goes back to the Founding and sometimes it looks like we're losing.  People don't vote because they think it does no good.  People support mouthpieces who try to tell them this or that is unAmerican because many of us don't understand the difference between change and chains.  People let pundits make up their minds for them because it's easy, especially when the pundits validate our anger and give us an excuse for our uncertainty.  We have been letting ideologues divide us over solutions that, if implemented, would cost some corporation market share, and we have swallowed the idea handed us by Reagan that American means market share.

But we don't run away.  We stand and fight it out and come to a consensus and do something that may work better—and if not, we try something else.

I stopped pledging allegiance to a flag.  It's a piece of cloth and the idea that we should have a law protecting a piece of cloth is silly.  I do believe in the idea of America—that individuals, regardless of social status, bank account, ethnicity, religious conviction, or political persuasion, are the primary purpose of our institutions, that preserving the rights of the declarative "I" in the face of sectionalism, bigotry, fashions and fads is the whole point of the experiment—and that's something I'll defend.  That supporting that idea does not mean abandoning others to die wallowing in despair because they don't have the wherewithal to pay for membership in the club and no individual has the right to blight others in the name of a false status.  And the idea of defending America, the idea of America, is embodied in the oath administered to soldiers, who pledge to defend the Constitution.  That's where our identity lies, in the structural document that, along with determining how we shall govern ourselves, also includes a series of proclamations about who we want to be. Part of that is to live in a country where you should not have to prove it to anyone what you believe and who you are.  I have always mistrusted people who wear their affiliations on their sleeves—little American flag lapel pins or a baker's dozen of them spread on the front lawn—because it would never occur to me to doubt that they're who they are.  But by displaying it like that, they make it a challenge to everyone else—"I'm an American, are you?"  That's not my country.  That's not how I live, that's not what makes being here worthwhile.  Being an American should mean being the best human being you can.  It means treating people decently because we believe that's how people should be treated, and they shouldn't be made to pass a test to deserve it.  I'll back that.

I was a pretty stupid kid in high school.  But I grew up and got over it.  And I'm thankful that I live in a place where I could do that and not have to explain myself or apologize, either for believing one way back then or for changing my mind now.

Have a good day.  Remember.

Still Here

So, it's the 23rd of May now.  I heard on the radio this morning someone claiming that we're now in the Tribulations and that we've got 153 days before the actual end of the world.  That might be just about enough time for me to finish the rewrite on my desk and the new novel I am now half-finished with.

I thought about writing something scurrilous and amusing, but why?  People who would laugh at it don't need to be reminded that this was silly and those who wouldn't laugh likely wouldn't read my blog anyway.  And there's the story about the kids whose parents, utterly convinced that this was the weekend, had quit their jobs and went on Mission, handing out tracts and stopped paying attention to the college fund the kids were acutely aware of.  How many people have basically torpedoed their futures by reacting in similar ways to this thing?  It's not funny, it's sad.

But it's not like this is the only thing people spend inordinate amounts of time and money on that make no sense.  Dedicated conspiracy theorists, the Area 51 crowd, Birthers, white supremacists, STURP fanatics, various fan groups dedicated to a tv show or music group among whom there are certainly members whose entire lives are dedicated to worship to the exclusion of all else, including personal relationships…

So I think I won't crack wise about this.  It seems to me that the truly Left Behind are all those folks who've basically given up on life in order to feed their obsession with  being one of the Elect.  I just can't really bring myself to find it amusing.

Aye of Newt

Okay, I've been trying to get some sense of how the GOP intends to retake the White House in 2012 and not having a lot of luck.  Now this nonsense with Newt Gingrich.

On Meet The Press he was asked what he thinks about Paul Ryan's budget plans—plans which include massive eviscerations of social programs like Medicare—and he made one of his rare reasonable statements.  He criticized the budget as, basically, right-wing social engineering and went on to say social engineering from the Right is as bad as social engineering from the Left. Think what you will about the merits of that in terms of national policy, it is nevertheless a self-consistent, reasonable statement.  Ryan's budget is counter to democratic expressions of support for some of these programs and Ryan and others in this Congress have been struggling to cast their efforts in terms of fiscal responsibility, which clearly has nothing to do with why they won't axe the military budget or do anything about corporate welfare.

Be that as it may, here is Gingrich being reasonable and setting himself up as an independent thinker.

Then came the backlash.  A big no-no to openly criticize a fellow Republican, especially someone who is seen to embody the Tea Party aesthetic of "gut the government!"  And what does Gingrich do?  Back pedals.  Not only that, he makes a prepared statement to declare that anyone using the footage from that Meet The Press interview to claim that, (a), Gingrich believes the Ryan budget is bad or (b) Gingrich disagrees with the social conservative agenda or (c) that Gingrich himself is flip-flopping and kowtowing to the Party is lying.

So now I'm baffled.  Because Ryan's proposed cuts in Medicare at least are unpopular, so how does aligning himself with a position Gingrich initially criticized make points with voters?  How does coming out of the gate with confusion aid his campaign or reflect well on the GOP?

And what social engineering?  The idea that a popularly elected government should do nothing to promote justice—and in this instance we're talking about economic justice—and that people who need help should just either rely on charity or go away?  Well, if you look at the out-front rhetoric of the most vocal segment of the GOP, the Tea Party, they seem to be backing an exhaustively libertarian approach.  But even so, at the heart of it is a desire to reduce government to little more than a few offices on the Atlantic coast that deal with rubberstamping whatever the private sector wants and is capable of doing.

I'm still mulling some of this over, but even though I disagree with Gingrich about the nature of social engineering, I am disappointed that yet again we have someone campaigning to achieve the office and will say or do whatever it takes, front any idea, kiss any ass, subvert any consistency to reach that goal.

This whole social engineering thing, though, is starting to annoy me.  It sounds ominous, but really, every society, if it has a common vision of itself, indulges social engineering, some more benignly than others.  It must be so.  Consensus is necessary to have a functional social mechanism.  The notion that we can be free of social engineering is a utopian fantasy that is poorly thought through.  Do you know what a country looks like that has no social engineering?

Somalia.

Food for thought.

Rapture Ready

This weekend, it's supposed to be all over.  Harold Camping of the Family Radio evangelist organization has announced the Rapture for May 21st—at six P.M.

In my own little patch of interest, the SFWA Nebula Awards will be given out this weekend.  If Mr. Camping is right, this will be the last of these.  Going out in grand style, that.

I don't have a lot to say about this other than it's silly.  It's one more reason that makes me wonder about the people who follow this kind of nonsense.  I can't help but think that, beneath all the sanctimony and babble, a lot of these folks are just, well, unfortunate.  Wishing for it all the Be Over so they don't have to deal with reality anymore.  Unfair, perhaps, but from my encounters with folks like them over the years I'll stand by it.  This is the ultimate "grass being greener" thinking and I no longer get angry at the absurdity but feel sad at the wonders they pass up spending so much time anticipating the end of wonder.

On the other hand, I have a pile of work that will take me a lot longer than the next three days to get done.  It would be pleasant, at least for a short while, not to have to worry about it.  But at some point I'd start to resent the interruption.

I asked some Jehovah's Witnesses once if they ever thanked Zoroaster for the very idea of the Apocalypse and they returned blank stares.  What?  Zoro-who?  After all, they keep coming up with new predictions for something which, according to their founder, Charles T. Russel, should have happened back in 1914.  (This was his final guess after previously predicting Christ's return for 1874, 1878, 1881, and 1910.)  They got that one wrong, but Russel's successor, Joseph Franklin Rutherford (who gave the movement the name Jehovah's Witnesses) revised the date to 1916.  Later it was moved up to 1918, 1925, 1941, 1975, 1984, and 1994. 

William Miller, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists, had predicted the Rapture for 1843 using a complicated bit of figuring based on Daniel.  He revised it to 1844 when the January 1st rolled around and everyone was still here.

More recently, Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer and self-taught Biblical scholar, published a little book, 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Be In 1988.  He gave 300,000 copies away for free, but sold 4.5 million.

There were dueling predictions about 1994, one from Pastor John Hinkle of Christ Church in L.A., who claimed June 9th.  Our Mr. Camping held out for September 6.  Obviously he's revised that estimate.

Still, the one to bet on by virtue of it having been figured by a true mathematical genius remains Sir Isaac Newton's prediction that 2060 is the year.  No sooner than, Newton claimed.

But then there are the words of Mr. Whisenant to keep in mind: "Only if the Bible is in error will I be proved wrong."  Might turn out to be that he was the shrewdest of the bunch—unless some of them play the stock market and contrive to short stocks that might fall as Rapture approaches.  For myself, this Saturday is another coffee house at which I'll be playing music and indulging a different kind of rapture.  Oh, and it will be in a church, in case you're wondering.  The once-monthly event takes place in a Methodist church in the neighborhood.  So if it comes, I'll be doing something I love, and that wouldn't be a bad way to go.

A Different "Doctored" Photograph

For something less fraught with the concerns of the day and a bit more fun.  They say you ought not take photographs from a moving car, but sometimes it's the only way to get certain shots.

And yes, this is heavily worked over.  I wanted an extra rainy effect.  This is something I was never able to achieve in color before and in B & W only by chemical abuse of the film.

I'm completing some of the online galleries—this one finishes out the Experimental gallery, which is filled with images that I have played with at length.  It might not be immediately obvious in some of them that they are, indeed, experimental insofar as the extent of manipulations are concerned, but they are all distortions of what was Actually There.

Anyway, something more pleasant.