Living Behind A Mask

I was going to title this “What’s it like being an atheist in the hyper-superstitious US Midwest?” but that was too long and the title I chose answers that question in a nutshell. For the majority of my 76 years, I’ve had to waste far too much time idling away the minutes after some arrogant nutjob mutters “Let’s pray.” One of my fondest memories of living in southern California for almost 10 years was that never happened one single time. Midwestern faux-Christians might squall about the “godless heathens on the left coast,” but I’d just call that good manners. I found no shortage of religious people in southern California, but for the most part they were not particularly fragile types who required me to pretend along with them to maintain their faith.

If you are a superstitious Christian tribalist/primate-trooper, you might imagine that Californians are harboring “deep feelings of fear and guilt from a sinful life and turning [their] back on God,” but you’d be as nutty as usual. It’s impossible to “turn your back” on an omniscient imaginary friend, for one thing; if he’s everywhere that would be physically impossible. But, mostly, the Californians I knew were incredibly hard-working, talented, and driven people who were trying to live their lives as best they could.

Before the Reagan Revolution did its permanent damage to the California education system, the highest percentage of adults I’ve ever known were taking night classes at the community colleges and the many University of California facilities, working one or many side hustles, trying to improve their neighborhoods and communities, and enjoying the best weather and recreational opportunities in the country. The mega-churches were still stuffed with Midwestern robo-people, but it wasn’t hard to find people who had useful things to do. Outside of a few marginally civilized cities, the Midwest is nothing like that. And I lived in Orange County, the L.A. area’s most conservative nuthouse! The more rational parts of the state are even less infected with delusional Christian cults.

What it’s mostly like living in the Midwest, especially in the burbs or rural areas is lonely. It’s also scary because the one thing the followers of “the prince of peace” are best known for is intolerance and violence. Humans, like most other primates, are a herd animal. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and monkeys live in “troops.” Although orangutans are mostly solitary animals, just watching freeway traffic will make it pretty obvious that humans are inclined to pile up in tightly packed herds, even when we are going nowhere. Put generously, we’re a “social animal,” more honestly we’re a herd animal easily spooked into following the lead steer over a cliff.

All religion is about producing conformity, but Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions and cults are about forcible conformity. So it is entertaining, at best, and incredibly disappointing, more accurately, to hear someone whining about atheists asking some sect of the Christian cult to behave at least marginally-legally and morally. The US version of Christianity has been as ruthless, ethnocentric, racist, and self-centered as any cult in the history of humanity. That is not to imply that Christians have behaved particularly well since the Roman emperor Constantine commissioned the first edition of the Christian Bible and invented Christianity in 330 CE.

The fact that the majority purporting to be Christian (representing 68% of the US population) could be terrorized by the miniscule 4% of the population representing atheists should be hilarious, but it is mostly disturbing. Christianity is a religion based on conformity of thought and speech, not necessarily actions. From simple observation, it is clear that those Christians are so shaky in their faith that they require universal conformity to cling to their fragile beliefs. As one academic author explained, “The Church so fiercely opposed heretics, i.e. those who did not conform to the articles of faith that they espoused, because they believed that their existence threatened society and would undermine the Church.”

So, those of us who aren’t terrified by our mortality and gave up on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairies and angels, demons and fire-breathing dragons, and other imaginary terrors are forced to try to be invisible in this fading empire of superstition, kleptocracy and capitalist feudalism. I have lived in western Kansas, north Texas, rural and urban Nebraska, urban California, suburban Colorado, urban and rural Minnesota and the only place I felt I was safe without my constant mask of anonymity was California. If I could have afforded to stay there, I would still be there. Nobody moves to places like everywhere-else-I-have-lived because they want to be there. If we all had the necessary skills, motivation, and drive to be in California, we’d be there. We pick lessor places because they are easier, the competition is less fierce, the standards of performance are practically non-existent in rural areas. That makes the place where I currently live less demanding, but far more lonely.

Work vs Jobs vs Mission

A lot of young people in tech jobs have recently discovered how little loyalty their previous employers held for their employees. As usual, a lot of millennials think they are the first group to experience this horror. Kiddies, you aren’t. I doubt there has ever been a generation who was happily surprised to discover their masters were willing to make sacrifices to keep the minions fed. Modern government jobs are probably the closest thing to that kind of situation, but that is only because in a socialist system everyone in the system shares in the funding of the system. In a public education system pension, for example, if the retired teachers don’t get paid the retired bureaucrats don’t get paid. In business, except the CEO and a few other C’s who will always get their golden parachutes, there is no such thing as “us” or “them”; it’s just “me” and everyone else. When you work for a corporation, it is a gross mistake to imagine “we’re all in this together.” Corporations, by design, are everyman and woman for themselves.

I do have sympathy for all of the young people recently dumped from their “dream jobs.” Been there, done that, and worse. The “worse” was being middle-management and being told to layoff my employees. The firs time in my life I was drunk was when I was in my early 30s, in the late 1970s, and I had just finished the slow painful dissolution of my test engineering department at Valmont Industries. For three months, the company mismanagement kept telling us “this will be the last layoff” and, a week later, we were handed another list of employees to get rid of. For me, this was the first of a fairly long list of engineering jobs but for several of my friends and coworkers it was the end of the brief rise in their career paths. A couple of weeks later, my boss laid me off and, later that day, he was handed his notice.

I had no “mission” at Valmont. It was just a reasonably well-paying job near a reasonable tolerable Nebraska small city where my wife had picked our next house. The economy in Nebraska and all of the country’s agricultural areas was in rapid decline and our small city, Fremont, was especially hard-hit when Valmont laid off 1,600 employees, Campbell Soup closed their canning facility, two packing plants shutdown and moved to non-union states, and the city practically closed down for the duration of the recession (well into the 90s). There was no Reagan “economic miracle” or any other kind of miracle to save us. We managed to “sell” our house for a substantial loss, including giving the “buyers” $5,000 under-the-table for their down-payment. I took another awful tech job in Omaha, which lasted until my new employer asked me to layoff my best employees because the were “overqualified.” I quit, instead, and wrote this song the night I decided to leave that job, “I’m Gonna Quit.”

Over the next 40 years, I went through 11 employers and discovered whatever “mission” my life was going to have in the process. Like soldiers in battle, there is no such thing as patriotism or fealty to king and country, there is only loyalty among peers and “the unit” within the organization. Having any kind of emotional attachment to any larger entity is foolish and in most organizations (using that term loosely) you have to watch your back even around your peers. Functioning teams are a rarity. Most departments are organized around defending management from responsibility and unnecessary (anytime the buck can be passed) effort.

I think mostly by accident, I have been blessed to be part of a half-dozen teams, probably amounting to a total of 15 years out of my 50-year career. The other 35 years were spent earning a living in a “job.” In many ways, I learned more useful lessons in the jobs than in the functioning work situations: sometimes seeing how not to do a job is more valuable than examples of excellence. I believe the key to that whole “mission” thing is to have one for yourself, totally separate and even isolated from your job. I have always advocated “The best time to start looking for a new job is when you start a new job.” Your “career” and your “mission” are to constantly be updating, improving, and fine-tuning your skills and taking care of yourself. Your employer almost certainly holds no loyalty to you other than the expectation that assigned work will be completed as expected. You should also expect fair and reasonable treatment, but you should not be surprised if that ends suddenly, unsentimentally, and without notice. Corporations, contrary to foolish assertions by our Extreme Court, are not people although they may be psychopathic and sociopathic.

Living in A One-Sided World

The people who make the rules, the rich and powerful, are beginning to experience the world as the rest of us have to live it and they aren’t happy about it. And let’s face, it’s a pretty miserable world. The rules that most of us are forced to live by, out of necessity, are only suggestions for the rich and powerful. If you didn’t get that out of the 4 years of being mismanaged, ignored, abused, and ripped-off by the Trump 3rd Tier Elites, you will never get it. But a lot of people got it. And now that we are in our 3rd year of a pandemic that has cost this country at least 1,010,599 lives (as of June 25, 2022) and at least 6,300,000 worldwide, some people are discovering that they can use the same rules that have always applied to the idle rich and abusively powerful.

For example, if you are a skilled healthcare worker, like a registered nurse, you are in big demand today. Typically, an RN makes about $29/hour as a hospital employee. Hospital employees are historically abused and misused by their grossly overpaid and under-skilled and cynically misnamed “administration” executives. During the early days of Covid, that abuse went ballistic as hospitals’ staff were decimated by the killer virus and administrators did as little as possible to protect their employees from the disease and hostile, delusional patients. People died, people quit, and as of this writing about 20% of US healthcare workers have left the workforce and 47% of those remaining in that workforce plan to leave their “current role” or the occupation entirely in the next 3 years. One of the ways to leave the role as a hospital employee, for nurses, is to become a “travel nurse.” This article, “Why Do Travel Nurses Get Paid More | Travel Nursing,” does a nice job of explaining why a freelance nurse gets better pay, has more job opportunities and control, and is less stressed than a clinic or hospital employee. The bottom line, though, is more money and less hassle. If a hospital administrator is a pain in the ass, leave and work somewhere else in a heartbeat. Want more money? Travel nurses can make more than twice the salary of a permanent employee. Don’t like the work assignments, don’t do them and the employer’s leverage is practically zilch. Most likely, they won’t fire you because they are already way short on people to do the actual work and everyone knows the administrators don’t do anything resembling work. No patient ever picked a clinic because of the administrators.

Some friends who are retired nurse were recently marveling at the fact that people would apply for a job with Mayo Clinic, be offered the job, and not show up. The assumption was “people don’t want to work anymore,” but the fact is that in that business the odds are good that the applicant received several offers and just took a different one. Employers have been in that position for decades and when they pick an employee for a job most employers don’t bother telling the other candidates that they didn’t get the job and they sure don’t bother to tell them why they didn’t get the job. But for the last 100 years, employers have expected prospective employees to be massively more considerate than employers. No longer that world, is it?

Doctors are in a completely different and much better situation, thanks to mismanagement and Covid and the two combined. For example, pathologists are in hyper-short supply: Industry Voices—The shortage of invisible doctors | Fierce Healthcare. Where there were typically about 100 annual open positions in the country for pathologists there are well over 1,000 today and there are expected to be almost 6,000 open positions by the end of the decade. We can thank scumbags like Ronald Reagan for the current situation, since he made “work” a dirty word and single-handedly flipped a tax system that penalized idle “unearned income” into the spectacularly profitable but culturally worthless “financial services” investment income scam that has destroyed our manufacturing sector, diverted talent from all sorts of necessary functions (like medicine) to money shuffling, and set the country’s education system back at least 50 unrecoverable years. Doctors are retiring, many far earlier than they had originally planned or expected, and doctors are leaving the healthcare system. Even the moderately representative and grossly conservative AMA admits that one in three doctors are planning on cutting back their hours and commitment or leaving their practice entirely in the next three years. Doctors can pretty much go where they want to go, from research positions in the medical device or drug industries to teaching or administration jobs in completely different fields. You might think you are special with your cute little MBA party animal degree, but with an MD behind your name you are special.

And those thousands of open positions with a fraction of the necessary and critical applicants are just the tip of the “Great Resignation” iceberg. One of the longest lasting aftereffects of the Black Plague was an idea that is still growing; the rich and powerful are not as important as they imagine themselves to be. Like today’s Bezos, Musk, and the rest of that dependent, unskilled, over-valued ilk, the idle rich of the 12th Century might have been able to isolate themselves from the plague, but they couldn’t support themselves with their meager talents and when serfs realized that the penalties for walking away from the manor and the 3rd tier royalty were unenforceable, they walked. They kept walking until they created what we now consider “the middle class.” Royals have been trying to beat back that movement for at least 1,000 years, but the more education and talent is required to support a society the more people there are who can do the simple math that illustrates the inconsequential quality of idle elites. One of the key purposes of religion is to convince workers that God has chosen the idle rich for their special qualities and to question that is to question God. If you ever wanted to know why atheists' like Trump, the Kochs, Musk, and the rest toss money and acknowledgement at evangelical preachers, this is why. The priests have the same marching orders they’ve always had, “Baffle ‘em with bullshit, keep ‘em in line, don’t let them think for themselves or you’ll have to get a real job.”

As the author of “How the Black Death made life better” wrote, “With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been ‘essential’ over the past 16 months.” As every competent employee in the world knows, if every CEO, CFO, COO, or any other C-word executive on the planet died tomorrow, the day after tomorrow would be no different than any day that came before it except that companies would be more profitable, more efficient, more flexible, and the stockholders would be richer. With Trump, we discovered that an incompetent and corrupt President is much worse than no President at all. And for 8 years of the worst recession in 75 years, the Republican Congress demonstrated that most of the design of the US government is so flawed that congresscritters can say out loud that their whole goal is to prevent the President from restoring the economy, rebuilding the infrastructure, and preparing the country for the future without any penalty.

For the moment, many employees are in the driver’s seat. Because humans are gullible and easily distracted, most likely this won’t last long. So, enjoy it while you can.

Mangling the American Dream

I am never more out of sync with my country than when it comes to consumerism. For all of the reasons Republicans say people like me are “un-American,” I hate all of the holiday seasons; especially Xmas. It’s not just the superstition and faux-good-will that smears itself across this smarmy holiday from work (for a rare non-retail few) and common sense, it’s the constant guilt-manipulating whining about “gifts” and expectations. If I could pick any time of the year to be struck down by lightning, it would be anytime between Halloween and Easter. Hell, I’d step between practically anyone and a bullet to get out of that time of the year (Trump and his spawn excluded).

One morning a few weeks ago, I was making potato pancakes for our breakfast and decided to drag out my rarely-used food processor to shred the potatoes and onions. As I was assembling the pieces of this vintage machine into something that would turn potatoes into bits of vegetable confetti, I was reminded of where this kitchen implement came from. Sometime around 2005, I decided I wanted to make one more attempt at adding a lot of vegetables to my diet and I figured buying a food processor to make that job a little less irritating might be motivational. As usual, I didn’t want to pay much for this speculative diet-motivational tool. So, I went on Craig’s List, created a “search alert” and let CL do what it does best. A couple of days later, I got a hit on a processor in my price range in the Payne-Phalen area of St. Paul. I called the seller and set up a time for me to check out the appliance a few hours before I needed to be in St. Paul for a recording session later that evening.

The sellers turned out to be a fairly recent-immigrant Asian couple who were doing the American Dream thing: buying all new everything as fast as they could toss their credit cards at anyone with stuff to sell. They had a new Honda Accord in the driveway, a living room full of nice leather-bound furniture and a television bigger than my living room wall, and a recently redecorated kitchen with lots of brand new appliances. I suspect the processor they were selling me was a hand-me-down. When they greated me at the door, they checked out my classy 1998 Ford Escort station wagon and my usual high-style outfit: a tee-shirt and jeans and sandals and a Denver Nuggets jacket. I don’t think I impressed them at all. We talked a bit while I tested the food processor and stuffed it and its parts back into the original packing box they had provided. They wanted to show me their new Cuisinart food processor, but I needed to keep moving so that I wouldn’t be late for my gig.

That morning, I considered the fact that I have never been much of a fan or even a participant in the American Dream; as commonly accepted by most Americans. I have owned exactly one new car—a  1973 Mazda RX3 station wagon—in my life and would just as soon never get financially beat up that badly again. I bought two new motorcycles, both early in 1974, and got my financial ass handed to me on those vehicles. Since then, I’ve owned a collection of beaters and utilitarian used vehicles and have driven a few of them into the ground. I’ve been accused of being willing to buy used food if I could figure out how to safely digest it. During my working career, I allocated so few minutes to meals that I probably wouldn’t have tasted the difference most of the time.

I don’t care about keeping up with the Jones’s, I just don’t want to get screwed. For most large purchases, being the first buyer is accepting the fact that you will likely be the one who takes the biggest financial hit for getting it when it is new. New cars lose 25-50% of their purchase value the day they roll off of the lot. Most motorcycles are no different. I bought a relatively new construction home in Parker, Colorado: I paid $71,000 for it in 1992, the original owners paid $110,000 for the house in 1984. (Thank you, Mr. Reagan.) I bought a like-new carbon fiber guitar a couple of years ago for $750. The original owner paid $1100 for it and a friend bought a lower cost version of the same instrument at the same time I found my used one; he paid $1300 plus tax. I bought a collection of power tools from a local retired guy for $100. On the way out his door with my new tools all loaded in the pickup, he mentioned that he’d paid about $2000 for those same tools when they were new. I bought a like-new $1400 digital oscilloscope a few weeks ago for $200 and the original owner threw in a couple hundred dollars worth of test probes to seal the deal. All of this equipment was barely used when I bought them. And on and on I could go. You too, I hope.

The real American dream used to be to hand off a world and a country that was better than the one we inherited. Americans used to take pride in trying to give their children a leg-up into the world they would possess when their parents were either old and feeble or gone. Today, many Americans appear to be proud of doing exactly the opposite. The two generations currently in power, Boomers and X-gens, seem to be doing everything they can to use up all of the world’s natural resources before their children realize how greedy they are being. We’re cobbling together dysfunctional national and state governments, solely purposed to make the rich richer and everybody else poor and enslaved. At least half of us are pretending that humans are not primarily responsible for the rapid climate change the world is displaying.

Americans and Arabs are doubling-down on their death-cult superstitions, pretending that prayers and wishes and a collection of gods so confusing that even the Greeks would be confused by who-is-who-in-the-sky. In the US, we’ve decided social and economic justice, education, democracy, and national security all take a backseat to making the rich richer and more powerful. That is NOT the American Dream. If anything, it is the Russian ogliarchy’s dream and they seem to be driving the car at the moment. I’d call that an American Nightmare.

Never Forget

One of the key components to pseudo-conservative/alt-right “thinking” is forgetfulness. If you remember history, you would never admit to being conservative because that would mean you are always wrong. Always, in the history of civilization and humanity. For example, pseudo-conservatives delude themselves into believing that Reagan was some sort of economic savior. For southern California, maybe, on a short term, but for the rest of the nation and the world that is total bullshit. Long-term, Reagan did damage to California that won’t be repaired without another Great Depression and a massive population drop.

For example, do you know when the United States became a permanent debtor nation? 1985, the beginning of Reagan’s second term. As tough as reality is for pseudo-conservatives, it's a fact. On September 17, 1985, the New York Times published an article titled “U.S. Turns into Debtor Nation” (“The United States has become a debtor nation for the first time since World War I, owing foreigners more than they owe it, a Commerce Department report indicated today.”) which should have tossed traditional conservatives into a fit of panic and generated a wave of cost-cutting, but Reagan and his band of nitwits convinced the New Right that “deficits don’t matter,” at least when fake conservatives are creating them. So, like every pseudo-conservative administration since Reagan, Republicans have stood for borrow-and-spend, instead of actual conservative principles.

Pseudo-conservatives have just elected the least conservative President in modern history. Trump’s “business” history is a sad tale of leverage gone wrong, with six bankruptcies and a long list of Trump-scam vendors and customers robbed and left broke in his wake. When his administration has spent its wad, the US will be further in debt and the economy will be crushed into a shadow of what it could have been. Like the post-Reagan and Bush I and II years, actual national security will be non-existent, the economy will be in shambles after a series of deregulation scandals and regulatory mismanagement, and U.S. citizens will be an international laughing stock. Our national resilience will be further stressed and our capacity for a comeback weakened by a degraded national education system and the resulting loss of technological capability and increased international competition for the bits of talent our education system produces.

Like every other pseudo-conservative President in the country’s history, national mismanagement will produce one or more extreme terrorist events; probably tossing us into another endless and mindless “war on terror” or some such bullshit label. Those of us who actually read will look back on the Obama years as the last gasp of Washington’s great experiment ("And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."). The American people have degenerated far below any hope Washington might have held for democracy and the republic concept. We are a Nation of Stupid and, worldwide, we’re turning into a species of stupid.

Every good technician, engineer, and scientist knows “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” The inverse is also true. A relatively recently described human trait, the Dunning-Krueger Effect, explains "a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately." Or, the less you know, the more you think you do know. Trump voters are that crowd. Their science, psychology, technology, economics, and mathematics are so shallow that they barely qualify as humans, but they have convinced themselves that they are of above-average intelligence. The less they know, the smarter they think they are. This isn’t going to end well.

They Took Ur Jobs!

Trump promised to bring the jobs he shopped out to China back to the USA. What do you think the chances are that Trump’s hats, shirts, ties, and other cheap shit will come back to US clothing manufacturers? How about zero, unless he can get US wages down to China’s.

The Trumpets wailed about how badly they were being treated, most of whom are living on Social Security and Unemployment and Welfare. These are the same people who elected Reagan and started the transfer of wealth from the US to Indochina and from the working class to the 1%. But they don’t get that, because they are the “uneducated” that Trump loves so much. When Reagan took his dribble-down axe to the federal tax code and made “unearned income” (interest and investment income, rent, income received from the ownership of natural resources, inheritance: aka “passive income”) more profitable than active income, any chance of US jobs expanding died and has almost no chance of ever returning. Trump is a prime beneficiary of this tax/social engineering plan and if you think Donald Trump has ever done one thing that didn’t benefit himself over every other person on the planet, you are one of his beloved “uneducated.”

For example, the unemployed (probably for decades) steel workers who campaigned and voted for Trump are great examples of uneducated voters without a clue. What could Trump do to bring steel production back to the US? He doesn’t even us US steel in his own casinos. The problem is on multiple levels: 1) the US tax system does not reward capital investment, 2) even if someone were insane enough take on creating a modern steel production facility, it wouldn’t employ uneducated, unskilled labor and would be highly automated, and 3) the US hasn’t invested in manufacturing and engineering education for so long that the country doesn’t have the talent to build a competitive steel production facility. Financial services has siphoned off at least two generations of the nation’s most talented people to the point that 45% of US STEM undergrads are foreign students who intend to return home with their US-subsidized education and skills. Our manufacturing economy is so weak that 74% of US STEM grads work in non-STEM related jobs. And why not? Engineering is complicated, competitive, and constantly demanding new skills. Finance is barely any different today than it was in the early 1980’s, when the Reagan Administration decided to blow-off enforcing Glass-Steagall. To become a finance millionaire, all you need is ruthlessness, a total lack of morality, and a little luck. You actually have to have talent, education, and perseverance to be Elon Musk.

The media has decided to blame Trump on liberals who, supposedly, ignored the “plight” of the poor white man. The reality is that the poor white man has always had the tools he needed to crawl out of poverty and step into the middle class: public education and white entitlement. The problem is these are the same poor white men who were easily distracted by the 1% aiming them at poor blacks, Hispanics, and every other ethic immigrant with a work ethic. The one skill poor whites will always have is an innate capacity for hate and violence. Otherwise, their claim of “white supremacy” is disproven by their existence.

There is, as best I can see, no fix for massive unemployment in the unskilled labor demographic. The best this lot can hope for is decent healthcare, available education for the small percentage with the values to work for it, tolerable housing, and the usual distractions of sports, religion, and guns. Preying on this crowd with easy credit and heartless bankruptcy laws is the Republican tactic and, so far, telling these nitwits that Democrats and liberals and immigrants are to blame has worked. It doesn’t make their lives any better, but it does keep their capacity for hate and violence in play.

#167 Three Dead Guys, One Long Year

In the past eight years that I've been writing Rat Rants, I haven't once bothered with an "end of year wrapup." I'm not sure this will be such a conclusive document, but all the hand-wringing about Jerry Ford and Saddam Hussein's death this week brought out the rant motivation this morning. Listening to eulogies from characters like Dick Cheney, Bob Dole, Donny Rumsfeld, and the like approached ruining my New Year's eve morning coffee.

Everyone who was a conscious adult in the 1970s knew that Jerry Ford made a deal with the Nixon Administration to pardon the head criminal and create a distraction that would allow the legal escape of a long list of Nixonian criminals. The almost universal disgust regarding Ford's pardon of Nixon was evidence of that knowledge when Ford was solidly trounced by a Georgia peanut farmer who was, four years later, trounced by a b-movie acting, failed California politician. Ford's attempt to "end our long nightmare," was just beginning of a much longer nightmare. The nation has not recovered from the cynicism and radical distrust of our institutions that was began by Nixon's criminal behavior and has been continued since, because Gerald Ford established a precedent that demonstrated that criminals do not have to pay for their crimes, if those crimes are big enough. The Bush Administration's huge collection of criminals are counting on this precedent, which is why Cheney spoke so emotionally (for a zombie) at Ford's funeral. If Nixon didn't have to pay for his wide array of crimes against humanity and the nation, surely Bush and Cheney will escape their criminal activity equally unscathed.

Ford's legacy includes allowing some really vicious Nixonian characters to remain in the Republican national party; Rumsfeld, Cheney, Casper Weinberger, and many of the Rat Pack who have made up the past 30 years of Republican incompetence. As for his redemption in the short attention span of the American media, the New York Times stated that his pardon of Nixon was "a profoundly unwise, divisive and unjust act" which wreaked Ford's "credibility as a man of judgment, candor and competence." Nothing in the last 30 years has changed to restore any of those qualities to Jerry Ford. Much in that amoral action has contributed to the long nightmare that was continued by Reagan, Bush I, Clinton (the "Eisenhower Republicans") and Bush II. A public trial, conviction, and new laws to protect the nation from a despot President would have followed Nixon's escape from Washington. We could be a massively improved nation if that had happened, Ford made sure it did not.

Thanks for the legacy and the endless nightmares, Jerry.

Another legacy was created Saturday, two days before the New Year, the hanging of Saddam Hussein on the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Adha festival. Just to be certain that portion of the world understood how insensitive the United States and our microscopic "coalition" is to Islamic feelings, Traditionally, Muslims execute an animal on this day, in remembrance of Abraham's willingness to slaughter his own son on God's command. Only the least informed citizen could believe there was anything legitimate about Hussein's trial, conducted by hand-selected judges while the nation is occupied by American troops, so the symbolism is pretty clear to the Mideast. Hussein has probably been elevated to the unlikely stature of "hero" in the eyes of many Islamic fundamentalists. No one ever (intelligently) accused the Bush cronies of being sophisticated or having a sense of timing. I don't know where you'd find better evidence of their incompetence than this incident.

Finally, someone for whom I actually cared died Xmas Day, 2006. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the true Kind of Rock and Roll, and a revolutionary of the best sort, died at 73. James wrote and performed the song that should be the modern national anthem, "Living in America," in 1987. He lived it as he played it, too. The multicolored band that performed that song in the movie and music video from Rocky IV was as American as a professional basketball team; representatives of every race, clothing designer, and popular musical instrument rocked out to a cowed and boring Russian crowd. James shouting, "I'm an American, eat your heart out!" to that audience was the only highpoint to an otherwise mindless, worthless movie.

For most of my life, I've taken crap from family, friends, and other musicians about my "James Brown rules!" convictions. From "he can't even sing" to "that's nothin' but jungle music," I've heard it all. And it's all wrong. Anyone suffering through another artist attempting to sing "A Man's World" knows how difficult Brown's music is to recreate. All of the lame comedians who grossly failed to even remind us of any aspect of JB's performance skills discovered how complicated, technical, and physically demanding this music is.

I don't imagine that one minute of 2007 will be taken up with my memories of Saddam Hussein or Jerry Ford, but I'm going to miss James Brown and the hope that I'll have another chance to see "the Hardest Working Man in Show Business" again. 

December 2006

#145 Too Many Targets (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

Wow!  This has been an incredible month to look through the rat hole into the real world.  Republicans are drizzling ooze in all directions and they're presenting so many targets that writing about them is like shooting catfish in a barrel.  Just as a reference, for those of you who aren't counting:

• Bush's mole in the last remaining piece of non-right wing media, ex-Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, quit before he was fired by the CPB's board.  The CPB's inspector general had found that Tomlinson had hired lobbyists and contractors, without the board's knowledge, to campaign Congress to restrict public broadcasting's ability to report the news, unless it was favorable to the administration.
• Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pled guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion and resigned his office.  Cunningham soaked up $2.4 million in graft to while working for a collection of crooked military contractors.  Cunningham, who often promoted his military connection as a former Navy pilot, was one of the few Republicans in office who could actually make any kind of claim to national service.  He's facing 10 years in prison and had to give back some of his booty.  I'm sure he'll receive a sharp slap on the wrist.  Republicans are really into "taking responsibility" when the responsibility can be passed on to someone else.
• Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his lobbying partner, Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Tommy DeLay, bribed Rep. Bob Ney and a collection of Republican congressmen into making bold statements in favor of gambling casino interests in return for at least $10,000 in contributions to the RNC.  Big surprise, Republicans and the Mafia are connected.  Who'd have thought?  Funny, when cops find drugs on poor person, those drugs are astronomically priced.  When they discover a Republican politician is taking bribes, we're barely talking any money at all.  Raise your hands if you seriously believe that a gambling casino siphoned only $10,000 to the RNC.  Ok, so there are a few really stupid folks still able to breed.  Nature works overtime to populate the species, no matter how dumb a move that may be. 
• Bush and Cheney are on the road promoting their right to torture captives while the rest of the world wonders what the hell happened to "the land of the free and the home of the brave?"  On the upside, many people (Lawrence Wilkerson, Rep. Norm Dicks, Sen Jack Murtha) are beginning to locate their lost testicles and are speaking out against this abomination and perversion of our national values.
• Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. has become as interesting as an afternoon soap opera.  He has ruled in favor of investment companies that, incidentally, he had considerable financial interest.  Paragons of propriety, such as Arlon Spector decided, "It is my conclusion that there has been no impropriety on your part," but folks with a conscience and a lick of sense are less convinced.  Alito ruled that a strip search of a 10 year old girl was within the powers of our police state.  Alito has ruled that machine gun ownership is every (mobster) American's right.  And on it goes.  Where do Republicans find these whack jobs?  
• The new Iraqi Congress resolved that Iraq’s opposition has a “legitimate right'’ to provide resistance to American occupation.  They also asked for a timetable for an American troop withdrawal, something Bush has claimed he'd do the moment Iraq asked us to leave.  Of course, now he's saying it's "premature" (wonder if he knows what that word means?) for us to consider withdrawal while Iraq still has oil and Halliburton hasn't yet extracted all of the gold in Fort Knox. 
• Senator Tom Delay is sinking further into the Texas court system.  For me, the highpoint of his legal mess has been the difficulty a Texas politician has had in finding a competent, unbiased Texas judge to hear his case.  Bush seemed to think that every damn court in Texas was competent to try death cases, even without a state public defender system, but political corruption is beyond their capacity.  How difficult is it to determine if a Republican is taking bribes?  I'd be surprised if it's any harder than deciding if a politician is lying (are his lips moving?).
• New Orleans and Katrina are still spilling into Bush's lap.  Corruption and incompetence seem to be the legal tender of this administration's attitude toward domestic issues.  As our weather changes, lots of red states are likely to be experiencing natural disasters.  I'm sure Pat Robertson will be praying for their contributions to his newest castle on a mountain.  One thing for sure, Bush and the Republican wolf pack has made sure none of those damn homeless freeloaders can escape from natural disasters through filing bankruptcy. 
• Lastly, a collection of "conservative think tanks" (an obvious oxymoron) have been advocating large families as a "solution" to the Social Security crisis.  Their argument is that Social Security was "set up" to be a system that relied on the contributions of new workers to support retiring workers.  This ignores the fact that the original system was a "pay as you go" insurance program that has been grossly mismanaged and liberally robbed from by every Republican President from Eisenhower to Bush II.  Republicans hate "pay as you go," because it requires the people they represent, the grossly rich, to contribute to the nation's expenses.  This idiot "solution" ignores the fact that large families are overwhelmingly the major contributors to poverty, child abuse, illiteracy, and unemployment.  I heard one of the brain-dead "conservative intellectuals" explaining this solution on NPR and nearly hurt myself laughing at his justifications.  Finally, the poor boy had to fall on his sword and admit that there was a religious/superstitious component to the argument that made large families "even more compelling."  Ah, the Corporate God demands "more customers" and who are we to disobey?

The list is much longer and funnier than this.  If it weren't scary beyond belief and dangerous beyond our wildest terrors of the Cold War, it would be a lot more entertaining. 

The most important thing we should have learned from the Cold War was that a national government run by a single party is dumb beyond belief.  Instead, Reagan imported Soviet Union-style politics to the United States and the right has promoted that incompetence to a fine, political art.  There are few signs that the media is going to contribute anything useful to the reform of our political system and our elections have been contaminated beyond simple reform.  Unless individual citizens wise up and rise up against the nuttiness of the right, we're screwed.  For the short term, we're screwed anyway.  Bush and his puppeteers have blown the national budget, decimated our national reputation, and lowered our future standard of living to third world status.  Good thing they're entertaining, otherwise they would be totally worthless. 

November 2005

#133 The White Collar Crime Party

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

GeeWiz Bush's close friendship with "Kenny Boy" Lay (ENRON) and a large collection of recently convicted and accused corporate criminals is pretty good evidence that Republicans are closely linked with white collar crime.  Ronald Reagan hardly knew anyone who wasn't a corporate criminal and presented the nation to a close experience with several of those crooks in his cabinet and administration.  As a result, a record number of Reagan Presidential associates were accused, fined, or went to jail during that seriously flawed Presidency. 

The first edition of President George Bush smoothly slipped from hanging with oily white collar criminals to the Presidency and back to his high life with Fortune 500 mafia cronies.  Fahrenheit 9/11 showed us GB 1's close relationship with corporate oil criminals in a scene with a crowd of oil executives and Saudi royalty. 

Here in Minnesota, our current governor Pawlenty was "employed" doing nothing for a year, at $4500/month by his "advisor" and Access Anywhere pay telephone exec Elam Baer.  Pawlenty had this gig for a year running for the highest state office and "serving" in the state legislature. Pawlenty's big money backer asked absolutely nothing from his Republican pool boy for two years, while the candidate established his candidacy.  In exchange for nothing, Pawlenty received at least a $54k "consulting fee" and his backer received "future considerations" (as they say in Republican doublespeak).  Even before the election, the money guy was saying that he'd "received fair value" for his investment in Pawlenty.  We're still waiting to see the pictures of what Pawlenty did to earn $54k.  Access Anywhere and its subsidiaries have been fined for a variety of consumer fraud abuses by several states.

These fine examples of Republican amorality are nothing new for the GOP.  Since Grant, most Republican candidates have been crooks first, politicians second, and Americans behind every other entertainment.  Eisenhower was a slight departure from the norm, but he waited until his last moment as President to, uncharacteristically, lash out at the white collar criminals heading the "military-industrial complex."  Otherwise, his term of office was decorated with scandals and abuses of power and weeks of vacationing at the nation's finest golf courses.  Republicans are nothing if not expert at relaxing and ignoring they job they've been elected to perform.

This year, though, the Republicans are coming out of the closet with the kind of confidence that could only belong to a party that does not fear losing the next election.  They have a right to feel fearless, now that they have fixed national and local elections so that they can "win" any office they decide to fill.  Being unafraid of the whim of democracy, their first act is to provide the same kind of immunity to their white collar criminal buddies.  So, "tort reform" has risen to "the most important problem the nation faces," according to Republicans and their $4,000 suit cohorts. 

"Tort reform," if you haven't been paying attention, is directed at a specific, very narrow aspect of civil law; the part that allows the rest of us to strike back at the abuses of big business and other white collar criminals.  Real tort reform would embrace all aspects of legal time-wasting, including the overwhelming number of frivolous business-to-business lawsuits.  But Republicans, on the rare occasion they develop any practical skills, are occasionally corporate lawyers.  And business law is one of the few places where large companies can beat small companies.  So, this pretense of "tort reform" is only aimed at limiting the capability of class action lawsuits.  Because the last thing a Republican wants is for his gravy train to be taken to court, shown to be as criminal as we all know they are, and deprived of millions of dollars that could be better spent putting a well-connected Republican into political office. 

Forbid the thought that a poor or middle class person might find a way to strike back at a corporation that caused loss of life, limb, or means of survival.  Republicans believe that our courts are reserved for whatever purposes the really evil white collar criminals believe they are best served.  "Tort reform" is intended to protect big tobacco, bigger oil, drug manufacturers, polluters, inside traders, creative accounting executives, and the long list of incredibly rich and powerful white collar criminals. 

The arrogant bastards who are promoting this think you don't have the brains to know what they are doing.  So far, all of their decisions have been based on the assumption that the average US voter is too dumb to know what's good for him.  They're probably right.  The world is still waiting to hear about the first scumbag to go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

April 2005

#126 A Voting Resolution (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

2004 could be my last election for a long while.  I have voted in every election, local and national, since 1968.  I have put my mark next to names for Presidents and City Council members, Senators and county judges, and I've found some reason to either write-in a name or select an properly registered name for every position on every ballot that I've been allowed to complete.  The 2000 and 2004 elections have proved that exercising that "right" is a pointless waste of time.  Republicans have bought, bribed, terrorized, and cheated our election system into a foregone conclusion and I don't want to contribute to the illusion that our democracy is still democratic.  We are a corporate communist state, blended with a neocon crackpot theocracy, and justice has gone the way of the dodo.  I mean the bird, not the dumbass Texan in the White House.

Citizens were shown that their wimpy little participation in "democracy" was unwanted and unneeded in 2000.  After the voter fraud in Florida, the Supreme Republican Court decided the election with the most blatant and vile distain for states' rights, one-man-one-vote, and the concept of representative democracy in general.  The Republican Senate refused to exercise its responsibility and allowed the fraudulent "election" to stand, in spite of irrefutable evidence that the Bushies had violated the voter rights of thousands of Florida citizens and, after all that, had still lost the Florida election. 
In 2004, the Republicans were even more blatant.  They put up thousands of fake electronic voting machines in Ohio and other backward states.  They tossed out hundreds of thousands of votes and broke so many civil rights laws that even other countries were astounded at the passivity of United States citizens. 

I am disgusted.  While whacky neo-Christers are babbling about how the founding fathers would be turning over in their graves at how "liberals" have removed religion from government and education, I know that the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights would be disappointed that there hasn't been a revolution against the corporate commies who arrogantly own the country.  Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Sam and John Adams, George Washington, and Ben Franklin did not risk everything to create a corporate theocracy.  Those thoughtful men did not accidentally begin the Bill of Rights with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."  Humans had suffered several hundred years of religious persecution, horrific torture, vicious totalitarian governments, and unbalanced economic systems, all at the hands of governments based on religion.  One of the key components of The Enlightenment was the understanding that government and religion should never mix.  The fall of the republic of the United States is one more piece of evidence to support that obvious platform of democracy. 

The reason I am leaving the polls is that I don't believe my vote will even be counted in the future.  Republicans have shown that they will do anything to achieve their goals.  Anything.  They will destroy this country and all of the good things it stands for to protect the interests of the rich, powerful, and superstitious scumbags they represent.  They will invalidate voter rights, abolish the Bill of Rights, terrorize citizens and foreign nations, wage war against random fictional enemies," and bankrupt the world's natural resources.  There have never been more evil people in charge of weapons of mass destruction in the history of humanity.  Voting is a waste of time in a time and something we don't have to waste.

#124 We Called Them "Freaks" (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

In the early 1970s, the worst of the drug abusers from the 60s often completely lost touch with reality and "turned to Christ."  Real hippies called the ex-zombie-doper-burnouts "Jesus freaks."  In a culture where anything went and almost any damn idiot idea found some level of acceptance, the "born again" and the "saved" were considered crazy-beyond-redemption.  Even Scientologists, those freaky Dianetics self-helpers who still chant "he's not dead yet" whenever a book critic has the gumption to suggest that L. Ronnie Hubbard may not have actually written the latest piece of SF trash bearing his name, got more respect than Jesus freaks.  Even Young Republicans, an oxymoron if I ever wrote one, sat further up the credibility totem pole. 

Today, Jesus freaks rule the country.  The rest of us are scared shitless of the crazies and that's good enough for Jesus and his daddy, according to the current herd of spokesmen and the rare spokeswoman.  Like their 1930's German counterparts, the neo-con Jesus freaks can't discriminate fear from respect and don't care to waste time making the distinction.  In fact, they'd probably rather generate fear, because respect is something they can't possibly earn with their unusually small intellects and amazing fear-of-everything timidity.

How did Jesus freaks move to the top of the food chain?  I think it's because of the down-breeding that occurred during the 1960s and has continued from then till today.  The social welfare programs and the extended time of peace of the 1950s allowed far too much cannon fodder to reproduce.  Dumbasses who should have died in pointless infantry charges against overwhelming firepower survived the 1950s and bred like rats, producing the dumbest bunch of children ever to populate the planet .  In the 1970s and 80s, these stupid-beyond-belief quasi-humans came out of the womb ready to accept nonsense and fantasy as fact. 

It didn't help that the country had grown so large that the once-small federal government became Big Mommy and the majority of the citizens accepted and even begged for "help" from the most incompetent civil serpents since the Soviet Union built its governmental monument to human foolishness.  It's possible that these idiot children could have been educated, but the federal and state governments had their brainless hands deep into the education system by 1970 and "reading, writing, and 'rithmetic" turned into "baby-sitting, semi-pro sports, and sadistic sensory deprivation experiments."

Without good genes or competent educations, a generation of morons grew into superstitious, timid quasi-adults who desperately yearn for the warmth of Mommy and Daddy's comforting, if deluded, care.  They run to churches for fantastic myths of life-after-wasted-life and to politicians for even more fantastic fables of nationalistic or racial superiority.  The 70's piss-ants are the most gutless, moronic generation ever to fake being young. 

An unusual number of kids who were born from the genetic mistakes of the 1950s came out of the womb conservative.  While there were a few Young Republicans in my generation, most of the conservative freaks were non-political rednecks.  That's pretty bad, but what came next was really bad.  Their kids were really strange abominations, born dumb and political.  250 years after the Age of Reason inspired the founders of this country to firmly and clearly separate government and religion, the fools and the fools bred by fools took 10,000 steps backwards and elected Ronald Reagan, the anti-Washington, President of the United States.  Downhill the country traveled, after Reagan, until the idiots search the country for the dumbest, least capable, least ethical person in the entire nation and made him our fearful, incompetent leader.  What happens next is anyone's worst guess, but I fully expect the least from the majority of my fellow citizens and I don't expect to be disappointed.  P.T. Barnum once said that no one ever went broke under-estimating the intelligence of the American public.  Lots of people been elected, however, doing just that. 

#121 A World of Funny Stuff (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Comedians have to feel specially blessed these days.  We have Colon Powell claiming that he has "evidence" of yet another oil-rich country possessing dangerous WMDs (wimpy male dandruff?).  Citizens in the Ukraine are protesting their rigged Presidential election and the Bushies are babbling about "preserving democracy (for everyplace except America)."  Finally, every other newspaper ad is for some sort of male erection enhancement dope or a male pattern baldness treatment.  You don't have to be a professional comedian to see the humor in the daily newspaper.

From the perspective of the rest of the world, or any rational human being, let's try to read something into an American newspaper.  Starting from the top, literally, what's with the "thinning hair blues" paranoia?  Men get bald.  Hell, even women lose their hair as they get old.  In fact, old, fat, white, bald men have been an object of terror for as long as I have been alive and a lot longer, if you can imagine that.  Suddenly, these folks what to moderate their scary image by painting the tops of their heads black?  I guess there is some sense in that.  They've been trying to convince the rest of us that the scariest people in the country are black men, so maybe they are enhancing their own powerful image by partially painting themselves the color of their favorite demons. 

The really cool combination of a comb-over and a painted-black skull is pretty scary, I have to admit.  Anyone that intent on disguising himself has to have something serious to hide; murder, robbery, child-abuse, and/or being a member of the NRA or the Republican Party.  All truly terrifying character flaws.  Even scarier, the ads tell us that the disguised men and women "feel 10 years younger" after painting their heads.  There is nothing scarier than young feeling Republicans. 

"Boost your stamina and performance" with one of the many recreational drugs now on the potency market, that's the subject of about 90% of today's television ads.  My favorite ad is the one for the non-prescription dope, Endurex for Men.  They never picture middle aged, fat, bald, white men as their typical customer.  Apparently, Endurex is for young twenty-something men who are getting it one with even younger, beautiful women.  I'm not bragging here, but when I was twenty-something married to a beautiful 20-something woman, I did not need any sort of endurance or performance dope.  If anything, I needed something to take the edge off of my permanent state of horniness.  Apparently, twenty years of eating hormone-stuffed beef hasn't been good for the American male.  We're going limp much earlier than in any previous generation. 

Pretending to be potent is almost as popular among the Whacky Right as pretending to give a damn about democracy every where in the world except in the United States.  You have to applaud the Ukrainians for being so brave in the face of the Russian military's attempt to subvert their first democratic election in zillions of years.  But what does it say about us when Bush can pretend to be part of "building a democracy" in Asia after he worked so hard to destroy an existing semi-democracy in his own country?  It says that we don't know democratic institutions when we are losing them.  Fair elections in this country ceased to exist with Bush's first abduction of the federal government.  The 2004 "election" cemented the fascists' control of our federal government and moved this country out of the democratic column into the corporate communist column for the foreseeable future.   We have as much business telling other countries how to manage their democracies as Donald Trump has in writing a humane business management textbook.  This would be a lot funnier subject if it wasn't so disastrous for the rest of the world. 

It's an odd fact that even imperialist wars haven't done much for our testosterone levels.  And that's sad because Bush has his favorite poodle, Colon Powell, parading more "evidence of WMDs" to the world as a demonstration of how far Cheney has his hand stuffed up Powell's ass.  Powell seems to be a little miffed at the world's reaction, "More magical PowerPoint slides, Generalissimo?  We can hardly wait."  Yes, the leaders of the civilized world are on edge waiting for Mr. Powell to demonstrate the latest piece of evidence that Powell is offering as an excuse to take over a few more square miles of the world's richest oil fields.  Whoops, do I sound a little cynical?  Gosh, why wouldn't I expect Powell and the rest of CRAP to be just as honest in their presentation of evidence as they have been for the last four years?  I guess if my vote actually counted, I might be more inclined to consider even a candidate that I voted against to be a legitimate representative of my country.  Since I'm living in the New Soviet Union (thanks for "winning" that war, Mr. Reagan), I'm more interested in regime change than nation building.

Our five-foot-two, Alfred E. Newman look-alike, soft-shouldered, hunchbacked by an oversized-wireless prompter, booze-and-dope-dappled, inbred rich kid, picture-of-impotence President isn't exactly creating an image of power and vitality to the rest of the world.  If anything empowers terrorists to believe that we're a nation of helpless wimps, it's our head wimp.  The boy looks like a walking advertisement for skull paint and impotency drugs.  At least we don't have to worry about GeeWiz getting it on with sexy interns.  Bush couldn't get it up with a lifetime supply of Viagra and this year's Playboy pin-ups spread across the White House lawn.  What we do have to worry about is terrorists believing that we're all as helpless and cowardly as Bush and his whining neo-cons.  The fact is, at least half of the country is made up of exactly those character traits.  The fact is, we are weak, spineless, and inclined toward irrational behavior under stress.  Osama can blow up a chunk of New York and we'll run away from him and attack a nearly defenseless Iraq.  If Iraq fights back, we'll run away and go after Iran.  If Iran looks dangerous, maybe Grenada will need another whipping.  Cuba seems to be a likely, defenseless, third-world target.  Eventually, we'll find a country we can whip and they'll stay whipped long enough for us to declare "a lasting victory" before we're mired down in hand-to-hand-combat in hospitals and nursery schools.  Hopefully, Bush won't mistake Canada's generally passive attitude toward our un-neighborly behavior as a sign of "easy pickins'."  A nation that can tolerate 10 months of winter would kick our girly-man asses. 

#119 Who's Voting Smart? (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea for me.  Most likely at least once in the last eight years, I've ranted about fools overpopulating the world and my country.  However, this last election sure pointed out how true it's becoming: the dumber are becoming dumber and more prevalent.  We've been working at this for 200 years as a country and for at least ten times that long as a species, but it's a little scary how quickly the viciously stupid are taking over the world. 

NPR did a series of interviewing various folks from various parts of the country, asking about their political views and Presidential choice for 2004.  One stop that particularly entertained me was in western Nebraska.  Other than the town's barber and a retired teacher, every person interviewed was a single issue voter with absolutely no intellectual grasp of that lone issue.  Most of the reasons for voting were embarrassingly stupid or selfish.  I was appalled at the lack of knowledge of the candidates or their real positions on the only issue the small town spud cared about. 

My favorite is the sole moral position of the religious right; anti-abortion.  Or, as they put it, the Right to Life or, even less consistent, Pro-Life.  Outside of this one issue the Right is consistently on the side of immorality and about as anti-life as a group of living beings could be.  Take, for instance, their goose-stepping leader, G.W. Bush.  While the Governor of Texas , Bush executed 152 people.  Does this sound like someone who believes in the "sanctity of life?"  Bush even ridiculed the pleas for a stay of execution Betty Beats, mimicking her words ("Please don't kill me!") to a Time reporter and laughing at her doom.  That was early in his reign of death.  Beats was his 121st victim, but Bush still had work to do.  He loved killing people and, given his charge into an unjustified war, still does.  The difference between G.W. Bush, the Governor, and GeeWiz, the President, is that he can kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people as President.  So much for that moral position.  The only time Bush turns the other cheek is when he's using the cheek to take aim.  The best I can figure is that the right wants more people to grow up in dysfunctional families or orphanages so they can have the pleasure of killing them as adults.  That's hardly a moral position.

The other farcical pro-Bush position is a deluded belief that Bush is some kind of defender of capitalism.  If there ever was a socialist in the White House, Bush is the man.  GeeWiz comes from a state and family history of socialist leeches who have made their fortune feeding on the public blood vein.  The Texas economy is based on federal welfare from military installations, oil, and aerospace.  Without federal subsidies, Texas would be just another southern state populated by backwards hillbillies, crooked politicians and illiterate fundamentalist preachers. 

George, himself, was a total failure at everything he attempted until he hooked up with a pack of corporate socialists who conned Arlington, Texas into condemning a few hundred acres of prime private property and handing over $600 million in public financing for a new stadium.  Bush and his co-conspirators still owe Arlington Texas $7.5 million for their piddling share of the stadium costs.  Apparently, they have no plans to pay back the debt, tying up the city and citizens in court while the Statute of Limitations runs out on the balance due.  The extremes Bush and his buddies have gone to hang on to the largest-ever baseball team sale profits have been very close to criminal.  Being good socialists, they've offered absolutely nothing in return to the city that made them millionaires and moved Bush from the "loser" to the "winner" column.  Even as President, Bush is taking advantage of rich guy tax breaks, handing federal money to his crooked cronies, and violating national and international laws on a daily basis. 

For anyone with a lick of sense, those two inconsistencies ought to be enough to make folks think twice about putting someone like GeeWiz in charge of catching stray dogs.  But not small town Americans.  So the real question is why are these people so irrational?

Anyone who's lived in a small town knows the real problem facing rural America.  The smart kids leave and the dumb ones stay.  Even the dumb kids who stay know that they are living in a depressed fools' paradise.  Because of the ag economy/ecology, the down-breeding has not just been a passive sport.  I moved my family from western Kansas to western Texas to central Nebraska during the 1970s.  Part of what chased us across the plains was the runoff of industrial agriculture.  Literally. 

Agriculture is one of the dirtiest industries in the world.  In the mid-1970s, western Nebraska's water was so contaminated with nitrogen from irrigation fertilizers that the EPA was faced with the the decision to cut back industry's productivity or poison children.  The government chose the poison and the allowed levels of nitrogen was raised to ten times the previous limit.  Exceeding the previous limit was known to cause brain damage in small children and likely would cause unknown/unstudied harm to adults.  So, over the last 30 years, just this one source of vicious pollution has been doing a job on the IQ of country folks.  There is no shortage of harmful pollutants in the rural environment.  Cities often dump their really toxic waste in the country, under the assumption that what the hicks don't know won't hurt them.  Which is another reason why the smart kids get out of the country as quickly as possible.  If they don't, they won't be smart or healthy for long. 

Small towns have been down-breeding since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but the last 40 years have been incredibly hard on village IQs.  For a few short moments, in the 1990s, telecommuting looked like the answer to the shrinking gene pool.  When technical folks found that they could live anywhere and get their job done, small towns experienced a short revival in their quality of resident.  It didn't last.  The economy went bust and many telecommuters became tele-unemployed.  When they did find jobs, they had to move back to the office and the city.  When they didn't, it was because they were over-employed and under-skilled and that meant that they were the same kind of folks who were already living in the outback.  Of course, many of the technical types discovered that rural existence is less than Mayberry-like long before the economy died.  They discovered the pollution, the corruption, and the ignorance and learned that these faults are something the locals actively designed into rural life. 

The rural economy is so bad that they've been exporting dumb-asses to the city for decades.  Now, we have huge populations of inbred hillbillies  surrounding urban areas, sticking the cities with the foolishness they've imported from the boondocks.  Those areas are politely called suburbs, but the citizens would be more accurately called "urban hicks."  They've brought the rural desire to pretend to independence while relying on state and federal handouts for survival.  They've brought their provincial dependence on superstition and religion to urban government.  Worst of all, they've continued their breeding practices which means that the stupid are having large families while intelligent citizens are having small families or avoiding reproduction altogether. 

As if the degeneration of the species wasn't progressing fast enough, our immigration policies have been slanted toward increasing the importation of rural fools from all over the world.  With a recession well into its fifth year and real unemployment heading toward the 1980s levels, you'd think that immigration might become a little more selective.  You'd be disappointed.  We're importing the world's menial laborers in record numbers.  The one thing the Republicrats need most of all is a stupid electorate.  The Heartland is doing its part to supply all the fools necessary to satisfy this demand.

#109 Legal Recreational Drugs (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The current federal administration and Minnesota's state governor and big fans of Reagan's War on Drugs.  The argument seems to be that any drug that doesn't make a drug company exec (political contributor) rich causes irreparable damage to society.  Once upon a time, I thought the conservatives' anti-drug case was based on the conservative terror that somewhere someone might be having fun.  Not anymore.  As long as the people having fun are rich, old, white and fat, we're likely to promote their case with an advertising campaign.

Today it's obvious that money is the core to the War on Drugs.  Recreational drugs are the hot sellers in several drug companies' product lines.  If Viagra isn't a free-from-social-value recreational drug, marijuana has to be one of the most beneficial medicines ever discovered.  Pfizer's Viagra (and it's recreational buddies Celextra, Lilly's Cialis, Senetek's Invicorp, Bayer's Levitra, Propecia, Alprostadil, Uprima, and the never ending, constantly growing list of male erectile enhancement drugs) have only one function; to help old fat white men get a hard-on so that they can engage in recreational sex.  If that isn't a meaningless recreational drug, I can't imagine what kind of definition you would use for "recreational drugs."  No activity on this planet could be much less critical to the quality of life on this planet than old fat white guys wallowing on top of their trophy wives. 

It's interesting that the Bushies' argument to protect the income of their drug peddler buddies isn't doing the job they claim it will do.  All those profits were supposed to inspire drug companies to create more lifesaving drugs, but new drugs are not happening at the speed that they were developed before the current medicine=money culture.  In fact, the creation of new drugs is slowly coming to a halt in the US.  After an incredibly slow start, European medical-use drug development is cranking up in capacity and quality.  In a few years, American drug companies are going to want to have their new "intellectual property" laws defanged so that they can steal the patented work of their European competitors. 

A few years later, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea will join the competition.  Those nations are already providing much of the US manufacturing capacity.  Our lazy, greedy executive class gave away the computer business by "teaching" those countries how to manufacturer, design, and market personal computers.  Those same fools are repeating their mismanagement foolishness with drugs.  The upside is, since US manufacturers have dedicated themselves to creating and selling recreational drugs, we have to hope that the rest of the world will take up their slack and develop drugs for medical purposes.

In the meantime, American dope peddlers are pumping out recreational sex drugs, spending millions on television ads promoting their dope, and spending millions bribing docs and politicians to keep the pipeline open between their dope-peddling docs and the dope-abusing, impotent, fat, old white men.  You have to suspect that the Mafia is getting jealous.  In the past, when the Mob gets jealous they get political and violent (as if there is a difference).  I wonder if we're about to be entertained by gang wars between drug companies and street dope peddlers?  That would be fun. 

What's the beef about recreational drugs?  Don't ask me.  I dislike all of our "victimless crime" laws.  If people want to dope themselves into oblivion, even death, as long as they don't take anyone else down with them, I could care less.  Life is hard, humans are grossly over-represented in the world's animal population, resources are dwindling, and you could make about 4 billion arguments as to why people should be allowed to dope themselves into oblivion.  The world economy is such a mess that most people have two choices, sell themselves to the highest bidder or die.  Prostitution is only a crime when a rich man doesn't make a profit from it.  Employees are prostituting themselves to the employers every day.  Men and women have been sacrificing their health and time to employers for hundreds of years but nobody seems to think that is a moral crime.  It's only a crime when someone makes the sale without an employer middleman taking most of the profit.  The ultimate prostitute is a soldier.  Not only does a soldier offer his own life for money, but he'll take other, often innocent, lives for the same hard cash.  But that well populated with victims occupation is often honored in our cultures.  In our current "war," which is waged to steal the oil resources of North Africa, we're forcing National Guard members (who, mostly, got into the guard as a way to get to play with expensive toys, pretending to be soldiers, for extra cash, as a pointless part-time job) to kill and die for money.  A little recreational drug use, in comparison to that activity, has to be qualified as harmless.

My complaint about the Viagra-strain of recreational drugs is the inconsistency displayed by a culture that allows its ruling class legal access to recreational drugs and turns violent when the working class expects the same courtesy.  The rich can drink and drive without expecting serious consequences when they kill bystanders.  They can have meaningless―and conceptually disgusting―old man sex and have their dope choices sanctified by national televised advertising campaigns.  If someone grows a single marijuana plant in his backyard, federal and state SWAT teams will descend from black, noiseless helicopters to burn the crop, confiscate the grower's property, and imprison everyone in the neighborhood who might have "profited" by the illegal substance.  If we actually set out to create an irrational society with an incomprehensible Through the Looking Glass legal system, we couldn't have done a better job. 

#98 Redneck Conservatives

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

[This is another old rant, pre-Rat, in fact.  The original piece was published in the Orange County Register, in 1986.  I discovered it in a fit of hard disk sterilization and it seemed appropriate to this year just as it did during the Reagan years in SoCal.]

The onslaught of "redneck" conservatism is prompting me to write this.  A combination of the micro-minded (I apologize for the Communist metric term.) state representatives Dornan, Ferguson, and their supporters, the comments of the Contra Costa County District Attorney (DeBeer, L.A. Times, 6/22/86), the insidious attack on free speech that the Meese commission's blackmail represents, and our pitifully confused president's defense of his awful court selections have overwhelmed me.  I am under personal pressure to defend the "real" standards that America represents.  Standards that were expressed and well documented by the "real" Founding Fathers; not Reagan's contra imitations.

First, I want to establish two definitions. 

The Right often applies the descriptive terms "Bolshevik", "commy", "red", "pinko", and (when they are feeling sociable) "socialist" to any opinion and opinion-holder on the liberal side of George Patton.  When this scale of analogy is applied to themselves (as in "Nazi", "fascist", etc.) the right wing acts like they have been horribly wounded.  Tough.  If you can't take it, don't dish it out.  On an unnecessarily civilized scale you good ole boys are practicing vicious forms of argumentum ad hominem (personal slander) and ignorantiam (ignorance).  If you can't be restrained to argument by the logical rules of debate, don't expect your opponents to be so shackled. 

The second defiled word that I want to reclaim is "conservative".  The present political definition of "conservative" is a fundamentalist, anti-human rights, supporter of the loudest, most macho posturing demagogue (unless the "conservative" is that demagogue, then he simply supports himself).  Webster's has a more satisfying definition; "a cautious or discreet person...tending to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions...marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners."  I believe that definition applies to many of the people that the right opposes and few of the politicians they support.  Especially the last section; "elegance, style, or manners" are in short supply from the far right.  Take a look at the Times picture of Dornan and Ferguson (Hayden, L.A. Times, 6/24/86) for examples. 

I think any intelligent reader of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Whitman, or Thoreau would be forced to link Tom Hayden's positions closer to a true "American" stance than the rantings of Bobby Dornan or the posturing of Guilt Ferguson.  The difference between the quality of Dornan's "a liar . . . a coward . . . and a traitor" (or Dornan's ranting at a closed door, "I am a member of Congress!") and Hayden's "My country, let me right the wrongs" should shed some light on the subject.  These two "conservative" politicians remind me of another phony patriot's heroism.  Anybody ask where "Rambo" was during the Vietnam period?  He wasn't hiding behind twenty layers of officers and enlisted men, but he was safely in a foreign country exposing his chest at a girl's school.  It doesn't take courage to assume a right-wing stance. 

This country is full of simple people, who will follow the man who tells them they are "number one".  They will follow him off the tallest cliff top.  Hitler didn't go against the popular grain.  Dornan and Ferguson know where the prevailing winds blow.  They know the cost of fighting the crowd (They may not have a motive, though.).  History contains a long list of men without morals and/or wisdom who followed the chanting of the masses.  It does not present them well.

I can't give a retired general much credit for patriotism.  Possibly radical protectionism, but not patriotism.  Scores of these profiteers parade their self-claimed heroism after short twenty-year careers of poor quality middle-management while having their every whim catered to by enlisted boys.  Then, using the guise of "sacrificing servant", they double-dip into the public coffers with civil service careers or political ambitions; paid for by the companies whose over-run, pitifully-designed products their mis-managing allowed into the cynical military industrial simplex.

Military men are military men.  They aren't about ideology and it doesn't matter which side they are on.  For them, the struggle between right and wrong is reduced to tactics and firepower.  If our imagined invaders leave anybody in place, it will be the middle-to-upper military management.  It would not be cost-effective to replace them, since they won't need re-training or expensive additional linguistic education.  If they are left in place (or slightly re-sorted) they will carry on as before with a few new phrases to shout at their fool soldiers.

During a recent conversation about the real or imagined threat presented by Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, I began contemplating what changes would occur from such an invasion.  The most radical right-winger's scenario goes along these lines: The far-right often uses examples of what sets us apart and above the "communists".  Freedom of speech and press is often example numero ono.  I've noticed that "conservative" politicians seem to be in the forefront of censorship's fan club.  I suspect that they are merely honestly interested in their own comments and would be strongly in favor of shutting the rest of us up.  Freedom of religion is close to every rightist's heart.  Especially those fundamentalist types who offer the rest of us the freedom to join their religion or find somewhere else to live.  And we can take our radical, pornographic, or un-nationalistic free press with us!  Their interpretation of these freedoms seems to closely resemble the freedom another Mr. Christian offered Captain Bligh. 

I could be missing something, but this all seems suspicious.  It has been often noted that government officials are most interested in limiting access to documents that chronicle their foul-ups and criminal actions.  I suspect that the government officials in the Kremlin who are responsible for the notorious communist press repression are the same kind of people that are interested in that sort of authority in our own government.  In fact, I suspect that, if the Russians could have non-violently overthrown our political system, they would employ the same people just to simplify the language difficulties that a new government would face.  Walt Kelly and Pogo might be even righter (no pun) than ever with "We have seen the enemy, and he is us."

From sometime in 1986

#86 The Real Them (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

"Character," "ethics," "morality," and other right-sounding buzzwords have been the watchmarks of the last few elections.  The media wants to pretend these things are difficult to evaluate, and they are if you don't use a little common sense.  The major media is just one never-ending infomercial and common sense is never part of any marketing plan, so they are the wrong place to go for that resource.  I think the easy source is history; a candidate's history, a party's history, and, in the case of parties that are trying to create a royalty class, the candidate's family history. 

Take our last collection of Presidents, for example.  In modern history, say from Lyndon Johnson forward, we have a fair collection of characters to review.  We have the right wingers: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I & II.  We have the left or center: Johnson, Carter, and Clinton.  I can't seen how anyone could consider either Johnson or Clinton "left," but we'll put them in that category to make Republicrats happy. 

If personal character were a real issue, you'd think that, once someone was on the public dole for the kind of cash that ex-Presidents rake in, a person of character would feel some obligation to the people footing his bills.  So, let's look at the ex-Presidents and see what they did for the public after they left the bright lights.  And they should have been doing something for the public, since they are on the dole big time. 

Johnson left office in shame.  His "War on Poverty" was buried under the Vietnam war garbage and he was practically blasted from the primaries by a series of people he once considered his friends and allies.  He quit the race for President before the 1968 Demolican convention and before he suffered the ignominy of becoming one of the rare standing Presidents defeated by his own party.  Even after all that embarrassment, he followed his Presidency by staying involved in several of his pet social reform programs: Head Start and the Peace Corps.  But, mostly, Johnson faded into Texas society and was a drain on the taxpayer for the rest of his life. 

Nixon ran and hid after being impeached and nearly convicted for a collection of crimes.  Before leaving office, he pardoned a pack of hardened corporate criminals and replaced himself with a Republicrat crony who had balls of fluff and the brains of a golf ball, Jerry Ford.  After leaving office, Nixon became a right wing spokesperson and a corporate board member of a collection of companies who owed him a boat-load of cash for years of non-observant government mismanagement.  So much for character and a much larger taxpayer drain than Johnson, since Nixon built a collection of "memorials" to himself which were funded and maintained by taxpayers.

Jerry Ford served out his appointment term as President, lost the 1976 election, and returned to playing golf with his corporate buddies.  Other than an occasional figurehead position as a "moderate Republicrat leader," Ford has been on a vacation since (and mostly during) his term in office.  Still, no character showing and more wasted tax money.

We've heard almost as much from Jimmy Carter, and received more value from him, after his Presidency as during.  He's been involved in Habitat for Humanity, actually building houses along with finding funding for this charity.  He's worked with Amnesty International and a collection of democracy-promoting organizations, often putting his own life at risk to observe elections from South America to Africa to Florida.  Finally, a large bit of character and something for our money.

Then, Reagan, who didn't show a lick of character before, during, or after his Presidency, followed in the traditional Republicrat model.  Most of the way to senility, before he started his 2nd term of office, Reagan did a little international corporate speaking for huge sums of cash after he left office and, then, succumbed to his natural state; napping and mumbling.  Reagan did receive some monster payments for 15 minute formal mumbles in Japan, as a repayment for his handing massive quantities of US natural resources and political power to that country's elite.  Republicrats named every road and public building they could desecrate after this President, in an attempt to rewrite history so that it might look at Reagan's term in office more kindly.  Which means more tax money than ever was tossed after this lost cause.  Still, we're back to no character, again.  However, if suffering a terrible late life is God's will, Reagan's fate would almost make me into a believer.  On the other hand, taxpayers got stuck for a huge medical care bill for Reagan's last few years of drooling. 

Bush I was the most obvious characterless character the Republicrats ever elected.  He was a corporate scumbag before his term as Vice (the most perfect application of this term ever) President and went right back to scamming the public with oil execs, military-industrial execs, power and communications execs after he left office.  Bush I hadn't done a single lick of selfless activity since he came to government and has been totally wrapped up in creating wealth for himself since he left.  If character really mattered, Republicrats would be ashamed to show their faces or include "character" in their chants after having pawned this scumbag off on the country.  Republicrats are totally devoid of character, however, and no act of failure or immorality shames them. 

Clinton, the right wing's "character" whipping boy, has followed, a few steps, in Carter's footsteps. Bill Clinton has continued to work for peace in the Middle East, being a part of peace negotiations and working for world peace foundations.  Clinton has stayed at the job he started in eastern Europe, whenever he's given an opportunity.  Until recently, he'd stayed low-profile in the 2004 election process, probably because he's such an easy target for the morally corrupt right who want to use his personal failure as evidence that they massive moral void is justified.  Clinton is young and what he does with his personal popularity and clout is yet to be seen.  Still, not Republicrat characterless.

Bush II was a clueless, money-grubbing moron before he stumbled into the Presidency and it's safe to say he will remain one afterwards.  His associations are the same as his father's; evil and greedy.  His motivations are not as convoluted, though.  He's lazy, dumb, and spoiled.  It doesn't take much to make that kind of rich kid happy, so he'll vanish from public life and continue packing his pockets with cash after he leaves office.  Character?  Never had any, never will.  His claim to moral fame is that he managed to stop publicly packing his nose with coke and hasn't been caught driving drunk for at least a decade.  Not much of an achievement, but the best we can hope for from Republicrats.

July 2004