We seem to have barnacles again. Very sensitive barnacles.
Anyway. Today's big news: Huffington Post has an exclusive about a presidential candidate who, as senator, insisted on meeting with a ruthless dictator, free of preconditions. McCain met with Chile's Augusto Pinochet for an informal chat back in 1985. Muy interesante.
And in other news, the New Mexico GOP recently had to give up on accusations of ACORN false voter registrations in light of verification that the people they wanted investigated were legitimate voters. So now the GOP has hired a private investigator to go to their homes, ask for identification, and, reportedly, ask them questions like what they'd do if immigration authorities got in touch. Nothing like protecting the franchise from dangerous legitimate voters.
This is, of course, quite an example of vote suppression techniques (as opposed to voter fraud) that raise questions about the legitimacy of recent elections. It seems that accusations of voter fraud become the excuse for vote suppression. Ugly stuff.
My favorite part of that story, though, is the reporting over at the conservative bastion Townhall, where people were going crazy over one of the names in question: "Duran Duran" voted in New Mexico. Outrageous! Though I agree it is questionable to have large two-tone mullets, I guess the Townhall folks haven't heard of Internet searches: it turns out Mr. Duran Duran of 10010 San Francisco Road Northeast, Albuquerque, NM probably believes his ballot should be counted.
Just a word of warning to the GOP: you probably shouldn't go after Bon Jovi or Winger, either. I would, however, get concerned if Mister Mister or Der Kommisar show up.
PS–There are also 100-plus people nationwide with the legal name "Mickey Mouse."
Not that these aren't legitimate issues. It's just that the very, very few confirmed instances of voter fraud are eclipsed in number and effect by very clear instances of vote suppression, going on right now, in this election. As in trying to selectively shut down early voting centers in Indiana, and using the so-called "Help America Vote Act" to remove thousands of voters from the rolls.
10/24/08
The best science fiction writer in the world
The late Stanislaw Lem's long-lost (even to himself) satirical "quasi-opera" about Stalin has been found, tucked between the pages of a failed crime novel. If you don't know Lem's work, do yourself a favor and check him out. To call Lem merely "a science fiction writer" is akin to calling the Beatles "a pop band." You could say he expanded the genre far beyond anything it had seen before, and you would be correct. Only thing is, no other science fiction writer, even among my favorites–Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, Ian Watson, D.G. Compton, China Mieville–has come anywhere near exploring the territory he trailblazed. Philip K. Dick came closest.
The New York Times Review of Books had this to say:
The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem isboth a polymath and a virtuoso storyteller and stylist. Put them together and they add up to a genius… He has been steadily producing fiction that follows the arcs and depths of his learning and a bewildering labyrinth of moods and attitudes. Like his protagonists, loners virtually to a man, his fiction seems at a distance from the daily cares and passions, and conveys the sense of a mind hovering above the boundaries of the human condition: now mordant, now droll, now arcane, now folksy, now skeptical, now haunted and always paradoxical. Yet his imagination is so powerful and pure that no matter what world he creates it is immediately convincing because of its concreteness and plentitude, the intimacy and authority with which it is occupied… read Lem for yourself. He is a major writer, and one of the deep spirits of our age.
Here's Lem's website, if you'd like to explore further.
10/23/08
Sarah Palin, genius
Look closely. Her mind is like ANWR–empty, cold and full of moose:
10/22/08
How Not to Vote
At some point, enough people are going to realize that we are not Democrats and Republicans, but democrats and anti-democrats. If you think we live in a healthy democracy, you haven't been following these developments lately.
10/22/08
Clans of the Alphane Moon
I love the work of Philip K. Dick, in which reality is a tenuous thing. I read something like the excerpt below, and I realize that there are people whose experience of the world starts in the same place as mine, and then goes to such strange and tortured conclusions that I don't think we, in the end, actually live in the same reality.
I, of course, live in New England. I love fall in New England above all other seasons. It's a time when things seem ripe with possibility, when the breeze seems to blow in some intimation of a poetic past, as if ghosts want to tell a story, but can't make the wind speak. It's a time when I find it easy to write.
Over at a blog called Wake Up America, a fellow New Englander breathes in these same breezes, and gets a lungful of something quite different, something that points up a cultural divide that, I think, cannot be crossed:
This town where I live, this quintessential small New England village is beautiful in the Fall. Sometimes I forget how beautiful. Yesterday was a crisp clean October afternoon. It was Saturday and I was driving through town to get my groceries for the weekend. I was away from my computer and out into the real world. Comforted by the surprise of the cool fresh air and the reassuring solidity of this unchanging historical reality which surrounds me. Clean white wood frame houses, tall slender church steeples rising up into a cloudless blue sky. And then there are the people, some of them my friends, up on ladders, painting their houses, in their yards raking leaves or playing with the kids. I wave at some of them as I pass and they wave back. Joggers jogging, lost in their zone. Young lovely mothers pushing baby carriages, thinking about the future.
…
There is of course another reality, an alternative reality, a competing reality, that not-so-reassuring reality I left behind me on my computer. And it seems so far behind me now, so foreign to this glorious day, so infinitely removed from this crisp bright Saturday afternoon. I comfort myself with the thought that that other reality I left behind me is nothing more than a virtual reality, an insubstantial two-dimensional reality, that exists only on my computer screen or in my overwrought imagination. It's not a real reality like the one I'm out in now. It has not the same weight nor credibility of this sumptuous October afternoon in New England. I am temporarily comforted by this thought. I think about those dark, looming existential threats that I left back home on that now-darkened computer screen, and they seem as inconsequential and amorphous as children's fantasies, as foolish and spooky as Halloween ghosts. What power do they have here? I ask myself. What have these hypothetical specters of creeping sharia and pending Socialistic doom to do with this real tangible world I see around me now? Do these people who I pass on my way to the store look frightened or vulnerable? If I stopped and asked one of them if they were living in fear of al Qaeda right now, what would they answer? If I stopped and asked that man who is raking leaves in his front yard if he's worried about America losing its national sovereignty or the encroachment os Islam into our Judeo/Christian culture, what would he say? These are the normal people living in their normal world. That alternative reality is as absurd and out-of-place here as a Transylvanian vampire.
…
But then I start seeing the signs. Just one or two at first. Then more and more of them, until they seem to be everywhere. They are the signs of Obama. And they are from that other reality I thought I had left behind but hadn't. And my Saturday afternoon is suddenly not so pleasant anymore, not quite so invulnerable as it was just a minute ago. I had asked myself, How could all this that I see out my window, how could all this great American reality actually change? And the answer is in the signs. How many people in how many different worlds looked around them in history and asked these same great questions? How could all this change? It is incomprehensible.
Then I see another little sign, tacked up on a telephone pole. An innocuous little sign, weather beaten and torn at the edges — it's been up there for quite a while now. "No room in this town for hate" it reads. And I shudder to myself. This is the sign that advertises our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses. This is what makes this beautiful little town of mine so friendly and pleasant and so blind to the steady encroachment of that other less friendly reality. We have no room here for hate. And without hate we are vulnerable to those who hate us. We are, this sign proclaims, a community determined to be tolerant and just. We are fair-minded and trusting. We don't just welcome the Other into our midst, we eagerly embrace them. And if you are different than us, we say, if your culture is different than ours, and if your values are different from ours, no matter, we will embrace you just the same. Our survival is secondary to our tolerance.
It is, of course, hard to know how to respond to the overwhelming contradiction: "without hate we are vulnerable to those who hate us."
I may be a liberal (I just took a political alignment test, and it placed me at "liberal libertarian," in the neighborhood of Ghandi), but I also grew up in the Baptist church. I believe Jesus was also in the political neighborhood of Ghandi, and practiced a kind of jujitsu this writer would do well to heed. It's blindingly clear–unless you've been stuffed full of fear, as many of us have been since 2001–that hatred cannot be fought with hatred unless you wish to perpetuate an inescapable cycle of violence. No liberal I know (and I certainly know plenty) advocates welcoming terrorists into our midst, as if we could empathize them into becoming Westerners. Self-defense doesn't require hatred, just vigilance and resolve. Isn't this completely obvious?
When I stroll through my own achingly pleasant small new England town, I have a hard time reconciling the beauty with a darker reality, too. For me, that's a reality based on what has happened, not what could happen; it's not a pre-emptive fear.
I fear we will continue down the path we have embarked upon because of people who are willing to tap into that blogger's hatred to justify giving up our civil rights, our privacy and our right to be free from unwarranted imprisonment. Those things have occurred: our Constitution's guarantees of rights have not held under Bush. Many of the cornerstones of American rights and freedoms are clearly and demonstrably absent. To reconcile that with the gorgeous fall in New England is the task I face.
It's real simple, for the many religious right wingers: "Love thine enemy."
Did you get that? "Love thine enemy." That was Jesus talking. He didn't say "love thine enemy and let him kill you." He didn't say "become a simpering fool who won't protect his own."
The fear and hatred our friend here is feeding is the real enemy, in my opinion. That fear and hatred has driven us away from democracy. And I'm just enough of an Enlightenment Westerner to believe that democracy works. I hope that Mr. Gardner will someday realize that hatred is only negative. Period. And it's leading him to destroy and blindly ignore the teachings of "Judeo/Christian culture" he purports to wish to protect.
It's no wonder the last eight years have been so exhausting.
10/21/08
Mordor Blogging
Hot on the spurs of having won "Best Cowboy" at a charity hoedown costume event this weekend (for the Joy of Jasper, a horse rescue in Holyoke), I am basking in the thrill of victory. And, two weeks out, I'll admit I'm nervous about election day. I want to bask in the thrill of a victory then too, thank you very much. (I just have to add here that I'm feeling a surge of cowboyness lately, having been rated 14 gallons, and now winning "Best Cowboy" with the clothes in the back of my closet.)
Anyway. As I've opined before, I think politics is, in some ways, a massive waste of effort and, for the last eight years, an endless fount of disappointment. Not just disappointment that the Bush moonbats seem to have hoodwinked a nation into skating to the very brink (or is it skating over the brink?) of fascism. Not just disappointment that they've done away with the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, habeas corpus, posse comitatus, verifiable voting, exit polling and generally not being a @#$%@$#$. All that is why I've bothered to find out about the workings of Washington in more depth than ever seemed necessary pre-Bush.
I first noticed, like a lot of people, that something very wrong was up when the 2000 election was contested in such abhorrent fashion. Contesting is well and good, but the unbelievable sliminess of that Republican PR campaign, from the Brooks Brothers riot (if you don't know what that is, please, please visit that link!) to the ludicrous argument that votes shouldn't be examined, made my blood boil. I recall my shock and disgust as CNN flashed the headline that the Supreme Court was halting the vote count and giving Bush the presidency in a decision so bad they didn't want it to serve as a precedent. All the giddy wingnuts kept saying "Get over it!" It was a small glimpse of the wingnut fearmongering giddiness to come.
Well, I haven't gotten over the illegitimate presidency of George Bush, and I won't. I might have "gotten over it" if George W. Bush hadn't irrevocably changed my country into something only vaguely resembling America. I might have gotten over it if he hadn't started a war because he wanted to show up Poppy Bush. I blame Bush and his sidekicks for every hour I've had to spend in the last eight years getting to know the intricacies of Senate procedure, and for the years they may well have taken off my life because of all the blood pressure spikes as my head nearly exploded with every incremental change to American government that took us further from democracy. You don't "get over" the loss of 200-plus years of an Enlightenment experiment in democracy being demolished before your eyes.
So as we approach election day, I'm nervous. Take into account the ludicrous suppressing of votes, the proprietary code that counts our votes behind firewalls, and the current subpoena of a man who may have manipulated the Ohio vote in 2004, and the Republicans probably haven't legitimately won the presidency since 1988. All those things are still going on, down to the current weirdness of West Virginian early voters watching their votes flip on touchscreens from Obama to McCain. Will Obama overcome that? And don't even bring up ACORN to me unless Mickey Mouse shows up to cast that vote. Then I'll get concerned. The wingnuts are firing up for another 2000. I hope they don't get it. Obama, I fervently hope, will take this thing, and will do so decisively and fair and square. I suspect that even if he does, the wingnut fervor will be stirred up once more, and more Brooks Brothers mobs can be expected.
I'm happy to do anything I can to see that voting is transparent and fair–it's the biggest problem we've got, in many ways. But will we make it across the finish line Nov. 4? I want to believe it can happen. I want to breathe a sigh of relief after eight years of holding my breath. I want to get back to firing up the computer to fly a Hawker Hurricane instead of incessantly hitting refresh on Talking Points Memo. I don't want to have to keep on blogging just about politics. There are, it turns out, other subjects.
I'm nervous about all of this. But I want very much to wake up November 5 with the feeling that old-fashioned politicians, the kind where your president merely disappoints you or bores you rather than makes you question whether you still live in a democracy, are back in town. That's all I'm after. Obama isn't perfect–far from it. But he's at least a democrat (small "d" intentional) who won't destroy our way of governing ourselves.
Maybe, finally, the ring will be returned to the fires of Mordor where it bloody well belongs. The moment approaches.
ADDITIONAL: If you've been paying attention to the tenor of McCain's campaign lately or watching the footage Fox news has aired of ACORN workers dancing maniacally, you might think he's trying to make Obama look like a scary man of a non-white color. And of course, the final card in that hand is to return to Rev. Wright (remember him? the guy who went over the line, Smokey, and was publicly repudiated by Obama?).
You read it here first: I predict that between now and Monday, Nov. 3, somebody will find a way to use footage of dancing Africans in an anti-Obama ad. Somebody who isn't directly affiliated with McCain, perhaps a "shadowy" 527 group.
