Friday, August 21, 2009
From the back of the head
Jules Feiffer cartoon. His archetypal loser character is at a party, where he is being conversationaly demolished by a square-jawed, pipe-smoking, painfully urbane guy. Finally, the nebbish has as much as he can take and screams "You dirty, lousy, cheaty rat!!!!!" As Mr. Urbanity smiles and says "Let us define your terms," the loser melts into a puddle of tapioca muttering "you can't win, you can't win, you can't win ...." is decreasing font sizes. I wanted to be the guy with the pipe, until I found out that everybody really hated him for being cooler, sharper, smarter, more educated, that kind of thing.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
And, taking my own advice.......
...which, by the bye (and unlike Alice), I do with reasonable frequency, I have recently subscribed to the Ann Coulter weekly newsletter. I have avoided the works of this particular person in the past, since it was just too easy to dismiss her as being so thoroughly outside of reality and/or rationality that the other Conservative True Believers noticed (being well brought up, I avoid the word "wingnut").
This also ties me into a whole group of other people who are so sure of their truth that they refuse to sully it with fact. Lots of fun. Also more than a little fright-making.
These are people who really believe that the President can simultaneously be a fascist, a socialist, a one-man Arab sleeper cell, a communist, a tool of the Zionist Owned Government, and a militant liberal. In between the "Obama invented the deficit" diatribes and the "Obama is the Anti-Christ" discussions, they send me e-mails touting a wonderful array of products. In general, these are the sort of things the infomercials wouldn't carry (out of respect for their customers).
As I write this, I am reminded of the last time the loonies of the right decided they could get away with saying the first thing that popped into the heads of their corporate sponsors. It was during the Kennedy/Nixon presidential campaign. Nixon put out ads that claimed that electing Kennedy would please the Communists, the Beatniks, the Unionists, and the Catholic Church. Didn't work, but it was pretty insane for the times. Nixon closed it all off when he wrote in Six Crises about his little girl asking him "Daddy, did people vote against us because we're Quakers?" What dreck, but we thought it was over.
Now we have Ann Coulter telling us we are going to have to stand in line for aspirins once "Obamacare" goes into effect. Outside the world of the Uber-Rich where Ms. Coulter apparently lives, there are people doing that now. They are known as the poor, the underinsured, and/or the uninsured. When the nonprofit organization Remote Area Medicine Volunteers decide to set up their tents in the United States instead of their usual locations of Third World Countries, you can easily believe we have rationing of medical care. The dividing lines are easy, in The States. If you have money, or a job with benefits, or you are drawing care from the VA, or TRICARE, or Medicare, or another single-payer system, you get a reasonable level of treatment. If not, tough.
When Medicare came in, the Right Wing claimed it was a plot to impose a national health care upon the nation. Didn't happen, but for a few years we had fewer elderly people facing the" sell your home to pay the doctors or die" dilemma. After the Bush II administration, it's close to getting back to the old days. But maybe not yet.
I do learn from the Human Events newsletter. I learn that there are a significant number of people (adjusting for the ones who are clearly sending the same posting with multiple different identities) who are willing to believe any number of long-disproved (and, in some cases, demonstrably impossible) lies. Moreover, they will cling to these ideas when even their leaders have found that level of shame beneath which even they will not cross. I'm sure most of them are, in many situations, perfectly nice people. But when certain subjects are raised, they have all the charm on the lady in Spokane, WA who, in 1992, apologized to me because she hadn't realized I had "Eye-talyun blood" and she had promised her neighbors she would only sell her house to a white family.
This also ties me into a whole group of other people who are so sure of their truth that they refuse to sully it with fact. Lots of fun. Also more than a little fright-making.
These are people who really believe that the President can simultaneously be a fascist, a socialist, a one-man Arab sleeper cell, a communist, a tool of the Zionist Owned Government, and a militant liberal. In between the "Obama invented the deficit" diatribes and the "Obama is the Anti-Christ" discussions, they send me e-mails touting a wonderful array of products. In general, these are the sort of things the infomercials wouldn't carry (out of respect for their customers).
As I write this, I am reminded of the last time the loonies of the right decided they could get away with saying the first thing that popped into the heads of their corporate sponsors. It was during the Kennedy/Nixon presidential campaign. Nixon put out ads that claimed that electing Kennedy would please the Communists, the Beatniks, the Unionists, and the Catholic Church. Didn't work, but it was pretty insane for the times. Nixon closed it all off when he wrote in Six Crises about his little girl asking him "Daddy, did people vote against us because we're Quakers?" What dreck, but we thought it was over.
Now we have Ann Coulter telling us we are going to have to stand in line for aspirins once "Obamacare" goes into effect. Outside the world of the Uber-Rich where Ms. Coulter apparently lives, there are people doing that now. They are known as the poor, the underinsured, and/or the uninsured. When the nonprofit organization Remote Area Medicine Volunteers decide to set up their tents in the United States instead of their usual locations of Third World Countries, you can easily believe we have rationing of medical care. The dividing lines are easy, in The States. If you have money, or a job with benefits, or you are drawing care from the VA, or TRICARE, or Medicare, or another single-payer system, you get a reasonable level of treatment. If not, tough.
When Medicare came in, the Right Wing claimed it was a plot to impose a national health care upon the nation. Didn't happen, but for a few years we had fewer elderly people facing the" sell your home to pay the doctors or die" dilemma. After the Bush II administration, it's close to getting back to the old days. But maybe not yet.
I do learn from the Human Events newsletter. I learn that there are a significant number of people (adjusting for the ones who are clearly sending the same posting with multiple different identities) who are willing to believe any number of long-disproved (and, in some cases, demonstrably impossible) lies. Moreover, they will cling to these ideas when even their leaders have found that level of shame beneath which even they will not cross. I'm sure most of them are, in many situations, perfectly nice people. But when certain subjects are raised, they have all the charm on the lady in Spokane, WA who, in 1992, apologized to me because she hadn't realized I had "Eye-talyun blood" and she had promised her neighbors she would only sell her house to a white family.
Monday, April 27, 2009
When you feel yourself geting complacent ....
When the sheer rightness of having a President who can speak decent, grammatical English and a staff who carry out Administration policy rather than their own evil agenda lulls you into thinking those who disagree with you have been placed firmly in the background.....
Take this three-step cure
1. Find the web site with which you most strenuously disagree. I routinely update this by turning my pack of search engines loose with phrases such as "most conservative" or "suppressed truth" or "they don't want you to know". For my conservative colleagues, I recommend they stick with Kieth Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. Either of those folks will do the job, as well as possibly sneaking some level of improved grammar and/or vocabulary into the process. Yes, there are MANY more liberal sites, but start slow. You can work up later.
2. Set this page as the first thing you see when you go on line. If you're in a rush (no, that is NOT a suliminal recommendation), you are allowed to skim, but you must come back and read it carefully before you leave.
3. As you read, repeat the following mantra to your self. If you're in public, you can do it in your head, but the reality of it gets better when you engage the vocal chords:
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
....................
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
..............................
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
When somebody actually expects you to get all irate over the President's choice of tie, or the latest "make it up as you go along" social gaffe (frequently bruited about by people who eat pie with their fingers), remember: THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT.
When various right wing Conservative commentators (radio, TV, blog, or print media) make statements that patently conflict with evidence, history, or just pain common sense, remember: THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
This truth was brought home to me several weeks ago. My wife and I were traveling from my mother's home in Southern California to our home in Oregon. We had stopped for the night in a part of Northern California generally thought of as fairly liberal. At breakfst, we were having breakfast in the hotel, and, as one does, struck up a conversation with some of the people there. It turned out that three of them were in town as vendors at a gun show, and a fourth was an organizer of that event.
Two of the three vendors were leaving the gun show early. They had run out of merchandise. The third was all right, since his home was not that far away, and one of his sons was bringing up enough stock to keep him going.
All four of these people (well-spoken, apparently well-educated) were eager to give credit for their success to President Obama. First, because of his (apocryphal) intention of closing down gun shows in their present form, since (paraphrasing here, but close enough for inverted commas) 'Gun shows are the only source law-abiding decent Americans have of arming themselves without creating a record in the Government archives.' Second, because (same caveat as above) 'B Hussain has a plan to confiscate all privately owned weapons as part of turning us into a Socialist State.'
All right, I'm pretty sure that neither "secret government plan" exists. Neither does the "secret plan" to turn two hundred-mile-wide strips stretching from the Canadian to the Mexican borders to NATO and/or the UN as part of any of a number of nefarious plots. The point is that these otherwise reasonable people believed every word of it.
as these four people left the breakfast room, I heard one of them make a racist remark about "Obambi" and his family. Another said (and this I remember): "somebody is going to take that boy out before too long." I doubt any of these meant to do anything about that particularly nasty sentiment. After all, they are making a lot of money out of the fears of the ignorant. But would the mind if one of the guns they are selling to people was used? Probably not.
They have heard all the idiotic trash about the President, and, for that matter, about "any number of card-carrying Liberals that are currently infesting Washington." That last quote? From a nice lady who was trying to recruit me into an online grad program at Phoenix. Just part of the friendly chit-chat that is normally part of such sales pitches.
My response? "Well, nothing lasts forever."
Hers? "I think the people will take matters into their own hands."
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT!!
Take this three-step cure
1. Find the web site with which you most strenuously disagree. I routinely update this by turning my pack of search engines loose with phrases such as "most conservative" or "suppressed truth" or "they don't want you to know". For my conservative colleagues, I recommend they stick with Kieth Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. Either of those folks will do the job, as well as possibly sneaking some level of improved grammar and/or vocabulary into the process. Yes, there are MANY more liberal sites, but start slow. You can work up later.
2. Set this page as the first thing you see when you go on line. If you're in a rush (no, that is NOT a suliminal recommendation), you are allowed to skim, but you must come back and read it carefully before you leave.
3. As you read, repeat the following mantra to your self. If you're in public, you can do it in your head, but the reality of it gets better when you engage the vocal chords:
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
....................
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
..............................
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
When somebody actually expects you to get all irate over the President's choice of tie, or the latest "make it up as you go along" social gaffe (frequently bruited about by people who eat pie with their fingers), remember: THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT.
When various right wing Conservative commentators (radio, TV, blog, or print media) make statements that patently conflict with evidence, history, or just pain common sense, remember: THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT
This truth was brought home to me several weeks ago. My wife and I were traveling from my mother's home in Southern California to our home in Oregon. We had stopped for the night in a part of Northern California generally thought of as fairly liberal. At breakfst, we were having breakfast in the hotel, and, as one does, struck up a conversation with some of the people there. It turned out that three of them were in town as vendors at a gun show, and a fourth was an organizer of that event.
Two of the three vendors were leaving the gun show early. They had run out of merchandise. The third was all right, since his home was not that far away, and one of his sons was bringing up enough stock to keep him going.
All four of these people (well-spoken, apparently well-educated) were eager to give credit for their success to President Obama. First, because of his (apocryphal) intention of closing down gun shows in their present form, since (paraphrasing here, but close enough for inverted commas) 'Gun shows are the only source law-abiding decent Americans have of arming themselves without creating a record in the Government archives.' Second, because (same caveat as above) 'B Hussain has a plan to confiscate all privately owned weapons as part of turning us into a Socialist State.'
All right, I'm pretty sure that neither "secret government plan" exists. Neither does the "secret plan" to turn two hundred-mile-wide strips stretching from the Canadian to the Mexican borders to NATO and/or the UN as part of any of a number of nefarious plots. The point is that these otherwise reasonable people believed every word of it.
as these four people left the breakfast room, I heard one of them make a racist remark about "Obambi" and his family. Another said (and this I remember): "somebody is going to take that boy out before too long." I doubt any of these meant to do anything about that particularly nasty sentiment. After all, they are making a lot of money out of the fears of the ignorant. But would the mind if one of the guns they are selling to people was used? Probably not.
They have heard all the idiotic trash about the President, and, for that matter, about "any number of card-carrying Liberals that are currently infesting Washington." That last quote? From a nice lady who was trying to recruit me into an online grad program at Phoenix. Just part of the friendly chit-chat that is normally part of such sales pitches.
My response? "Well, nothing lasts forever."
Hers? "I think the people will take matters into their own hands."
THESE PEOPLE REALLY MEAN IT!!
For those who remember ....
Uncle Shelby's ABC's, that book so many of us tried to smuggle into the bookbags of younger siblings. Or used as the heart of a Lesson Plan Construction exercise.
Quick digression -- if you have never read this, please go and get the book.
Sample, from admittedly suspect memory, and with apologies to the late Shel Silverstein, his heirs and assigns.
H is for Hole
Let's dig a hole in the back garden
We can Put Daddy's golf clubs in the hole
We can put Mommy's toaster in the hole
Little sister will rat on us, and we'll get in trouble
What else can we put in the hole?
OK, not politically correct. Big Deal. The last time I read it to a bunch of grade 3 and 4 kids, they loved it. Maybe not as much as Tom Lehrer's "Irish Song" but a lot. I have a lot of hope for that particular group of short subversives.
ANd the point of this rawmaesh? Simply that you should go to My First Dictionary and see how well the author is channeling the Spirit of Shel. The Revolution Lives!!!!!
Quick digression -- if you have never read this, please go and get the book.
Sample, from admittedly suspect memory, and with apologies to the late Shel Silverstein, his heirs and assigns.
H is for Hole
Let's dig a hole in the back garden
We can Put Daddy's golf clubs in the hole
We can put Mommy's toaster in the hole
Little sister will rat on us, and we'll get in trouble
What else can we put in the hole?
OK, not politically correct. Big Deal. The last time I read it to a bunch of grade 3 and 4 kids, they loved it. Maybe not as much as Tom Lehrer's "Irish Song" but a lot. I have a lot of hope for that particular group of short subversives.
ANd the point of this rawmaesh? Simply that you should go to My First Dictionary and see how well the author is channeling the Spirit of Shel. The Revolution Lives!!!!!
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