Suggestion for California libertarians

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Attention California tax resisters: if you don't like Government, then next time a wildfire starts to melt your vinyl siding, call Nancy Reagan.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoyed your imbecile-of-a-governor's awesome garage sale this past weekend. Don't worry: the 14% wage cut he forced on state employees probably didn't apply to the firefighters (especially not the ones who died Sunday while you were still congratulating yourself about your brand new $10 government surplus office chair).

Just dream of it: state-maintained Highway Patrol cruisers and BMW cycles for thousands under book value --- everything must go. Haha --- LOLROFLMAOGTGBRBZOMGZ! Extra, extra --- read all about it! Illiterate eurotrash governor sells off anything a sociopath might want to pick from the twitching corpse of his own state government, pennies on the dollar for the savvy shopper, courtesy of the state's impoverished public schools, colleges, and diseased poor people. Hey, wait, I've got it: let's call it The Great American California's Fire Sale!!! Government sux, destruction rulez!!!

Healthcare fact checking? For real?

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Facts?!? What the hell are facts doing on NPR and in a non-Krugman Times Blog? I'm a-skeert!

But there you are: ATC host Robert Siegel and NYT healthcare blogger Anne Underwood pretty thoroughly shoot down barefaced distortions pertaining to the costs of litigation, malpractice insurance, and defensive medicine told on Sunday Times op/ed page by former Senator Bill Bradley. It was a refreshing and unexpected piece of journalism to my shell-like ears, which are no longer accustomed to such spectacles as, uh, professional journalism being broadcast on NPR.

I'll have to dock Siegel and Underwood a few points for not directly calling Bradley a lying sack or reporting who is paying his wages and stipends these days. But gee whiz --- I'm actually slightly impressed!

The origin of Big Otis (28 August 1949) [updated]

Part I: postpartum nirvana. If this li'l guy looks like your uncle, send him an email and tell him you're sorry you forgot his birthday. (Me too; couldn't post before midnight.)

489 --- Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, defeats Odoacer at the Battle of Isonzo, forcing his way into Italy (Odoacer... haha!).

1609 --- Henry Hudson discovers Delaware Bay (immediately changes his name to "Henry Delaware")

1961 --- Motown releases its first No. 1 hit, "Please Mr. Post(partum)man," by the Marvelettes.

1968 --- Agents provocateurs incite violence at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago (or at least the late Sherman Skolnick thought so).

Luminaries born on 28 August include Tito Capobianco, Argentinian stage impresario and director (1931); Sybille de Selys Longchamps (1941), Belgian aristocrat; Svetislav Pešić (1949), Serbian basketball player and coach; Myke Hawke (1965), American Survivalist. (Editor's note: Haha: I have Freud, Orson Wells, Willie Mays, George Clooney, and Bob Seger... loser!)

Update: well, I got the date wrong in the headline but Big Rock Head told me that the post showed up with a 29 August date stamp. Please make a note of it.

Creeping meatballism (and related Night Person geeking-out)

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While plowing through a surprisingly tedious book about one of my pop culture heroes, radio humorist Jean Shepherd, I came upon a previously unknown (to me) reference to an article dictated by Shepherd for publication in the March-April 1957 "ish" of MAD Magazine. In the article, entitled "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism," Shepherd warns his impressionable readers of a scourge then sweeping the nation --- a menace that threatened to transform America into a race of dimwitted robots who completely identified with The Pepsi Generation. (The text page also has links to graphic facsimiles of the original MAD pages.)

Shepherd's radio audience, The Night People, were fundamentally different than The Day People, but with a role reversal that had the zombies and vampires coming alive with the first drop of Maxwell House Coffee and prowling the earth until Bonanza was over and the kids were tucked in. The Night People were considered outsiders, both by The Day People and by themselves --- alienated, round pegs hammered carelessly halfway into square holes, not "getting it" like The Day People seemed to.

The text may seem tame by today's standards, but I don't believe anyone outside of Harvey Kurtzman and MAD were doing this kind of humor for relatively mainstream readers (albeit The Night People). The content was intended for impressionable adolescents and precocious kids, written by a premier New York City hipster, and Shepherd mean every word of it in grim earnest. To me, Meatballism provides a classic display of Shepherd's prescience regarding the decline and fall of Western Civilization, as it begins with mass conformity and loss of individual identity as driven by mind-colonizing ad agency vermin.

MAD's editorial intro to Shepherd's Meatballism recitation is clearly a fully savored fuck-you to the hapless WOR manager who fired Shepherd a few months earlier for not being commercial enough, and was then immediately forced to hire him back due to a fierce Night People backlash. The MAD editors, writers, and artists were obviously Night People, as were so many of their pimply fans. (And, for that matter, as was Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in New York City, who subsequently introduced an emergent nation of comic book geeks to the cry "Excelsior!", which was a Shepherd trademark.)

Fun Fact No. 1: if you're too young to know who Betty Furness was or why MAD and Shepherd were poking fun at her in Meatballism, then you might miss the irony that Ms. Furness later became a respected consumer rights advocate in the Johnson Administration even though critics felt LBJ had picked a bimbo for the post.

Fun Fact No. 2: Shepherd did not like his first name because, not being short for "Eugene" and being spelled the way the Frenchmen spell it, some Americans in Hammond, Ind., during the Depression perceived it as a "girl" or "sissy" monicker. Shepherd's pal Shel Silverstein immortalized young Jean's plight in the lyrics he penned for Johnny Cash's 1969 hit, "A Boy Named Sue."

So take that, you meatballs!

Healthcare reform town hall fashion statement

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In the comments thread of a previous post, Big Otis indicated that he would exercise his Second Amendment Rights at an corn belt healthcare reform town hall meeting next week by brandishing a chainsaw. His reasoning, which appears sound to me, is that it's perfectly legal to carry power tools in public, even ones belching two-stroke engine exhaust. So, therefore, it must be doubly blessed to for Big Otis to defend himself with a nice American-made implement of dual-use technology such as the one hanging there all quiet in his tool shed.

Frequent commenter "Anonymous" calls the idea brilliant. I agree. I'll bet Big Otis could parlay this sincere expression of his Second Amendment Rights into appearances on CNN and FOX, not to mention Colbert and Democracy Now! It could start an exciting new trend in liberal activism, and BO could become the progressive incarnation of Joe The Plumber. Maybe the liberal grassroots also need to be watered with the blood of tyrants... but, oh, I think I already said too much. Never mind. Pass the blowtorch, please.

Above: Artist's rendition of Big Otis departing from his sleepy rural demesne to exercise his freedom of expression. Editor's note: this picture may be protected by copyright law; it is reproduced here under fair use rules solely for purposes of education and social commentary.

Take 5

An iPhone snapshot from early a.m. on 15 August 2009, composed by Big Rock Head during a sightseeing excursion in Chicago to visit some ne'er-do-well friends. Postprocessed in Bridge and Photoshop to boost the red objects a little and reduce color noise. Since I don't know anything about rendering for different color regimes and output devices, the reds don't look as vivid on my screen via the web as they do in my photo directory. But I'll worry about that tomorrow.

The photo is a found little gem of urban beauty. Thus spoke StuporMundi.

Cuddling enemies, losing friends [updated]

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Big Otis referred me to this Jane Smiley column on HuffingtonPost, which says pretty much what I've been feeling about Obama over the past 2 months. My own thoughts have been bifurcated, with clarity recently provided by Niccolo Machiavelli during my rereading of The Prince (Everyman's Library edition, which rocks!).

First, Obama has inexplicably been pandering to his worst enemies during this so-called healthcare reform debate. Instead, he should read what Machiavelli wrote about the folly of sparing adversaries who have reason to hate you: you don't reach out to them for approval and empowerment --- you go on the TV and point out to craven media talkers and their audience that Republicans and "Blue Dogs" are willful liars who don't want regular people to have it as good as everyone in the TV studio has it. I have been planning future posts on this topic so I won't belabor it here.

Second, Obama is either disregarding the positions his mainstream supporters elected him to fight for, or else he feels he can be extremely coy, with no negative consequences, toward hundreds of thousands of small donors such as myself who made his ascendancy to the White House possible. Machiavelli stated repeatedly, with clarity, that the Prince must never lose the support of the people; Niccolo's much-misunderstood advocacy of treachery in the building of political power largely did not countenance deceit and abuse of the people. Again, I've been planning some writings on this topic for a later date.

I'll simply conclude here that Jane Smiley, as usual, is on target in the way she writes about her Obama trepidations. Barack Obama --- who has a hardcore vocal minority expressing open hatred for his ideals, his background, and his racial heritage on Main Street, around the office pop machine, and on corporate news networks --- cannot afford to end up in a position where he literally has no friends. I haven't written him off just yet, but I'll (generously) give him until the day after his first State of the Union address. This coyness shit will not work with his regular, everyday supporters forever... especially after a major political defeat by the very scum we elected him to neuter and tame.

Update: I just noticed that Paul Krugman blogged about these same two points this morning, but from the very specific perspective of the "public option" and its rhetorical place in the so-called healthcare reform debate. If Obama's electoral based trusted him, it would not necessarily see the public option as a litmus test for Obama's good intentions. But owing to the President's apparent lack of interest in forcefully promoting universal healthcare coverage or denouncing right-wing lies about it, Obama hasn't consolidated the trust of many of the people most active in getting him elected --- progressive volunteers and contributors.

They'll shoot your eye out, kid!

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What do you suppose would have happened if, say, union members arrived packing heat outside venues where President Bush II spoke to carefully screened friendly political audiences in the earlier years of this decade?

The corporate media basically treat this kind of thing as if it weren't even news, let alone very disturbing news that should alarm anyone who prefers civic society to live under a military junta. But just you wait until a Secret Service agent or cop drops one of these assholes in his tracks. That will be all the evidence required by serious pundits to wonder aloud whether Obama really is The New Hitler, on the verge of launching Kristallnacht 2009 in the direction of all average, freedom-loving citizens.

Toward a unified field theory of current civic insanity

If you’re up for pondering a unified field theory of the insanity that passes for public discourse these days, as served up by cable news networks that likely give Joe Goebbels lumpy wet dreams in hell, then the following two finds may be worth a read along with the Steve Benen post I highlighted last night.

First there is Benen’s follow-on to his earlier email conversation with veteran Republican pol Bruce Bartlett, in which Bartlett theorizes about why Republican dead-enders hold such sway over the national media today. Benen provides a reality check to Bartlett’s overly robust assertions about our traditionally “liberal” media, but agrees with much of what he has to say (as I do, too). Bartlett:

Liberals have long been content with the mainstream media because it did largely reflect their values. It doesn't any more but liberals still treat the mainstream media as if it does. Thus as the mainstream media has declined, liberals have lost their primary sources of news and commentary and have not replaced them with those that are explicitly liberal in the same way that the right has created a fully-formed alternative media.

The missing piece of the problem that Bartlett and Benen don’t mention, though, is the consolidation of news media under transnational corporate ownership, and the funding of it under transnational corportate sponsorship. The unsurprising result of those developments has been the demolition of the traditional firewall between the newsroom and the business operations shop. Fat chance that MSNBC could become the liberal version of Fox when it’s principal function is to serve as a profit center for Microsoft and General Electric. Still, Bartlett would appear to be that rarest of birds these days: a reality-based conservative. And I salute him for that. (Not that I really consider “free market economics” to be reality-based, but at least I probably wouldn’t bar him from my swingin’ New Year’s Eve party based solely on his previous unfortunate associations with the G.H.W. Bush cabal.)

Second is a column I’ve seen several references to over the past few days: a Rick Perlstein Washington Post essay on why our current political ecology is no more deranged than it has been since the 1940s but, at the same time, very much more disturbing. Pay attention to Perlstein's 1963 anecdote about a protestor whacking the inoffensive milquetoast Adlai Stevenson with a picket sign to his bafflement. Also note Perlstein’s reasonable inference that if the Stevenson incident were to have happened last week, with America’s current U.N. ambassador as a stand-in for Stevenson, the furious wingnut protestor lady would have been interviewed on CNN and Fox, and her droolings would have become part of our national dialog. But Perlstein left out one other significant speculation, which I’ll now provide: if the lunatic protestor had been a sloppy, tie-dyed liberal whale named Wavy Gravy Jr., and the U.N. ambassador had been John Bolton, and the incident had happened 4 years ago, then our hypothetical Mr. Gravy would probably be awaiting trial in some U.S. penitentiary located in the deep, deep south.

Bartlett half-astutely notes in Benen's column that liberals “need to abandon the mainstream media and create their own alternative media,” but he seems to think that this alternative should manifest as a liberal version of Fox. I disagree, because such a thing could never work correctly in the context of being a corporate profit center. The alternative media are emerging on the web. The leading example is TPM, which combines a lucid, largely fact-based commentary function with a very impressive investigative reporting unit. Television should be left to feed on the shrivelling brains and souls of helpless right-wing consumers.

Canadiennes sans frontieres

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Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram security blog tells of the dismantling, by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, of a large sign on the Canadian side of a U.S./Canada border crossing at Massena, New York. The mighty, yellow sign was declared to pose a significant risk of endangering customs agency employees by drawing the unwelcome attention of international terrorists.

No, the sign did not say "Bin Laden Sucks" or "Fuck the Ayatollah." It said "United States." Because if Canadians become aware that they're entering the United States via Massena, NY, then you-know-who has already won.

Apropos of previous post

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Steve Benen, a TPM alum who writes for Washington Monthly (which I really should read more often), reports on an email chat he had with Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush I regimes. It's about the nauseated wonderment with which we regard twin monstrous absurdities: the Republican delusion that they have anything to contribute to society other than ruin, and the corporate media's treatment of these people with continuing deference and moral authority. Benen's observations are worth reading from top to bottom.

In addition to hatred and blame to Republicans and the corporate media, I add a supertanker brimming with typhoid spit for establishment Democrats, all the way up to Obama, for not force-feeding some reality trash talk back down the throats of the people who have been dismantling our democracy for 30 years. Yes: congealed typhoid spit with large, lazy pinwheels of gum abcess blood and thick with mats of wriggling Anopheles mosquito larvae.

I say that the Benen piece is "apropos" of the previous post because I'll bet any of you the best bottle of purple booze in my basement that in the coming days there will be no credible discussion of the absurdity of letting an 8-year-old boy play with an Uzi... and that anyone with enough guts to suggest such a thing on TV will be denounced as a far-left enemy of America's second-amendment right to empower our children blow their brains out. Read the piece.

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid."

Stories like this bring out the worst in me, but I don't even care. Rest in peace, kid.

Hat tip to "Dworvin" for the link.

Wise sayings

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This issue of "Wise sayings" was outsourced to Niccolo Machiavelli, from The Prince (1513, p 89, Everyman's Library editon):

And here it should be noted that hatred is acquired as much by good works as by bad ones....