Too little, too late

Dear Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, you stated that you now believe the Supreme Court may have made a mistake in agreeing to hear the infamous case which became known as Bush v. Gore, effectively throwing out the 2000 election results and appointing the Bush regime.  You may not realize it, but you have placed yourself in the company of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, men who changed the world in monstrous ways and then tried to make amends.

As I said to Oppie and Andrei, the time to grow a conscience is no later than your undergraduate years.  Then it will be firmly rooted and flourishing when, in later life, you are bullied by someone like Edward Teller, or Leonid Brezhnev, or Antonin Scalia.  (It suddenly occurs to me that all of them could have been played by Eugene Pallette.  It's how my mind works.)  Oppenheimer tried to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons and lost his security clearance; Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, had a worse time when they stood up for human rights in the Soviet Union.  What are you prepared to do? 

What can you do?  You can't resurrect the thousands of dead in Bush's needless wars,  nor make whole the maimed.  You can't restore the trillions of dollars wasted on bloody folly, nor heal the mangled economy.  You can't even give us back the eight years of stem cell research lost to fundamentalist superstition.  It would have been more decent to say nothing.

I think I can hear a train of thought leaving the station.  You saw the crowds lining the streets of London to make sure the Thatcher woman was really dead.  You read about the opening of the Texas Bullshit Depository, a/k/a the "George W. Bush Presidential Library," still making the case for war with sweaty desperation.  You began to wonder about your own legacy, didn't you?  Well, you needn't.  You will be celebrated by the people who celebrate the first woman to do anything, no matter what it is or how badly she does it. 

By a curious twist of fate, the worst storm since Galveston 1900 bears your name.  SANDY AFFECTED THE LIVES OF COUNTLESS AMERICANS, NONE FOR THE BETTER.  There's your epitaph.  And now back to the lucrative speech circuit, and having it both ways.

Everything you know is wrong

...is more than the title of a great Firesign Theater album.  It's a philosophy of life which has stood me in good stead (whatever that means) for many years. 

With all hell breaking loose, not everyone may have kept up with the Kaufman County, Texas, assassinations.  The district attorney and his wife were shot to death in their house, and an assistant district attorney was gunned down in the courthouse parking lot.  Everybody -- and you know who you are -- knew it was the work of the Aryan Brotherhood, a violent prison gang who have the ability to reach out and kill anyone they want.  Were the killings related to the murder of the Colorado director of prisons?  Who would be next?  Why?  What?

Yesterday police arrested a former justice of the peace and his wife and charged them with the three crimes.  Mr. Williams is a former j.p. because he was caught allegedly stealing computers from the courthouse.  It looks as if he and the wife decided to get even, as you do in Texas when you have a gun.  Williams was Wayne LaPierre's archetypal "good guy with a gun" right up to the moment he shot ADA Hasse, who also had a gun but had no time to draw it. 

On a day when they were celebrating the Senate's predictably craven refusal to require even modest background checks for gun purchases, the NRA became a parody of itself, a bad SNL sketch.  Apparently guns don't keep you safe, and just as apparently, the answer to any situation is not more guns.  Oh, and publishing photos of innocent bystanders and accusing them of horrific crimes?  Also not a good idea.  Rupert Murdoch and his minions should stop pretending to be journalists and stick to something they know, like hacking Hugh Grant's phone.  Building a  nursing home and two schools in the shadow of an enormous fertilizer plant was another questionable move.  Forcing air traffic controllers to sit home instead of landing planes because the T-party hates Barack Obama...look, before you act on the basis of what you know you know...

Read the title again.

This just in...

The White House Easter Egg event has been put on hold, pending consideration of Rep. Zeke Flyover's Chickenhood Amendment.  This bill defines all fertilized eggs as chickens, and requires that they be set aside for use in chicken salad sandwiches.  Said Rep. Flyover, "If you think making chicken sandwiches from an egg is silly, it's no sillier than calling a zygote a person."

Dennis Rodman has returned from North Korea with some explaining to do.  While attending a Harlem Globetrotters game in Pyongyang with Kim Jong-Un, a/k/a The Plump Leader, he persuaded Kim to bet on the Generals, insisting that "They're due!"  When he learned that the Generals never ever win a game, ever, Kim was furious.  Haircut notwithstanding, he hates to look ridiculous and has announced the resumption of the Korean War.  When advised that the People's Democratic Republic would not be able to count on the assistance of the Chinese army this time, Kim said he would call off the war if Rodman returns his fifty dollars.

  

A spoonful of sugar

It's always magical when they swear in a new pope.  Everyone watches his style and demeanor and all the scandals are forgotten during the honeymoon, if that isn't a wholly inappropriate term.  Francis I is a rock star, wading into crowds to kiss babies, holding press conferences, working the rope line, and basically acting as if he needs to be re-elected.  (He doesn't, does he?  If popes can quit whenever they like, maybe the rules have changed.)  He has the knack for making people feel good while budging not a centimeter from the church's centuries-old traditions of misogyny and homophobia.

John Boehner was invited to accompany Vice-President Biden to Rome but declined.  This was probably a mistake, as he and his party need to study Francis closely.  Having decided during last week's ComiConservative '13 that their basic philosophy is perfectly sound, they now must learn how to sell it better in order to avoid another debacle like last November.  In other words, they have to "reach out" to the objects of their hate -- women, gays, naturalized Americans and the non-white.  With Republican-controlled state legislatures vying to enact the most rigid restrictions on voting rights, collective bargaining, abortion and even contraception, this is going to take more than the snark of prop comic Sarah Palin and the artful deployment of a few brown faces like Bobby Jindal's.  With the Mad Tea Party in Congress bent on ending government as we know it, it's going to take mass hypnosis.  

Part of the GOP's "image problem" stems from its willingness, for more than a decade, to use hate radio, Fox "News" and the rightmost extremes of Blogenheim as a free source of propaganda.  Now they need its operatives to bank down their incendiary ravings.  Why should they?  Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Coulter et al. are not in politics, or even in journalism.  They are in show business.  Their fat paychecks depend upon their ability to corral the largest possible number of mouth-breathers and deliver them to the sponsors; this is how commercial media work.  Jabba the Rush is not going to stop calling women sluts just because the RNC has decided it needs the slut vote.  Glenn Beck doesn't care who wins elections as long as he frightens the foolish and walks off with their money, and he can't do that by comparing Mitt Romney with Hitler.  Right-wing media need Obama the way Oceania needed Emanuel Goldstein.  If I were given to wild conspiracy theories...

Pope Francis has one advantage over the Republican Party -- his edicts are optional.  It has been many years since the pope's word had the force of law outside Vatican City.  Millions of people call themselves Catholics, raise their children as Catholics, financially support the Catholic Church, and yet ignore its doctrines concerning contraception and abortion.  From time to time the Church tries to make an example of a politician who refuses to denounce Roe v. Wade -- John Kerry, for instance -- but short of Stalinist-style purges, nothing will detach those sub rosa "sinners" from their religion, and I can't believe anyone wants to.  When the inevitable encyclical "Non usare pillum" is read from the pulpits, the people in the pews will listen in silence, line up for the sacrament, and drive home, stopping at the pharmacy to pick up their birth-control pills.  Assuming they live in a state where the Republicans haven't made that illegal.  The people in the pews had no voice in picking the pope.  Picking the next governor is another story.  There isn't enough high fructose corn syrup in this country to mask the arsenic the Republicans want to feed us.

      

In your face, Wayne LaPierre!

Did you notice?  We had some real progress on gun control last week.  It seems the Second Amendment does not cover the President's right to keep and bear drones, at least in the United States.  All right, it's just one weapon and one person, but it's a start, and all it took was a thirteen-hour rand by Rant Paul.  I'm sorry, that's a rand from Paul Rand.  Ryan Paul.  Rick Paul.  Scott Rick Paul Rand -- listen, they all look like those pale dead-eyed telepaths from Village of the Damned.  A thirteen-hour rant and a Democratic president, because nobody gave a toss what George W. Bush did with drones, or where.  So who needs Harry Reid?

Arms and the Man, and the Boy

  "Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival." 

That's an excerpt from a fund-raising letter by Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, which received wide and wide-eyed attention last week.  The organization's response to the whispered phrase "gun control" is to scream "Guns compulsory!"  Anyway, they've never been accused of subtlety.

I'm confused.  On the one hand, the Government is huge, powerful, intrusive, and bent on controlling every aspect of our lives.  Paratroopers, Navy SEALs, UN helicopters and ATF agents are just over the horizon, awaiting Obama's order to haul us all off to FEMA camps for re-education and a punitive diet of organic broccoli and Dreams From My Father.  On the other hand, we are one bad storm away from hunkering down in our homes, fending off gangs of heavily armed "Latin American" zombie drug gangs.  Oh, and Hamas.

Well, which is it?  Tyranny or anarchy?  A two-minute flip through the dictionary tells us it can't be both.  Are we living in Airstrip One or some post-apocalyptic Weimar Republic?  Is Wayne ThePeter too dumb to see this giant contradiction?  Or is he hoping the recipients of his mail are too dumb?

Last week the world was stunned when Oskar Pistorius was arrested in South Africa for murdering his girlfriend.  Also last week, a four-year-old boy in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, got hold of his mother's  gun and killed himself.  His story was not reported nationally.  He was not a famous athlete or the son of a celebrity.  He was not part of a group of twenty.  He had not performed at the Inauguration.  He was just an ordinary little boy who is now a statistic.  There is a lot of crime in South Africa, and in Memphis.  In fact, just about anywhere there is poverty, there is crime.  Perhaps a loaded gun in the bedside table is not the answer to either problem.  Nobody is even talking about restricting access to handguns.  What would be the point?  So a child will not celebrate his fifth birthday, and a man the world admired has very likely thrown his life away.  "It's not paranoia to buy a gun.  It's survival."

For who?     

This is my rifle, this is my gun...

The US has some of the toughest laws in the world when it comes to child pornography.  Production, distribution or simple possession can be punished by years in prison followed by additional years of (probably unlawful) "civil commitment," until a psychiatrist deems the offender "cured" -- and all this in the event no other offense has been committed.  The Supreme Court has ruled that child pornography is not protected speech under the First Amendment, and I concur.  This society is so determined to protect children from exploitation that we deny them even basic sex education until relatively late in life, to preserve their supposed innocence. 

Which makes me wonder why it is so hard to pass laws which will reduce, even slightly, the likelihood of children being murdered.  No one dies from sexual exploitation, or even rape as such, but almost everyone dies from being shot in the head.  Is it a case of "better dead than violated"?  Or is it something much deeper, our cultural inability to cope with sexuality?  Which I happen to believe goes all the way back to our inheritance of monotheism.

Think about ancient Greece, and its polytheistic mythology.  The gods were just like people but more so -- generous, impulsive, sadistic, cruel, chaste, lascivious, merciful, vengeful, wise, silly, immensely powerful and immortal.  Zeus was proof that men are not naturally monogamous -- he would transform into a bull, a swan, whatever it took to couple with comely human maidens.  Apollo, Aphrodite, and others interacted with humanity, despite having official spouses on Mt. Olympus.  Then monotheism came along, offering a single deity who was perfect, male but sexless.  Yahweh was not permitted a consort, and now myth had no way to describe sexuality except to denounce it.  With Allah, things only got worse.  As for Jesus, remember the official outrage when that awful novel The DaVinci Code suggested he had married?  And unlike the others, he had a fully functional human body.

I apologize for being pretentious, but are we not the heirs of all this?  Lacking a divinely ordered outlet for sex, what are we left with but violence?  We have never really escaped the shadow of the Puritans, with their distilled hatred of the body and their inability to recognize "savages" as fully human.  Malcolm was right:  Violence is as American as cherry pie.  Sex is European (the new right-wing pejorative).

We adore violence.  It informs our language.  Someone who recently said we have "a shot" at restricting assault weapons was scolded for his choice of words, but I understood.  The American idiom is awash with ordnance.  "That big-shot from the home office is gunning for me, but I dodged a bullet.  The guy's a real loose cannon."  "I invited her to see that blockbuster movie, and she shot me down."  "Lincecum got shelled, but that new right-fielder has a rifle for an arm."  Violence informs our entertainment, our music, our literature, our thinking.  The iconic Christmas movie is no longer about a miser who learns charity, or an angel who gets his wings, but a nine-year-old who wants a BB gun.  And of course, our sports.

Remember the Super Bowl a few years ago?  In the middle of the half-time show, there was a momentary glimpse of a female nipple.  I thought the Republic would never recover.  Was it deliberate?  Was it a "wardrobe malfunction"?  Did the children see this terrible thing?  How can we talk to them about it?  Are they ruined forever?  Should someone go to prison?  How can we, as a nation, go on?  All right, back to the game.  Back to big men slamming into each other, sustaining brain injuries which will kill them before they're fifty.  Aaahhhhhhhh......And there you have it.  America, the nation of perpetual childhood and perpetual childishness.  A President is impeached over sex (and not very much of it).  A Vice-President shoots his friend in the face and it's just good fun, coupla guys confirming their manhood by blasting away at flightless quail bred to be slaughtered by gutless chicken-hawks. 

Maybe we deserve the numbing daily statistics, the drive-by shootings, the four-year-old who played with a gun, the scuffle at a party that turned into a killing, punctuated by the mass murders that bring out the solemn faces on the anchormen and cause gun sales to spike ("Obama's comin' to take yer guns!").  The truth is, we're nowhere near a "tipping point" yet, nor will we be as long as even liberals have to start every sentence by stating their devotion to the Second Amendment.  I say it's time that amendment went the way of "three-fifths of a man" and Prohibition.  People wrote it, and people can get rid of it.

Put up your guns, or shut up.  

     

Looking for Richards

This old Shakespeare hand got two nasty surprises last week.  First the dishonored remains of Richard III were discovered in a grave -- a hole really -- under what is now a parking lot.  The curvature of the spine was confirmed; the gaudy crimes attributed by Shakespeare could not be proved or disproved, of course.
I seem to recall a touching story about local monks taking charge of the dead king and giving him proper rites.  Well, brothers?  Anything to say? 

A few days later, on a PBS/BBC program called Shakespeare Uncovered, Derek Jacobi stated his belief that Richard II and other plays were written by Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford.  Say it ain't so, Derek!  Or to quote another play, "Et tu?"  Sir Derek echoed the familiar Victorian line that a Warwickshire bumpkin with a grammar school education "could not have" written these works.  But "could not have" is not an argument, it's an emotional response.  One might say the illegitimate son of a small-town notary "could not have" painted The Last Supper, or the son of a second-rate musician who spent his childhood traipsing around Europe instead of going to school "could not have" composed Don Giovanni, or an obscure German who didn't talk until he was six "could not have" changed the way we look at the universe.  Genius is ineffable.  It happens when and where it happens.  You of all people should know that, Derek. 

Goodness, I'm in a short-tempered mood this year.  If it was anyone but Jacobi, whom I've admired since I, Claudius...

Quitters

I don't know which is more bizarre, the pope quitting or the pope giving two weeks' notice like any junior accountant in the Receivables Department.  Today's announcement comes only days after the abdication of the Queen of the Netherlands.  Whatever happened to leaving the job feet first, with a band playing Chopin's Funeral March?  I love a state funeral.  Anyway, there isn't much chance the new Dutch king or the new pope will represent much of a change in policy.  One will reign powerlessly over a liberal democracy and the other will continue trying to return to the Middle Ages.  I'm willing to be surprised.

A world elsewhere

I wanted to write something more cheerful, and this seems like the moment since Blogger is getting more difficult to deal with every time.  This is from Norman Lebrecht's contentious, wildly opinionated Who Killed Classical Music? the very title of which assumes that it's dead:

That Pavarotti loyalists should have felt the need to smear Domingo was proof itself of the Spaniard's potency.  Unable to malign him vocally, the Pavarotti camp attacked the weak spot in every artist's make-up -- his age.  A whispering campaign alleged that Domingo had been born before his admitted birth date, 1941, and was probably older than Pavarotti and closer to the final curtain.  A fake date of 1934 crept into at least one standard music dictionary.  Domingo, distressed by the aspersions, produced an authenticated copy of his birth certificate from the registry office in Madrid, but failed to quell the rumour-mongering.  (page 270)

So you start a rumor, the object of the rumor produces documentation to show it is baseless, and then you refuse to accept the documentation.  Lebrecht's book was published in 1996, which means that Jerome Corsi is a big fat plagiarist.  Now I have to wonder what other political phenomena originated in the weird and wonderful world of opera.  Were Fafner and Fasolt the models for the Koch brothers, ready to kill for their horde of gold but using it for no useful purpose?  Is Tosca's leap from the parapet inspiring the budget quagmire?  Did Bill Clinton base his career on the Duke of Mantua?  Puts it all in perspective, doesn't it?      

Silence of the lambs

This was bad.  This was so bad, Rupert Murdoch has called for a ban on assault weapons.  It remains to be seen which of his minions will get in line, and which will accuse him of joining the Obama conspiracy to disarm America and sell us into UN slavery.  I. Do. Not. Care.

Friday afternoon I turned on the local CBS affiliate to watch Jeopardy!  Instead I saw pictures of a suburban elementary school, children being led away with their eyes closed, and a graphic reporting that more than twenty people had been shot inside.  Beneath that was a crawl about two Memphis police officers being shot, one fatally, and the dead officer a mother of four.  At first I thought it was one story.  Try processing this when you have expected to eat a sandwich and watch an innocuous game show.  ("I'll take the Second Amendment for two hundred, please, Alex.")  It should come more easily, after so much slaughter.  But this was bad.  Little ones, none older than seven.  Little white caskets where the Christmas presents ought to be.  Teachers who died trying to save them.  The brain shuts down. 

It wiped everything else off the screen:  last week's eruption of violence at an Oregon mall (the gun jammed, apparently, only -- only two dead.)    The persecution and character assassination of Susan Rice by the cowards McCain and Graham.  The suicide of a nurse pranked by a couple of radio "comedians."  The love life of General Petraeus.  The endless game of chicken being played by alleged adults charged with working out the tax code.  And let's not forget the abuse hurled at Bob Costas for daring to suggest that gun violence ought to be discussed as seriously as the Heisman Trophy or the hockey strike.  When the President's silence is deafening, we rely on sports commentators to speak truth to madness.

I don't entirely blame Obama.  His mere re-election drove the tinfoil hat community to binge-shop for guns and ammo and call for secession from a country they no longer recognize.  If he follows up on a call for "meaningful" action, the owners of assault weapons may decide they have nothing to lose.  The gun lobby will maintain that it's really a mental health issue.  The people who believe in logic, bless them, will point to the deranged man who ran amok in a school in China; many were stabbed but no one died.  "Guns kill people.  He didn't have a gun."  "Guns make you free.  The Chinese are not free because..."  As Huck would say, I been here before.  May I go now?

And grief sifts down on a New England town, falling alike upon the living and the dead.