Waking up

I started this morning deep in dream-shadow.  I woke up trying to detangle the last shreds of REM-sleep from reality.  In the dream I was describing my family to someone.  I had gotten to my uncle, and described him as having four sons.  I named his second oldest grandchild as his oldest, and put her age as significantly lower than it is, and woke up with a strong sense of wrongness.

My first thought was “That’s not right!  George doesn’t have four sons, he has two!”

In reality, George has three.

Dreams do that to me sometimes.

Trying to regain my online presence (obviously I’ve fallen off the net somewhat).  I’m going to make more of an effort to at least occasionally read LJ, and am considering starting a Facebook account, because I’ve been getting lots of invites recently from people I haven’t seen in ages.  I’m weeks behind in e-mail.  If you REALLY need to get hold of me, phone.   If you really need to get hold of me and don’t have my number, either of the other authors on this blog can ‘ping’ me for you.

Will try to do better at being in touch.

Black and blue

I’ve made some various comments elsewhere about the arrest of Dr. Gates, a Harvard professor and nationally-recognized expert in race relations in the U.S.  Everybody has their own opinions on this matter, a lot of it depending on who you believe.  (Fox Noise, as an example, has made their bias pretty clear – as per fucking usual.)

Most are saying that both parties overreacted, which seems safe enough to say.  The thing that I’m not hearing from anyone is that of course, parties to such emotionally loaded situations do overreact – they’re just human beings, after all, and they have human feelings.  It’s natural for a police officer investigating a possible burglary to be on edge; it’s natural for a homeowner to feel anger and fear when challenged as a suspect in his own home.  And because these situations do happen, and because it’s not reasonable to expect people in those situations to deal with it as if they were emotionless aliens from the planet Vulcan, we have rules and laws to govern such interactions.

Let’s assume for the moment that the officer was correct when he said that Dr. Gates was unreasonable, unwilling to listen, and creating a disturbance of some variety when he mouthed off.  On that basis, the officer charged Dr. Gates with disorderly conduct; that is the law that was applied in this case.

EFBQ asked for it last week

and I was able to find the bookmark I knew I put somewhere…

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/??

- deadbytes

Add it up

Wrote this a week or two ago, but never finished it.  May as well post what I have while it’s relevant and finish it later…or perhaps even provoke some commenters into doing it for me.

…nah, that’ll never happen.

Was reading yesterday in Rolling Stone about the state of the Republican Party post-2008.  It’s a lovely bit of schadenfreude, but I was tinged with a bit of sadness and frustration about the whole thing – and not because a bunch of guys who I think should dry up and blow away politically elicit any sympathy from me.

Briefly, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, the GOP is in a grand clash right now between the ideologically pure segment (Cheney, Limbaugh, Sanford, Gingrich, Grover Norquist, et al.) and the old-time politicos (Lindsey Graham, Charlie Crist, Colin Powell, et al.) over the future direction of the party.  The moderates, for what appear to be mostly practical reasons, want to back off on some of the more strident bits of ideology and try to appeal to the former “Reagan Democrats” (who may or may not be a fictional construct; more on that a different time).  The purists want to keep dragging the party to the right, as they’ve done with the entire country since Reagan, and, earlier, Goldwater.

The sad part about this is that never has there been a better, more apt, more shining example of a need for electoral reform than this intra-party ideological struggle, and yet no one is looking at – sorry, but I have to use it – the elephant in the room.  In any sane democratic system, this battle wouldn’t be fought out in the wonkish margins of the Times’ editorial pages (be it the NY or DC) – the two sides would simply break off, post different candidates, and decide at the ballot box.  But because of the two-party system, that obvious solution can’t be done.

Getting to equal

There are many, many problems when we speak about race, gender, religion, and minority/majority in this country, and they can be committed on both sides of the equation.

At this point, I should stop and allow that sentence to percolate.  It is, I fear, more profound than it should be.  To say that people are fallible no matter who they are should not be a statement of any insight whatsoever…and yet, there are some who refuse to acknowledge it because of who they are, or the characteristics they exhibit, or the group to which they belong.

Too often, the dialogue needed in order to address and eliminate bigotry and the various -isms that spring from it becomes a monologue – or worse, a sermon.  A one-way street between those who are the sole repositories of wisdom, and those who are unenlightened, whose opinions and stories and lives are of no consequence to those who hold the truth-with-a-capital-T.  Privilege, or the lack thereof, does not and should not have any bearing on knowledge and wisdom and its exercise in solving problems.  One can listen and acknowledge and gain wisdom from any vantage point; one’s group should not be the defining factor.  All men are not rapists.  All whites are not elitists.  All blacks are not militant.  And so on.

To those earnestly seeking an end to the inequalities of society, this shouldn’t be any kind of impediment.  Arguing from a position of strength – basing opinions on facts, allowing evidence to adjust one’s views, working together towards solutions rather than engaging in ad hominem – does not require making yourself and your kind infallible while the “others” are irredeemable.  There can be multiple solutions to a problem, all borne of sincere efforts to understand and fix things.  Apologies and courtesies can be strong.

I’m going to ask that we all please think carefully in these situations – not because I am so very profound, but because we really need to solve some things in this country once and for all…and we can’t do it without clear thought.

National disaster

Granted the Orioles are not yet a “good” team, but there is some hope on the horizon, in the form of some refreshing young talent.  There is also the shining example of exactly how bad it can really get, and it is very conveniently located just down the road from us in a town which has always been smug about its supposed superiority to Baltimore.  It is therapy and schadenfreude all in one package, and its name is the Washington Nationals.

Exactly how bad it really is in the city where I now work, as opposed to my “home” city of Baltimore, was brought home in no uncertain terms today.  The Examiner, a franchised daily, flogged the Nationals on the very front page of its local edition today in a full page ad.  Ryan Zimmerman, the Nats’ talented (and quite lonely in that respect) 3rd baseman, was in the ad.  The other two figures shown, and I am absolutely not kidding when I say this, were the Nats’ eagle-headed costumed mascot, and…the guy who cruises around in a Segway between innings, firing t-shirts into the crowd with a compressed air cannon.

That was it.  Literally.  Those were the selling points for professional baseball in the nation’s capital.  Oh, and the mascot was in the middle, and was portrayed the largest of the three – the obvious main draw.  I hope I didn’t drool from my mouth gaping like that when I saw it and realized they were trying to sell tickets for the team.

Whew.  Thank God I’m a country boy, indeed.

Frame-up

O’s pitcher Koji Uehara was forced to leave the game yesterday after three innings due to dehydration.  Okay, it was pretty hot in D.C. yesterday, where the Orioles were playing, and we did win the game and all…but could we please teach the O’s coaching staff how to say, “Hey, have a cup of water,” in Japanese?

Onto other matters: I was listening to a discussion on Nominally Public Radio about the hullaballoo over President Obama’s address at Notre Dame.  The usual balance stunt was in effect: a member of the faculty for the neutral stance (he was obviously in favor of Obama’s speech, but was very carefully asked neutral-seeming questions in an effort to bleach out his viewpoint), a Catholic activist for the antis, and – all together now! – E.J. Dionne for the liberals.  (As an aside, can we just buy that man a sign that says “LIBERAL ELITE” and have him wear it on every single channel?  Good thing that the MSM is so independent and all.)

Sacred works

I don’t go to bat for people too much, especially on the Intarwebs.  One could spend one’s entire life doing so, unfortunately, and there are things around the house that need doing, and the cats need to be fed, and such like that.  But every so often I pipe up on something which I feel needs a bit of attention, and so it is with the Internet Sacred Texts Archive.

I don’t know the fellow that does this at all, or what his particular reasons are for doing it beyond those stated on the site, but the Archive is exactly what it says on the tin: a voluminous collection of texts which are sacred to someone, somewhere on the globe.  Note that this isn’t confined to the usual Most Popular Religions, Inc., but there’s also plenty of weird cultic stuff, long discredited nonsense, and even stuff that the seculars and atheists dredge up just to get into the act.  (They get jealous.  It’s almost cute.)

The guy running the site sells copies of it on DVD-ROM, and you should buy one, because I can’t, because I’m broke.  Obviously he has been – all together now! – hit by the economic downturn, so he could use the cash money to keep things going.

The Librarian Syndrome

Alright, okay.  I haven’t written here in eons.  Chalk it up to a perfect storm of soul-searching, personal drama, dwelling on some insignificant details like where the next meal’s coming from, and a well-deserved vacation from, to closely paraphrase Barbara Bush on post-Katrina New Orleans, “wasting my beautiful mind on something like” the news of the day.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the wherefores, because I have a different fish to fry right now.

I do not have extensive experience in politics.  Yes, I helped to lead a political party, but we weren’t exactly in the mainstream; there were many, many backrooms where true political power was exercised that I was not invited to, and I may not have accepted even if I was.  But I can safely say that I have more than the average joe, and from observation, I may have more than the dreadful excuses for punditry whose limp opinions dominate the interminable analysis that news is subjected to, thanks to the 24-hour news cycle.  (That’s a true misnomer, by the way: there simply aren’t 24 hours of news in a day, pretty much by definition, so much of what they say has no value.)  Even if one doesn’t buy that assumption, I would hope I’d be seen as possessing at least a different point of view, informed by different but no less valid information.

With that as prologue, I feel I can say two things are true about politics:

Humor in a political vein

-OR-

Election Results with Mr. Peabody…

Again I laugh [1]…  followed a link from an article on the current google news page and found this:

The Myth of Stagnant Wages

Got down to the third paragraph, to wit:

consider this: If the standard of living of the average American really had not improved for more than three decades, wouldn’t there have been a tremendous political backlash by now? Wouldn’t the Democratic Party have fully mutated into a full-scale social democratic party—nationalized healthcare, a return to superhigh tax rates—rather than moving right over the past three decades?

At which point I looked and saw the dateline on the article is  September 20, 2007

[1] Like the Comedian (Ob Watchman reference)