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)

Speaking sports to power

It’s kind of weird.  At a time when you are looking for something, anything, to be optimistic about, and you’re one of the few people who aren’t bigoted or severely lacking in education that still doesn’t automagically believe that Barack Obama is it, end of story, you end up finding political redemption in a sports story.

Keep in mind that this isn’t the usual sort of sports story.  Sports have always been an escape from the here-and-now drudgery of the world; a place where a goal line stand, or two outs and the bases loaded, or the nebulous stoppage time of a drawn match is an episode of high drama in a world that is filled with the real thing, minus the idea that there must be a winner.  It’s why we get so upset about whether Roger Clemens did actually take the steroids, or some other “real” event snuck its way into our fantasy world.

Nor have sports been any kind of escape.  The New York Yankees, as an example, have recently signed C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and now Mark Teixeira to their squad, giving them the highest-paid players in baseball at a majority of the positions on the field.  Sportswriters and other enthusiasts have been tripping over themselves to laud the Yankees and pompously brush aside the idea that the game is “broken” or that rules to level the field, such as a salary cap or meaningful revenue sharing, are needed.  Where these opposing ideas come from, I haven’t a single clue…every story I have seen, from ESPN down to the blogs and boards, is universally approving of the Yankees, in a sort of Gordon Gekko, law-of-the-jungle fashion that reminds us of the conservative and rather thick-headed nature of so many sports buffs – a subject for another sermon, to be sure.

This story is about the business and, in this particular case, politics of sport, and therefore it speaks more directly to the subject at hand.  Dave Zirin covers sports for, of all publications, The Nation, and in a recent article, he spoke to the idea of star athletes speaking out on political matters, and how this is not only an improvement over the more self-absorbed athletes who demonstrate to their fans that consumption and material goods are the pinnacle of all, but is an improvement in society to the general good – and implying, by saying so, that there’s room for improvement in which we can all participate.  Zirin closes the article:

It’s an old expression: It doesn’t matter who’s sitting in the White House, it’s who’s sitting in. When athletes break down the wall and speak, it becomes a living expression that we have entered an age where we will be reclaiming power from those who have abused the collective trust.

Certainly that speaks to what we have endured as a people under George W. Bush, but it doesn’t stop there.  It speaks to failures on both sides of the artificial dichotomy into which our nominal leaders have divided themselves – and what needs to be done in order to reclaim sovereignty, both personally and collectively.  It will not be delivered by Barack Obama and it would not have been by John McCain.  It will be delivered when people are energized to speak out, and proceed to claim the power commensurate with their voice.

Being needy

I am more than ready, at this point, to have the year come to an end, and to be about the business of doing something with this one.

I need a year that doesn’t involve surgeries for my children, or job horrors for me, or the general state of insignificance that my politics or my journalistic endeavors have fallen into.  I need the progressive movement to wake up and realize that, though the tactics may differ, we’re as necessary under Barack Obama as under George W. Bush.  I need to get back on a stage.  I need a contract for my company.  I need for the Israelis and the Palestinians to stop killing each other, and just settle differences with Parcheesi or something.  I need to get off my duff and get back into shape.  I need another trip to Ocean City and a number of days under a warm sun.  I need the Orioles to have a winning season, and I need to watch the Yankees spend a great deal of money to buy everyone in sight and then collapse like an overripe avocado.  I need for those very few tie-wearing white guys responsible for the appalling collapse of the economy of the United States to be staked out over anthills, their bodies smeared with honey.  I need to be part of an America in which I do not feel like the single lamb sitting at the table with four wolves when a vote comes up on what to have for lunch.  There are some other things that I need that I won’t get into right now.

None of these things are likely to happen in 2009.

But it’s for certain they didn’t in 2008.

The most recent ray of sunshine

The news is in from Louisiana, and it isn’t good.  The perfect capper on this House-of-Horrors election cycle for the Green Party.

Rahim did everything with a candidacy that one could: he was a well-known, locally and nationally recognized community organizer under the most difficult circumstances one could imagine – Hurricane Katrina.  He was running against a Republican unknown, a Libertarian perennial, and a multiply-indicted Democratic incumbent in a postponed, light turnout election.  He was well-financed (over $20,000, all of it from clean non-corp sources), well-backed by volunteers, and kept to a message that was sane, salable, and principled, with a lot of local resonance.  And in the end…

Good housekeeping

Incidentally, I thought I would bring to note a couple of changes here at the Hidden Message…stuff we’ve been thinking of doing in order to make this seem a bit more like home, and hopefully draw some more eyes to it.

First, dig our fantastic icons!  That was one of the things I actually liked about LiveJournal, and I had a great deal lying around from my time there – moreso really than I could even store there, in number, size, or format.  Here, it’s a bit different, and once I learned how to put them in place, albeit by fudging things a little, I don’t even have to worry about such things.  And, as an added bonus, I can even put breasts on the icons or whatever I wish without worrying about the LJ/6A/SUP/Whomever Police jumping in and censoring my journal on the complaints of ridiculously sensitive fundamentalist hyperactivist groups!  How nice!  Anyway, much of the “Scooterbird Collection” has yet to be put in place, so watch this space for further details.

Also, you may have noticed that we have another “correspondant” here, Deadbytes.  He hasn’t yet produced anything for us, but that’s okay, as he receives exactly the same from us as he would if he was writing, which is the big squadoosh, so, no harm, no foul.

There’ll be a few more changes in the future as we go forward; nothing that would cause us to go sour or anything (coughBoingBoingcoughcough).  Watch this space for further details.