[Title=cult. non-seq. ref.; 10 pts.]

I don’t yet have the second part of my last post.  In fact, I’ve been avoiding all mention of politics for the past several weeks, ever since the Green convention.  I’ve been told by reliable sources that I haven’t missed much, which was rather my perception that led to the sabbatical in the first place.

I’m still thinking that I’m not quite ready to come back.  I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to baseball and theatre and my kids and trying to get a better job.  I went bowling over the weekend, which I didn’t do well at, but I could console myself that I was a helluva lot better at it than Barack Obama.

You have to pay attention to politics in this country for the same reason you have to pay attention to deer by the side of the road while driving, because God alone knows what’s going to happen if you take your eyes off ‘em.  This isn’t necessarily a criticism as much as it is one of the problems of democracy, or at least the democracy-cum-kleptocracy that we’ve developed…and yes, you can cue one of Jefferson’s quotes about liberty right here.  I’ve done a great deal of paying attention over the last several years, and sometimes it’s just good to let your mind dwell on other subjects for a bit.

Alas, Churchill has some equally prescient and profound quotes concerning liberty and democracy as well.  (I once got taken to task by a fellow Green - who shall remain nameless except to say that it was Myles Hoenig - for quoting the “arch-conservative” Churchill, which was an obvious indicator of my “true sympathies” or some other nonsense like that.  Leave it to me to pick the one place in the entire world where I’d be thought of as a right-winger.  My fellow people in that place do keep an open mind, as most on the left do - but unfortunately, some do to the extent that their brains fall out.)  A five-minute conversation with the average voter is in fact an excellent argument against democracy, and taken to its logical conclusion, the same can be said for a recent forum at which Barack Obama and John McCain appeared.

I was tuned into Michael Phelps’ inspiring performance at the Olympics that day, and thank Ghod I was, because it restored my faith in the possibility of basically good, local guys like myself being capable of extrordinary things, and it also likely saved our TV from having something heavy thrown through it.  Consensus of the bloviating morning-after talking-headery is apparently that McCain “won” because Obama was “too thoughtful” in his responses, and Lord knows we don’t want a President that thinks about things before he responds.  This is bad enough, except that one of the examples I was cited of a question where Obama didn’t do this was on the question, “What is marriage?”

Now I hate to risk the wrath of the pundits by asking this of readers - after all, they are on cable 24 by 7 and they do just fine without the messy business of having to think before they say anything - but I do ask you to just take an extra munch or two of your donut and just consider that end of that last graf while doing so.  An opportunity was presented for questions to be asked of the two leading candidates for President of the United States, and the question, “What is marriage?” was thought to be perfectly fitting in that context.  Further, both chose to take the church-proffered bait and answer the question in the same way.  After all, this is the People’s Glorious Two-Party System, and gays have to vote for Obama, sez right here…so what was the harm?

Now there’s a great deal of wrong to go around here, and I’ll apologize in advance that I might miss some…but let’s give it a shot.

I mentioned baseball previously.  One of the good things about it is that there are 30 teams, not two, and you generally don’t have to worry about a lot of mealy-mouthed, go-along bait-taking as we saw here.  As an example, when hearing that this question was asked, I was reminded of Tommy Lasorda’s response to a question, back when he was manager of the Dodgers, after a game they lost to the Cubs in which Dave Kingman hit three home runs:

What’s my opinion of Kingman’s performance!? What the fuck do you think is my opinion of it? I think it was fucking horseshit! Put that in, I don’t fucking care. Opinion of his performance!? Jesus Christ, he beat us with three fucking home runs! What the fuck do you mean, ‘What is my opinion of his performance?’ How could you ask me a question like that, ‘What is my opinion of his performance?’ Jesus Christ, he hit three home runs! Jesus Christ! I’m fucking pissed off to lose the fucking game. And you ask me my opinion of his performance! Jesus Christ. That’s a tough question to ask me, isn’t it? ‘What is my opinion of his performance?’

People in baseball, when needing to make a point, are given to, shall we say, individualistic responses.  In short, they can and do call bullshit when necessary.  Politicians do not.  In fact, politicians can do this, but it takes some guts, and it’s usually much, much easier to hide behind the two-party racket and just not be the other guy.  (This is really the main function of the two-party system, in fact, but that’s our sermon for next Sunday.)  The correct response to the question, “What is marriage?”, aside from a diatribe worthy of Lasorda, would be, “What difference should it make to the President of the United States who is getting married?  Why is this an issue that the government has to weigh in on?  I assume that as a church, which does marry people before God, you already have an answer to this question.  If you’re against gay marriage, don’t marry people of your own sex…but don’t then come to the government and suggest that we deny to other people what you yourselves do not wish to do.“

For suggesting things such as these, I have been called “revolutionary” in the recent past.  (Yeah, it was my sister.)  That’s not necessarily my intention.  I suggest what makes sense, both to myself and in some objective way, such as being backed by actual facts, or having a working example in place elsewhere that is doing the stated job.  Republicans usually react by saying something pithy, in no more than one sentence using small words, and wrapping themselves in a flag, or perhaps strapping on an armband and doing one of those jaunty salutes.  Democrats react by saying “um”, “er”, and “well…” a lot, and shifting their weight from foot to foot as if they have to go to the bathroom.  Doing something else gets me called “revolutionary” - or, more commonly, “stupid” and “unrealistic”.

Hmmm, Churchill may have had something here.  I think I’ll stick with baseball for the time being.

Publishing this now, as is; there’s much more to say, but I’ve been sitting on this for long enough.  More to come.

As we all know by now, Cynthia McKinney won the Presidential nomination of the Green Party on the first ballot last weekend in Chicago, and chose Rosa Clemente, a hip-hop activist from New York, as her running mate.  Most are reporting that the atmosphere was very positive and congenial.

I was unable for financial reasons to make the trip to Chicago and participate as a member of the Maryland delegation, but as most out there also know, I was actively involved in the campaign and my candidate didn’t win.

Now some would be interested in hearing what I have to say about this.  After all, I’m a former co-Chair of the Party, I was actively involved, as I said, and I have a blog and a podcast dedicated to, in part, news of the Green Party.  And I’ve been weighing this carefully, because there’s a lot to say.  I don’t want it to seem like sour grapes because my guy didn’t win - that’s really not the case - and I want to make sure that the GP itself isn’t getting damaged.  Not being a “major” party, we can’t really afford to have a lot of people forming caucuses and such that work at cross-purposes.

As you can guess, I’m not enamored of this choice.  Cynthia McKinney has a great many upsides: she’s intelligent, she’s dedicated, and she’s  a great speaker.  She’s a six-time Congresswoman, so she knows how to win, and she’s got support in her district among African-Americans.  She’s also got some downsides: she’s a former Democrat, with a history of flip-flopping on her commitment to the GP; she’s known in the larger populace as being a nut who goes off about conspiracy theories and punched a Capitol police officer; and she has an adversarial relationship with the media, tending to lecture and harangue them rather than treating them as a resource for getting the message out.

Over in the other parties, their positions are weak: McCain is a consensus candidate while the Republicans work out leadership between the small-gov libertarians, millenarian Christians, and the hate-based neocons and protofascists.  He’s forced into running as a Rightist in order to appease the knuckle-draggers in his constituency.  Barack Obama is coming off a tougher-than-expected primary against the classic anointed Democrat; he too is now running right to try and appeal to the same segment as McCain, and he and his fellow Democratic Senators have been a model of inaction and broken promises since taking control of Congress in 2006 - as Greens expected.

Now consider from that where the GP is.  Nader is taking his last bow as an independent once again - the break between he and the Greens, in all except the casual voters’ minds, is now complete.  David Cobb, the 2004 candidate, signaled a different way of running, indicating that the GP would not become yet another “Socialist Worker’s Labor World Radical People’s Front” style of party - an insular, far-leftist concern that does nothing of any consequence, existing only to attack other groups like it.  While he was roundly attacked for it, Cobb insured that the Greens would not simply be a cudgel for angry leftists to bludgeon the Democratic Party, but a party in its own right which would frame its concerns as those of the majority of Americans and try to build an independent base away from the fringe.  It was unsuccessful due largely to the stridency of the Nader concern, which is, if Chicago was any indication, finally dissipating (as not even Nader is willing to lead them).

The chance existed for the GP to continue moving to a different dynamic.  The room existed among the populace at large for a principled progressive candidate to move in and take over the spot abandoned by the Democrats.  As the Dems did in 2006, and so many times before, Obama began by pitching progressive reform and then slouching towards the expected “Republican-lite” positions; never has “Chaaaaaange!” sounded so preposterously hollow.  Additionally, the Greens could fall back on their Ten Key Values and attack both parties on their corporatist base, coming from directions that weren’t previously expected.  Comprehensive health care is the obvious one: both majors take large amounts from Big Pharma and the insurance companies, and so will never deliver health care for all; the Greens could insist on it and attack them freely for the money they take.  “Personal and Global Responsibility” is another Value: how about revealing that when Greens govern, taxes go down, because they insist on sustainable economies?  Greens could produce a budget that cuts out the vast majority of “defense” spending, including the Iraq War, stops shipping weapons abroad, and uses the money to repair our social programs and crumbling infrastructure - and we could legitimately sell it by saying that your taxes won’t be raised and may in fact go down.  Can you imagine the Republocrats and the media trying to assimilate that?  When the party they’d dismissed as a collection of far-leftist freaks suddenly attacks from a majoritarian position of fiscal responsibility?  And, more to the point - does so without pandering, without “going right”, without compromising its values one iota?

Even with McKinney as the nominee, all of this was possible.  We could have come forward with a platform and a strategy in 2008 that announced to all that we were ready to run with a winning strategy, and, regardless of the odds against us, we were ready to govern when we won.

to be continued…

I haven’t written here for a while, but there’s a particular reason for that.  The GP’s convention occurred the weekend before last, and it’s safe to say that it had an impact on my view of the Party and the actions that I’ve been taking and planning to take as an activist.  I figured that the best thing to do was to take some time and sort out exactly how I felt about the whole thing.  (As an aside, I do wish more people, particularly journalists, would do exactly that; however, the 24-hour news cycle demands immediate filler and “breaking news” even when it would be best to report the bare bones of a story and leave analysis to a later time, once things develop - in other words, say it is too early to tell because it is, and leave it at that for a bit.  Of course, this can’t be done, and in any case such tactics are best for those who create the policy rather than those who report on it.  I have a foot in both camps, to an extent, so I find myself in the ever-popular “weird area”.)

So my silence hasn’t been because of neglect, but rather a deliberate consideration as to my next move: what I’m going to say, how I’m going to say it, and what I’m going to do next.

In the meantime, I was struck by a few recent developments of JFK assassination lore: the publishing of a new home movie taken on the day of the assassination, and the publication of Vincent Bugliosi’s voluminous defense of the Lone Gunman Theory.

The film is a several-second clip showing the motorcade approaching on Main Street, shortly before turning right onto Houston Street.  The President would be shot approximately 90 seconds later.  It was shot by a citizen of Dallas and kept for 45 years before being revealed, presumably by one of the person’s descendants.  (In a detail that makes me wonder who the hell these people are and what they are thinking, several of the LGT writers wrote about their bafflement as to why this film was concealed from public revelation for that long…apparently not considering that someone might be so upset about that day and the actions which took place not two minutes later that one might not wish to ever see it again.  I suppose such revelations also interfere with one of the LGTers’ attempted proofs-by-fiat: that a secret couldn’t be kept that long; therefore, if we simply assert what we believe happened and wait long enough, we’re right.)  The film shows nothing of too much consequence, except for the LGTers’ gleeful freeze-frame of the back of Kennedy’s suit jacket, which appears to be somewhat bunched around his neck, as it he’d gotten into the limo and flounced back in a deep seat, causing his suit to rumple, rather than sat back in a more controlled manner.  This is significant, because one of the tenets of the Magic Bullet Theory is that Kennedy’s suit was indeed in this fashion when he was shot, causing the hole in the back of the jacket to be lower than where he was actually shot.

Bugliosi’s book is impressive just by its sheer size - about 1500 pages - and is an account of his prosecution within a mock trial put forth by London Weekend Television, in which Oswald is tried post mortem by engaging surviving witnesses.  The not-too-surprising verdict, considering he wrote a book rather than denounced the findings, was that Oswald was found solely guilty.

The LGTers are very much in ascendence right now.  It’s very fashionable of late in the mainstream sources (the networks, the New Yorker, etc.) to paint Jim Garrison as a crazed lunatic, berserk in the realm of jurisprudence; Oliver Stone as an opportunist hack director; and all theorists except themselves as wild-eyed and unstable, without any grasp of logic.  Call it the Richard Dawkins Effect: “I’m so very right in my scrupulous method that I’m perfectly justified in applying my findings to absolutely every aspect of the investigation, whether or not it has anything to do with science or logic.”  As an example, Dawkins, or the LGTers, reason that they are so correct in their absolute ownership of the truth that they can’t be assholes…therefore everyone else must be.

In truth, there are an awful lot of examples of such on both sides.  Getting to the truth of this requires that people examine the minutae of the case: the trajectory of the bullets, the sometimes-ghastly forensic details of a murder by gunshot, the various web of connections and alleged connections.  Most of it - on both sides - is pure bullshit; Bugliosi in particular is quite bombastic and cock-sure, as befits a prosecuting attorney, and his pronouncements of good and noble intentions in producing his book while Oliver Stone, et. al., are slimy creeps for producing theirs rings very hollow.  The sweeping generalizations on both sides are frequently laughable; guys like Jim Marrs and Harrison Livingstone have been randomly dismissing Warren Commission evidence for years by constructing sinister ulterior motives for everyone involved with a different opinion, including former partners like Richard Groden…while on the other hand, LGTers scoff at the idea that there could be a confluence of CIA agents, mobsters, anti-Castro Cubans, and fascist right-wingers to kill the President - while ignoring or refusing to acknowledge that an acknowledged conspiracy existed among these very same elements to kill Castro.  LGTers will laugh at “conspiracists” for their habit of drawing dozens of “trajectories” all over mockups of Dealey Plaza - and then expend rounds of ammunition at blocks of gelatin and duct-taped watermelons in a usually vain attempt to get them to flinch back and to the left.  Occam’s Razor falls unkindly on both sides of the equation.

I find it all fascinating because of the implications.  The President of the United States was murdered in a particularly brutal fashion - being shot in the head in broad daylight as he drove through a major American city in front of dozens of witnesses.  Many had and continue to have the motive to kill the President, but with a few exceptions, LGTers consider Oswald a lone nut, a man with delusions of a Communist imperative to kill Kennedy who nonetheless refused to bring that up after he did it.  Whether Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy or the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, there is so much more to what happened there in Dallas than any researcher or indeed historian is currently admitting.

I’ve been reading some of the testimony of Hermann Goering from the Nuremberg Trials; more specifically, from interviews conducted in his cell by a psychologist. Not exactly the best of reading topics at any time, and particularly not now.

I’m struck by the justifications from men in power - the denials, the half-truths, the buck-passing.  It was all further justified by their worldview - that this would have happened in any country and it was the same anywhere, and that they’d suffered at the hands of other countries and of the “Jewish race”.  They were being prosecuted only because they lost, not for any reasons of moral transgression.  It was petty and small, unbacked by any kind of greater vision.  Goering reiterates his hate of communism, because he believes the idea that men are created equal to be a ridiculous notion, unproven on its face; he bristles at the idea of the United States, who took wide swaths of territory from Mexico, condemning Germany for doing the same thing in Europe.  Hess, Goering, Doenitz, and the others mostly blamed those who were dead, playing down their own part when it would have gotten them in trouble, inflating it otherwise.

The whole thing would be played out again in the admittedly far less severe circumstances of Watergate.  It was played out again by men whose conservative worldview placed them beyond any “abstract” notions of an absolute good.  Some, like Chuck Colson and John Dean, found a moral compass again; others, like Nixon himself, never quite did.

There’s no doubt in my mind that justice, in the overall, objective sense, would demand that a similar trial for the current architects of the nation’s misery.  Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzalez, Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, Rumsfeld, Feith, and so many others should be placed in the dock and charges filed against them: waging wars of aggression, the use and promulgation of torture as a tactic against the enemy, warrantless spying against U.S. citizens, and numerous violations of the Constitution.  And there’s equally no doubt that the same excuses, so common to the conservative frame of mind, would be trotted out: the denials, the buck-passing to deceased former comrades.  Godwin be damned - it’s time to draw the parallels that already exist.  The conservative “values” of self-aggrandisement and the need for an “other” as an enemy combined with a lust for power, the need to be beyond the rule of law that applies to everyone else, and the existing concentration of power and money, create these proto-fascist structures.  Sometimes they are fully realized, as with Goering, sometimes they simply lurk and simmer in the background, as with Watergate…and sometimes, they end up in the very, very uncomfortable territory that exists between those two options.

Let’s get to the meat of the matter.  Is George W. Bush the worst President in U.S. history?

Typically, up to this point in history, Warren Harding has been considered the worst.  For sure, he was a conservative, and functioned as the sort whom FDR had to later save the country from.  He was corrupt, dreadful at using the language, and a sell-out for business interests, and surrounded himself with similar stooges - all of which is to repeat my earlier point about him being a conservative.  Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan also often make the list, in a clear case of historical evaluation over the long haul - they’re most infamous over what they didn’t do, what they allowed to happen in their wake.

Some were tremendously complex and disjointed in their legacy.  Richard Nixon was also a conservative, and was, along that ideology, completely ruthless and lacking in even basic morals.  But he was also capable of compromise for the good of the country and occasionally produced moments of brilliance in foreign and public domestic policy.  (As Ralph Nader correctly points out, he would be seen as too liberal for the Republican Party of today, and probably the Democratic Party as well.)  Ronald Reagan has been unjustly deified by conservatives who are absolutely desperate for a lasting hero who matches their peculiar anti-social ideology; thus, he “won the Cold War” by taking a hard line against the Soviets - a hilarious and childishly naive assessment.  He damn near turned the world into a series of smoking radioactive craters, succeeding only when he, uncharacteristically and in a series of manuevers which are just now being historically understood, suggested nuclear disarmament at Rejkjavik.

The real question in evaluating Bush is, what will happen five, ten, or more years from now because of his incompetence.  That he’s unfit for the job is by this point beyond debate by reasonable people; it could serve as a litmus test to see if those with whom you are attempting to share an opinion are worthy of any kind of intelligent discourse on the subject.  Not liberal or conservative, not Republican or Democrat, nor Green nor Libertarian nor Constitutionist nor any other party…that Bush is an incompetant blight on the Presidency is as true and as obvious as the rising of the sun in the morning or the passage of the tides throughout the day.  It’s a matter of debate only as a divider between the reasoned and the mad.

I’d argue that Bush’s shredding of any dignity remaining in the office of the Presidency will have extremely far-reaching effects; the next President, whomever it may be, will have to spend pretty much an entire term erasing the wreckage that has been done to not only the office, but the Constitution, and indeed the entire makeup of the United States.  We are now the logical extreme of conservative neo-fascist states: we are a nation of might-makes-right, pre-emptive striking militarists and torturers.  We serve only the global elite, the ultra-capitalists and power-mongers.  We are drowning in debt and addicted to foreign supplied fossil fuels - which we will take whenever we deem necessary, given the first precepts.  All of this was done in a few short years…

The next President, and likely those after that, will be faced with the task of, pretty much, turning this country back into a democratic republic guided by law.  Granted, Lincoln had to do so as well, but at least had a Union from which to start; this subversion has come from within, from the very office which is attempting to turn it all around…the only base to work from is the majority of the people, of the country and the world, unrepresented as they are in the halls of power.*

Obviously, the true test will come over time…but there’s no good that can come of the legacy of George W. Bush, and there’s probably no farther down he can go - at least, comparatively.

* Thus, any change but an institutional one is no change at all.  You’re welcome, Barack.

(Note: many naughty words herein. Sometimes, there’s only one way of saying something. Warning duly delivered, those under the age of, etc., your mileage may vary.)

Cab Driver: Look out there; it’s a fucking coup d’état.
Sands: I can’t see, fuck-mook. I have no eyes.
– from Once Upon a Time in Mexico

I don’t really know whether it was Robert Rodriguez or perhaps Johnny Depp who first coined that particular word - Depp, apparently, ad-libbed some of his dialogue in the film - but I’ve come to appreciate in retrospect the usefulness and versatility of the word fuck-mook*. It takes the pejorative mook, used to describe the faceless extras that are plowed down by the dozen in martial arts and Hong Kong action films, and turns up the vitriol an appropriate and necessary notch. It also serves to amplify the connotation of mook - that of the generic human obstacle, too lacking in any personality or imagination to register on one’s consciousness as anything but, and useful only in their rapid disposal. The prefix fuck-, in this case, indicates an almost willing embrace of a fate over and above that - someone who has reached their pinnacle in mookdom, either through working their hardest and failing to arrive anywhere else, or through a cussed determination, unvarnished by a scrap of intelligence, to become such to those who honestly do have better things to do.

It would be very useful in, for example, describing some of the management at my current job. Ah, but wait!, you say. Management is not under consideration for mookdom, as they are in the positions of power, not obsequious subservience! Yes, quite a clever observation, however a) these are for the most part middle managers, and therefore about as useful as screen doors on a submarine, and b) they serve to prevent work from being done by those below (for none is done laterally), and recognized by those above.  Thus, fuck-mooks; thank you for playing.

Rolling Stone, of late, has some good political stories about fuck-mooks. John McCain is apparently rapidly retuning his teetering image to appeal solely to fuck-mooks - Matt Taibbi has the story, and it’s a very impressive rant. It does also serve to draw a distinction between the Republicans and Democrats that may previously have been located elsewhere. The GOP, for the past fifty years or so, has made a concerted effort to reach beyond its traditional core of fat cat corporate slime and court every single person of below-average intelligence** in the country…ones who would be quite willing to allow anything to happen to anyone beyond their own mailbox as long as they can have their (*sniff*) flag, their Bible, their SUV, and American Idol piped into their plasma screen TV. The only problem with this is, it’s a winning strategy. The number of chuckleheads out there is greater than the number of reasonable persons, and when truly motivated to do something destructive to the whole, such as, say, electing George W. Bush (or at the very least pretending to), they truly morph into fuck-mooks. It is these whom John McCain, formerly a “maverick”, is courting in his attempt to be President.

Many Democrats, particularly of the Daily Kos-type (also fuck-mooks themselves, but that’s a long story), have retaliated by embracing their own, now-created base: the educated “elite”. There is a despair at getting run by a bunch of dingbats for an extended period of time, as well as having your own party being so lacking in testicular fortitude that the only way you win anything is by sending in an Arkansas bubba who’ll not only act like them, but enact their policy as well. And you have to feel for them. How sad is it that being intelligent in any measure whatsoever is seen as “elite”, branding you as hopelessly out of touch with the majority of your own country? How sad is it that McCain is now a righty hate-monger, Obama is now a socialist, Hillary Clinton is now the champion of the lunch-bucket crowd, and Bob Barr is the new defender of the Constitution - and if you question any of this as transparent pandering or labelling, you’re tossed off as a “fringey” “kook”?

Right, back on topic. The point is that the opposite side is being fueled by not only marching morons, but proud marching morons - true fuck-mooks to the rest of us. Ignorance has been raised within to such a level that it is a higher calling, and intelligence is stigmatized as a sin - “elitism”, it’s now called. And this makes sense. When society has matured, it has done so by means of liberalism and progressivism. In the last century, conservatives championed things like slavery, voting restrictions, and “states’ rights”, all in the name of the Bible or “natural law” or similar, familiar-sounding arguments. The difference was that the money guys - the actual “elite” - were against them, because it got in the way of making money. Starting with Goldwater, and reaching its pinnacle with Reagan *spit*, the money guys wised up and realigned themselves with the yokels, because they realized - probably after watching things happen in Europe before WWII - that if you just spat out the same nonsense and didn’t back down from it regardless of how much it stank, you really could fool all of those people all of the time. The point was to transform anti-intellectualism into a siren call. Keep society from maturing and you keep them from progressing - and conservatives win.

This is why the opposite tack - progressives sucking back up to the Great Unwashed - doesn’t work***. The “wisdom of crowds” has marched on; it’s now seen mainly on the Intarnets****. Those left are the type that McCain is now tapping into - the point of Taibbi’s column.

(As an aside, when said this way, it’s easy to see the appeal of The Matrix as a sort of lefty dystopian fantasy…an entire population of fuck-mooks, too lacking to know they are being manipulated by unfeeling elites…all standing in the way of those who are intelligent enough to manipulate computers and cut themselves loose from the “strings” that others can’t see. More study needed here; this might lead into the third party/independent/secessionist wing of the progressive movement. At least, I hope it does.)

* The Urban Dictionary doesn’t do the term justice in its definition and therefore isn’t linked here.

**** Sorry, “Internet”. The “series-of-tubes” variations are Republican in nature (See: Stevens, Ted; Bush, G.W.; etc.) Which kinda proves my point, now that I think of it.

Leave it to the WashPost, in particular their Express birdcage liner that’s handed out free at Metro stops, to completely and utterly miss the point of the legacy of Bo Diddley.  The generic, vaguely respectful footnote-style obit noted all of the superficial aspects and failed to capture what we have lost in our soul by not having him with us.

Bo Diddley was much more than a rock ‘n’ roller with a funny guitar - it was he and Chuck Berry that pretty much invented the genre, taking a backup instrument and turning it into the centerpiece of what was not only a new style of music, but a new cultural revolution.  Every brat who’s wanted to make noise in a basement ever since the 1950s…every disaffected youth or sub-working-class dreckarbeiter or borderline criminal who’s had it with the Man, with Whitey, with society, or with whatever the hell you’ve got and escapes it by picking up a guitar owes it all to those two men.

But there was a difference in them.  Chuck played the stuff that teeners “knew” really mattered:  girls, cars, parties, drive-ins, and parking by the lake.  Even though it was met with withering disapproval from the adults of the day, it was almost an expected, wholesome part of just growing up.  Kids were gonna act up sometimes, and Chuck Berry spoke to that. Bo Diddley was…well, different. Bo Diddley was dangerous.

I walk twenty-seven mile of barbed wire
I got a cobra snake for a necktie
Brand-new house out on the roadside
And it’s made outta rattlesnake hide
I got a brand-new chimney, baby, put on top
And it’s made out of human skull
Come on, take a little walk with me, baby
And tell me who do you love

Nobody who wrote or sang anything like that was up to any good at all, and Bo Diddley knew it and did not care. This was what he knew from the hoodoo tradition that permeated up from New Orleans, and it was not for everybody. He built his own damn guitar, pissed off Ed Sullivan on his own show, and called himself a gunslinger and a roadrunner, baby. And who were you to argue? You don’t know Diddley, indeed.

The better articles describing his passing talk of him listening to gospel music, giving it the thumbs-up, and saying he was going to see Jesus.  And then he did, and that’s cool.  And I can’t help but think, as a believer, of what that scene must be like, because you kind of know how Bo Diddley is going to do it - he’s going to do it his way, all the way.  No floating around and strumming on harps.  Heaven just got louder.

I think today, by way of remembrance, we should all do something that someone whom we shouldn’t pay any never mind to anyway will disapprove of.  Yeah, it’s true - we don’t know Diddley.  But if we can each maybe take a tenth of that with us, then the world will be better for it.

I don’t pat myself on the back very often - no, really, I don’t - but boy howdy, my latest podcast ep suddenly took off.  Granted, it has more to do with my loverly efbq hawking it on a couple of podcast sites than anything I did, but it’s still nice to have happen.  It stars m’self and my sister (link to her usual font of incorrectness), and it was pretty good.  Another ep is of course in the works, so stay tuned.

That and my fantasy baseball team being in first place is enough to brighten my spirits a bit after the pounding that Jesse Johnson took in Maine, which is essentially enough to take him right out of the race.  At least we won’t be doing what Hillary is doing, though he is staying in the race.  (Note to “Mary”: what do we have to lose?  Have a look at Hillary and ask that again.  Betcha can’t.)

I just went to get some lunch at a laughingly named “cafe” around here on North Capitol St.; a sandwich shop, really, run by Korean immigrants and doing a very brisk business at the time.  I handed the fellow at the front a sawbuck for my meal; I received in change two fives and a bit of coin.  I stared at the cash for the briefest of seconds.  He’d mistaken my ten for a twenty.  Decision time, right there at the register.  What was my conscience saying to me?

It is of course wrong to say that I don’t have a well-developed conscience, a sense of right and wrong, and I believe that it’s pretty strong, in general.  I’ve been known to return to stores to give them money, and I’ve only shoplifted once in my life - that was a comic book.  On the other hand, I, er, may have been known to download music from the Interwebs without paying for it, and may have otherwise acted unfairly in other ways.

It’s not wrong to say, however, that most interactions under capitalism involve what you can get away with, although I’m not naive enough to think there’s any system that’s truly free of it.  Self-interest is assumed, and the assumption is further that you will put yourself out the least and attempt to gain the most.  Even better is when you can leave your customer without a choice - they must deal with things on your terms…such as when record companies jack up the price of music across the board, or when a sandwich shop overcharges based on their neighborhood.  I got a turkey club with a side of fries and a bottle of iced tea; nine bucks and change, as indicated above.

I would guess - and I’m just throwing this out there, it wasn’t a justification before the fact - that in a way, I’m introducing fairness to my interactions through selective rewards and punishment.  Charge me $9.50 for something that’s six bucks tops and you are stealing from me, just as surely as if you’d taken the extra money out of my hands by force.  Charge me the six bucks in advance and make a mistake with the change and I’ll give it back to you.  Similarly, if you’re an artist putting your music out there along with the equivalent of a tip jar, I’ll pay.  If you’re a bunch of assholes and scream about “your property” and “theft”, then I will do everything in my power to jack you up.  It’s your “intellectual property”?  Then fine - you go to your own bedroom and play it for yourself.  Getting it on the ‘net is “theft”?  You want to explain your CD prices, then?  Do something about your theft and I’ll do something about mine.  Having the “law” on your side (particularly law that you paid for, through lobbyists) doesn’t make it any different, or any more right.

You might guess what I did with the change.

Now I have a couple of credos I live by.  The first and foremost is that actions should have reasons behind them that make some objective sense.  If you don’t want to do that, at least have some other, more subjective reason.  Do it for art, do it for the Revolution, do it for some reason.  Don’t do it because you just happened to be plodding along and this was the default action.  Don’t do it because it was the thing that the teeming masses of that area were doing.  Question yourself, and question the dominant paradigm.  Of course, by introducing my comment in this fashion, you know that I’m about to talk about baseball caps.

Now back in my day, prior to the meteor impact, people wore baseball caps because they were fans of the team, for the most part.  You were a Dodgers fan, you wore a Dodgers cap.  Not too complicated.  Sure, there were fair-weather fans - teams like the Dallas Cowboys and N.Y. Yankees and, preeminently of late, the Red Sox, wouldn’t exist without them.  They wore the caps because they wanted desperately to be cool, and hoped that the team from the distant city in which they’d never set foot and would be hopeless lost and miserable if they ever did would sympathetically lend them that little bit of cool to bolster their lousy self-image.  (I, OTOH, would frequently choose losing teams from other cities in leagues where I didn’t have a dog in the race and wear their stuff, just to try to give some balance back to the universe and stand out a bit.)

At one point many years ago, when she was in her teenerdom, my little sister apparently suggested to my mother that I be given a San Jose Sharks t-shirt or something as a gift.  Sharks merch flew off the shelves at the time, which I chalked up to the team being new.  But it wasn’t just that.  With their cutesy teal colors becoming de rigeur for every single damned sports team that began play at that time, the Sharks began the trend of sports team as fashion statement.  Now people didn’t even care how the team did, or even what sport it was - it was simply wearing a logo.  I’d say it was free advertising*, which it was to a certain extent, as the team did get some money from the sale of the apparel, but in another sense, they weren’t even selling the team’s tickets.  It was simply adapting a sigil as one’s own, and not having the originality to make it for yourself.

Later, the whole thing came completely unglued.  Teams started to put out different colors of their apparel; there were red Yankee caps.  Girls started demanding pink hats, and the impossible to read black-on-black caps became a statement of…something, don’t know what.  Tags were left on, the brims were worn flat, caps were made to be permanently worn backwards (thus defeating the whole purpose of keeping the sun out of your eyes), and other asinine-looking silliness sprouted up.  But alas, this was and is fashion, which is a word meaning, “a large number of people making asses of themselves more or less in unison rather than simply one or two”.

Today, I spotted a kid on the Metro with a black cap sporting a green logo.  It was the same as the Red Sox “hanging socks” logo, but of course, divorced from that context in that it was green; it could have been for the White Sox as well, given the circumstances.  As I still think in the old-fashioned, making-sense way, I assumed that the guy was a fan of a minor league team, the Green Sox, which probably exists out there somewhere.  (I checked; they don’t.)  The only other thing on the cap was an MLB logo in back; it too was entirely in green, but more to the point, its presence indicated that this was indeed the cap of a major league team.  But which one?  Was it indeed a Red Sox cap?  Did they get the money for it?  Could the White Sox not press charges, saying that they should get half the money for that cap, since it may as well have been theirs…?  And there’d be no proving it, because it’s not the cap of a Ghod-damned major league team!

We have actually sunk to that point.  The Red Sox don’t even have to wear a bit of red.  By the time I saw the Latino kid at Fort Totten wearing a Yankees jacket and a Dodgers cap without any apparent embarrassment, I was just past the point of disgust.

Now I hate to just bitch about things without suggesting some kind of positive remedy, and I did indeed come up with several for this particular problem…however, all of my proposed remedies contained the phrase, “…and then we beat them with sticks”, which people tend to frown upon as a solution - despite the fact that I would recommend that for Red Sox fans just on general principle.  Of such things are comments columns made, so, have at it, I suppose.

*Actually, I should indeed charge money to companies for the advertising space on my t-shirt.  You want me to wear the Nike “swoosh”?  No problem; just cross my palm with the appropriate cash and let me know what you want the ad to say.