It Can Happen Here
One "room" of the FDR memorial in DC.Here's the thing. We live in a country that's forgotten the Depression. I was raised by two parents who lived through it. My father was born in 1905, so he was 24 when it started. This was after he'd survived the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. No wonder the man prayed to the Virgin Mary for help every night.
My great aunt on my mother's side, Mame Mae, kept a pot of stew perpetually simmering on the stove in her house in Minneapolis. The hobos (as they were called then) drew hieroglyphics on the fence outside the house that said, "friendly house" so that other hobos knew they could stop in for food and the chance to do chores. Hobos were people like my family - white, middle-class - whose jobs, like rugs, got pulled out from under them when the stock market crashed. Today it seems "acceptable" to think of those things happening to people of other races, or from other countries, or with mental illness or some disease - anything to make them seem like "the other" and not like us. Those things don't happen to us. Not to people with college degrees and McMansions.
Before the Depression, my mother was lucky. She was raised by her aunt, Mame, and her uncle - a man whose drinking and bad judgment made him alternately a millionaire, a pauper, a millionaire, a pauper, then a government worker in DC. Consequently, Mom was cautious of wealth, though she always had a desire to be among the wealthy, I think.
The point of all this is that I came from parents who'd lived through the unthinkable happening: jobs went away, families went broke, children raised their siblings, a nut in Germany tried to take over the world and exterminate a great race of people... and we were all tasked with being part of the solution. Whether it was cooking a meal for our starving fellow man when they came to our front door, or whether it was paying for the GI Bill to send our soldiers to college when they came back from war. We were part of something greater than ourselves. And we made things better.
It's election season. We have a chance to do something just slightly similar today. We have different boogeymen and fears, but fear itself hasn't changed - just the call to action we get from our leaders. Today, we're asked to shop. Today, fear is not the only thing we have to fear.
To many politicians today, the thing we have to fear is the truth.
Slap them with the consequences, people. Demand representation. Demand honesty and accountability. Or trust me, it has happened before and it can happen again... Our house of cards will come crashing down upon us. But this time, Mame Mae is gone and her like is not to be found again.
If we don't take care of ourselves and our country, we will all starve. We will at last all be The Other. But we can turn it all around.
To quote P.J. O'Rourke: Vote like hell!
Why Bother?
Why bother to vote?
It doesn't make a difference. The Black Box machines will just eliminate it. The Bad Guys will always win.
Call me crazy, but I think it makes a difference. Here we've got ten (mostly) stupid ballot initiatives on the ballot and 2 weeks to think about them. It takes a million times more effort than most people would care to spend on it. Maybe only the geeks do it. But you gotta.
I disagree that you have to be ultimately informed to vote in an informed way. Just one of our Voters' Pamphlets was over 170 pages long. Who's bored enough to read that? So, what you do is you skim through the initiatives that might make sense to you. You see who writes the arguments pro- and con-, then you vote with the organizations or people you agree with. A friend in Eugene says he knows who to vote for because he drives by a well-informed friend's house at election season. He remembers whose signs she puts in her yard and votes for those things/people. That's good enough. I bet that's even good enough for our founding fathers.
I've been working on this right to vote thing. Amazingly, it's not a right that's guaranteed in the Constitution - yet another proof that that document is not infallible.
In those days, only rich, white landowners could vote. Forget women. Forget anyone whose skin wasn't white. The slaves were only considered 3/5th human. These were areas that had to change in the blessed document.
Today, smart political forces have realized there's a value to keeping certain segments of society from voting. Stop the elderly - they're not too sharp anymore. Stop the disabled - you know they'll only vote for more government aid. Stop the working poor - they don't have the time to wait in line because their shift starts in 45 mins.
If things keep going as they are, the right to vote will one day be like the right to choose - something enshrined at the top of a precipice somewhere in the desert - the kind on top of which Wile E. Coyote would land after an explosion. We'll be able to point to the right to vote, squinting in the setting sun, and say, "Look, we still have the right! It's over there, where the SUVs and Hummers and Segues and Cessnas can get to it. That's all that matters."
Tonight I toast the right to vote. Hell, I've already done it myself. All my choices are in the mail. Nobody's dirty ad can touch me anymore. And maybe, just maybe, things will change in 9 days.
To quote my boss: WOOOOO!
If Women Ran the World
I'm on a radio show next Saturday morning with my former town's mayor, discussing "if women ran the world." So I've been thinking about that a lot.
Then the Mark Foley thing happened and they threatened to end the page program in Congress. I got to thinking how that outcome would make our congressional representatives equal to the Taliban, whose desires were/are so out of control that the women near them must hide their face, head and bodies under burkas. This is the only way to keep the men from being driven mad with desire. [See above.] Much like members of Congress and those nubile pages.
If women ran the world, these choices would not be an option. Man would have to simply keep it in their pants and shut up about it. I get attracted to men all the time -- okay occasionally -- but somehow I manage to not commit a crime against them.
Maybe I have more faith in the fortitude of men than the members of Congress do. I believe they can be trusted around young boys and girls, for the most part.
Then there's that conundrum: do you have to be an asshole to run for Congress or does running for Congress make you an asshole? (Transpose words like "child abuser" in appropriate places in that sentence... or other nouns... and it still works. The transitive property of scum.)
I think it's time we stopped stooping to the lowest common denominator in what behavior we'll accept of our "leaders." I think it's time we demanded more and left the kiddies alone. Whaddayasay?
My only residual fear: that this crisis will drive Karl Rove and his minions to unexpected depths this October to find a Surprise worth taking our attention away from Mark Foley and Dennis Hastert.
Hold onto your hats. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.
Richard Nixon's Close, Close Friend is Back
"The illegal we can do right now; the unconstitutional will take a little longer."
Henry Kissinger
One of the revelations in Woodward's book is that Henry Kissinger is giving advice on a regular basis to the Bush Administration on their conduct of our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That REALLY makes me think we're going to bomb Iran eventually too. These guys are insane. All you have to do is watch Dr. Strangelove and everything will become clear to you. Or perhaps the following will help.
On Kissinger's creation of the Plumbers, who broke into the DNC's office at the Watergate:
"It was the leading Anglo-American financier factions who decided to dump Nixon, and availed themselves of the pre-existing Watergate affair in order to reach their goal. The financiers were able to implement their decision all the more easily thanks to the numerous operatives of the intelligence community who had been embedded within the Plumbers from the moment of their creation in response to an explicit demand coming from George Bush's personal mentor, Henry Kissinger...
Preponderant power during the last years of Nixon and during the Ford years was in any case exercised by Henry Kissinger, the de facto president, about whose pedigree and strategy something has been said above... in retrospect there can be no doubt that Watergate was a coup d'etat, a creeping and muffled cold coup in the institutions which has extended its consequences over almost two decades. The roots of the administrative fascism of the Reagan and Bush years are to be found in the institutional tremors and changed power relations set off by the banal farce of the Watergate break-in...
The Plumbers were created at the demand of Henry Kissinger, who told Nixon that something had to be done to stop leaks in the wake of the 'Pentagon Papers' affair of 1971. But if the Plumbers were called into existence by Kissinger, they were funded through a mechanism set up by Kissinger clone George Bush. A salient fact about the White House Special Investigations Unit (or Plumbers) of 1971-72 is that the money used to finance it was provided by George Bush's business partner and lifelong intimate friend, Bill Liedtke, the president of Pennzoil... Cancelling the Patman probe meant that there would be no investigation of Watergate before the 1972 Presidential election.
The Washington Post virtually ended reference to the Watergate affair, and spoke of Nixon's opponent, George McGovern, as unqualified for the Presidency.The Republican Party was handed another four year Administration. Bush, Kissinger, Rockefeller and Ford were the gainers."
-- "George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography"
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
Kissinger is a proponent of "Realipolitik" - as defined in Wikipedia:
Realpolitik (German: real ("realistic", "practical" or "actual") and Politik ("politics")) is a term used to describe politics based on strictly practical rather than idealistic notions, and practiced without any "sentimental illusions."
Oh, if only he'd use that philosophy to squash the "optimism" and belief that you can bomb people into democracy that are the driving forces of their policies...
Lastly, Henry, in his own words, waxing eloquent about Tricky Dick over the latter's casket:
"Richard Nixon's foreign policy goals were long-range. And he pursued them without regard to domestic political consequences. When he considered our nation's interests at stake, he dared confrontations, despite the imminence of elections and also in the midst of the worst crisis of his life. And he bore, if with some pain, the disapproval of longtime friends and allies over relaxing tensions with China and the Soviet Union. He drew strength from a conviction. He often expressed to me the price for doing things halfway is no less than for doing it completely. So we might as well do them properly. That's Richard Nixon's greatest accomplishment. It was as much moral as it was political -- to lead from strength at a moment of apparent weakness, to husband the nation's resilience and, thus, to lay the basis for victory in the Cold War...
So let us now say goodbye to our gallant friend. He stood on pinnacles that dissolved in the precipice. He achieved greatly and he suffered deeply. But he never gave up. In his solitude, he envisaged a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen historic friendships, and give new hope to mankind -- a vision where dreams and possibilities conjoined."
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it - but why do all of us have to share their leaky, sinking boat?
One "room" of the FDR memorial in DC.
