Back to the Parties

Ok, as always, its been a while since I last posted, but I'm going to keep it short.

I had a conversation recently about the "true" nature of the Republican party.  My counterpart insisted that George W. Bush did not represent "true" Republicanism, and that a true Republican would not have spent so outrageously nor violated the constitution so egregiously.

This was smart young man.  I can't remember just now with which of my friends I was having this conversation, but I do recall clearly that he didn't seem the least bit lost when I took his "true" Republican argument back to 1801, begining with the premise that the Republican Party (or, rather, the ideology that is today called the Republican Party), and I quote myself, "was founded by George Washington, or rather, founded on the image of Washington, because Washington never wanted there to be 'factions' at all, by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton."

I continued by pointing out that almost always since that time, there have been two tracks to Republican ideology, one represented ably by Adams, the other, frighteningly by Hamilton.  He readily agreed.  The whole problem with my friend's premise about "true" Republicanism, is that Adams did not want factions either.  It was almost exclusively on the engine of Hamilton's callousness that the two party system was formed, and Adams became a part of the conservative faction almost by default, because he needed those rightist votes combined with his centrist followers in order to win the presidency over Jefferson.

Notice that Adams HATED Hamilton, all his life.  Notice that with the exception of the height of their policy battles at the turn of the century, Adams and Jefferson were THE CLOSEST high profile friends of the whole congress of Founding Fathers, all their lives.  The truth is that the "true" Republicanism argued by my friend, has far more in common with Jefferson and the present day Democratic Party than it EVER had with Hamilton and his monarchist, treasury centered policy.  So the "true" Republicanism is actually exactly what we've had for the past eight years.  George W. Bush (the Federalist Society's president), is exactly the logical extension of the core priniciples that led to the foundation of the Republican Party.

The Thing About Making Fun of Barack Obama

So there's this uproar both from Barack Obama and from sources far around the political spectrum from him regarding the cover of the New Yorker, which I believe would intentionally damage Barack Obama about as much as I believe the son of god (any god) was begotten by a human woman and the child went on to do wondrous deeds.

The feeling of offense must be genuinely felt by Obama's supporters, among whom I don't classify myself (I'm one of his voters, but I wouldn't say I think he's the best candidate), because many of them get the New Yorker and like it's tone, generally. And in a sense, it is a funny cartoon, not aimed at Obama at all, but using him as the subject. The problem is that, being a political cartoon, and being a quite sophisticated joke, it is killed by the fact that there just isn't a lot of room for humor surrounding Barack Obama becoming the President of the United States of America.

In particular, the time surrounding his inauguration is a sensitive subject for his backers, who fear assassination (and for good reason of course). And more broadly, for people of leftist ideologies in general, the chilling effect of his assassination, yet another liberal Icon murdered in the long 20th century, would likely send shockwaves through the country. Drawing a picture, however funny it may be on a sophisticated level, that might easily be considered emblematic by the opposition, whether by isolated fundamentalists or by the broader conservative movement, while it isn't exactly irresponsible, is just effing scary.

There's just not a lot of room for humor surrounding the topic of Barack Obama becoming President. I mean, an unsophisticated person, i. e. an idealized voter of the red state presidential strategy, might easily look at that picture, go "Yeah, that's exactly what we're going to have if that nigger becomes President; a Black Muslim Anti-American Militant and his Black Bitch of a wife."

There's just not a lot of room for humor surrounding the topic of any black man doing something for the first time. Doesn't everyone know what a cross it was for Jackie Robinson to bear, being the first black man in Major League Baseball? How all his career, spikes would be turned up at him covering second base, how he was under near constant death threats all his life.

There's just not a lot of room for humor surrounding the topic of a black man risking his life to do something a white man might dream of doing all his life without the slightest knowledge that people of other backgrounds must fear for their lives when aspiring to the same ambition.

I don't blame the New Yorker for trying; heck, maybe they hoped to elicit that passionate response from the left, to stir emotions in preparation for the final campaign. I think that's basically the actual result, but really publishing it seems a lot like playing with fire in the old fireworks warehouse.

Farewell Angelina

This is a bit of fiction I wrote in college. I'm rather fond of it, but anyone who has a suggestion is welcome, in fact requested to comment. I don't consider criticism as intrinsically negative.

It begins with a familiar melody, telling a story from an unfamiliar world...

Farewell Angelina the bells of the crown

Have been stolen by bandits I must follow their sound

The triangle tingles; the music plays slow

But farewell Angelina the night is on fire and I must go.

There is no use in talking and there is no need for blame

There is nothing to prove everything still is the same.

A table stands empty by the edge of the stream

But farewell Angelina the sky is changing colors and I must leave

The jacks and the queens they forsake the courtyard

52 gypsies now file past the guard.

In the space where the deuce and the ace once ran wild,

Farewell Angelina the sky is folding; I’ll see you after a while.

See the cross-eyed pirates sit perched in the sun

Shooting tin cans with a sawed off shotgun

And the corporals and neighbors clap and cheer with each blast

But farewell Angelina the sky is trembling and I must leave fast.

King Kong, little elves, in the rooftops they dance

Valentino type tangos while the heroes clean hands.

Shut the eyes of the dead not to embarrass anyone

Farewell Angelina the sky is flooding over and I must be gone

The camouflage parrot he flutters from fear

When something he doesn’t know about suddenly appears

What cannot be imitated perfect must die

Farewell Angelina the sky is flooding over and I must go where it is dry

Machine guns are roaring puppets heave rocks

At misunderstood visions and at the faces of clocks

Call me any name you like I will never deny it

But farewell Angelina the sky is erupting and I must go where it is quiet.

Farewell Angelina

We had left the main camp late in the afternoon because I had wanted to ask the Lady Angelina to marry me. I am not a nobleman and although I will certainly be at least a Commander in the army someday it would still have been an affront to her honor to be asked for her hand in public by a commoner. I was going off on campaign soon; the Alleman were already raiding in the east. But I had decided that I loved the Lady Angelina and I knew I had to ask her before leaving on campaign because I would lose my nerve otherwise.

She looked so beautiful as we rode a mile or so from camp to a glade I’d found scouting before we stopped for the night. The Bells of the Crown hanging in her hair like musical gems gave off giggling tingles whenever she tossed her hair. I could hardly speak as we entered the glade and the sunset shone off her face, I had no eyes for anything or anyone but her, more foolish me. In my anxiety I bent down on one knee almost before we’d really come beside the stream with the fallen log. I stared into her surprised eyes and asked the question I’d learned by rote, knowing I wouldn’t be able to think.

“My love, will you become my wife?”

She screamed.

She screamed again and turned to run. Only then did I see the men approaching from behind her. As they reached for her I went to whip out my blade but a sharp pain at the back of my head put me on my face in the edge of the stream. Before my eyes cleared, before I could even roll over there were two men sitting on me.

“The first of you who makes another sound will eat their own tongue before we leave,” the voice was raspy and lilting. “We don’t mean you any harm milady, we only need those bells in your hair.”

When I heard this I was furious, this scoundrel was going to steal the Bells of the Crown and probably sell them to some noble who would use them to shame the King or else hold them ransom for a ridiculous price. I started bucking and squirming but all it got me was a kick in the groin, which of course shut me up.

It by no means cooled me off though, especially when they proceeded to lay hands on the Lady Angelina, taking the bells from her by force.

“You coward, no man with honor would treat a woman so—“ I stopped abruptly when a knife slid lightly along my neck, drawing blood shallowly and nearly cutting my jugular. I tried to slow the pounding of my heart, the pressure through my veins, anything to gain another micrometer from that slicing edge. I could feel the painful burning of the lightly sliced skin already beginning to throb in my brain.

“But I am not a man of honor Lieutenant Graves; I have been spying on you and I knew that you would be coming here tonight, I followed you from camp, I’ve been listening to your most intimate moments for months, knowing that you were the key to separating the Bells from their owners just long enough to snatch them.

“Ah, my dear, I am afraid I have ruined what was supposed to have been a very special moment. You should never have worn your lady’s Bells without her permission. I know because it is my way that she will not fault you. But the guilt will be intense. Hmm,” he smiled to himself, “no, not a man of honor at all.”

It was less than a minute before they were gone. They smashed my horn before leaving and galloped off without touching our purses or the strongbox on the wagon.

The moment they were out of earshot I was up and running after them. As I ran I shouted direction to the Lady Angelina to send men after me with a horse and my armor. I still remember her face, tear stained and still full of fear, but as I ran off into the night I saw her face grow determined and she turned to the wagon. The last time I saw my beloved Angelina she was marching over to the mule without even gathering the picnic basket from the ground.

The road the bandits took ran west; back the way we had come, away from the castle and its garrison only a day to the east. I chased them on foot for an hour before my squad game pounding up the road behind me. I didn’t even let my men stop to wait for me to mount up, only caught up with them a minute later. The bandits had followed a small cart path north and east, directly into the setting sun when the main road curved south around a set of hills.

The sun set in an orange blaze of fire that fueled my drive to find to bandits and I drove the horses hard those first hours. But in the twilight, I had to slow the men and in the end I had to call a halt when the trail could no longer be made out even though we climbed down from the saddle to try.

My squad was three twenty-man teams. The first team carries lances and broad swords and their horses are heavily plated. The second team carries large shields and one-handed battle-axes. They also have horses outfitted for a charge. The last team carries bows and broad swords. The bows are long for horse bows, meant for use while the horse stands still and the horses themselves are much more lightly armored so that the team can move quickly. You’ve never seen a more disciplined bunch than my boys; there wasn’t a sound from man or horse through the three-watch night. For all the bandits knew they had gotten away free as Scotts.

All night I sat up and kept an eye on my men. Well, I told myself that was what I was doing. Really I was replaying the encounter with the bandits over and over again in my head, first the lights sparkling off the Lady Angelina’s eyes, her spreading the blanket then me grasping her arm and sinking down to one knee. Was that a flicker of movement I should have seen? A clink of chain mail rustling?

I don’t know how many times I told myself that it didn’t matter if it was my fault, that what had happened had happened and now my only choice was to follow the lost Bells. My Queen had charged her serving maid Lady Angelina with the protection of those bells and I intended to see that what I had allowed to be lost was returned. But that didn’t help ease my guilt, especially when I thought how I had let these bandits interrupt our privacy, my farewell before going off to campaign, my proposal.

I thought of Angelina, I worried whether she would have answered ‘yes,’ I wondered how she would greet me when I returned the next day with the bells. The King would probably reward me with a small title, recovering the Bells of the Crown was no small thing after all. I scolded myself for thinkng of the advantage. Ha.

I never did sleep that first night; I kept thinking I heard the bells tingling in the night. It was never repeated but it would get me thinking through the same old circle of guilt. When I finally calmed my mind and settled down near sleep I would hear it again and start listening for it, but my mind would always wander and then quiet before the bells would ring again. The moment I could see my hands I began rousing the men, first my sergeants then going down the row waking each and whispering the day’s orders which began with absolute silence until otherwise ordered. We had been no more than half an hour behind the bandits when we made camp and they could not have gone much farther than us in the pitch dark of an overcast night even if they’d scouted the area beforehand. If they had been following me for a long time they probably had a hideout here but it was likely not their headquarters.

The true headquarters would be farther from the capitol: I have still never heard of another bandit incident within one hundred miles of the capital. Well, not in the last two hundred years. They would be going back to their true headquarters today if they could, but if I could find them before they left I could have the Bells back in the castle before the King even had a chance to hold court. No one would ever need to know they had been stolen; they don’t come out in public except at court.

Sure enough a half hour tracking on foot brought us to a secret trail and after scouting the area I surprised the bandits at their breakfasts. In the end I killed twelve and captured captured fifty-two of the outlaws, but a small group, no more than six escaped out of a second exit to their hideout. The bells escaped me. I sent the squad back to the castle with the prisoners. I collected all the papers I found in the leader’s tent and read them as I set out in pursuit of the bells with a dozen chosen men.

The papers contained many assorted maps, some of the area, which we put to good use in our pursuit. We realized they were heading for the King’s forest to the north by tracing our path on the map and we even chanced some shortcuts and gained nearly an hour by my guess.

We kept right on their tail like this for three days, sometimes losing a few minutes, sometimes gaining, always scheming, always pressing, but they were forever out of reach just at the next ridge.

I soon wished I’d brought more men and especially more mounts. I knew I couldn’t simply ride off across the kingdom with my unit but I still grudged the loss of manpower when I came upon fired bridges and toppled trees that had to be cleared. Lady Angelina had made quite a scene when she arrived in camp all windswept and calling to arms. Speaking to Angelina in private the King told her that he had decided he could not spare any units from the campaign but that he charged me directly with retrieving the Bells in the name of the Crown.

Lady Angelina, being clever as well as beautiful left this meeting with the King knowing that I could not hope to retrieve the Bells without soldiers and a horse and knowing that the King would never dispatch them. But I had given an order for her to deliver as she shrewdly saw and as the order to bring you a horse did not in any way keep your men from going on campaign they, at least, if not the rest of the king’s soldiers had to follow you. Such technicalities of logic are easy to forgive if one acts first then appologizes where permission might never have been granted.

It was thus that I had first been rescued from my sprint. A full rank would have let me surround and capture the horn that first morning but I had to respect the King’s word, I had to return my squad quickly to the capitol so they could go on campaign even if I did not lead them. They left the bandit redoubt as the sun rose and were aparently less than an hour behind the King in returning to the city. In the confusion of the Queen’s long welcoming ceremony no one even noticed their coming despite the fifty-two prisoners in rough armor and rich jewelery.

I felt badly for my men. I’d stripped the squad of most of it’s backbone, I’d left two talented recruits and a veteran of middle yerars in charge of teams of underseasoned men who were more frightened than anything at the prospect of going out on campaign. Unless they got a few more talented recruits to replace the dozen I’d taken as escort on my quest those boys would break like a stick if they faced any heavy units.

But I could not think of that. I had to retrieve those Bells, even more so now that I had the King’s command, but I didn’t need any more encouragement. The dozen ment I brought with me made it two to one odds in my favor instead of six to one against and there was time to replace fifteen men including the one dead and two seriously injured from the fight with the bandits. The squad would have a full roll by the time the King called muster.

We followed on our quarry’s very heels for four days before there was any real change in the routine of the chase. Late on the fourth day the terrain began to change, the forest to thincken and the land to roll in low hills. We began to encounter patrolls of soldiers who loomed on the hilltops threateningly and kept us from going past for fear that they were truly hostile.

I found a map of the area deep in the pile of maps; on it was marked a castle near the edge of the King’s forest. Using the map and some luck we snuck past the patrols and onto the castle grounds. I left my men guarding the exit by which we’d entered and followed the sound of bells on the other side of the castle. Sneaking past a pair of bandits patrolling I came to a place where I could here the bandit leader’s raspy voice.

“…Now, highness we have made a bargain regarding this little goodie and what you have paid me already is lost I’m afraid since my nw employer offered me three times as much money. And that is not the only thing which is lost to you,” a strangled cry brought me around the corner in time to see the Prince, filled with arrows, fall to the ground. Five bandits stood behind him lined up executioner’s style. One of them spit at the body and the rest laughed.

I was on them before they knew it, even before I knew it, and they fell to me in my rage like stalks of corn. I managed to take the Bells and I killed the remaining five bandits who attacked the Lady Angelina but the bandit leader got away once again and I, having attracted the attention of the bandits on duty guarding the castle was forced to cut my way back to my men past the two men I’d avoided before. That was the only encounter I had though and we slipped out of the castle and mad a run for it.

We were pursued of course by the patrols and we had a few close calls and we lost a man and two more took significant injuries. But finally came a time when I was sure we had lost our pursuit. I brought the company to a halt by a stream where I could wash the dried blood from my hands and bandages could be changed.

It began to rain as we ran from the castle, a hesitant drizzle building to a steady rain, which soaked everything to the bone. I’m told the King had a planned festival the evening he heard that his son had been killed and rather than call it off and go into moruning he only delayed the start of the festival so he could write a new commencement speech. The long and short of the speech, as I have heard it recounted is to say that I, Captain Graves am wanted for the treasonous murder of Prince Gerald and the thrft of the Bells of the Crown.

I tried to return to the castle. I arrived carrying the Bells of the Crown for all to see and presented them to the King with my version of events, but a man with a familir rasping voice, a councelor to the King interrupted me before I had the chance.

“Silence, lying dog,” he called me, ”You hve spun a pretty tale my friend, but we here have all seen the body of the Prince and it has been beheaded with a sword, not shot full of arrows. I have had enough of your lies, for returning the Bells you have earned yourself your life, but you are forthwith banished from this kingdom now and hance.”

Just like that I was chased from my home and the only master I ever served. With never a chance to tell them that this was the true bandit, without even the chance to see my Lady Angelina I was run from the capitol and hounded all the way to the border in the driving rain.

These days I fight for a new King, he has accepted my allegiance because he knows I am an effective commander, but I will never be a General as I might have in my true King’s army. My new King does not trust me though, he has heard both sides of the story and though he claims to believe me, I know that he will never trust me enough to give me a real command of armies.

I have fought in two wars against my old King. Apparently my name has become a common curse word in his domains, a very foul description for traitor. There are always plenty of commanders willing to fight me, the great betrayer, but none has ever beaten me and my King has lost ground to my new master year by year. It seems like I’m constantly at war now, either in the West against my old King or to the south against the Goths.

I know not how my lady sees me these day, she has probably married some rich courtier who lies through his teeth like all the rest and she likely hates me more passionately than any other in the capitol. As far as I’m concerned she can call me any name she likes; I will never deny it. I’m only tired of it all, tired of the war, tired of fighting the good fight for the other side.

I hate being a foreigner in a strange land. These court intrigues have broken me, left me a shattered hulk of a man. I fight because it is what I was born to do, but really all I want is to go off somewhere beyond the plots and beyond the fighting. When the rain comes down these day my thoughts turn back to those happy days returning from the King’s forest, still stupid enough to think I would be a hero when I returned, still thinking I was a hero.

But there are no true heroes, even the ones with the right intentions are only playing martyr in the end for the cause of someone else’s power. This is Farewell my Angelina, I wanted to write this to you, I wanted you to know my side. You have probably not even read this, merely tossed it in the fire, but I wanted you to have the chance to hear it anyways. Someday soon I will not be coming back from war, no man’s luck can last forever, after all. All I ever want out of this life is that you will mourn my passing and not find pleasure. Maybe in another time, another life we will have better luck, better time together, but I cannot bear the thought of you hating my memory through the long years of your life. I simply could not bear it.

Project for the New American Century

This is written by a woman named Mary Alice, it was handed to me by an unrelated woman on the street in Santa Barbara, who'd cut and pasted it from Ms. Alice's blog into a 1/3rd page flyer, and is a nice little entre into the murky world of the truth about what happened during the George W. Bush presidential administration.

The blueprint for our current foreign policy was being written back in 1992 by then Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney. His writings set out a new doctrine that called for U.S. power in the twentieth century to be that of an aggressive and unilateral approach that would secure American dominance of world affairs by force if necessary. This “peace through strength” policy has been unfolding from the day Bush Jr. took office: the strategic planning of it was done during the Clinton administration with funding from the military-industrial complex, energy companies, and right wing foundations. Over time, those working on these new plans evolved into PNAC, established in 1997 with members Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz at the helm.

In September 2000, the PNAC updated and refined Cheney’s original version into a new report entitled: “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century” calling for unprecedented hikes in military spending, American military bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, toppling of non-complying regimes, abrogation of international treaties, control of the world’s energy sources, militarization of outer space, total control of cyberspace, and the willingness to use nuclear weapons to achieve “American” goals. This plan by the neo-conservative or neo-con think tank, PNAC, shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power and says the U.S for decades has sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security, revealing that a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure a regime change was planned even before Bush took power in January, 2001. The lengthy blueprint for U.S. global domination can be accessed, albeit in truncated form since 2003, at Project for the New American Century’s website. Search Google for more information.

BITTER - The saga of the American working class and Barack Obama

Just for the moment, let’s forget “bitter”, we’ll get to it, but just for the moment, let’s focus on the part that actually is pertinent, which is the voting against their own self-interests.

The awful truth is that for too many years, the Democratic Party has ceded working class voting blocs to the Republican Party; yes, because the Republican Party favors gun control, and yes, because the Republican Party toes the most fundamentalist religious ideological line, and because working-class, i.e. less educated persons (voters) are more likely to value these issues, that’s not a value judgment, it’s simply a quotation of statistic.

But the unfortunate thing is that in doing so, the Democratic Party leave uncontested the very real truth that working class voters are voting against their own self-interest, because the same party that toes the line of religious ideological fundamentalism is also the party of cutting taxes, and the working class is demonstrably the prime beneficiaries of the social programs that must be killed in order to cut these taxes.

So, why do they generally vote Republican?

It is because they are bitter, but it is especially because their bitterness has been misdirected by efficient propaganda from the Republican Party which faults the party which promises a better life through robust government programs because these government programs either never materialize, or because they do not work. But the reality is that the reason these government programs never materialize has little to do with a lack of commitment on the part of Democrats, and everything to do with resistance and obstructionism from the Republican Party.

In California we have recently seen the reality of this self-feeding propaganda maneuver. Governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, ostensibly because he consistently failed to pass a budget. The reality of who was to blame for these budget failures because clear two years later, when Arnold Schwartzenegger “failed” to pass the California budget because of resistance from the same exact same group of lawmakers who had opposed Gov. Davis’s budgets, The California Republican Party.

Voters do indeed become “bitter” when their government fails to act, or fails to fulfill the promises is has made. Because of an overall right-leaning undercurrent in the media of the last 20 years, it has been possible to cast the failures of Democrats to pass the measures they want as a failure of government in general. If government does not work, the Republican premise posits, then obviously the party that favors a smaller government is the party that is best suited to running the government: at least individuals won’t be wasting tax money on social programs that don’t do anything.

The underlying fallacy should be obvious, but that’s not the way TV works. You see only what they decide to put on screen, so if they only tell you half the story, you can be excused for thinking that there is no second half to the story.

It is because of resistance from Republicans that social programs don’t get funded. Think of SCHIP, think of Social Security, think of Medicare, the FDA, the FTC, EPA, and the VA. Of course government will not work when more than a third (often, over the past 20 years, more than half) of the elected representatives of the government have a vested interest in keeping it from working.

For the past 20 years, the less functional the government, the more likely Republicans have been to be elected. It is no wonder the voters who are most in need of support from the government are bitter.

My plan

I try, and I want to do it more all the time, to live in this world, not as if it were merely $1200, 16 hours and some jet lag from here to Great Britain, but as if it were 12,000 miles, 3 gallons of petroleum, 500 gallons of jet fuel (which I must, in fairness, attribute the lot of to myself, because I can never know when I am the one passenger making the difference between 19 flights and 20 flights per day by British Airways from Los Angeles to London in any given tourist season). This is not to mention my consumer's responsibility for the building and maintenance of this air craft. In fact, it is fair to say that the more I travel by air, the greater responsibility I own for the sustenance and expantion of the industry. Think of the amount of metal that goes in to all of that skin, frame, wings, engines, moving parts, and all the little miles of wiring that run throughout the entire structure of the plane; think of the energy used in mining, extracting, shipment of the metal itself. Think of the manufacture from raw metal into alloys, then into actual products, think of the test flying, the movement from producer to buyer, and all of the myrriad trips it has taken between it's virgin flight and the time you board, think of the portion of that infrastructure that you own, and then you decide wether to fly to another continent twice, three times, four, but really, even just once a year for an entire lifetime. It just seems like more than one person's share. And granted, not every one person on this earth actually recieves the share they are due, but that in no way justifies anyone taking so much more than their own share.

If I ruled the world...

A Bit of Cknowledge From My Pop

My Dad contributed this little gem of information this morning:

Because glass is actually a liquid, it is never as sharp as when it has just broken. Because liquids flow, and pull themselves into round through capillary action, the edge will immediately begin flowing back onto itself, blunting and widening and rounding to a smoother point. Even 20 minutes later, apparently, according to my Pa, it won't be nearly as sharp as it had been when freshly broken.

Food for Thought

Jack Johnson

By now we say if it's a war for peace it's the same old game, but do we really wanna play?
We can close our eye's; it's still there. We could say it's us against them. We could try but nobody wins. Gravity has got a hold on us all.

Question

There are times when I feel like posting a whole bunch of things at once, but don't, because I ought to post every day. And if I convince myself to wait, write one now, and write another after midnight, I often end up writing the long one now, finishing it up around 1:07 AM, and going, crap, now I can't write the other one, even if I can still remember it. Now, the time, I'll mention, is not an issue, I like to be up late late at night. Everything is very still at night. Anyways, the point is, so what? So what if I post two different blog posts on Sunday, March 30, 2008 and they're listed that way in my table of contents. Often as not, I don't post anything the day before, and I'm just as likely to completely blow off the second one altogether and not post anything on the next day as I am to either write it, save it, and post it later, or to save it and write it thirty-six hors later, since I'm not likely to start writing something at 12:15. So, bottom line, I'm going to be making a few postings tonight. If I don't write anything for three days afterward I'm sure you'll understand. But who knows, perhaps writing more separate posts will translate to more production, and I have heard, though I have never experienced it, that productivity can feed on itself so perhaps soon I'll be writing six posts a day. Sure.

Wow, a lotta news

Well, there are a lot of things to talk about happening all at once right now.

Personally, I have just spent two days in Ventura County Jail.

Nationally, Hillary Clinton has stumbled quite ostentatiously, and undercut her argument that she is the toughest candidate.

But more important than any of that: in Iraq, the Iraqi army, in its first major independent offensive, are moving against the Al Mahdi Militia! I'm surprised, actually, and I think Muqtada al Sadr and his organization might be surprised as well, meaning they might be vulnerable.

No one is really paying attention to what is happening in Iraq, now anymore than usual, but the Iraqi army is moving into strategic positions in Basra and, from what I hear, Sadr City, the neighborhood in Baghdad that has been the real nucleus of the violence coming from the Shi'a side of the sectarian divide.

In the past six months, the so called "surge" has, I must tell my Liberal friends, worked to reduce violence perpetrated by the advantaged, minority class, the Sunnis. But for the much more populous, much lower wealth Shi'a population, the driving factor behind the violence has been untouchable politically and, probably, militarily.

It is clear that the American Army cannot move into Sadr City at acceptable casualty rates. It says something about the state of the Iraqi Army if it is constituted to take on friendly threats to stability. The Mahdi army is ostensibly friendly to the regime in power in Iraq now. But it is fundamentalist and hostile to elements of the population of the Nation, and therefore a threat to the larger nation that the regime controls. If the Iraqi army takes and holds Sadr City and Basra, they will be well on the way to having a strategic advantage in maintaining peace independent of the American Army.

I don't want to be labeled an optimist, but I feel like this could be a decisive battle in actually pervading democratic government throughout the country of Iraq. I have said it before though, General David Petraeus knows the difference between winning engagements and winning wars. I think the war could be won and the democrats could win a huge majority in the congress and the presidency and America will really cement a pretty bright future.

The Presidential RACE

I've finally come to understand something. It's about the candidacy of Barack Obama. Everybody talks about how great it has been that he is a black candidate who transcends race, and that really IS great. But what makes him even more special, even more important to our history is that fact that, even in transcending race, he never fails to be fundamentally BLACK. It is a wonderful thing that liberals in America will someday soon be able to unite behind a truly inspiring candidate, and that for the first time ever in the History of the world, that candidate is of African descent.

In this light, I cannot blame Hillary Clinton for having made her candidacy a referendum on Feminism, although I can and do still think she ought to be ashamed of herself for the condescending attitude she has taken towards her opponents, almost ALL of whom have been really spectacularly qualified for the post of President of the United States. What is really shameful is the way she has taken a field of candidates that, when I looked at them standing on stage during any of the various debates they held together, it made my bleeding Liberal heart swell to the edge of bursting with pride in the generation of leadership coming of age this election; Clinton has treated them all like petulant playacting children. This is a group of nine (more fairly seven) really, really good leaders, Clinton included, leaders who, if unified, can move this whole country in an incredibly revolutionary direction, a direction completely opposite to the disastrous path we have been treading these last 20 years. Yet Clinton has painted them all as inept, unprepared, unready to face the challenges that SHE WOULD NEED THEM TO HELP HER MEET, in the unlikely event that she were to become president.

Sadly, it is SHE who is unready to be president. A president is a LEADER. Not THE ruler, not the most powerful person in the world, but the first among equals, the leader of the most powerful nation, the most powerful government in the world. Hillary Clinton tries to DO IT HERSELF, and in the end, she cannot DO IT HERSELF, she cannot do ANYTHING without the aid of a willing and motivated congress.

Why was Bill Clinton's presidency derailed? Is it because Republicans threw every slander they could think of at him? NO. I know this will strike the reader as a strange statement, seemingly at odds with the obvious reality. But the truth is that Republicans could have thrown any slander they wanted to at Clinton, and it would have had about as much effect as throwing mud against a brick wall, if Clinton had not squandered his party's majority in Congress IN HIS SECOND YEAR IN OFFICE. No Democratic congress would have impeached a democratic president over a drop of CUM on an intern's dress. It never would have happened. So I maintain, that his trouble in office, is HIS OWN DAMN FAULT.

But that's besides the point. ANY of the democratic candidates would have pursued historic changes in the course of American government. And either of the current contenders represents an historic change in the demographics available to the office of the presidency. Expansion of the availability to aspire to the presidency either to black Americans or female Americans would be an UNPRECEDENTED change in the demography of the office. And it just happens to be Black America's turn. That's no indictment against feminism, nor against Hillary Clinton, that's just the way the cookie has crumbled. Obama is a LEADER. Clinton is a conqueror. Sadly, she is a conqueror who has never successfully conquered a substantial opponent. She lost the fight for Universal Healthcare in the 90's, the only fight that ever reached it's conclusion, and she ran unopposed for senate after Rudolph Giuliani dropped out of the race when a scandal that she had nothing to do with bringing to light made his candidacy untenable. She is now losing to Barack Obama. She is about as successful a general as the emperor Octavian, who, granted, was a good emperor; beloved, stable, able, and successful. But never because of his fighting skills, he never won an important battle, he secured the principate by entirely other means. I'm not saying she would not be a good president. I'm just saying that she should wait eight years for another turn at it. Now it's Obama's turn.

Let's have this conversation about race. Let's welcome the opportunity to examine the way life is for black people in America. It was GREAT that Obama was able to go this long in the race without having to make his candidacy about the fact that he is black. But now that it is an unavoidable issue, LET'S DO IT. No one would be better suited to it that he is. I can't wait to see John McCain try to pin his ears back for his skin color. John McCain will GET HIS ASS KICKED in that fight. Let's see Barack Obama debate Mr. Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, let's DO IT. Hillary Clinton, and her supporters with her, ought to be ashamed of themselves for obstructing the country from having this argument. We can and will get to the women's movement in due time, of that there is no doubt. WE NEED THIS ONE NOW; they should be ashamed of themselves for delaying it.

So I've Just Had a Thought

Well, between writing that title and beginning these words, I've seen a news story that seems to throw my own thoughts into crisis, but I turned on the news to a story about the possibility or the likelihood of a Clinton Obama or an Obama Clinton, so-called 'dream ticket', which, I was going to point out, ought to be no sweat to Clinton as, particularly for a woman, she is not really getting old. Obama, on the other hand, is rightly considered far too young to want to be Hillary Clinton's Vice-President, as he can do plenty more good for himself and for his ideology, in his present position as a senator, than as a Vice President to a strong President.

There is no question that Hillary Clinton would be a strong president. I think, though, that there is equally little question that Obama would be the same. Either one would be able to get particular things done and would fail to get other things done. Hillary though, would make a great Top Advisor type to a sitting president, a spectacular two headed foreign policy delegation (her and Bill that is), and would still be vigorous enough to be a great Vice President-to-President candidate at the end of eight years.

But unfortunately a top advisor to Senator Obama has made inflamatory statements about Senator Clinton, so that might become a problem, ego-wise that I, unfortunately did not really think we would get down to. I guess I can still hope this will come to be seen as a 'water under the bridge' event, but I'm not sure Hillary Clinton is a 'water under the bridge' sort of person.

Florida

So, I guess one of the reasons I haven't been posting lately is that I feel like I don't have much to write about right now. But I know I ought to put a little down every now and then anyways just to keep this thing from going stale. Also I know its good for an aspiring writer to write a little bit every day in order to sharpen his or her skills, and I've never been good at disciplined daily anything, so I'm tryin hard to get into this as a habit.

Anyways, I'm on family vacation in Florida, my first time ever in this state, which is exciting. Aside from one of my sister's softball tournaments in Tennessee, I've never been to the south. And I know the peninsula isn't really very southern (I've heard that the farther south you go in Florida the farther north you go in perspective) but still, it was pretty dern cool to get off the plane to find the baggage handlers all talking to each other in Creole!

I'm serious, I swear. I honestly couldn't believe it myself. It didn't seem possible at first. I figured it must be Spanish and they were Cubans, but no, it really was Creole. Other than that, everything about Ft. Lauderdale has seemed completely sterile, just like every other place in the country, but just that little flash of authenticity was really cool.

Tomorrow we're gonna go to Little Havana in Miami, which should be just a bit more unique, but so far, the Miami 'burbs are just like the DC 'burbs, Long Island, Moorpark, or Downers Grove. More black people I guess, but I only notice that because there aren't any black people in California. Well, none outside Richmond and Compton anyways.

So I'm gonna go. I'll try to write about Calle Ocho before bed tomorrow, but who knows if I'll have the will. Peace and Love all.

Written at Dusk, 2/8/08

The Catholic Church tells me that the earth is flat, but I know it to be round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in shadows, than in the entire Catholic Church.

~Ferdinand Magellan

The moon is so beautiful tonight, and you can indeed see the shadow on the dark side quite distinctly contrasted between the bright silver sliver of the lighted side and the still bright sky while the light of the sun remains for a few minutes more in the western sky. Even though Magellan either misinterpreted the shadow, which is actually the surface of the moon that never sees the sun, or he was talking about a lunar eclipse which is indeed the earth’s shadow on the moon, the beautiful apparition in the night sky made me think of his wicked little remark as I sit here at an outdoor restaurant patio tonight.

Peace and Love

The Editors of the LA Times don't like me

I was going to write this as a letter to the editors of the LA times, but the reality is that they're a right of center fascist pandering rag, and their editors don't tend to like the perspective I try to bring into their opinion section. So instead I'm just going to publish it here, where it can be read or not read by as few or as many readers as care to do so (I still haven't gone to the trouble of learning to use the traffic tracking function I added a few weeks ago, so I don't really know what that number constitutes).

On February 5, the Times ran an article titled 'Did Marines Kill Wildly or Not?', in which they continue their coverage of the court of inquiry into the actions of the Marine unit which allegedly fired into civilian crowds without provocation or justification after an IED explosion near one of their Humvees while on an unauthorized patrol in southern Afghanistan.

Near the end of the article, a Sergeant in the unit, thinking that he's making an ominous prediction that justifies his behavior, says that in the future, "I would hesitate to shoot my gun...knowing I would have to go through this fiasco."

As I had written it in my draft meant for the LA Times, a grateful nation and his entire general staff respond, "Good! Great! That's all we're asking; that you, a professional combat soldier, a U.S. Marine, perhaps the most highly trained general infantry in the history of the human race, would risk your life one fraction of a second longer than any lesser soldier would in order to gauge weather you can really justify firing your weapon.

In doing so, you not only obey the rules of engagement you were trained with and laws of war you are legally bound to obey, you protect your mission and your country, in addition to yourself. In fact, in not doing so, you may reduce the immediate risk to yourself, and I do stress 'may,' but in the long term you increase the risk to yourself, just as American soldiers in Vietnam were at increased long term risk because of the atrocities they committed in the name of self-preservation three decades ago.

I don't pretend to understand the stress of combat. I am grateful to Sgt. Heriberto Becerra-Bravo and all of his comrades for the risks they take to secure me the luxury of that ignorance. But I do know, as I have studied it in greater detail than they, that both their mission and their immortal honor are at stake in that small difference.

The fact is, that small hesitation will rarely be necessary, as in most circumstances, it will be abundantly clear that they are under attack. But in that small fraction, be it ten percent, one percent, or one tenth of one percent that their hesitation results in their realizing that they need not fire their weapon, they do more service to their country and to their mission than they do in entire live-fire combat episodes.

I personally with to express the respect and honor, uncharacteristic as it is of my political ideology, in which I hold the Marine Corps, and the entire U.S. Armed Forces, but we expect better than the conduct unbecoming an American of any stripe, rank or role that Sgt. Becerra-Bravo and his unit exibited.

Life is Strange

I don't know what it is. Life is just strange.

I got a DUI a few months back. It's a long story, but I'll try to summarize.

I was going out to the bars in Santa Barbara with my cousin Rosalina as we do pretty regularly. She's one of my favorite weekend companions because we have a similar outlook on partying vis a vis how much is acceptable and what kinds of things are ok to do. The plan was for me to leave my car at her friend Natalie's house, and to crash on the couch there at the end of the night.

As it turned out, though, I got into an argument with Natalie's roommate, also named Natalie, and she kicked me out of the house. What did we argue about? That's the long story, but it has to do with the fact that I got kicked out of a bar for saying something that I should have had every right to say, and that she took the female bartender's side in the matter.

Well, Natalie had called me a cab when she kicked me out, but I couldn't take it, because my car was parked on the curb there and I had to work at 8:00 am, the math just did not work for me to get up, get back to the mesa and get to Ojai in time. Leave aside the fact that my cousin had gone home early in the night, presumably to make love to her boyfriend, and the only other place I might have counted on to sleep was off limits because the last time I'd crashed at my Nono's apartment without prior warning, I'd nearly given him a heart attack.

So I drove home. I know it was stupid, but based on the rule of thumb formula I knew I was close to the limit and I figured I'd be alright if I was careful. As it turns out I was indeed close to the limit. I know because I was breathalized, I had a BAC of .09%. The limit, by the by, is .08%. Basically if I hadn't finished my drink before getting kicked out of the bar I'd have been alright.

Anyway, why do I tell this story now? I'm staying at my cousin's house again the last few nights because I've been volunteering for the Barack Obama primary campaign. Saturday night we went out to the bars, and in the course of the night we met up with Rosie's friend Natalie, who just happened to be hanging out with little Natalie.

No biggie, I convinced myself that I'd just cold shoulder little Natalie and try to have a good time anyways. Life had other ideas.

Almost immediately on meeting up inside EOS, a nightclub just off State St. we all went to the bar and I bought a round of drinks because it was my turn (it didn't really bother me that little Natalie got a drink because that's the nature of buying a round, it's about alcoholic karma, not about only buying drinks for the people you like). Rosie and her friend Natalie grabbed their drinks and walked off to the dance floor to dance, but little Natalie grabbed my arm and held me back to ask if we were "cool".

"Whatever," I told her, knowing it was the closest thing to an apology I was likely to get. "I don't particularly think you acted very fairly toward me, but I don't hold any grudges."

Well, we talked about it, and I have to admit, just the fact that she brought it up, without any hesitation or sense of trying to avoid the issue made me more inclined to forgive and forget. I figured that in truth I hadn't been blameless, I'd definitely not been very nice, etc. In the course of talking about it we had both told each other straight out that we were attracted to each other, and eventually, after we'd both sort of admitted fault and more or less expressed regret for out part of what we'd done, we ended up making out!

Yeah, I felt a little bit stupid and easily manipulated, but then again, I made out with a girl I'd liked when I'd first met her, and the reality is that it's not like its her fault that I got a DUI, it's just her fault that I didn't have a couch to sleep on. I'm the asshole who decided to get in my car and drive that night. I don't know, in a way it's totally messed up and neurotic and sad and even a bit masochistic, but in another way, it's kind of just totally reasonable and makes sense. Part of the whole reason we'd gotten as pissed at each other as we did was because of the sexual tension between us, it was sort of natural, after we forgave each other that we would hook up pretty immediately.

Anyways, life is just a ridiculous story. My Nana liked to say, before she died, that the only difference between reality and fiction was that fiction had to make sense.

Ok, sorry. I'm back on the horse

I was waiting for a friend from high school who is Pakistani and had just come home from touring the entire country to send me a personal review of his trip and of the atmosphere there. I saw him during the winter holiday and I e-mailed him, but he never seems to have gotten around to writing it up, and I confess I let things get away from me and didn't make posts long after I'd given up waiting for his.

I have been writing though. I'm working on a novel, if I haven't said so before, and I've been making a lot of good progress on it lately. I recently killed a character for the first time though, and I've since been dealing with the consequences.

It's funny, maybe more so to me than to anyone else, how I refer to it as if I was really the character's murderer, but I really am responsible for the death, in a manner of speaking. On the one hand, I've always had the good luck to feel like the best of my stories write themselves, as if I were only reading them out of the ether of existence and transcribing them as I go. But on the other hand, I must take responsibility for the fact that I do, in fact have a climax I'm working toward, and that if I were simply writing without trying to fit it into the story I want to tell, I might never have had to kill this man.

I mean, he's a totally ancillary character anyways, I only give him a name three pages before I kill him, and in point of fact I have killed villainous characters before. But this character is a friend and colleague of the more central characters I have familiarized the audience with so far, and so the consequences of his death appear in the thoughts and hearts of the others, who must deal with the loss of a friend.

The more realistic you're trying to make your story, I think, the more you have to behave as if your characters really are flesh and blood creatures, who react to the world you spin around them according to the chemical laws we all follow: how is their brain wired? how does x event make them feel? Are they angry? Sad? Turned on? Obviously it's unlikely that the event I'm talking about would result in my characters being turned on, even though death is known to be aphrodesiatic for others of the same species who witness or give testimony to it, and of course, there's the fact that in a company of 100 soldiers, plus eleven corporals and an unspecified number of officers, the statistics show that roughly a dozen of them will be homosexual, I'm just not prepared to have that reality assert itself in my story yet.

So what I guess I'm getting at, is that, in a way, a lot of story really does write itself. You, as the writer, do make certain decisions on the trajectory of the story, but in the course of making those events believable, you are bound by the circumstances you've already fashioned to write probably four pages on cruise control for every one of actual creativity you produce. I bet Gabriel Garcia Marquez didn't have this problem as much. He didn't have to make his characters actions believable, the whole point was that they were demonstrably caricatures of reality.

But in the end, I'd say that being a novelist had made me more credulous that there is a creator of the universe. I mean, once you set one law in motion, all you have to do is sit back and watch, maybe tweaking things every once in a while, in order to get the results you want. DNA for instance. Once the properties are worked out, all you have to do to get the species you want is, you know, blow the wind here, land a comet in the gulf of mexico there, and voila! Elephants! Sorry, most people would say 'voila, humans,' but the human ego, as the anthropologist on Colbert Report suggested last night, does not need any more stoking.

Peace and Love. I'll try to keep posting regularly, now that I am back on the horse.