| He Must Go | 12/25/05 | One of the biggest problems with fascism
is that by working together to secure one another’s interests, the state and
the corporations tend to gang up on the people. I saw a good example of this
in this morning’s corporate newspaper, the NY Times, which, in an effort to
restore credibility and sales, has decided it needs to act a bit more
newspaperish. On the domestic spying constitutional crisis that Putsch has brought about, they wrote, “As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.” Corporations like to facilitate government control over consumers. And remember: to large, multi-national corporations, Americans are consumers. Not fellow citizens. Consumers. Spoiled consumers who have far too much power to sue, to buy things elsewhere, to make their own products, to sing their own songs and even tell the corporations to back off on the advertising. Corporations don’t much like consumers having that much power, and are more than willing to work with the government to try and erode those powers. |
| Tempus Fugit | 11/1/05 | Anyone who reads my essays has an interest
in American politics, since that’s what a majority of them are dedicated to.
And if you are interested in American politics, then it’s almost certain
that at one point or another, you’ve asked yourself what the people who
founded America in the 18th century would think of the America of today. The idea is a common one, to the point where seculars and civil libertarians on Usenet use the initials WWJD to mean “What Would Jefferson Do?” His presumed opinions on everything from income taxes to pet rocks get bandied about. Of course, nearly all time travel stories involve meeting famous historic figures and dazzling them with your ballpoint pen and Bic lighter. Well, face it: you could go back and dazzle some peasant who is going to die in three years at the age of 27of dysentery, and die regarded as a lunatic because he babbled about strange people who could make flame dance from extra fingers at will. But time travel isn’t likely to be cheap, so why bother? Besides, there’s always those troublesome pair of ducks that make you your own grandfather or change the world so it’s run by cats with hands, or some such. |
| The Death of Federalism | 9/505 | David Brooks of the New York Times, a
conservative columnist, has figured it out. He wrote, of the catastrophic
failure of the administration to address the disaster of Katrina, “Reaganite
conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's.
Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence.” Brooks concluded
that some sort of big change was coming – if not progressive, than perhaps a
Giuliani law-and-order nightmare (“nightmare” is my word, not Brooks’). Brooks isn’t alone. Calls from all across the political spectrum are being raised, questioning while Americans sat, shamed, and waited for their fellows to be rescued in New Orleans, if this is really what “getting government off our backs” was supposed to mean. Certainly, Putsch is a weak and incompetent president, one who stalled for days with his trademark deer-in-the-headlights look, doubtlessly wishing he had a copy of “My Pet Goat” he could distract himself with while waiting for the grown ups around him to tell him what to do. But the failure of the government can not be laid at Putsch’s ineffectual feet. |
| Deep Throat | 6/3/05 | For years, right wingers have been trying
to bury Watergate. The scandal, which shook the nation to its core, very
nearly destroyed the GOP, and was seen by many of the Nixon True Believers
of the time as nothing more than a liberal conspiracy to get the
President.
A lot of those same True Believers and their whelps cheerfully supported the persecution of President Clinton some 20 years later, not because they shared any interests with Richard Scaife and his band of poisonous loons, but out of a simple desire for vengeance. Henry Hyde, one of the more insufferably pompous members of the House committee to impeach Clinton (and a sterling hypocrite with his own storied history of sexual infidelities) came right out and said that vengeance was the main motivating factor in a farewell interview he held when he left the House last January. |
| The Sweet and Proper Thing |
5/26/05 |
Memorial Day has always been something of a puzzle to me. It’s a holiday that commemorates the end of no particular war. It started out as something called “Decoration Day,” when people would go out and lay flowers and ribbons on the tombs of soldiers killed in the Civil War. But the North and the South couldn’t agree on who started the practice (over two dozen towns lay claim to it), an argument the North eventually won, and the South subsequently refused to acknowledge the day until after World War I, when the holiday was broadened to include soldiers killed in all American wars. Presumably by then the ranks of the widows of civil war casualties had gotten pretty thin, and florists and ribbon makers were noticing that business was dropping off. When I was a kid, we had Remembrance Day. That was on November 11th, and at 11:11 am, we would gather around the flagpole, wearing paper poppies, for a moment’s silence. It always seemed more solid, somehow. You could picture the Johnnies and Kaiser Bill’s boys squatting in their sordid trenches, listening as the guns magically fell silent. At 11:11 on 11/11 we shared a magic moment that crossed six time zones and 40 some years. Vets from the BEF, ancient and yet resplendent for one day, would march proudly, and people would sing the old war songs. |
| Ba-Boom! | 2/1/03 | When I was a kid we lived near military
bases, and sonic booms were a daily part of life. Everyone knew those
pilots were protecting us all from them red menace guys, and, being kids,
we thought sudden loud noises were pretty cool.
But a lot of older folks thought that those pilots could defend us against the red menace just fine without scaring Aunt Tessie our of her skin or giving Grandpa a heart attack, and supersonic flight was banned, first from populated areas, and then over North America in general. By the early 1960s, sonic booms had stopped, and became something you just read about in physics texts. |
The Old Fart |
5/5/02 |
The Old Fart is dead. The news didn't come as any great shock. He was 77, and along with end-stage emphysema (a condition not helped by his four pack a day unfiltered Camel habit), he had congestive heart failure and finally, colon cancer (or, in his words, "terminal rot of my asshole"). |
John Swinton |
5/17/01 |
I got email from Jay Salter, one of my readers, who had come across the John Swinton vignette in my "Other Voices" section. He forwarded it to a journalist’s discussion area, asking for feedback. One journalist there, Jeff McMahon, made this in response:Yeah, I'll take that bait. |
"And the Frog Jumped Off the Piano..." |
4/22/01 |
It’s the week of April 20th, and certain things happen on this date. It was Hitler’s birthday commemorative (and most people celebrate the 25th of April, when he heroically committed suicide), and the neo-Nazis had their sad little parades–not many people even bother to turn out to jeer them anymore–and they showed up on the net and laboriously explained that the Holocaust never happened, and oh, yeah, a lot of people died in the camps, but it was the fault of the British, who were bombing the food and medical trains just as they were pulling up to the camps. This used to result in people spending hours of their time showing how demonstrably wrong the Deniers were, but now people spot it, give a derisive snort, and point the net nazi wannabees in the direction of one of hundreds of sites on the web that have sprung up with the evidence and the truth about the Holocaust. |
Original Intent |
1/8/00 |
In discussions with Conservatives of various stripes, the topic of Original Intent and restrictions on Federal Power comes up often. Conservatives generally like a small government with limited powers, and to this end, often cite the ninth and tenth amendments to the Constitution. They in order, affirm the basic sovereignty of the people, and that powers not granted to the government or denied to the states devolve to the people. |
Dual Sovereignty |
12/8/99 |
The neo-Confederates in the Republican party like to prattle on about States' Rights a lot. Under this doctrine, the powers of the Federal Government are severely limited. Federal government, they claim, is limited in its powers only to those prerogatives explicitly permitted by the Constitution, and those aren't much. Some of the more extreme elements claim that the 1st amendment, for example, applies to Congress only, and that any other legislative body at the state level is free to legislate in any way they see fit on such matters as freedom of speech and religion and association. This would include outlawing those rights. |
The United States Constitution |
1789 |
Preamble
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