That boy ain't right

all politics is local

...and no, I don't mean fuzzy things like buying local food or even biking to work.

I mean the War on Fucking Terror, right here, right now.

Documents under court-ordered seal have recently been published by Wired, about how telecom companies are cooperating with various US domestic spy agencies in spying on domestic internet and phone traffic.

That's old news, actually.

There are new wrinkles, though -- read the entire article, because it's actually riveting. And important.

The main bullet points:

• Starting with AT&T, the government set up secret "server rooms" in telco offices to hack into fiber-optic internet traffic, diverting a portion of the light signal to the server room for rerouting to a central location in Virginia. The secret server room is in the SBC building on Folsom St., deep in the financial district of SF.
• There are other "secret" server rooms, mostly operating on the West Coast: Seattle, Portland, San Jose, and Los Angeles are among the rumored locations.
• The plans for this domestic surveillance were drawn up in 2002 as part of the appropriately-Orwellian "Total Information Awareness" program, but when the proto-agency was forced to disband and its director (the old Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter) resigned, Congress made a big show out of denying funding to most aspects of the program, but quietly held funding for parts of the program deemed useful. The spying program is one of these holdovers.
• When I worked at a certain hated former company, I'd walk past that SBC building in the Financial District every day. Considering that this secret room was designed and implemented right when I was working not a mile away, that makes it especially weird.
• SBC was also subject to a labor strike during this time (I witnessed the strike myself for a few days going to work), since many telco companies use unionized labor. The new federal focus on surveillance goes hand-in-hand with union busting, as one unionized force in AT&T that would've been involved with this was fired and rehired on a non-union basis.
• The new wrinkle of the military-industrial complex is, to no one's surprise, surveillance. Companies hoping to cash in on the surveillance boom are falling over themselves to secure lucrative government boondoggles. One of these, a Silicon Valley company, became responsible for devising the sifting software sitting on top of the telcos' traffic-monitoring systems.
• In light of the defense procurement scandals seen recently, it's a whole new level of politically-connected pay-to-play gamesmanship going on. With one party controlling the purse strings and defense lobbying, and the other party looking on somewhat greedily.

All hail the new Politburo!

In that vein, I'll just say the following: dirty bomb terror Afghanistan terrorism Al-Jazeera Iraq Osama jihad jihad 4th Amendment the dog barks at midnight explode Koran.

Fascist asshats.

EDIT: In addition to being a tech geek, I'm a law geek too. Here's the asinine justification used in the attempt to quash the EFF's class-action suit against AT&T: the mere fact that the government is a party in a lawsuit involving state secrets, even if the substance of the suit turns on governmental misconduct, means that the State Secrets Act is invoked and the lawsuit itself is quashed. Never mind keeping secrets under seal and letting the suit go foward on that basis.

Another very interesting article courtesy of Slate.

Again: fascist asshats.

in a country that hates me

Choice quote from this article:

Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

When intelligence becomes snobbery...

maybe I could play video of this during releases

Spongebob on the millenium economy.

Choice block quote from "Graveyard Shift":

Mr. Krabs: Mr. Squidward: (tears up the Closed sign) Welcome to the night shift. From now on, the Krusty Krab is open 24 hours a day.

Squidward: WHAT!? (crowd of people barge in cheering)

Spongebob: Wow. Now we never have to stop working.

Squidward: Mr. Krabs..

Mr. Krabs: See ya in the morning, boys. I can't hang out here all night, I've got a life. (leaves)

Squidward: Mr. Krabs..

Spongebob: Isn't this great Squidward, just you and me together for hours and hours and hours and then the sun'll come up and it'll be tomorrow and we'll still be working! It'll be just like a sleepover! Only we'll be sweaty and we'll be covered with grease! (jumps on cash register counter) Are you ready to rock, Squidward?

Squidward: No.

Spongebob: Good! 'Cause we've got customers!

Squidward: (customer walks up to counter; Squidward hands him a baseball bat) Here. Please hit me as hard as you can.

Spongebob: Psst, Squidward. I'm working in the kitchen (laughs) at night.

Squidward: (takes hat off; leans head on counter) Don't hold back.

Spongebob: (cuts to Spongebob in kitchen) Hey Squidward. Guess what, I'm chopping lettuce..at night. (cuts to Spongebob in the bathroom wiping it clean with himself) Look at me, I'm swabbing the bathroom...at night. (cuts to Spongebob at the grill picking up spatula, misses the spatula and hits the grill; screams) I BURNED MY HAND...at night. (cuts to Spongebob walking on the counter) Night, night, night, night, night, night, night, night, night, night, night. night, na-na-na-na-night! NIGHT!

...and somewhere the ghost of Ayn Rand smiles

Just as how I won't go to a Union 76 station ever again -- for a very good reason -- I won't buy any mass-marketed chocolate ever again (specifically made by Nestle, Cargill or ADM) for another damn good reason.

I'm glad to see lawsuits like this cropping up: where the government sponsors some legislation outlining steps for companies to be in compliance with some social good (e.g. a basic standard of human rights, e.g. NO FUCKING CHILD SLAVERY), and the legal system picks up the slack as an enforcement mechanism, because it's for damn sure the governmental crowd likes its child labor just fine as long as the dividend checks keep rolling in.

70% of the world's chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast.

ADM, by the way, has a nasty history of nefarious dealings and being a less-than-model corporate citizen. Its slogan ("supermarket to the world") isn't mere marketing hyperbole: like almost no other company, ADM has the power to corner the world market on a number of different crops and staples. In fact, it was busted for price-fixing a few years back; it was chonicled in this really excellent This American Life show.

So yeah -- it'll be free-trade yuppie hippie Whole Foods $10 chocolate from now on.

Why We're All Poor

Republicans and their allies in Congress (like Joe Biden (D-MBNA)) pass "bankruptcy reform" because it ties into the pile-of-crap rhetoric about personal responsibility when people are being more responsible with money than they were 30 or 50 years ago. So it's not just a completely corrupt sop to the debt industry -- it's actually a big fat middle finger to you and your attempts to live decently within the system.

Read the whole article -- it's worth it.

sly AP photography strikes again

Well, maybe not so sly. In the grand tradition of Ashcroft standing in front of Justice's boobies and other AP shenanigans, I give you this:

One's a medicated freak who lives in the fantasyland of a royal kingdom, and the other one's a court jester. G'night folks!

spotted on our bed:

Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37). In hardcover. Yeesh.

slouching towards NYE

So, here I sit at work, in a foul humor because I've been sick for 3 days, sick for a while now, sick and coughing up phlegm and drinking NyQuil like a wino and making paper towels into wet dishrags of snot and having little energy for anything other than sending "I'm sick - poor me" emails to work...

...and now here I am, hoping someone in a position of authority will see my sad pathetic state and send me home in an act of prophylactic, pathetic mercy.

And so this year comes limping to a close: where all 3 of us are just barely getting by intact. Yeah, it might be extremely fatuous of me to say all this when there are people in Indonesia, Pakistan and Louisiana who will gladly trade with me. But I also sense that I'm nowhere near alone in feeling this way; that there's something I'd actually go so far as to say was a collective mood -- that everyone's just sort of hanging in there, one severe hospital trip or one car accident away from being in very serious trouble.

This mood goes up pretty far: I get the same feeling about the country as a whole. That maybe the fact that something really horrible hasn't happened yet is because the religious zealots are more inept than our so-called good guys. That people credit W with keeping terrorists away because the alternative is too horrible.

So I quote the following overquoted Yeats poem -- he who believed he was a wizard and lived alone in the countryside:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And the less-quoted Auden, on the eve of World War II:

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
and darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism¹s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow,
"I will be true to the wife.
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages;
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

I'm going home in the afternoon, and then I'm going to dope myself up again and read wonderful O'Brian tales as I drift off to medicated, medicated sleep.

life imitates crap

You just knew that my earlier ranting about Christmas tree decorations would end up being uncomfortably true to life.

seen in the Hillsdale mall

So the Macy's in the Hillsdale mall has taken over what once was a Victoria's Secret on the second floor, calling itself the Macy's Christmas Outlet. I ducked into its stripey menstrual-colored walls in hopes of scoring kitschy ornaments for our tree. Everything there, however, was really boring. Lots of the same sort of glass ornaments you'd see anywhere, and nothing that was even visually interesting or remotely quirky.

Then I rounded a corner, and saw this:

It looks like two holidays had an incestuous relationship and had this poor misbegotten love child. I think the only Christmas tree decorations that could possibly be worse than these would have to be Operation Rescue's tree decorations (you'll have to use your imagination here), because this is just bad.

Is there really a market out there for people who forgot what holiday it was? Or people who are so invested in current events that they need to declare "my country, right or wrong" in their choice of holiday decoration? Is the War on Christmas (TM) that threatening to these people that they need to make some sort of loud, ignorant political statement right from every living room? And then there's what goes into the actual decoration: from a certain Fox News perspective I can see the Stars and Stripes tinsel, the ornaments made to look like exploding fireworks (always a plus around dry evergreens) and the flags, but what the HELL is up with the life preservers? Is this tree being shipped to an aircraft carrier in the Gulf? Is a sailor hat the only thing missing from the top? Is this some sort of lame-ass Ralph Lauren attempt at being ultra Martha Stewart-y tasteful?

Maybe the tree is trying to escape and save itself.

(Needless to say, our holiday decoration will be as it always should be: kitschy. We have ornaments of a velvet Elvis, robots, a bagel, the Starship Enterprise, a Star of David, assorted cool toys, obese Santas, metal snowmen, etc. Oh, there will be pictures. Yes there will.)

church sign generator!

In keeping with the whole theocratic nuttiness that's taken over nearly everything we hold dear, I have several bits of trivia to share:

1) Page out of a religious children's coloring book from 1954 (my favorite thing about it is that the Buddha looks all pouty and put out -- the initial comments on the originating blog are also, well, deeply fucking frightening):

(via BB)

2) Church Sign Generator! Church Sign Generator! With it, you can do cool things like this:

(via drinkatwork.com)

deeply disturbing

Bill O'Reilly, he of the furiously spinning "No Spin Zone", has a children's book out. The O'Reilly Factor -- For Kids!

Truth be told, after thumbing through it a little, it was less obnoxious than I thought. Nothing about the evils of progressive taxation or fantasizing about the death of Al Franken. However, as you might expect from a guy like O'Reilly, most of the book (even when it's supposed to be about the children) is about himself: every other page is crowded with his experiences growing up as a little hectoring O'Reilly, even up to the time he became a shouting (and highly-paid) media analyst. Living off the fat of the chattering classes is apparently very hard work. (He gets up at 7 every day to look at the news and figure out how he's going to talk about it.) The book is also REALLY creepy -- just look at Amazon's own quoted review:

Does the name Bill O'Reilly conjure up an advice maven for kids? Didn't think so. Yet here we have a book in which the Fox talk-show host goes into Dutch-uncle mode, offering his opinions about everything from families and friends to the Internet and sex (he lost his virginity at 20). Although written with Flowers, a former high-school teacher and coauthor of many books, this sounds like vintage O'Reilly: pithy and direct but also patronizing ("I like many things about you kids"). Each chapter begins with quotes from kids who have written into his show (!), followed by a short introduction and a personal O'Reilly story. In the alcohol chapter, for instance, he recalls watching a group of his friends get disgustingly drunk, which prompted him to vow never to drink. He ends with some general comments; for example, weatherman Willard Scott (lots of kid appeal there!) lapsed into alcoholism after his wife's death. Still, there's nothing wrong with most of the commonsensical advice O'Reilly dispenses; it's the sort found everywhere--do well in school, don't take drugs, avoid the wrong friends. But barf alert for the occasional instant-message inserts in which O'Reilly uses common IM terms to explore how two typical teenagers, one a "pinhead" and the other a "smart operator," would react to various situations. Bill O'Reilly talking kids' language: SMHID (scratch my head in disbelief).

Yes, the glossary at the end of IM terms makes the whole thing come off like he's your creepy uncle with the crazy eyes. The one who wants to sit down and "rap" with the kids while he stinks of pee. You have to wonder -- especially at the fact that he's supposed to be a former schoolteacher himself.

courage

A deputy in Alabama discovers Rosa Parks' long-forgotten 1956 mugshot:

I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.

-- R. F. Kennedy

(from the Smoking Gun)

tinfoil

First, the non-tinfoil: the CIA is influencing upcoming elections in Iraq. So I guess the word "elections" should be put in scare quotes.

I'll also just save the right-wing media the time: Jimmy Carter is a failed president who should look out for attacking rabbits rather than busying himself with elections in Iraq or Florida. We're taking the fight against terrorism to the source. America has to have the stomach for the fight against "Islamofascism".

Fuck.

Then there's always the ironic prospect of Saddam being on the ballot.

Begin extreme tinfoil:

So if the CIA is willing to meddle in an Iraqi election, why not here?

All the hallmarks are there: the incompetence at keeping skulduggery under the radar, the talking points disseminated through the Pravda media, the whispering campaigns, the shenanigans with electronic vote machines...

...but the simplest explanation is: why go to the trouble of getting the CIA involved when the clearly corrupt Supreme Court will do just fine?

(.pdf files -- and the article is lengthy but incredibly worth your time.)

money over principle

I'm a world-class hypocrite.

Ever since listening to an NPR story a while back on ongoing legal wrangling over indifensible corporate behavior, I resolved never to set foot in a Union 76 station again.

(The NPR stories are particularly recommended.)

After leaving work today, with my car running on fumes, I placed my principles behind being able to get home... although I probably could've driven further to a less ethically challenging business.

Trouble is, that last link indicates that any of the giant petroleum producers, if the Unocal suit reaches a good result, have as much to fear from peasants looking for redress in US courts. Sigh.

It's just that Unocal's behavior seemed especially bad. I won't go to Exxon for similarly obvious reasons. I sublimated my issues with Shell and Chevron. I tried to go to stations that sold cheaper gas and didn't have such political baggage, such as Martco and Olympic.

But sometimes different considerations trump principle.

And speaking of automotive issues, our money pit cars (a 1998 Nissan Maxima and a 1998 New Beetle) tend to use a lot of gas, as displayed by this helpful site.

Nissan: 22/27.
Beetle: for a small car, a crappy 22/27.

The upkeep on both cars, but especially the Nissan, is horrendous. Friggin' money pits. However, an emergency car is arriving in the form of a slightly ironically-named Subaru Forester, one of the more fuel-economy-conscious SUVs.

It weighs in at 21/27.

We needed a bigger car with a baby on the way, but the irony and hypocrisy of my environmentally-conscious ass tooling around in an SUV isn't lost.

We don't have the money at all to buy hybrid. Converting to biodiesel is simply out of the question.

We're prisoners of our commutes.

The company I now work for is a Barbara Ehrenreich poster child, the 800-lb gorilla, and has labor practices that one journalist calls "state-of-the-art, for the 1890s".

However, in stark contrast to the last company I worked for, management seems to get it. Or at least management doesn't go out of its way to screw people over. (Blue-collar employees are obviously a different story.) If I'm actually hired there, the company will spring to train me in automated testing -- something that will give me a measure of job security I haven't ever had before.

Again, however, the irony of uber-leftist me working in the heart of the capitalist beast isn't lost.

As in all things, there is hope.

feverish pessimism

(This was brought on by a recent email thread containing this snippet:
"I wonder how wrong we are about the future given this..."
Also brought on by a trip to my local Wal-Mart, which contained a McDonald's inside it.)

In which I become NostraBrian and prognosticate about the next 50 years...

GEOPOLITICS

Full-scale war with the Arab world brought on by a combination of factors including peak oil, religious fundamentalism, and US expansionism. This necessitates multiple fronts against the Saudis -- the monarchy will collapse from US pressure, not Wahhabist elements -- the Iranians, and Syrians.

One effect of full-scale war is that terrorism will come to US shores, and more frequently. Mass casualties will result when a weapon of mass destruction, most likely chemical, is detonated in a major US city.

In stark contrast to the experience of Spain, an enraged US public will demand a second Crusades.

The EU will admit the UK and by this time will begin arming itself against US aggressive gestures.

The countries in Latin America, South America, and the African continent will remain as corrupt kleptocracies (financed by First World debt) and suppliers of raw materials for First World nations.

Water, along with oil, will become the next resource to start wars over.

The UN will be disbanded.

MEDICINE

Gene therapies will become cheaper to mass-produce, and genetic disorders will be cheaper to treat.

AIDS vaccines (and a cure) will arrive, but too late to save about half the African continent. However, poorer nations will ignore existing patents and either openly defy First World patent holders or flood the market with black-market therapies.

There will be a dramatic increase in the incidence of equatorial diseases, mostly brought about by the aftereffects of global warming.

Organ transplants and stem cell research become easier and cheaper with the advent of widely-available cloning technology.

Many cancers will be cured as chemotherapy treatments become cheaper and more potent.

ENVIRONMENT

For the most part, holocaust.
Habitat loss continues unabated over much of the planet -- therefore, the first half of the century sees the extinction of many endangered (and high-profile) species. Many genomes of these species will be mapped, and some habitats will be set aside as wildlife preserves, but cloning zoo animals is just another way of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Global warming brings a more chaotic outlook to the planet; large areas of arable land in areas such as the American Midwest and the Ukraine suffer repeated, devastating drought. As a result, the US has to divert ever greater amounts of water from the Great Lakes, touching off a severe dispute with Canada over rights.

New York City has to build a small dike to protect Manhattan's outer highways from a slight rise in water level. Its sewers aren't as forgiving as the traffic, and its famous heat waves get more punishing.

San Francisco sees wide extremes in its yearly temperature variations.

Most large cities, for that matter, expand into open space, decreasing the amount of available land available for food production.

Florida repeatedly gets hit with Category 5 hurricanes about every 3 years.

ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

Owing to advances in bioinformatics and simple database management, law enforcement agencies are much quicker to respond to threats.

Most citizens willingly cede the last remnants of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th Amendments and with them the last of any expectations of privacy.

The 50 years have seen a steady widening of the gap between rich and poor; owing to a relaxing of "right-to-work" laws early in the century, the labor market is almost exclusively made up of low-paying service sector jobs. "Flex-time" options mean that downward pressures on take-home wages still exist, so the practical effect is longer hours at the same job, at a lower rate of pay. What white collar jobs are left have either been automated by AIs or outsourced.

The ratio of US CEO pay to worker pay reaches 600 to 1.

The number of companies controlling media outlets on the planet shrinks from 6 to 3.

Universal health care is passed in some anemic fashion in the teens as a bone (ironically enough) to the HMO lobby, to save HMOs' administrative costs.

The Internet, seen as the last alternative source of information, is closely watched by official agencies -- who get better at spying, tracking identity, and tracking information.

The US adopts a state religion in the early twenties with a creative Supreme Court interpretation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the 1st Amendment. An appointee of President Jeb Bush casts the deciding vote.

The first successful active-duty military reality show, first aired in 2005, significantly increases enrollment in the armed services. Compulsory service laws, enacted in the following year, also have an effect in driving recruitment.

--------

Goddamn it, I really hope I'm wrong.

I really do. Talk about carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders... sigh. The hell of it is I don't think I'm wrong on about half this stuff.

I need a beer. And to stop reading the news. I mean really.

because Orwell is so retro chic these days

Comrades!


Attention,

comrades!

We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us...

(Everyone is invited to submit their own caption. Courtesy of Daily Kos.)

POSTSCRIPT!

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.

Save the great white males!

Eric Idle has just vaulted to the short list of the few people in this world I would actually want an autograph from.

I mean, Terry Jones impressed the hell out of me enough with his writing about our whole sorry state of things. And John Cleese wrote something a while back.

But a whole, brilliant, wonderful song...

the kindness of strangers

I'm reading Studs Terkel's Hard Times now.

I've been on a binge of personal historical narratives these days. Last week it was Jarhead, one Marine's memoir of Gulf War I.

This week it's the Great Depression. You know, light stuff.

Told by the people who lived it.

It has all the details you might expect -- stories of a labor movement just born, rum-running during Prohibition just as a method of survival, stories of socialites becoming social workers and leaving Park Avenue behind, jazz, Freud, railing against that communist Roosevelt, the Hooverville riots (which began not as a protest against economic conditions generally but as a protest by veterans of WW1 demanding bonus pay -- Hoover called in the Marines, including Douglas MacArthur, who put down the marchers with tear gas and fixed bayonets), and, above all, desperation and survival. All pretty much expected.

One common thread, though, that I didn't expect: story after story about people who had nothing left sharing what little they did have. People struggling for each other and total strangers, because each other is all they had.

A lawyer who represented strikers, eventually the model for the attorney character in Richard Wright's Native Son, telling a story about how he was the only one with any money out of his social circle of attorneys. They would all sleep in the park nights, each one using the ass of the person next to them as a pillow.

A jazz musician who never really lacked for work -- he and the rest of his bandmates would play speakeasies -- but there was never any money to be had, so his band would be paid in booze. Bandmates would have to borrow from each other to pay for food.

A socialite who eventually became an actress in Cecil B. DeMille productions as a chorus girl -- and joined the nascent Screen Actors Guild.

A homeless man riding boxcars, telling stories of how he and other homeless men had a man, his wife, and their new baby, obviously not used to losing everything, join their little group on the train. The baby was looking sick, so the men got together and collected what pennies and goods they had to trade in town for a baby bottle, nipple and milk. The husband refused it -- like for many others, the humiliation was unbearable and simple human charity meant that you had failed completely.
The baby asphyxiated during the night from the train's smoke -- although the hoboes tried to warn the family and offered a blanket to help with the baby's coughing, the husband's pride got in the way.

Many of the interviewees in the book (written in 1970) take time out from their narratives to say that there is no "community spirit" like there was then, when they had the WPA, labor unions, community organizations, or simply each other.

Communities born out of necessity.

I remember when I was about 6, when my best friend, his little brother, and one of our other friends would play "guns", where we would run around the neighborhood, hide in our "foxhole" that we'd spent many days and hours digging in his backyard, sneak around neighbors' backyards, make explosion noises, complain about the rules of death not being observed, and occasionally hurting one another such that one of us would eventually say "my mom says you have to go home now."

I remember the birthday parties, the ones that my mom still shows on filmstrips to an unappreciative, bored audience that includes myself, where my mom is in flower-print polyester, and where I'm still trapped in my 6-year-old body, making stencils on the cardboard refrigerator boxes my dad would scrounge from behind Sears stores. I still see the film, and there I am in all my dork happiness, as I practice possessives to the enjoyment of no one else but my parents, and stencil like a demented Army quartermaster: BRIAN'S HOUSE. CHUCK'S DOOR. STACY'S WINDOW.

I remember the pool at the house down the street, and all the cannonballs I did, in Bakersfield, in July.

Halloween, where my sister is in heaven as a fairy princess, and I'm running around in a bunch of leaves (literally, fig leaves from our tree) that have been pinned to my swim shorts. Madam, I'm Adam. Gimme some candy.

My friends at that time ostracized me once high school hit; birthdays, these days, remind me of my parents' frailties in addition to my own; I avoid Bakersfield in July (or Bakersfield, period); I haven't dressed up for Halloween (my favorite holiday) in quite a long time, since that's really something only kids do, right?

You've really got to fight against growing up. Yes, you grow up, and your growing awareness of the world invites the world back inside. There are still little bits, though, fragments of purity that armor you against what your parents can't protect you from. Or the bits that you remember along with the realizations of your parents as real people. The bits that don't necessarily define you as an individual, but tell you this is where I come from.

Communities born out of necessity. Neighborhoods where the necessity is each other's well-being.

I remember when my dad taught me and my best friend how to drive.
We had a late '70s beater Caddy, silver, with maroon leatherette interior and a broken hood ornament that my dad drove out to the sticks, late afternoon in Bakersfield, stale sweat in the air, dust in the air, cotton fields, apple trees, row upon row of fields, wooden telephone poles, flat earth and flat sky.

He got out, told us to get out, and then he got in the back seat with a beer and a bag of potato chips, told me to get in and start driving.
There it all is: a nervous teenage son out with his dad, who is having a fatherly bonding moment as only a father can have with his son in a beat-up silver 1978 Cadillac; with a beer in his hand on a late afternoon, my dad is acting a little drunk but he isn't really, because he's drunk on the moment when his son and his son's friend are there in the front seat, learning to drive, and he's got his beer and chips in the front row, and it's time for these far-from-gentlemen to start their engine.
I drive a while, prompting loud boisterous laughter from the back seat at little mistakes, gentle loving ridicule as my father is awash in late afternoon, beaming in his stained T-shirt after the day's yardwork in 101 degrees.
My friend takes the wheel for the drive back to town, definitely the more dangerous assignment, which becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy when he reads a left turn signal as a protected left turn but it really isn't -- prompting more laughter from the back seat after the initial panic. This is Bakersfield, after all, where people take a while to do things, including making turns at lights. "Did you see that guy's face? I think he was going to crap his pants!" This is Bakersfield, where if the five feet of Detroit iron doesn't protect us from anything, the summer evening and our laughter will.

Years later, I moved to San Leandro and lived in the house my great-aunt and uncle lived in before they died. It was a really nice neighborhood, with my aunt's house, built in 1927, on a corner of the street surrounded by other houses of around the same age.

The Fourth of July in this neighborhood was something like those memories you pick up and hold on to -- it was amazing, and made you proud to be an American, because people were taking care of each other. Giving each other some sort of quiet joy that went all the way down to their children, all of them running around with each other and wheeling away on tricycles.

They blocked off the street, baked pies for each other, set up a little stage for neighbors who had formed a band to play oldies tunes on a beat-up amp, painted their kids' faces, flew modest American flags from their gables, asked about each other, had barbecue and corn for the entire neighborhood, passed out flyers inviting people to take part in citizen committees, flyers for party planning, sparklers for the kids, and through it all, that summer-evening sound of lazy insects, the look of lazy sunlight, and the complacency of living a bizarre Norman Rockwell painting, because everyone there has absolutely welcomed me and the new woman in my life.

A community, in all that great sense of the word. People taking care of each other's kids. People growing old on the same street.

We're still outsiders in this place, though. It's our own fault, really, because we've lived for so long in fear of our neighbors, or simply moving from place to place as transient students or transient job-hunters that we really don't know how to act when we come across an Americana out of myth, something we thought didn't exist, where the interracial couple's kids get their faces painted by the gay couple around the corner, and everybody's handing us corn and hot dogs, and we're wondering what happened to us on July 4 where we turn a corner and we feel cared for by strangers.

It's unnerving. We take a nice walk around the neighborhood and hole up in the house after a while. There are flyers in my mailbox the next day, based on some hopeful things I said when my armored cynicism briefly left me under the influence of barbecue sauce and pie. (I can generally be counted upon to say anything to anyone or do anything if I'm given a piece of pie.)

I make hopeful noises about it, but throw the flyer away after a while.

Someday, I hope to return to that state of being, where I have a neighborhood of people I can call my own, and our level of trust is such that we do things for each other -- not necessarily closing down the street. But it would be nice.
Someplace where I can laugh myself to death in the back seat of a shitty car while I teach my kid, and someone else's kid, to drive. Or maybe where I can be a hammy actor to the end, reading The Fellowship of the Ring to a group of spellbound children, including my own.

And life would be full of summer afternoons then, or as many as the real world will allow before everyone, including adults, grows up.

I'll make time, I think. I can't flake -- because then I'll be an adult.

you can't buy comedy like this

I didn't know until today that the Schwarzenegger team named their campaign buses after his movies.

Including, appropriately enough, "Predator"s 1, 2, and 3. I wonder if they've taken the names away now that the association is a little more negative.

That's like getting a vanity plate saying MGNS LAW.

In America...

...where up is down, and hamburgers eat people.

In which the blurry line of private vs. public sector gets washed away entirely.

In which we make up the rules as we go along and as it's convenient, because, well, it's our Manifest Destiny.

The Humiliator

An LA Times story goes into great gory detail about Arnold's sexual escapades over a few decades. Jesus H. Christ -- the last incident happened as recently as 2000.

I'm getting severe Clinton flashbacks.

Yes, it's all irrelevant to the question of whether Arnold will make a good governor. Don't want to make a hypocrite of myself, after all. Just as drugging 13-year-olds and raping them is irrelevant as to whether someone can be a brilliant film director.

It is, however, pretty damn sleazy. It also has the side benefit of making hypocrites out of those moralists who are now claiming Arnie's exploits were all in fun or taken way too seriously.

rage concentrate

Largely, I'm preaching to the converted here, but the environment is probably my #1 hot-button issue.

Thank whatever deity that may exist for Henry Waxman. There's enough here for days upon days of outraged reading. Sigh.

It's just part and parcel of the contempt this administration has for conflicting facts: expert advice and solid evidence that conflicts with the party line is dismissed as political spin. It's both pitiful and idiotic.

wishful thinking or ray of hope?

Overheard on a Plastic thread about our tar-baby that is Iraq: the promise of near-socialism brought about by the right's incompetence.

Republicans have plenty to worry about at the moment, whether they are awake enough to notice or not. The last time the Democrats put a man this incompetent in the Presidency (in 1976, a guy named Jimmy Carter), they were defeated by one of the most right-wing politicians on the American scene, and "conservatism" had a quarter-century run. (And even when the Democrats elected another President, he was an Eisenhower Democrat.)

But the last time the REPUBLICANS put a man this incompetent in the Presidency (in 1928, a guy named Herbert Hoover), they were defeated by one of the most left-wing Presidents in American history, the Democrats controlled Congress for the next half-century, and even when the Republicans finally started electing Presidents again they might as well have been Democrats. (For example, some of Nixon's policies and proposals reeked so strongly of "command-economy" mechanisms that even Democrats were unenthusiastic about them.)

I dunno. Historical parallels are fairly useless if you haven't got that many data points to work from. But it is a damn nice thought. FDR is one of those hero Presidents whose legacy the right is actively working to destroy, both through legislation and attacking his reputation.

We could definitely use another Presidency like his.

all of us

Swung by the Howard Dean media archive and found some interesting posters made by a few graphics-savvy supporters.

I have a few favorites, of course tending toward the savagely sarcastic as well as goofy.

Print them out and put one up on your window, your car or your cube. The more eyeballs see these the better.

sorry, Arianna

OK, new plan:

1) No on recall.
2) Yes on Bustamante. He's polling ahead of Arnie (miracle of miracles) but within the margin of error. I'd like to see the national GOP get a big goddamn black eye. They bought a coup attempt in CA and got somebody even more liberal.
3) Boil slowly with rage at the latest machinations of the energy pirates and their privatization obsession.

random rant

Begin political rant:

Weird and disturbing moment at the gym tonight: I look up from my huffing and puffing on the treadmill to see that I'm facing two TVs, one of which is tuned to FOX News, and the other is tuned to infomercials. Synergy! The news ticker that crawls by as Brit Hume does his "newscast" doesn't pretend to be fair and balanced; there seems to be much outrage over at FOX about Gray Davis, much gloating at how much money Democratic candidates have collected versus the campaign debt they have outstanding, and much attention paid to Paul Gigot.

Outrage is a wonderful motivator for running that last half mile at a better-than-normal speed. The market zealots have taken over -- the free market fairy cures all. I used to think this was a smash-and-grab presidency, where these idiots simply thought that handing out sweetheart deals to campaign contributors would have the slight side effect of doing the right thing for the government and the country. The business of America is business and all that.

I think differently now -- GWB has out-Reaganed Reagan and followed through on the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Lee Atwater: the government itself must be made smaller by spending it into bankruptcy, or at least putting it on a crash diet.

Libertarians would say this is the right thing to do, because government should be small and that the government's largesse makes us all hostages. I dunno -- ask a retiree or a vet if they feel like a hostage. Give me the New Deal, or even the Great Society (warts and all) over what our "Corporate Responsibility" and "Leave No Child Behind" president is doing to the country, and yes, to me.

I certainly feel like a hostage, but that's because I don't belong to the oligarchy that anointed this guy in the first place.

Another weird moment: Mer and myself (as some know) are big reality TV whores. So we're watching the final episode of "Last Comic Standing" (basic setup: funniest comic voted by viewing public gets a contract with NBC and a special on Comedy Central), and the first comic in the lineup is... angry. Not just normal Denis-Leary-am-I-not-edgy kind of angry, but this guy doesn't seem to like leftists too much. Angry rants about hypocritical poseur war protestors, environmental protestors... even friggin' Michael Moore. The big refrain: "I want cheap gas! I want cheap gas! Light 'em up! Light 'em up!" I don't mind humor cutting close to the bone, but I do require actual funny.

I don't know which was more disturbing -- that this was actually considered funny or that he got a standing O from the entire Vegas audience. Welcome to the future, folks.

Feh. What a world.

bombs, rockets and other inspiring things

I looked up the Vietnamese national anthem out of curiosity (cheesy MIDI audio available in the 2nd link) and found that it's no more violent than our own or La Marsellaise. Then again, La Marsellaise could be its own horror masterpiece.