Tannishblog

Dave at Electablog posted a meme that has been circulating my cranium for two days. To wit:

There are two political Americas. One where the masses are trained by politicians and the media to scream at each other about every issue (even though we all agree on most things); and the other where big businesses and connected lobbyists fly leaders from both parties around the country in corporate jets because lobbyists are not out to cheer for one party or the other, they are out to get legislation passed.

When it comes to political power, these lobbying and business groups are cruising at 30,000 feet while we’re wrestling in a below sea level mud pit (and I don’t mean that in the good way).

Over the last several months, we’ve seen former Presidents Clinton and Bush travel together, spend time together and generally look like they’ve become pretty decent friends.

Isn’t that blasphemy in these political times? Two men from the two families whose feelings for each other are most emblematic of our national rage are actually, well, enjoying each other’s company?

Think of a political party as your favorite sports team and think of voters as rabid fans. Like in sports watching, we often hate the opponent more than we love our own team. I have yelled Dodgers Suck a whole lot more than I have yelled Go Giants (and I’ve yell the word Malt a lot more than either). When the game is over, you’d be surprised to see rabid fans from opposing cities rubbing elbows at a brew pub. That’s what sports sells. Allegiance to a brand.

But when the game ends, one wouldn’t be that surprised to see professional athletes from different teams hanging out and even becoming best friends. The stadium is empty. The show is over. This metaphor can be extended to politics. The show ends. Politicans get that, but we keep hating each other.

Too often, voters don’t realize that the endless and wanton attacks are part of the game. And in this environment, we always come out the losers. Why? Because as long as we are determined to hate each other because of political affiliation, we can’t come together to fight for the things that are in our common interest (the very notion that we even have a common interest has been all but obliterated). And that’s just where the lobbyists want us.

He’s right, you know. The real show goes on behind the public’s back, because that’s how it must be. Try convincing a quarter-billion people to agree on something of political consequence. Can’t be done; At most parties I have frequented, one can’t get half a dozen people to agree on which pizza to order. Politics can’t be accomplished through an absolute, all-inclusive committee. The trouble comes when our elected officials seem increasingly untrustworthy. This, I believe, is the crux of the common folk’s complaint. We are ill-equipped to babysit our representatives, and we’re a bit irritated at feeling the need to do so. The overall sense of helplessness indicative of the American populace is given respite by the Internet’s capacity to allow the shouting matches that create an illusion of empowerment. Too often we either loose sight of or willfully ignore that we are involved in an illusion.

I am ashamed at my ignorant willingness to be sucked into this mud pit. On a personal level, I hesitate to post on politics in the future. Then I remember an interesting quality regarding illusions: If enough people are willing to suspend reality to embrace the illusory, it becomes indistinguishable from reality. This is called Suspension of Disbelief, and it works. If enough bloggers feel we can nudge the recalcitrant rudder of society, then it can be done - this ship will turn even in the mud. And that gives me hope.

Pass me the mud pies.

Who invented the paper greeting card? Greeting cards evolved from postcards and came into thier own in the ninteenth century. John Calcott Horsely is credited with creating the first Christmas cards in England starting in the year 1817. More history can be found here.

My dauther and I dutifully trekked to the local Hallmark shop this evening for our obligatory Mother’s Day cards and for my wifes birthday cards (also this month). I am struck - as I always am - by the lameness and sheer banality of the selection of cards for wives. My first impression goes something like this: For two hundred years this tradition has grown and this is the best they can make? Then I start figuring how this is big business. They write this rubbish because it sells. It must sell, or they wouldn’t persist. this thought leads to the state of the art of Husbanding: What kind of men would buy a card like this:

Front Message:
For my wife on Mother’s Day How can I find the words to tell you what you mean to me?
Inside Message:
Without your help I can’t even find my socks! Happy Mother’s Day!

C’mon guys! I bet you can find the remote. Try doing the laundry, then you’ll find your socks. Men like this are the reason there is a whole genre of men-bashing humor circulating in amils worldwide.

Here’s another fun example: bland and emotionless.

Front Message:
For my wife
Inside Message:
Together we have fun…friendship, understanding, and so much more. Because with you, I have everything a man could ever want. Happy Mother’s Day

Ah, yes. Heartfelt sentiment from the un-fairer sex.

For My Wife (I’ll remember your name soon)
Toghether we have fun… (we must have, there are children underfoot.) friendship(with other people), understanding (sort of), and so much more (so many damn bills, so much noise, so many leftovers). Because with you, I have everything a man could ever want (to rid himself of). Happy Mothers Day. (Remember: Father’s Day is next month, and I want a Plasma TV)

FYI: I bought a blank card into which I will print out a poem of my creation (my handwriting - or should I say hand-lefting - isn’t so great) that will - if not dazzle, at least make her laugh. She won’t chuck it into a drawer and forget about it because I created something unique just for her. My Loving Wife. Whatever Her Name Is…..

As I stated earlier, Wal-Mart needs to clean up its act. The world is watching. When a company rubs its metaphorical shoulders with the international business community, and it’s still wearing its motor-oil-stained coveralls and threadbare NASCAR Cap thick with finger grease, people will start snickering. NY Times has a nice graphic for the television crowd that illustrates the fate of 1.3 million of our neighbors. They also state the following:

A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company’s low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called “Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart,” five members of Congress joined women’s advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more.

And in a book to be published this fall, a group of scholars will argue that Wal-Mart Stores, having replaced General Motors as the nation’s largest company, has an obligation to treat its employees better.

Among workers at Wal-Mart’s 3,700 stores across the United States, the debate is also heating up…

…Labor groups and their allies are focusing on Wal-Mart because they say that the campaign will not just benefit its workers but also reduce the existing pressure on unionized competitors to reduce their own wages and benefits.

“Wal-Mart should pay people at a minimum enough to go above the U.S. poverty line,” said Andrew Grossman, executive director of Wal-Mart Watch, the coalition of community, environmental and labor groups running the series of ads criticizing Wal-Mart. “A company this big and this wealthy has the ability to pay higher wages.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., Wal-Mart’s chief executive, vigorously defends his company, arguing that wages are primarily determined by market forces and that Wal-Mart pays more than most retailers and provides better opportunities for advancement.

“If people tell you that Wal-Mart is leading the so-called ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of job quality or pay, they’re not only wrong, they’re dead wrong,” he said to journalists at a company-sponsored conference here in April, the first time Wal-Mart has gone out of its way to invite a number of reporters to its headquarters to hear its views. “We are instead creating a better workplace with more opportunity and more benefits than have been available in retail.”

Shouldn’t this guy run for office somewhere, he’s got the “vapor-speak” down pat! But, I’m confused here. Is this guy saying that he’s proud to be making $ 8.23 an hour?

Allow me to paraphrase Mr. Scott: “If people tell you that Wal-Mart is leading the so-called ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of job quality or pay, they’re not only wrong, they’re soon going to be dead wrong. The Republican congress, to whom we gave a lot of money, is leading the race to the bottom. Anyone who says different is a Socialist fag that deserves to die. We are instead creating a better workplace for the Chinese, with more opportunity for Communist integration and more benefits than have been available in Democracy”

That should clear the issue up.

And speaking of the Chinese, Walmartwatch.com has a nice ad running in USA Today: What Happened to Wal-Mart “Buy America” Program? I guess that program was more involved in buying American politicians, and not American goods. I reiterate my call to boycott Wal-mart this year when buying your Mother a token of your love. Drive past this bastion of unethical business practices - vote with your wallet and send the Mart of Wals to the Great Wall of China.

I am increasingly embarrassed to be American. (There. That should get the sanctimonious Righties fired up.)

As a country that is supposed to promote freedom, we are enslaved by our mortgage, our credit cards and our insatiable desires for more toys. We are enslaved by our corporate structure of trading time, effort, and skills for the barest possible monetary compensation, insufficient health benefits, and non-existent job security. As wages plateau, insurance benefits shrink and gasoline becomes dearer. As jobs become scarce, our future income is threatened by our President. To be an American these days is to surrender what’s left of our personal freedom for the chimera of terrorism, to watch as our nation becomes bankrupt while our government toughens bankruptcy laws for citizens. Politicians, who shout about diminishing Christian morals in society, leech perks from questionable sources for favors and gleefully bleed our treasury dry for two wars that cannot be won, all the while dismantle government programs designed as expressions of the Christian mores of helping the less fortunate.

I’m embarrassed that the America the world used to look up to has been reduced to this:

I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.

Mr. Delgado’s background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn’t happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.

“He laughed,” Mr. Delgado said, “and everybody in the unit laughed with him.”

The officer’s comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: “Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They’d keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people’s heads.”

He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. “I said to them: ‘What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?’ And they responded just completely openly. They said: ‘Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.’ ”

“Haji” is the troops’ term of choice for an Iraqi. It’s used the way “gook” or “Charlie” was used in Vietnam.

Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.

He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most G.I.’s, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence.

Mr. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. “It drove me into a moral quagmire,” he said. “I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: ‘I’m not going to fight. I’m not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I’ll stay. I’ll finish my job as a mechanic. But I’m not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector.’ “

The above is from an article from the NY Times by Bob Herbert. To me, this illustrates American arrogance in the extreme, as well as the hypocrisy of our current administration. Imagine the reality of espousing Democracy while letting representative of our armed forces partake in senseless cruelty and gratuitous violence against non-combatants. It also shows to the world that in American racism is alive and well. Our soldiers are representatives of our young people, they are the future business leaders and politicians of our country. One of these “Haji” haters might run for President one day. Now, that’s a sobering thought.

It’s not just our ruinous foreign policy that is failing. Our law enforcers are overusing their new toys- Tasers- with fatal results.

A man suspected of assaulting a police officer died Tuesday after being shocked multiple times with Taser stun guns during a struggle with police, authorities said.

The 24-year-old man had run out a back door of an apartment when officers tried to arrest him early Tuesday, Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Randy Force said. A female officer caught up with the man and shocked him.

When the suspect continued to resist, another officer shocked him with his Taser, Force said. Police did not say exactly how many times the man was zapped.

The man, who was not immediately identified, went unconscious and was pronounced dead later at a hospital, Force said.

The death comes amid increasing debate nationwide over police use of Tasers. According to a report released by Amnesty International in March, there were 13 Taser-related deaths in the U.S. and Canada in the first three months of this year - compared with six during the same period last year.

So much for the hype on the Taser corporate web site:

TASER International provides advanced non-lethal devices for use in law enforcement, private security and personal defense markets. TASER devices are among the safest and most effective use-of-force choices available.

Boards of medical experts and studies in the United States, UK, Canada, and other countries confirm the life-saving value of TASER technology. TASER International values independent reviews of its products and supports continued study of the use of TASER technology.

As I like to say: It is impossible to idiot-proof something - the idiots will always outsmart you.

Nicholas D. Kristof of the NY Times has written what other columnists wont, that the net impact on America by the boomer generation is negative.

Our influence has been huge. When boomer blood raged with hormones, we staged the sexual revolution and popularized the Pill. Now, with those hormones fading, we’ve popularized Viagra.

As we’ve aged, age discrimination has become a basis for lawsuits, and the most litigated right has become the right to die. The hot issue of the moment is Social Security, and the newest entitlement program is a prescription drug benefit for the elderly.

Our slogan has gone from “free love” to “free blood pressure medicine.”

But I fear that we’ll be remembered mostly for grabbing resources for ourselves, in such a way that the big losers will be America’s children.

A word he doesn’t use is “selfish.” To me, more than any, this word sums up the experience of living on the fringe of boomerhood. I say “on the fringe” because I was born late in 1959. To some indicators, the booming population growth cut-off is 1960, some analysts say 1964, either way, I have always been too young to participate in the mainstream baby boomer mentality. Does this exonerate me? No. For many years I have lived the boomer life, but my perspective of a younger sibling has helped my see the outright selfishness inherent in the “me generation.” I was able, to some extent, to learn from the mistakes of my elders.

Nicholas goes on to explain the rise in affluence American seniors enjoy compared to the constant 18% poverty of American children. As the boomer generation has aged, political focus has aged along with them. Yet our focus on the welfare of children in poverty remains unchanged. What he misses is the failing education system, whose funds have been systematically raided for the benefit of the political hot issues brought on by the aging boomers population. Now that the children of baby boomers have all left the primary and high school levels, funding has all dried up. Nicholas D. Kristof continues:

One measure of how children have tumbled as a priority in America is that in 1960 we ranked 12th in infant mortality among nations in the world, while now 40 nations have infant mortality rates better than ours or equal to it. We’ve also lost ground in child vaccinations: the United States now ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

With boomers about to retire, I’m afraid that national priorities will be focused even more powerfully on the elderly rather than the young - because it’s the elderly who wield political clout.

“The elderly are retired, and it’s easier to get them to go to rallies or write their congresspeople,” notes Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “Children can’t vote, don’t give money and have no power, and neither do their parents.”

We boomers are also preying on children in a more insidious way: We’re running up their debts, both by creating new entitlement programs and by running budget deficits today. Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist and fiscal expert who with Scott Burns wrote the excellent and scary book “The Coming Generational Storm,” calls this “fiscal child abuse.”

The book says that the Treasury Department commissioned a study by two economists of the United States’ long-term liabilities, for inclusion in the 2004 federal budget. The study found that the government faces a present value “fiscal gap” - the excess of expected payments over expected revenues - of $51 trillion. That’s 11 times our official national debt and also greater than our total net worth, meaning that in some sense we’re bankrupt.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration took a look at the study, blanched, and declined to publish it.

The suppression of unfavorable information will remain the hallmark of this administration. This is just another manifestation of boomer selfishness, as they are the ones in Washington, after all.

Such an attitude reminds me of a favorite work of mine from the boomer generation, The Point! as written by Gary Lund, and performed by Harry Nilsson. On his journey, the hero Oblio meets the Rockman, who states, “You see what you want to see, and you hear what you want to hear.” Does this remind you of the three little monkeys, Hear-No-Evil, See-No-Evil, Speak-No-Evil? In the story, therockman was pointing out the dangers of looking the other way. In fact, such behavior became indicative of the “My Generation” generation. Such willful ignorance is an barometer of a narrow minded, business-as- usual attitude of a not-in-my-yard selfishness that underlies what the baby boomers have always been about. To sum up the boomer generation, I would use the two word phrase: “Me First!” All other considerations are secondary. Nicholas D. Kristof sees it, too, as is evidenced by his closing statement.

In coming years, we’ll hear appeals for better nursing homes, for more Alzheimer’s research and for more wheelchair-accessible office buildings, and those are good causes. But remember that American children are almost twice as likely as the elderly to live in poverty, and that you get much more bang for the buck vaccinating a child than paying for open-heart surgery.

The solution is not to force the elderly to get by on cat food again. But we boomers need to resist the narcissistic impulse to ladle out more resources for ourselves. Our top domestic priorities should be to ensure that all children get health care and to get our fiscal house in order.

Otherwise, we boomers may earn a place in history as the worst generation.

Methinks it is too late.

A poetic moment after morning meditation:

White On Black

I stare at the screen, white on black,
Both empty.
Like my mind is empty of thought,
Of purpose,
Perhaps I try too hard to think,
Just let go.
The moment is all there is.

I stare at the words. Black on white,
All empty.
Meanings are inferred - illusions, all.
Just symbols.
Without the mind, what good are words?
None to hear.
Beneath all thought there is peace.

I stare at my words, “there is peace,”
White on black.
Useless symbols, no one listens.
No one cares.
Without Peace, what good can there be?
Swept away
By a wind of violence.