Category: blog
In Lieu Of
I said I’d try not to do any more political posts till after the election. I have nothing to say–well, nothing I care to say–about all the current bogs, tangles, pits, and mudholes. So in lieu of that, something peaceful, restful, effulgent with the promise of a quiet day…
Coffey and the Rooster
Endorsement
With only a couple weeks now till the election, I’ve decided to make it plain (if i I haven’t already) that I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton.
I have a number of reasons for doing so, some of which are not quantifiable, but if I may I’d like to state a few of them.
First off, she is opposed, disrespected, and outright hated by all the right people. Her list of detractors is a grocery list of those I would like to see ousted from their own positions in government. This includes people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, Representative Issa, and just about every firebreathing Tea Party moron who has been miring the workings of my government in the muck of intransigence like a child refusing to eat their vegetables for far too long. Given their records, if Hillary Clinton bothers them, then I’m voting for her. This extends to the entire Republican establishment which made it their number one priority eight years ago to simply block and impede everything President Obama tried to do, for no good reason. Try as I might I can find no justification for this other than petulance. If you aren’t willing to play the game you do not get to set the rules.
This has cost us as a nation.
Secondly, while I have been lukewarm about her for years, this past year I have come to respect her. She’s tough, smart, and by virtue of the relentless vetting she has undergone at the hands of a congressional majority determined to ruin her has apparently been demonstrated to be not only less corrupt than one might wish to believe but also one of the more honest candidates we’ve had. As to her criminality, the fact—the galling fact to many of those in my first category—is that if she were guilty of something we would know it by now and she would be under indictment. They have tried. They have spent multiple tens of millions, wasted months of public time, scoured, probed, intimidated, and otherwise made a nuisance of themselves in service of destroying—
Destroying what?
Apparently (and thirdly) a woman they fear. A woman. I know there is another woman running for office, but in the course of this last year I have come to feel that Jill Stein is not capable of managing the office. Her understanding, for one thing, of international finance and even basic economics seems lacking. While she opposes many things I also oppose I do not see her as someone who could do a damn thing about any of it, not just because both parties would be disinclined to work with her but because she doesn’t show to me the requisite comprehension of the complexities of the problems. She’s not being attacked much by the major parties because she is not a viable contender, but if she were then they would be going after her for the simple fact that, like Hillary, she is a woman. (Which means they would not bother discussing the issues, it would all be personal attack.)
(Years ago Phyllis Schlafly endorsed a woman for president—Michelle Bachman. Demonstrating that she was less interested in the historic meaning of having a woman as president as she was in wrecking the legitimacy of the idea.)
Like Obama, I believe the bulk of the antipathy toward Hillary Clinton is in her failure to be a white male.
Yeah, I do think on a gut level, for many of her detractors, that’s about it. First a black man and now a woman. A woman! Good gosh, what will the world think of us? As far as I’m concerned, it’s about time. She’s qualified. Her lack of the appropriate genitalia should not be a factor. But for some, it is. It will be. If they’re in congress, they must go. We need to get past this nonsense.
Fourthly, given her range of experience, I believe she will be best able to steer this ship that is our country through the reefs of the next several years quite ably. Not, perhaps, spectacularly, but we don’t need that. Spectacular has drawbacks. I’d like to bank on competence. That’s what I’ve liked about Obama. Say what you will, he has not wrecked us. We’re coming out the end of his term better than when he began. No, not for everyone, and for certain not without mistakes, gaffs, and bad calls along the way, but I believe we are in a better position to face the future now than we would have been under either of his opponents. I have no desire to have that derailed by handing over the wheel to a berserker.
Which brings me to Five. She is not Trump. If ever there was a clear distinction between two candidates, this is it. Aside from the meanness he has elicited in his base, he has a pitiful grasp of government, he has been a blatant hypocrite, a consistent liar, and a demagogue. I don’t believe you can call him an ideologue because I can’t discern a cogent ideology, unless it’s narcissism. But above and beyond all that, I do not believe he will Be There. I believe he will get quickly bored and leave it all to his vice president. We’ve seen a bit of what that can lead to (Cheney) and Pence is an ideologue, on par will all those in my first category, and I am weary of them. But Trump will quickly tire of the innate difficulties of managing an office he doesn’t understand. I believe this is why he has failed at so many of his well-touted business ventures. He has no staying power.
Hillary Clinton does have staying power.
Finally (Six) at least publicly she supports many things I support. Her statements on policy are consistent with many of my preferred positions. I need not recount them here, I think. Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time should know. Yes, there are some things that trouble me. But I will still back her rather than risk destroying the country.
That has often been part of the hyperbolic campaign rhetoric of many campaigns, but this is the first time I’ve felt it had some legitimacy. Trump’s assertion that he will virtually eliminate corporate taxes should surprise no one—he will directly benefit—but it will, under present circumstances, put us in such a hole that we might never climb out of it, effectively transforming the United States into the richest third world nation on the planet. The poverty, the collapse of infrastructure, the ruin of any and all safety nets will tear us apart.
I know people don’t like taxes. But for once we have to stop thinking of them as some kind of penalty. Taxation, at its most basic, is the best and surest way to secure capital in the country. That’s why we were able to build the strongest economy in history during a time when the top marginal tax rates were north of 80%. Even the private sector did better because the money was here, not free floating in some vague transnational pool of capital under no nation’s control.
Anyway, there’s my endorsement.
Since I’m in Missouri, I’m also throwing in my support for Jason Kander for senate and Chris Koster for governor. Both of their opponents hold positions antithetical to my own. It’s that simple. I do not agree with either Roy Blunt or Eric Greitens.
Maybe now there will be no more political posts from me till after November 8th. Maybe. We’ll see.
New Look
Maybe I should have waited till January, but then again maybe I’ll change the theme again then. But I was starting to get bored with the old one and decided that–because I’m older now, but why that should matter I don’t know–it was time for a new look. This one has sliding images on the header. I grabbed a couple at random but I’ll likely change those at some point.
This has been a fascinating year. My boss asked me–because I’m older–if I’d ever witnessed an election cycle this bizarre.
No.
Contentious, yes. Clownish, surreal, weird–no. It’s been suggested that you’d have to go back to Lincoln’s election to find one even close to this in unpredictably oddball strangeness, and that’s a good contender, what with the near-demise of the Democratic Party as it split into three smaller parties, the Know Nothings, variations of fence-sitters, nativist groups, and the odd prediction of the apocalypse. Note that the Democratic Party of that time would have been the functional equivalent–even the philosophical equivalent–of the current Republican Party.
1968 was the first presidential year in which I had any kind of political awareness, and that was a bad one. We had Wallace running a third party ticket based on the assertion that there was no real difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties (it would end up being a race between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, after an assassination and a steamroll over McGovern), but he himself was a nativist bigot who would most closely resemble the governor of Maine these days.
Nixon won on the promise of ending the Vietnam War (he didn’t, at least not fast enough for most of the country) and to “bring us together again”–which he also didn’t because he turned out to be a paranoid misanthrope. I wonder how many people who had voted for him wished they’d gone with Humphrey, even though he had some baggage as well. In 1972, Nixon was challenged by Edmund Muskie, who was a decent man who might have turned the country around, but the RNC ran a smear campaign highlighting his wife’s problems with depression. As I say, Muskie was a decent man and withdrew rather than put his family through what he correctly perceived as a new level of nastiness. You can probably trace it from there how our campaigns have become obsessed with the personal and have lost all sense of decency and decorum. Carter may well have been our last decent president from the old school of national politics.
It is possible, though I do not expect it, that we may be able to alter the way we conduct politics. It has reached a new low this time with a candidate who embodies all the worst aspects of the vulgar side of the American character. People support him because they are getting off on being able to be rude, sexist, racist, and basically what they mistakenly see as open and honest. Trump has elevated the idea that trash sitcoms are the highest form of national philosophy. He’s a one-man roadshow based on Three and a Half Men and Sh*t My Dad Says.
And we have come to see what happens when people decide they have “won” the field and go home. I’ll leave everyone to sort out who I’m talking about. I’ll add that clearly the mean-spirited, compulsively frightened element of the Far Right were the ones who did NOT go home and today we see the results of their taking the field. The Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, Alex Jones, Breitbart, Limbaugh…
I’ve unfriended a few people on Facebook over this. First time since I’ve been on it I have preemptively done so, because I just get so weary of the mindless toxicity that shows up on my feed from them. One in particular galled me by completely failing to make a distinction between fiction and personal opinion. Maybe all of them, but one in particular decided that since J. K. Rowling had written about ugly things she had no standing to condemn the ugliness in real life.
I suppose one of the things that has bothered me more than maybe it should is the upsurge of people who don’t seem to understand the meaning of personal choice when it comes to sex. I didn’t expect Rush Limbaugh to understand it and it didn’t surprise me when he came out condemning Consent. But so many other people who ought to know better…
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve known people who seemed to think that if a woman decided to have a sex life on her own terms it meant she should be willing to fuck anyone who comes along, indiscriminately. I thought there were fewer of them and I’ve been dismayed at how many women seem to think that way. But it makes one thing abundantly clear, that no matter what else you might think about Hillary’s relationship with Bill, there was no way she could have divorced him and have the remotest chance of becoming president. Because people are that petty.
Now, it may well be a divorced man might have just as much trouble, but I doubt it.
Anyway, we have a bit over three weeks till the election. I’ll make one prediction: the fallout from all this weirdness is going to cling to our political landscape for months if not years.
And since Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize, it seems appropriate to end this post with…
The changes they are a-coimin’.
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Because A Photograph Is Better
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Today being what it is, I have thoughts. I’m contemplating them and will write about them later. Meantime, I took a chunk of morning and did a little imagery, so here. Enjoy.
Back In My Lair
Archon 40 has come and gone. Much cool and neat stuff happened and I got to reconnect with friends. I’ll do something at more length maybe later. Meanwhile, I am back in my lair. I have stories to write. So, until later….
Crossing Eyes and Dotting Teas
In my previous post I talked about the use—misuse—of a term: Snowflake. It was brought to my attention that I myself may be misusing it or at least misunderstanding it.
It derives from Fight Club, as a negative. “You are not special snowflakes…you are not unique…” More or less. Tyler Durden exhorting the new members of a club no one is supposed to speak about. Which kind of automatically makes them special. Exclusive club, deeply hidden, secret, and very radical. How much more special can you get short of joining the Masons or being recruited by the NSA?
The term then entered the language by way of gaming, applied to people claiming unique privileges—usually unearned—in the course of some rule-heavy role-playing extravaganza. It went from there to an appellation attached to Millennials of a certain mindset who had absorbed the pseudo-Montessori-esque lessons of specialness and uniqueness and then took it to the next level as sinecure that they, being unique and special, can do no wrong and are allowed to exercise a degree of privilege and intolerance based on that assumed status.
Like all such terms, obviously, it has been handed on, re-purposed, reapplied, contorted, enlarged, expanded, and now, today, it is being used to label anyone even glancingly allied to that other wonderful term that has come to be applied as a derogation, the Social Justice Warrior.
That’s the problem with labels. They start out one way, they inevitably become something else, and then history gets retroactively rewritten to incorporate the new meanings.
Democrats belong to the party of Jim Crow.
Republicans freed the slaves.
As if those claims describe what they are intended to today.
What I have witnessed and heard is the appropriation of the label Snowflake by people who are unfriendly to messages and arguments about social justice, equality, political correctness, diversity, and related issues so they can apply it where needed to shut down debate. Classifying someone as a Snowflake (or a Social Justice Warrior) is little more than an attempt to categorize what they have to say as a specific kind of rhetoric which we are not obliged to listen to or credit because it only describes the presumed delicate, unique, and supposedly privileged character of the speaker. We don’t have to listen to them because, well, it’s just the way they are.
And somehow these delicate souls manage to harass the virtuous manly men (male or female) who have right on their side to the point of silence.
I haven’t, if you’ll forgive the mixed usage here, seen the silence. On either side, frankly. What I have seen is a big fat fence raised between the deponents made up of labels.
Now, labels can be useful. I like to know which aisle contains the pet food as opposed to the household drygoods as opposed to the liquor. I like to know which building houses what services and addresses are very handy. I even like knowing what kind of music I’m likely to find on what station and it is helpful to know where in the bookstore I can find History as opposed to Humor.
But when it comes to people, labels are useless impediments to dialogue and intercourse. And just because those people over there insist on using labels does NOT justify labeling by anyone else. Because it is the nature of such things—language—that usage is hijacked, meanings change, and context shifts.
Back in the Sixties, there was an event in San Fransisco. There was a funeral for Hippy. The label, the tag, the identity. Because the people at the core of the counter culture saw what was happening—that what they were, how they dressed, talked, acted, was about to be appropriated as fashion. They knew that all they intended, all they meant for themselves, all they held important was about to be changed by the normal misuse of the American dialogue. So they declared Hippy dead and they held a funeral. There was, after that, no authentic hippy.
It didn’t stop the entire country from assuming it knew what a Hippy was and that they were all around.
In the Fifties the label Communist was horribly misapplied. A wide net of philosophical and political opinions caught people up and labeled them and lives were ruined. Because it’s easy to think in labels. Action follows thought.
I don’t care for labels like that. Especially when deployed in such a way as to shut down meaningful dialogue.
What I am seeing is the use of a term that once described something quite different being applied by people who think they have the right to determine what is meaningful by excluding what they think is without merit.
Does this go both ways? Of course. Labels have universal utility. They are shorthand. The problem with them is they make it easy to not think.
Just in case anyone thought I meant something else.
Other Wildness Photography
This one isn’t going into the Archon art show, so I thought I’d post it here. Â Tracked this beauty through the dense pellucid thickets of an imaginary planet I’m thinking of using for a story. Â Some amazing stuff there, but I only got this shot for now.
