Best. Liberal. Writing.

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

“On the very day, October 12th, 2002, when I sat down to begin organizing my notes on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, there appeared in The New York Times a long piece by Emily Eakin about that long-ago event and the still continuing controversy it has engendered. Two new books have recently been published (Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets and Sally Denton’s American Massacre), and a third — which I understand will constitute a Mormon rebuttal — is now in the press.

Scarcely two weeks later the The New York Review of Books carried a thoughtful essay by Caroline Fraser about this same, much studied massacre. The Mormon historians who are doing the rebuttal will argue, yet again, that Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, did not order this massacre.

Mountain Meadows was again very much in the news, reinforcing my point that massacres, once exposed, just won’t go away. Of the six massacres I propose to study, Mountain Meadows is much the most complicated, and it is the only one in which there may have been a theocratic motive. Things just keep coming to light — 2,605 bones and bone fragments accidentally uncovered at the monument site in 1999, for example — suggesting that we are probably still a long way from having heard the last word about Mountain Meadows.”

Some links:
Wikipedia entry: “Mountain Meadows Massacre”
Wikipedia entry: “Mormon Blood Atonement”
Emily Eakin’s NYT’s piece cited by Larry McMurtry
Caroline Fraser’s piece also cited by Larry McMurtry
Why merely a “honorific designation” and not a full blown National Mounument?

Lastly, if you think think is a dead issue, read another McMurtry quote about those bones uncovered in 1999…

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Reclaiming Jesus

True story:

On Christmas morning 2011, I padded to my desk. For a few hovering hours, the world on that morning is as quiet as an abbey. If cleanliness is next to godliness —and it is— then surely silence must be —and it is— godliness itself. Would that I were deaf…

Alas I still have ears. Thus I tend to bask in that Christmas quietness like a monk at hermitage. Gently I shuffled thru some folders. I am an inveterate newspaper clipper, and lo, there misplaced in a folder was an article I’d clipped from the Arizona Daily Star a few months prior: Americans struggle to get food to table.

So I read the article at high-tide Christmas morning, and my quieted mind did something strange with it. Automatically, without any self-direction, it replaced every instance of “Republican Party” with the “Party of Jesus”.

Here is what I read in the heart of that deep Christmas quietude:

Some 32 million low-income children get free or reduced-cost lunches through the federal National School Lunch Program. And a record 45 million-plus Americans received food stamps. Concannon said the rise in food-stamp enrollment is exactly what lawmakers envisioned during economic downturns and they, likewise, expect enrollment to decline as the economy strengthens.

But under the Party of Jesus budget plan passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year, the food-stamp program would be cut by 20 percent next year and converted to a block grant in 2015 that would cap program funding.

The Party of Jesus plan also cuts funding for the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program.

Party of Jesus members say the cuts are necessary to curb unsustainable program growth.

Ever since then I’ve read articles with that substitution. I can’t seem to turn it off. And it is forever devastating: For what reads merely dissonantly for the Republican party reads disastrously for Jesus. This for me has become vivid fact: The son of God is being transmuted into a vile, mean-spirited, cold-shouldered, son-of-a-bitch.

How did American Christians allow the Republican Party to become the Party of Jesus and pollute Christ’s good name? Why have Christians — members of perhaps the noblest religion of all — allowed their Jesus to be filched, debauched, and defamed by overt torturers, war-mongers, earth-trashers, and the stingy rich? And how can we get that good Jesus back?

That last question is the most important. Getting that good Jesus back is absolutely essential for pulling this country out of its rich-getting-richer-and-poor-getting-poorer nose dive. Jesus’ values are the core ingredient. You and I may read economist Jared Bernstein’s technical argument on reducing poverty,— but that is written at college level. As such Bernstein is providing us with the analytical superstructure of where we need to go:

In this paper I present a simple model linking economic growth to poverty reduction, opportunity, and mobility. I then inject inequality into that chain and hypothesize about its impact. Inequality diverts growth from middle and low-income families, and under certain conditions—ones I show are present in the US economy over the past few decades—leads to higher poverty rates than would otherwise prevail and middle-class income stagnation. These developments lead, in turn, to less opportunity for certain groups, and that leads to diminished mobility.

By all means more of that please. But to tax the rich again at 1950-70s levels, to save Social Security and Medicare, it is going to take an ecumenical infrastructure based again on the teachings of Christ. But of course the Republicans have stolen and mutated that Christ.

And so we are at last up against the purpose of this post:

• The Democratic Party must initiate a national discussion on Jesus’ values.
• The Democratic Party must openly become the party of those values.
• Democratic Party leaders must actively promulgate their church attendance.

That is how you reclaim the high ground. That is how you strangulate resurgent Ayn Rand me-first, me-second and me-thirdism. That is how you make Americans think of themselves as a truly Christian-valued nation again. You can’t do it without church bells. And when was the last time you heard those ring out in your community?

Best. Issue Writing. Period.

I suspect there is no tougher audience to write for than the Aged. Just so every month, the AARP Bulletin tailors itself to fit elderly eyes. Their effort demands finely focused journalism. Every sentence is pared into relevancy. Nothing gets dumbed-down or doctored-up.

Even better, the AARP Bulletin gives clean prose on deliberately muddied subjects: Medicare, Social Security, and Health. I understand all these topics better because of their honed writing. But the AARP Bulletin isn’t unbiased. It is pointedly in favor of Social Security and Medicare because their readership is pointedly in favor of those same programs. And boy old boy, do AARP members howl in force should there be any hint of wobbling on these issues from above.

All of which of course creates a hole to be filled. The same sort of hole filled by both the Conservapedia, “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia” and “Fair and Balanced” Fox News. Yes indeed, there really is a “Better for you. Better for America” Conservative AARP. An organization that serves those seniors in favor of saving Social Security and Medicare by privatizing them out of existence. I suppose there is a senior-sucker born every minute, but let’s call “enough is enough” on that nonsense. And instead, let’s get back to the real world of pressing senior needs and the AARP that presses forward for all seniors. What follows are some examples of the AARP Bulletin’s most stellar recent work.

In November of 2011 the AARP Bulletin ran a Special Report: Myths and Truths About Social Security. It’s a classic. So good, I gave it a dedicated bookmark. This tidbit from it is stunning:

Myth No. 1: Social Security is going bankrupt. No, it’s not. Even in the unlikely event that nothing changes and the program’s entire surplus runs out in 2036, as projected, checks would keep coming. Payroll taxes at current rates would cover 77 percent of all the future benefits promised. That’s true for young and old alike, and includes inflation adjustments.

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Chilling in a “game over” sort of way

Absolutely must see video. After viewing you will agree with me that there are two kinds of people: Those that will fight to stop tar sands mining and those who simply don’t know any better. And you will understand why Jim Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said if this goes thru it is essentially game over for the climate.

Photographer Garth Lenz does not bury his lede. He begins:

The world’s largest and most devestating environmental industrial project is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the the world.

At the 12:20 mark Mr. Lenz shows a map of what is planned for 2015.
At 14:31 you will see the tar sands plan out to 2030.

This has got to be stopped.
Share this video with everyone you know as quickly as you can.

A professional mooch runs for Congress

Republican State Sen. Frank Antenori is running to replace Gabrielle Giffords in AZ’s 8th District. The Antenori biography that follows is mostly drawn from a recent article in the Arizona Daily Star: Antenori would sever Social Security from Congress.

The punch line to this post is a direct quote from that newspaper article. But first I want to review Frank Antenori’s life in a very blunt economic away. The reason for this will become obvious when I introduce the quote. So let’s begin at near Antenori’s beginning:

After graduating from high school (books, buildings, and teachers all on the public dime) Antenori surveyed the marketplace and decided that his best bet was to hire himself out to the U. S. Army.

Thence for 20 years, every ribbon and medal, all Antenori’s clothes, every toilet he sat on, every flush of water, every meal, every experience, all his education, and every plane ride came on the public dime. He was paid well and received an excellent benefits package also at public expense.

Next Antenori went to work for Raytheon, southern Arizona’s largest employer, and the fifth largest military contractor in the world. Raytheon is Raytheon because of the public dime. In fact, Antenori oversees development of hybrid vehicles for the U.S. Military. So once again, every toilet flush, every car, house, and every piece of clothing comes to Mr. Antenori from a paycheck drawn from the public treasury.

But Antenori wasn’t done sponging yet. There were greener public pastures for grazing. And by that I mean the benefits and lucre that come from public office. In 2008 Antenori ran for Arizona’s 30th House District and won an election that *entitled* him to more money and benefits at taxpayer expense. Then in 2010 Governor Jan Brewer appointed him to fill a vacant State Senate seat; from which position, he continues on the public dole to this day.

So in short, Frank Antenori has never —in his life— had to market his skills against others in a fair marketplace. He has never had to sell himself to a true capitalistic corporation. He doesn’t know a thing about real competition. Antenori has been carried by taxpayers from birth.

Now for that newspaper quote:

His solution for creating more Southern Arizona jobs is less government. “It is my philosophy that government doesn’t create jobs; as a matter of fact, it seems government has done more to kill jobs and chase jobs overseas than it has creating jobs.”

What is interesting there is not that Antenori’s ridiculous ideology makes him look like he has gone thru life sleepwalking on stupid pills. Rigid adherence to ideology makes you dumb. Everyone knows that. That’s just Critical Thinking 101.

No what’s interesting here is the birth of a new kind of shameless and insufferable military mooch. Antenori is a fantastic example of what I’ve come to call the military-industrial entitlement culture. In fact, his whiny existence makes a strong argument for a return to conscription. I’ll have more on that later, and a video of this insufferable ideologue as well…

“Right-wing bigot go away”

One less pile of dogshit on earth…
May the Devil treat him fairly:

Update: 3/8/2012 For historical reason I am embedding Breitbart’s last planned attack video. It purports to show President Obama as some sort of a hate monger. Breitbart dropped dead before he could edit it so…

Just to be clear on one thing: Breitbart lived to destroy people. Particularly people of a different political position. He was willing to bend reality sideways to gain such purchase. At root, that is the core stuff of Nazism. It is why I wrote of him: “One less pile of dogshit on earth”.

It is sad that so many on the left thought it best (or perhaps safest), on news of his death, to praise his passion or his multitasking abilities. Bah-humbug on such mealy mouthisms. An asshole is an asshole is an asshole. And a dead asshole is even better…

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

The brilliant quote below comes from Chapter XIX of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book turns 160 this year. For a quick jolt of interest, let’s remember Lincoln’s famous quote: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Ah yes, the power of the fictive pen…

February is also Black History Month. You might not think so given the month was dominated by Charles Murray’s white angst book Coming Apart. If anyone wants proof that the Great White Race is in decay please point them to the Republican Presidential Debates. All the candidates deny science and birth control. Q.E.D.

First, a bit of plot to set up my long Uncle Tom quote:

Uncle Tom, as pure a Christian as Jesus, has been sold downriver by his debt-ridden master who had promised him freedom. While traveling to New Orleans on a Mississippi riverboat Tom befriends a white child. Tom saves this child after the boat lurches and she spills into the river. Tom is purchased by the child’s father, St. Clare who is returning home with Miss Ophelia, his Vermont cousin, who is to be a sort of guardian to his young child.

A female slave named Prue delivers husks to St. Clare’s manor. Shortly afterwards, news comes that Prue has been whipped to death by her hard owner. Prue was a drinker. We are told she drank to escape her pain, and was whipped for bring drunk.

The conversation begins with Miss Ophelia expressing her outrage to St. Clare.

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“An abominable business,—perfectly horrible!” she exclaimed, as she entered the room where St. Clare lay reading his paper.

“Pray, what iniquity has turned up now?” said he.

“What now? why, those folks have whipped Prue to death!” said Miss Ophelia, going on, with great strength of detail, into the story, and enlarging on its most shocking particulars.

“I thought it would come to that, some time,” said St. Clare, going on with his paper.

“Thought so!—an’t you going to do anything about it?” said Miss Ophelia. “Haven’t you got any selectmen, or anybody, to interfere and look after such matters?”

“It’s commonly supposed that the property interest is a sufficient guard in these cases. If people choose to ruin their own possessions, I don’t know what’s to be done. It seems the poor creature was a thief and a drunkard; and so there won’t be much hope to get up sympathy for her.”

“It is perfectly outrageous,—it is horrid, Augustine! It will certainly bring down vengeance upon you.”

“My dear cousin, I didn’t do it, and I can’t help it; I would, if I could. If low-minded, brutal people will act like themselves, what am I to do? they have absolute control; they are irresponsible despots. There would be no use in interfering; there is no law that amounts to anything practically, for such a case. The best we can do is to shut our eyes and ears, and let it alone. It’s the only resource left us.”

“How can you shut your eyes and ears? How can you let such things alone?”

“My dear child, what do you expect? Here is a whole class,—debased, uneducated, indolent, provoking,—put, without any sort of terms or conditions, entirely into the hands of such people as the majority in our world are; people who have neither consideration nor self-control, who haven’t even an enlightened regard to their own interest,—for that’s the case with the largest half of mankind. Of course, in a community so organized, what can a man of honorable and humane feelings do, but shut his eyes all he can, and harden his heart? I can’t buy every poor wretch I see. I can’t turn knight-errant, and undertake to redress every individual case of wrong in such a city as this. The most I can do is to try and keep out of the way of it.”

St. Clare’s fine countenance was for a moment overcast; he said, “Come, cousin, don’t stand there looking like one of the Fates; you’ve only seen a peep through the curtain,—a specimen of what is going on, the world over, in some shape or other. If we are to be prying and spying into all the dismals of life, we should have no heart to anything. ‘T is like looking too close into the details of Dinah’s kitchen;” and St. Clare lay back on the sofa, and busied himself with his paper.

Miss Ophelia sat down, and pulled out her knitting-work, and sat there grim with indignation. She knit and knit, but while she mused the fire burned; at last she broke out—”I tell you, Augustine, I can’t get over things so, if you can. It’s a perfect abomination for you to defend such a system,—that’s my mind!”

“What now?” said St. Clare, looking up. “At it again, hey?”

“I say it’s perfectly abominable for you to defend such a system!” said Miss Ophelia, with increasing warmth.

“I defend it, my dear lady? Who ever said I did defend it?” said St. Clare.

“Of course, you defend it,—you all do,—all you Southerners. What do you have slaves for, if you don’t?”

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The Squidding of Mitt Romney

Or perhaps a better title for this: Things I didn’t know that I should have known.
From the always brilliant David Brin, Disturbing Trends in the News:

We have the illusion of choice…but six media giants now control a staggering 90% of what we read, watch or listen to, in the U.S. These companies are: CBS, Viacom, Disney, GE, News Corp (which includes Fox and the Wall Street Journal) and Time Warner (which includes CNN, HBO, Time and Warner Bros). The largest owner of radio stations in the U.S., Clear Channel, operates 1,200 stations, airing shows by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity, with programs syndicated to more than 5,000 stations. And who owns Clear Channel? Bain Capital purchased Clear Channel shortly before Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential bid. One clear reason why conservative talk show hosts support Mitt? And weren’t we supposed to be more independent and broad in in our access to information, by now?

“Squidding” courtesy of Matt Taibbi

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

I went for the jug. A stiff pull. It was good whiskey.

“Have a ding-dang seat, you’re making me nervous.”

I sat on the ground next to him.

“I love to watch the horses,” he said. “You know, all those years back down home, my people were just crazy for the NASCAR. They’d go out to some honking huge oval track at Darlington or Daytona and watch those dadblamed machines go round and round and round, making all that noise. A horrible din. For hours and hours. If I knew how somebody could endure that, I’d die happy. Not to mention calling it recreation! Heck, it’d be more interesting to go out to the freeway overpass and watch traffic. At least the goldurn cars’s go in different directions. Anyway, I’m glad that foolishness is over. The car wrecked the southland. It wrecked Atlanta worse than Sherman ever did. It paved over my Virginia. They made themselves slaves to the car and everything connected with it, and it destroyed them in the end. Well, here’s to the the New South. May it rest in peace.”

He raised his glass and took a good gulp.

Peak Crazy: The Quiz

Have we passed high tide for Peak Crazy? Was it the last Republican debate in which all nine nattering nihilists appeared together? One might argue that American politics has never seen a greater set of goats and monkeys. Well if that was Peak Crazy, we ought not to let it pass without putting down a milestone marker. Thus my quiz below.

Instructions: Nine questions for nine candidates. Everyone has their moment. The questions are drawn from nine Wikipedia entries.

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1)   At the age of 19 (and after living in Orléans, France) he married his High School geometry teacher who was 26.

 Gary Johnson

 Newt Gingrich

 Ron Paul

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2)

Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.

 Michelle Bachmann

 Newt Gingrich

 Ron Paul

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3)  Describes contraception as “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” At the age of 48, his wife gave birth to her eighth child who was diagnosed with a serious genetic disorder.

 Rick Santorum

 Rick Perry

 Jon Huntsman

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4)   Dropped out before graduating from High School to be a keyboard player in a rock band. Today he proposes reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% and eliminating taxes on all capital gains and dividends.

 Jon Huntsman

 Herman Cain

 Mitt Romney

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5)  Under his leadership an organization lobbied against increases to the minimum wage, mandatory health care benefits, smoking regulations, and lowering the blood-alcohol limit for driving.

 Rick Perry

 Gary Johnson

 Herman Cain

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6)   Involved in a near fatal paragliding accident when his wing got caught in a tree. He suffered multiple bone fractures, and used marijuana for pain control from 2005 to 2008.

 Jon Huntsman

 Rick Perry

 Gary Johnson

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7)  Responded to criticisms of ideological pandering with the explanation that “The older I get, the smarter Ronald Reagan gets.”

 Rick Santorum

 Mitt Romney

 Herman Cain

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8)  Said this regarding Social Security and Medicare:

…what you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system, that don’t have any other options, we have to keep faith with them. But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off.

 Herman Cain

 Michelle Bachmann

 Newt Gingrich

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9)  Vetoed a ban on the execution of mentally retarded inmates.

 Mitt Romney

 Rick Perry

 Jon Huntsman

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Friday Random Quote Blogging…

“When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out—most of them—that what’s left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway.  

For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell. My glass is empty.”

“I just had it filled again,” said Finnerty.

“Oh, so you did.” Lasher sipped thoughtfully. “These displaced people need something, and the clergy can’t give it to them—or it’s impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it’s enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn’t enough, and I suspect they’re right.”

“If they were so fond of the old system, how come they were so cantankerous about their jobs when they had them?” said Paul.

“Oh, this business we’ve got now—it’s been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was. Go to the library sometime and take a look at magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II. Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production—know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines. And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true. Even then, half the people or more didn’t understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making. They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego. And then there was all this let’s-not-shoot-Father-Christmas advertising.”

“How’s that?” said Paul.

“You know—those ads about the American system, meaning managers and engineers, that made America great. When you finished one, you’d think the managers and engineers had given America everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil—the works.

“Strange business,” said Lasher. “This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.”

“Well,” said Paul, “you’ll have to admit they did some pretty wonderful things during the war.”

“Of course!” said Lasher. “What they did for the war effort really was something like crusading; but”—he shrugged—“so was what everybody else did for the war effort. Everybody behaved wonderfully. Even I.”

“You keep giving the managers and engineers a bad time,” said Paul. “What about the scientists? It seems to me that—”

“Outside the discussion,” said Lasher impatiently. “They simply add to knowledge. It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.”

Finnerty shook his head admiringly. “So what’s the answer right now?”

“That is a frightening question,” said Lasher, “and also my favorite rationalization for drinking. This is my last drink, incidentally; I don’t like being drunk. I drink because I’m scared—just a little scared, so I don’t have to drink much. Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.”

“Messiah?”

“Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone’s going to keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following.”

Kleptoparasitism, word of the year…

The definition from the Wikipedia:

Kleptoparasitism (literally, parasitism by theft) is a form of feeding in which one animal takes prey or other food from another that has caught, collected, or otherwise prepared the food, including stored food (as in the case of cuckoo bees, which lay their eggs on the pollen masses made by other bees). The term is also used to describe the stealing of nest material or other inanimate objects from one animal by another.

And example of kleptoparasitism drawn from Salon’s The theft of the American pension: 

As Ellen E. Schultz, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, reveals in her new book, “Retirement Heist,” it wasn’t the dire economy that led these companies to plunder their own employees’ earnings, it was greed. Over the last decade, some of the biggest companies — including Bank of America, IBM, General Motors, GE and even the NFL — found loopholes, abused ambiguous regulations and used litigation to turn their employees’ hard-earned retirement funds into profits, and in some cases, executive compensation. Schultz’s book offers a relentlessly infuriating look at the mechanisms they used to get away with it. 

Another example drawn from Robert Reich’s Restore the Basic Bargain:

That was then. Now, Ford Motor Company is paying its new hires half what it paid new employees a few years ago.

The basic bargain is over – not only at Ford but all over the American economy. New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.

Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.

And yet another from Forbes’s It’s Getting Harder to Defend Goldman Sachs:

Goldman had two choices: discontinue the sale of junk-mortgage securities and alerting the government, media, public, their clients, and investors; or, keep it a secret, sell off junk-mortgage securities to investors, profit from the inevitable bursting of the bubble, and steal and even front-run part of Paulson’s trade.

Here’s the most basic analogy of guilt: Picture Goldman as a used car salesman. When it learned it had an inventory of lemons, rather than return those lemons to the manufacturers (lemon law in most states), it put those cars on promotion with very aggressive sales tactics.

Before the unsuspecting and trusting customer bought the lemon and drove off with it, Goldman purchased “protection” — life and auto insurance policies on the driver that were set to profit when the lemon crashed and burned. Clearly, Goldman’s short (protection) trade was connected to clearing out their long trades (selling the lemons), so ill-gotten profits on all these transactions must be returned with penalties too.

You know I could go on. I’ve got an Instapaper account filled to bursting with articles demonstrating kleptoparasitism. But you get the idea. And if your blood is not boiling now, it never will. 

So let me instead quit this post with a look not backwards at 2011, but forward to a temper and passion that may birth 2012’s word of the year. The quotes below are drawn from Michael Thomas’s The Big Lie. Should just some of this come to flare and fire, it will be a very happy year indeed for all of us:

As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head—and about time, too.

This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS—I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral—but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.

Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.

But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!

“Retribution” in 2012!

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

“Stop worrying about whether she loves you. One thing is fundamental; if you give love instead of asking for it, if you love openly, defenselessly discarding forever the proposition ‘I’ll love you if you’ll love me,’ which most people live by, then you will discover a wonderful serenity in your life. Give love, tenderness, affection, warmth, interest. Be unafraid to share your fears and worries, show people that you need them, too, and you will have love in abundance.”

“Sounds Christian to me,” I said. “Turn the other cheek.”

“It was a Jew who said it.” 

She’s wonderfully pneumatic too…

Deep into his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson asks to see what’s on Mr. Job’s iPad. The follow paragraph results:

More revealingly, there was just one book that he downloaded: The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since.

Let’s call this annual idea of a reread: one’s anchor book. And since it is a habit common to both Jobs and I (in the last week of December, for twelve consecutive years, I sat down to Brave New World) surely it must be common to others. I suspect anchor books exist because they hitch us to workable interpretations of our universe. Functioning as drogues they hold us steady in the shifting ocean of time. As such they are life preservers. This idea of preservation cuts both ways. Choose your anchor book carelessly, and you are an etherized insect permanently pinned to parchment. I like to think that Jobs and I, growing up a mile away from each other, have both chosen our anchors well.

But unlike Jobs I drifted; I have not read Brave New World for a decade. The Isaacson quote was a reminder and a spur. We are past the ides of December, tomorrow is the shortest day of the year, and once again I am deep into Brave New World.

The nice thing about a long absence is the mind sees the text anew. In my brave new revival there’s a depth that wouldn’t exist if I’d continued the annual reread. For example, the passage below that ends this post, struck me as profoundly visionary. Eighty years ago Huxley completely captured the Kim Kardashian model that relentlessly flogs our culture. It’s an incredibly stunning feat.

As an extra bonus I grabbed enough of the quote so that you get a taste of another contemporary situation Huxley foresaw: The 1% in charge of everything; the 99% happy to have jobs running the elites’s beautiful whores up and down elevators…

The lift was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina’s entry was greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them.

They were dear boys, she thought, as she returned their salutations. Charming boys! Still, she did wish that George Edzel’s ears weren’t quite so big (perhaps he’d been given just a spot too much parathyroid at Metre 328?). And looking at Benito Hoover, she couldn’t help remembering that he was really too hairy when he took his clothes off.

Turning, with eyes a little saddened by the recollection, of Benito’s curly blackness, she saw in a corner the small thin body, the melancholy face of Bernard Marx.

“Bernard!” she stepped up to him. “I was looking for you.” Her voice rang clear above the hum of the mounting lift. The others looked round curiously. “I wanted to talk to you about our New Mexico plan.” Out of the tail of her eye she could see Benito Hoover gaping with astonishment. The gape annoyed her. “Surprised I shouldn’t be begging to go with him again!” she said to herself. Then aloud, and more warmly than ever, “I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July,” she went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) “That is,” Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile, “if you still want to have me.”

Bernard’s pale face flushed. “What on earth for?” she wondered, astonished, but at the same time touched by this strange tribute to her power.

“Hadn’t we better talk about it somewhere else?” he stammered, looking horribly uncomfortable.

“As though I’d been saying something shocking,” thought Lenina. “He couldn’t look more upset if I’d made a dirty joke–asked him who his mother was, or something like that.”

“I mean, with all these people about …” He was choked with confusion.

Lenina’s laugh was frank and wholly unmalicious. “How funny you are!” she said; and she quite genuinely did think him funny. “You’ll give me at least a week’s warning, won’t you,” she went on in another tone. “I suppose we take the Blue Pacific Rocket? Does it start from the Charing-T Tower? Or is it from Hampstead?”

Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill.

“Roof!” called a creaking voice.

The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.

“Roof!”

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

Would it have been better, I wonder, if we had come out into the open, courageously called a spade a phallic symbol and handed one another our quivering entails on a silver platter? Maybe it would. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The truth shall make you free; but on the other hand, let sleeping dogs lie and, above all, let lying dogs sleep. One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things—in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses— a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols. ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words.’ And what’s in a word? Answer: corpses, millions of corpses. And the moral of that is, Keep your trap shut; or if you must open it, never take what comes out of it too seriously.