elder rap
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Category Archives: culture
it’s a DEPRESSION, stupid!
From Wikipedia, via Time Goes By (where Ronni Bennett proves that a “recession” it is not).
“[A] depression is characterized by its length, and by abnormal increases in unemployment, falls in the availability of credit, shrinking output and investment, numerous bankruptcies, reduced amounts of trade and commerce, as well as highly volatile relative currency value fluctuations, mostly devaluations. Price deflation, financial crisis and bank failures are also common elements of a depression.”
And deepening our collective depression, according to Bob Herbert in the NY Times, “Safety Nets for the Rich,”
The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: “U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since ’45.”
The headline next to it said: “Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses.”
We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.
[snip]
Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans.
We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day.
That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.
It’s also depressing not to see the Democrats shove these facts into the faces of the those who don’t believe that so many of the systems that we depend upon for citizen support need major overhauling.
Capitalism seems to only work on a small scale. Small businesses in consolidated communities that compete against one another have to rely on making it based on the quality of their goods and services and the ethics of their business dealings. Neighborly word-of-mouth recommendations and solid reputations ensure their success.
Once capitalism balloons into megacorporations-run-amok (as, it is now) then it’s up to the federal government to protect its citizens from greed, usury, and unethical business practices and to prosecute and punish corporations (and their officers) that take financial advantage of their customers.
Instead, we continue to reward the financial rapists. (see above)
I rather like this quote, from here:
And this one, from here:
For most of his life, my dad was a staunch Republican, and he and I could not even begin to discuss politics for many years — until he reached the age of about 60, after he had become a Commissioner on our city’s Housing Authority and after he had traveled and had experienced disenfranchised populations such as those in Haiti of several decades ago. He told me then that he has come to believe that what America needs is a Socialist Democratic government so that the disenfranchised of this country could have access to a safe, healthy, and opportunity-filled environment. Otherwise it would continue to be only the uber-capitalist, financially well-off citizens who could afford it.
Socialist Democracy, Democratic Socialism. There are lots of definitions for those concepts. According to here:
While I know that the European form of Socialism has flaws, from my perspective, maybe what we need is a Socialized Democracy, where the Federal government keeps a tight reign on capitalist greed by
— closing corporate and personal financial tax loopholes and off-shore money stashing
— imposing even higher tax rates on the highest income earners (corporate and personal) and outlawing using federal money for corporate bonuses
— encouraging, through tax benefits, the reinvestment of corporate profits into hiring more workers; improving worker benefits, salaries, and working conditions; and improving product quality (all of which benefits the capitalist system)
— providing universal health care (Medicare for all) to all American citizens.
Now, that’s just a start of what an American Socialized Democracy might be able to accomplish from the perspective of this depressed citizen-victim of the out-of-control capitalism rampant in this country today.
Capitalism, Jesus, conspiracy theories, and Bohemian Grove
I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what’s left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother’s and sister’s keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you’d have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.
The above is a quote from Michael Moore. Read the entire article here.
According to The Curious Capitalist:
The top 400’s share of the nation’s income went from 0.52% in 1992 to 1.31% in 2006—an even bigger increase than its share of taxes paid. When you chart the average tax rate paid by those in the top 400, the picture is nearly opposite.
Yet, even non-fundamentalist religious people continue to let the Republican Conservatives brainwash them into believing that somehow everyone else who is not them is an instrument of the devil. Despite Enron and Madoff and any number of smaller versions of these capitalist-inspired fiascos, there are people — people wealthy in neither money nor knowledge — who believe that the rich and powerful know what’s best for them.
Now, I’m a big fan on Dan Brown’s novels and just finished reading his latest, The Lost Symbol (which I read on my iphone with ereader). Being an eclectic agnostic brought up as a Catholic, I love Brown’s wild and well-documented speculations about hidden histories and mysteries. The Lost Symbol explores the influence of Masonic beliefs on our nation’s establishment (then and now).
But I know that, while Brown uses facts as his building blocks, he fits them together with the mortar of his imagination. One man’s conspiracy is another man’s frat party.
Which brings me to the stuff online about the Bohemian Grove gatherings, where smart powerful people dress up in costumes, light fires and fireworks, sing and enact a ritualistic “cremation of care”. What looks to me like a glorified frat party or boy scout fest is touted by the likes of Alex Jones as satanic ritual. If you want to see a conspiracy, you’ll figure out how to make it look like one.
I wish I had written down Dan Brown’s reflections on pagan rituals that described the drinking of blood and consumption of human flesh as an empowering and spiritual act — an act that gets translated daily into the Holy Communion of Christian churches.
Now, personally, I am not comfortable with secret societies of any kind, and the “old-boy” Bohemian Club makes me nervous, even though, as Daniel’s Free Speech Zone, describes:
For the last century, an elite group, called the “Bohemian Club,” has been gathering at the grove for a yearly retreat. The “Bohemians,” also called “Bohos” or “Grovers,” are an all-male pack of corporate, financial, military and government leaders. No women are allowed. The group has included every Republican president since Herbert Hoover. Both Bushes have been here; so have Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and Collin Powell, as well as a horde of lesser-known Bohos. All together, some 2000 of them descend upon Sonoma County each summer in July and assemble in the depths of the dark forest to imbibe huge quantities of costly alcohol, to piss on the trees, and to let it all hang out for the duration of 16 days.
“Weaving spiders come not here,” is the club’s motto, meaning that they’re here to relax and not to negotiate business.
While not a “conspiracy theorist,” I, like Daniel, have a concern, as he expressed:
…given the context of today’s world and the role these men play in it, the form of the Cremation of Care ritual — the priests in hooded robes, the mythologem of human sacrifice — seems to symbolize the mindset of men who profit from war, chop up the forests, pollute the environment and scheme to privatize Social Security. The ritual most likely creates an fraternal atmosphere in which they can bond and set the stage for future cooperation in the exercise of evil.
That seems to be the essence of what the Bohemians bring out from the Grove and foist upon the rest of us.
I don’t believe that Jesus, if here today, would be a capitalist, a conspirator, or an “old-boy” networker. He certainly would not work on Wall Street, although he might be forced by circumstance to work at Wal-Mart.
He would be out advocating for a single payer health care system. And if he tried to run for office, he would be eaten alive by the far Right/eous. [pagan ritual reference intended]
oh boy, oh boy!!
Maureen Dowd’s column in Saturday’s NY Times calls a spade a spade (no, this is not a racial slur).
She writes:
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.
[snip]
Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.
Dowd’s piece gives a little history of the South’s failed efforts to fight on the wrong side of national moral issues since the Civil War.
Obama, as an educated, eloquent, and erudite mixed race black man is the redneck’s nightmare come true.
For the rest of us, he’s our last great hope for rescuing our country from the lying maws of the stupid, selfish, and snide.
Is this how the moral Germans felt?
While Hitler was spewing his hateful lies and masterminding the most horrific manipulations of all times, the good and powerless German people who understood and feared what he was trying to do must have felt the way that some of us do these days. Nothing we say or write or do seems to deter the crooks and liars who are so fiercely opposing the kind of Universal Health Care system that would save lives and ultimately save money as well. The right-wing conservatives are railroading to its certain death the ability of this country to keep its citizens healthy.
How viciously ironic that the Right/eous portray President Obama as a Hitler figure, when it is they, his opponents, who are copying Hitler’s tactics of spreading distortions and disinformation, manipulating and inventing language that totally misrepresents the truth and stirs up the most primal fears of those who adhere to the right-wing’s philosophy and values
This from an article in The Nation: Reverse Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare
The spinmeisters of the right have done quite a job with what used to be straightforward English etymology. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, “integration” was inverted to mean “takeover” and “colorblindness” is code for abandoning the advances of the civil rights movement, which itself is synonymous with an “industry” of exclusion. It’s no surprise, then, that whenever a piece of progressive legislation comes to the table, the same manipulations come into play from right-wing pundits who shamelessly profess their desire to see the Obama presidency fail. Thus it is that America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is being turned upside down as the neat equivalent of Germany’s Bankrupting Forced Death Act of 1939.
Like the Nazis, the Right/eous are playing to the fears of people are afraid that change will somehow mean that they will get less because someone else will get more. They are the same people who were afraid of integration and feminism, and they follow the leaders who validate their fears and keep them riled up and misinformed.
From the article cited above (read the entire piece here):
But if you listen as though deciphering pig Latin and realize that this demographic is speaking from a well-managed, near-hypnotic looking-glass world where every word from the mouth of a Democrat (or a liberal, or a Latina, or a Canadian) is a lie, a betrayal… then it all makes sense. Their world truly has been turned inside out, by the election, by the economy, by the precarious conditions that threaten us all. But for those whose sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.
I am afraid. They are afraid. If the Health Care legislation doesn’t pass, I think ALL of our fears will be realized. They will get less of what they already have. I will be OK because I have health benefits from a government job, but my adult son and the millions (yes, I said MILLIONS) like him will still go without.
This is the time for strong moral leadership to step up and take some risks and vehemently press for a Universal Health Care System that, when enacted, will alleviate all of our fears.
I am inclined to ask here, “What Would Jesus Do?” Certainly not support the profiteers of the for-profit health care industry.
C’mon President Obama. Rise to the position of leadership that we put you on and press for the changes we so desperately need.
Woodstock, tonight
Not Bethel, where the original Woodstock festival was held, but rather the town of Woodstock, where the planning for the original festival took place and where, for decades, the town served as a magnet for the most talented artists and musicians..
That’s where my brother is tonight, to hear and rendezvous with his old pals from the original Blues Magoos, who are performing tonight at the Bearsville Theater.
Forty years ago, when the original Woodstock was happening, I was the mother of a 6 year old and 7 months pregnant with the son who has become theonetruebix. The Woodstock Festival was a far cry from my interests at the time.
Family lore has it that my cousins (then teenagers) all piled into a car to drive up to Woodstock Festival from where they lived in lower New York State. They never made it, having got stuck in the long line of cars heading for Bethel who never made it either.
I never missed missing Woodstock. I don’t miss missing the Roots of Woodstock concert tonight.
Tonight I am missing my home in Massachusetts and I will miss going to the beach with everyone there tomorrow.
Vaya Con Dios
It was 1953. I was thirteen and feeling my burgeoning hormones. I would tell my folks that I was going to confession and, instead, meet my friends at a soda shop with a juke box, located a few blocks away, where the owner let us get together in a back room. We closed the door and played “spin the bottle.” That was where I got my first kiss from a boy — to the music of Les Paul and Mary Ford.
Mary Ford passed away in 1977, and by then I was listening to the Moody Blues and Judy Collins. Mary Ford and Les Paul were divorced long before then. I don’t remember hearing anything about her passing, but
Les Paul died today.
Moody Blues and Judy Collins. Here no longer young, but, like Les Paul did until age 94, they can still move an audience.
“I can’t not buy those Ferragamos“
I’m reading Origins of the Specious and remembering the grammar wars (well, skirmishes, really) that I used to have with (son) b!X back in the old days. I was as adamant about the rules as he was about accepting common usage.
When I taught 8th grade English in the late ’60s, our grammar text book was my bible, and I carried it with me all through graduate school and beyond so make sure that my writing and editing were grammatically “correct.” Now I find out that b!X’s points were the ones I should have been paying attention to.
Like ending a sentence with a preposition (see previous sentence). Or beginning a sentence with a conjunction (note current sentence). And then there’s the split infinitive, as in “to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
I rarely read non-fiction, but this book is as entertaining as any Stephanie Plum adventure, chock full of ear-opening anecdotes that explain where those old grammar rules came from and who were responsible.
Here’s a little sample of Patricia O’Connor’s clever chapter headings and her catchy writing style:
Isn’t it Pedantic?
Quick, what’s the plural of “octopus”? If you think “octopi” is classier than “octopuses,” go stand in the corner…..
We live in a postmodern world, but the Latinists are still among us, especially in academia. They insist on using plurals like “gymnasia,” “syllabi,” and symposia,” even though dictionaries now recognize a preference for Anglicized plurals (“gymnasiums,” “syllabuses,” “symposiums”). There’s pedantry off campus too, of course,. I’ve seen real-estate ads offering “condominia” for sale — to ignormani, no doubt.
As Garrison Keillor notes on the book’s back cover:
It’s right there on page 54: ‘It’s better to be understood than to be correct’ — pull that out the next time somene corrects your grandma. This tour de force of our beautifully corrupted language is both. And dull it ain’t….
And yes, as the title of this posts indicates, sometimes double negatives are what make the point. Never say never.
a movie for the aged and the ages
Take a grandchild to the movies and go and see Up.
It was supposed to thunderstorm this afternoon, so we figured we’d all go see a movie that we all might enjoy. And we did.
A Walter Mathau look-alike (voiced by Ed Asner) literally animated Carl Fredricksen is my new hero, and if you wear dentures, creak when you get out of bed, and wish for adventures you never had, you’ll love him too. He brings a refreshing understanding and appreciation of elderly people (with those continually growing noses and ears and those increasingly sagging jawlines and shoulders) who struggle not to be overwhelmed by a world that often seems to be leaving them behind.
In some ways, my almost-seven-year-old grandson saw a little different movie than I did, but that’s OK. I mean, when I laughed at Carl’s dentures flying out when he spit at the villain, it was for a reason much more personal than my grandson’s giggle.
But we both did see a movie about a feisty (and sometimes crotchety) old guy and a fumbling, eager kid who, together, grapple with many of their obstacles to making ordinary life an adventure. And they succeed.
“Up.” Definitely and “up” movie.
when comics were king and we didn’t worry
It was the 40s. Comic books were 10 cents, and Mr. Wellman, who owned the news stand down the block from my house had a wall full of constantly updated comic books, which he let me read for free while I sat on the bench and munched on penny candy.
On the way back from visiting my mother yesterday, I listened to a piece on NPR about Harvey Kurtzman the creator and driving force behind Mad Comics and later, Mad Magazine.
By the time the 50s arrived, my interests were moving away from comic books and more toward True Confessions and Mad Magazine.
Comics historian Tom Spurgeon picked Mad as the medium’s top series of all time, writing, “At the height of its influence, Mad was The Simpsons, The Daily Show and The Onion combined.”[1] Graydon Carter chose it as the sixth best magazine of any sort ever, describing Mad’s mission as being “ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous” before concluding, “Nowadays, it’s part of the oxygen we breathe.”[2] Joyce Carol Oates called it “wonderfully inventive, irresistibly irreverent and intermittently ingenious American.”[3] Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam wrote, “Mad became the Bible for me and my whole generation.”[4
Irreverence and ingenuity. They sort of go together.
There is something endearingly irreverent about Alfred E. Neuman, the poster boy for Mad Magazine, and his philosophy of “What, me worry?”
It was the 50s, and I didn’t worry about much.
Nothing good lasts forever.
Except maybe irreverence.
Here’s a great comparison of the sayings of Alfred E. Neuman and George Bush, asking “Who would you trust?”
Irreverence.
One of the many great things about Obama is his ability to be irreverent about himself.
Yesterday, when I walked in the door of my now home after visiting my mother, I was greeted with a scene that was a far cry from the 50s. My son in law was ironing his shirts for the work week and my grandson was imitating him, using his toy iron on one of his own shirts laid out on a tray table.
There are lots of good things about it not being the 50s, even though we all do worry a lot.,