Category Archives: politics

The Courage of Real Journalism: It is Not Entertainment

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From cleantechnica.com:

Courage has a way of empowering others to also stand up and say “Enough!” This week, two other long-time Washington Post journalism professionals — Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen — also resigned from the Post to form their own independent journalism channel, The Contrarian. The irony here is that Rubin is known as a conservative voice. If she is horrified by what conservatism has become under the influence of MAGAlomaniacs, perhaps the rest of us should be concerned as well.

In her introductory post, Rubin wrote,

Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy — Donald Trump — at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.

The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives. Americans are eager for innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation. Which is why I am so thrilled to simultaneously announce this new outlet, The Contrarian: Not Owned by Anybody.

Also, Ann Telnaes, who was a political cartoonist for the Washington Post for 16 years, had one of her cartoons rejected recently; she decided enough was enough. She quit to pursue her own idea of what journalism should look like by creating her own media channel on Substack. As she explained in her first post:

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.

MSNBC is stepping up to the plate, as well, putting Rachel Maddow back on with a daily show for the first 100 days of the Trump tenure.

Hecuba should have cried “Enough”!

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Another oldie but goodie, from 2002. Maybe even more relevant today.

Tonight I watched the film version of Euripedes’ Trojan Women that featured Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba, Queen of Troy, who was given no choice but to watch while her city, her countrymen and women, and her family were ravaged by men of great ego and little else. They took everything from her that they could — her birthright, her identity, her freedom. But what they couldn’t take from her was her voice.

I watched the film with a group of women called together by my therapist friend in ritualized support of one of those woman — an American nurse suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as result of her experiences in Viet Nam. We were there to help her give voice to her painful memories, to rage and cry out and vocalize whatever was staying stuck so painfully in the deep wounds of her soul. (Ritual, art, drama, healing: the legacy of Asclepius.)

ENOUGH! We wanted Hecuba to finally cry ENOUGH! We wanted the Trojan Women to all finally cry ENOUGH! But they didn’t, and so we all cried ENOUGH for all the times we didn’t — for all of the times that men and women of conscience do not cry ENOUGH loud ENOUGH for all of the times that men of great ego and nothing else continue to repeat and repeat, over and over again, the very same tragic scenario that Euripides so eloquently and dramatically and ritualistically unfolded all of those centuries ago. When will it be ENOUGH?

In the Middle East men of great ego and little else ravage and destroy what they cannot possess. In our very own America, men of great ego and little else take away everything from us that they can — expect us to watch and endure, like Hecuba. We are all Hecuba, watching, enduring, while men of great ego and little else ravage our liberties, our identities, the very planet that sustains us.

Where are our voices crying ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH!

from “Letters From an American”

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Historian Heather Cox Richardson publishes an online newsletter about the history behind today’s politics, “Letters from an American”. The current issue offers some details about Trump’s cabinet candidates that have not been widely publicized. I quote some of them below. She also includes the following disturbing observation:

There are a number of ways to think about Trump’s appointments. The people he has picked have so little experience in the fields their departments handle that Erin Burnett of CNN suggested that he is simply choosing them from “central casting”—a favorite phrase of his—to look as he imagines such officials should. Indeed, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN pointed out, while President Joe Biden vowed to make his Cabinet look like America, Trump’s picks look “exactly like Fox News.” Trump has actually tapped a number of television hosts for different positions.

That so many of his appointees have histories of sexual misconduct is also striking, and underlines both that they share his determination to dominate others and that they do not think rules and laws apply to them.

But there is another pattern at work, as well. In a piece he published on November 15 in his “Thinking about…” newsletter, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: “health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.” The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a “decapitation strike.”

“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump’s proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.”

Pete Hegseth: According to Heath Druzin of the Idaho Capital Sun, Hegseth has close ties to an Idaho Christian nationalist church that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”

Linda McMahon: She once incorrectly claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in education when she was trying to get a seat on the Connecticut Board of Education and is known primarily for her work building World Wrestling Entertainment. And she, too, has been entangled in a sex abuse scandal. In October, five men filed a lawsuit claiming that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were aware that former ringside announcer Melvin Phillips was assaulting “ring boys” who were as young as 13.

TulsI Gabbard: Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security. Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent.

Pam Bondi: In March 2016, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that the Trump Foundation illegally donated $25,000 to support Bondi at a time when she was considering joining a lawsuit against Trump University. Her office ultimately decided not to join the lawsuit. Bondi defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, during which she was a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel. She supported Trump’s campaign to insist—falsely—that he won the 2020 presidential election. She is also a registered lobbyist for Qatar.

To read the complete issue of this newsletter go here. To subscribe to the newsletter, either free or paid, go here.

Buddha and The Babe

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This is part of my altar that features a Laughing Buddha and the Venus of Willendorf.

Buddha and The Babe

The body parts of the ancient female figure are exaggerated, and many scholars believe that figures such as this one were considered fertility goddesses.

Abundance, luxuriousness, and productiveness are all considered synonyms for “fertility”, all of which relate to the attributes applied to both icons. The gifts that these symbols represent are very similar:  the comfort, security, and stability of having more than “enough.”

It is what we all want, yet millions of humans around the world have barely enough.  Five years ago, a study reported that 40% of Americans do not have enough resources for the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter.  Researchers state that, although economic growth and low unemployment are “critical to reducing material hardship,” they “alone do not ensure everyone can meet their basic needs.”

An article on the Santa  Clara website by Joseph Westfall,  a research assistant at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, offers a cogent argument for Social Welfare.  He begins with this:

When Congress and the president negotiated over welfare reform in 1996, a key element of the debate was whether government aid should continue to be an entitlement, a grant the poor receive solely by virtue of being poor.

Ultimately, the bill that passed last August changed welfare from an entitlement to a block-grant program for states; states are now free to set their own eligibility criteria and may limit access to welfare in various ways, including limits on the length of time a family may receive assistance.

Still, the basic ethical issues behind the debate persist. Is society responsible for the well-being of the poor? If so, at what cost to the rest of the community? Are the poor to be held in any way responsible for themselves? How far must poverty go before society is morally bound to act?

He cites philosopher  Peter Singer, who  writes, “[I]f it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” For Singer, social welfare is not only a “good thing to do,” it is a moral imperative.

Beef up your argument for Social Welfare by reading Westfall’s article.

And take a look at my son, Bix’s blog post responding to Biden’s statement where the President refers to the necessity and dignity of having a “job”: “It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, ‘Honey, it’s going to be OK,’ and mean it.”

Bix, who calls himself a Mediocre Autistic, has this to say:

You know what else would let people look their kid in the eye and say this? Universal basic income. Medicare For All. Orienting our society around social welfare rather than the scarcity lie of extractive capital.

My dignity is inherent. I’m born with it. So are you. Biden, as I said, would scoff at a suggestion that he doesn’t believe this; no doubt he’d call the charge “malarkey”.

But there’s only one way to read a statement like “a job is about your dignity”, and if it isn’t what he means, then he should say what he means and mean what he says, because saying what he did serves only to lessen the lives of those who can’t work.

 

 

Dear Diary: Bring Back the Yippies

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In 1967, I was married and had a five year old. While others were in Washington protesting the Vietnam War, the most I could do was make a peace banner and hang if off a branch on the tree half-way up our driveway.

The Yippies, officially

What I would have love to have done is political street theater, like the Yippies, who became famous when they banded together in the mid-sixties to “Stick it to the Man”. At the 1968 DNC convention they organized an absurdist counter-convention — including nominating a pig for president. They named themselves the Youth International Party to give themselves a sense of legitimacy.

Their colorful protest methods were tailor made for the television cameras .For example, once they poured into the vast main concourse of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station 3,000 strong, wearing their customary capes, gowns, feathers and beads. They tossed hot cross buns and firecrackers, and floated balloons up toward the celestial blue ceiling. They hummed the cosmic “Ommm,” snake-danced to the tune of Have a Marijuana, and proudly unfurled a huge banner emblazoned with a lazy “Y.”

While Yippies were a radical bunch, their basic philosophy paralleled the movements today to establish equality in all areas of American life:  We want everyone to control their own life and to care for one another … We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life, the accumulation of profit.

The Yippies used mockery, ridicule and silliness to call attention to the wrongs of our society. Imagine how our current president would be affected by this kind of outrageous public contempt. What if a new generation of Yippies performed an exorcism on the White House, the way they did it on the Pentagon in 1967 at the “Be-in” protest against the Vietnam War.

This is how it went back then:

The initial conception of the protest had been to occupy the Capitol, but that might have sent the wrong signal to the public, suggesting that the marchers wanted to shut down the democratic process and thus were offering only more political negativity.

So, instead, they came up with the idea of an exorcism that would levitate the Pentagon 300 feet. Since the five-sided pentagram was symbol of the occult, representing evil forces at work in the world, the Pentagon was a natural symbol of the evil war and itwould serve as a far more resonant target than the Capital..  Time magazine later reported the intention of the proposed ritual would turn the Pentagon “orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled” and the war would come to an immediate end.

On the makeshift altar before the Pentagon, a number of competing rituals began simultaneously to unfold. Ed Sanders, of the rock band the Fugs, delivered an impromptu, sexually suggestive invocation punctuated with repeated calls of “Out, demons, out!” Allen Ginsberg declaimed mantras for the cause.

Two hundred pounds of flowers were trucked in and distributed to the crowd. When military police and marshals confronted the protesters, images of gun barrels blooming with daisies became the iconic photographs of the day.

As we approach November, I can’t help wishing there were a new version of the Yippies to dramatize the absurdities of our current Cheeto-in-Charge. I’m not suggesting that they disrupt the convention; rather I’m suggesting that for the two months before elections, a swarm of costumed political pranksters organize “guerilla theater” events to draw the attention of the public and the media to (my words) drive tRump even more crazy.

If he is even the least bit superstitious, I’m sure that anything smacking of magic and mystery will fuel his paranoia and insecurities. So how about an exorcism on the White House to rid it of negative energies — racism, bigotry, misogyny, elitism, etc. etc.

While there are no more Yippies, perhaps a gathering of witches:

ON MIDNIGHT LAST Friday, all over the United States, an alliance of magical practitioners called the Magic Resistance gathered Tarot cards, feathers, orange and white candles, pins, water, salt, matches, ashtrays, and unflattering photos of President Trump. The objects are prerequisites for a binding spell, an incantation typically used to keep someone from harming themselves or others, like a magical straitjacket.…

..Magic (and particularly witchcraft) has been a form of protest for decades, probably centuries, but protest magic has burst into the media and broader public consciousness only twice in recent memory: during the 1960s and now, during Trump’s presidency. In the ‘60s there were the yippies, but also the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell—W.I.T.C.H.—a pointy-hatted wing of the women’s liberation movement.

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-witches/

In 2016, the anonymous W.I.T.C.H. movement was resurrected by a group in Portland, Oregon, inspired by the injustice they see in the world around them, and in their own backyards ….. Sometimes they hand out tarot cards at events, edited to include a message such as “A vote for the health-care bill will mean DEATH for millions of Americans” on the death card. On their YouTube channel, they posted a video of one of the rituals they performed before a protest: the “binding” of Donald Trump.

The exorcism of the White House can be done virtually on a specific night over Zoom or some other platform. With enough chatter about it over social media before hand, perhaps the mainstream media might also cover it. The point would be to make our Hitler-Wannabe nervous and insecure as he is surrounded by the notion that mysterious enemy forces, over which he has no control, gave gathered to erode his power and his sanity. What great fun to add some fun to ensuring that he loses the election.

These are the sites I used for background information:

https://www.history.com/news/yippies-1968-dnc-convention

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_IntFor ernational_Party

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-rag-tag-group-acid-dropping-activists-tried-levitate-pentagon-180965338/

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chicago10/yippies.htm

The Eyes Have It

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I crave the cosmic and the common,
refusing to sever half my soul.
I choose to grow in all directions:
to grow both fruit and edible root;
to glory in the ground and desire the sky;
to stretch roots across acres
and reach for the bedrock;
to rejoice in the changing shapes of the seasons.
I eschew the single minded vision.
I am all Eye.

I wrote this when I was in my mid-thirties, when life was an adventure. At almost 80, my life now is a different kind of adventure.

These are my eyes as of last week,  Something going on with with the right eye.  The eyes don’t have it any more.

And it’s more than the eyes.  The WordPress I used more than a decade ago is a different animal.  I’m on a very slow learning curve.  But they say that learning new things is good for the brain.  Maybe so, but it’s not always good for the stress..

As I get older, I need things to be more simple. Only nothing is simple these days.  Even though the “Ayes” had it in Washington and voted to impeach the Big Orange Turd, it’s still complicated, and it’s not going to be easy.

Starting Over. Again.

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Once I was a prolific blogger. Once I was part of a larger blogging community. But that was almost 20 years ago.

The onslaught of social media drove personal blogging out into the internet hinterlands. But, as folks get fed up with the advertising and limited opportunity for actual communication on platforms like Twitter and FB, there is a growing interest in resuscitating old blogs and setting up new ones.

I originally got into blogging through the example set my my son, who is inspiring me, again. I haven’t written anything in over a year (including poetry), so I’m hoping this current effort will get me inspired.

Meanwhile, I continue to slog through the the depressing overtone of our times, hoping for impeachment, hoping my adult son, diagnosed with autism three years ago, will be able to find the help and support he needs from “the system.” Writing helps both of us deal with the struggles of our lives.

Well, here goes “starting again.”

Hecuba should have cried “ENOUGH!”

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[I posted this on my old blog in 2002.]

Tonight I watched the film version of Euripedes’ Trojan Women that featured Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba, Queen of Troy, who was given no choice but to watch while her city, her countrymen and women, and her family were ravaged by men of great ego and little else. They took everything from her that they could — her birthright, her identity, her freedom. But what they couldn’t take from her was her voice.

I watched the film with a group of women called together by my therapist friend in ritualized support of one of those woman — an American nurse suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as result of her expriences in Viet Nam. We were there to help her give voice to her painful memories, to rage and cry out and vocalize whatever was staying stuck so painfully in the deep wounds of her soul. (Ritual, art, drama, healing: the legacy of Asclepius.)

ENOUGH! We wanted Hecuba to finally cry ENOUGH! We wanted the Trojan Women to all finally cry ENOUGH! But they didn’t, and so we all cried ENOUGH for all the times we didn’t — for all of the times that men and women of conscience do not cry ENOUGH loud ENOUGH for all of the times that men of great ego and nothing else continue to repeat and repeat, over and over again, the very same tragic scenario that Euripides so eloquently and dramatically and ritualistically unfolded all of those centuries ago. When will it be ENOUGH?

In the Middle East men of great ego and little else ravage and destroy what they cannot possess. In our very own America, men of great ego and little else take away everything from us that they can — expect us to watch and endure, like Hecuba. We are all Hecuba, watching, enduring, while men of great ego and little else ravage our liberties, our identities, the very planet that sustains us.

Where are our voices crying ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH!

The Sound of One Hand Slapping

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There it is. Can you hear it? It’s the sound of one hand slapping. It is the metaphorical slap that women are finally starting to give in place of the physical one they wished that had had the courage to give in the first place.

That sound has been a long-time coming, mostly because the cultural context for male-female interaction has been dominated by a male world view, a perspective influenced by both biological/hormonal as well as environmental/experiential histories. The myth of the superior Alpha Male, unfortunately, still endures in our society.

While some men continue to evolve beyond the influence of adolescent hormones and cultural aberrations and learn to interact with women as respected equals, others still cling to the mistaken notion that women are their inferiors and exist mostly as the means to fulfill their unrealistic fantasies. The worlds of sports, entertainment, and politics are well-populated with ego-driven men who relish asserting the power of their popularity and wealth. These men are many of the ones who are currently being “outed” for their long histories of sexually harassing women.

For women, sexual harassment ranges from an unwanted kiss or sexual comment, to the extremes of rape and pedophilia. But, it seems to me that it is unfair to judge the evil of all incidents of “sexual harassment” by the same standards.

Several years ago, when I volunteered in the Alzheimer unit at an upscale assisted living center, one sad 90 year old gentleman kept trying to pat my butt. Each time I saw him coming, I would try to grab his hand before it grabbed me. Sometimes I succeeded; sometimes I didn’t. He was 90 years old and suffering from dementia. I did not feel sexually harassed.

Like many of the men over 65, he grew up in a cultural context in which men expected men to “come on” to women as an assertion of their male egos. That is why the older politicians and entertainers who have been notorious for the sexual harassment of women don’t think it’s such a big deal. They don’t have a clue that the really big deal is that they never grew out of their limited understandings of women and never emotionally evolved into mature, responsible adults males. I can excuse (and gently correct) a 90 year old man with dementia when he makes a grab, because he is on the very low end of the harasser spectrum.

But It’s another thing to be a powerful elder male still engaging in sexual harassment (like Donald Trump and Roy Moore). It is also another thing to be a powerful elder male who did some stupid adolescent pranks in his early years, has proven that he has evolved way past that kind of behavior, and is embarrassed and apologetic about those past transgressions (like Al Franken). Punching someone is not as horrendous as murder; trying to kiss someone is not as bad as forcing more intimate sexual contact.

Most women neither expect nor want any of those advances, but, as we have been reading in countless current confessions, women usually feel powerless to resist, afraid to lose whatever the harassers had the power to take away from them.

For whatever reason, they didn’t slap their harassers when it happened, so they are slapping back now, loud and hard. They are setting an example for other women who felt and might feel powerless to tell their harassers to stop, to back off, to show respect and not condescension.

Oddly enough, I don’t remember ever being harassed, except maybe by the nuns in elementary school, who definitely felt obliged to assert their power over us puny kids in the most unappealing ways.

Maybe it was that I was careful to appropriately dress for every occasion, well aware of the visual signals that purposeful cleavage and a short, tight skirt tend to send to the eager male eye. That is not to say that I never used what limited assets I had to give those signals; but my doing so was a conscious choice, with a consensual expectation and an acceptance of responsibility for what came next.

And that is the responsibility that we women need to take for how we present ourselves to the world of the puerile assumptions of some males. We need to stand against misogyny where it surfaces, and discredit the advertising media that keeps presenting women as sexual objects and therefore encourages the cultural context that we need to reveal, revise, and reform, We need to engage life (as suggested by Camille Paglia) with wary vigilance, personal responsibility, and enough self-assurance to assert our right to hear the sound of our one hand, slapping.

Tomorrow is Veterans’ Day

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Desert Storm: A Family Scrapbook

Someone’s son huddles
gravely under desert rain.
restless as his heartbeat,
he waits for signs in the sky
to turn the taste of metal
in his mouth to blood.

Someone’s daughter,
leather jacketed, baseball capped,
takes her place in U.N. Square,
lights a candle against the wind, and
joins her voice to the hymn
that pulses like blood
through the streets, through the night,
through the weary dreams of men
reduced to war.

Someone’s daughter runs
from classroom through snow,
stuffs her duffel to bursting
with camouflage and conviction,
prays for the chance
to set the skies ablaze with truth.
At the table of her father’s house,
she waits for orders
and watches the colors of dawn
melt like blood into sand.

Someone’s son
boards a bus at midnight,
sheathed in a confusion of
army surplus and disbelief.
He joins the dawn in Lafayette Park,
seeking solace – if not answers –
in the steady drum,
the solid hands,
the strong songs
of sons and daughters
refusing to bleed
for the dreams of weary men
reduced to war.

(Elaine Frankonis 2013)