Monthly Archives: August 2012

And After the Nausea, the Vomiting…The RNC and Lee Atwater’s Sins

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I stayed true to my earlier statement: I didn’t watch a lick of the RNC. I did not care. I couldn’t even make it through YouTube videos of the candidate that other bloggers got excited about: Mia Love, Paul Ryan. I read the text of Romney’s speech and thought it a good one, on balance. But if I have to hear one more of these people talk about their hardscrabble upbringing and the Promise of America, I was going to hurl.

This is the downside of a Romney campaign, everything becomes I kind of Hope and Change II: Electric Bugaloo. When what I would like to hear; what would get my blood pumping would be a full-throated denunciation of all the Thousand of Myriad ways that the Government screws with our lives. Something with the intellectual heft of The Federalist Papers with the wit and sheer gob-smackedness of Parliament of Whores. I don’t just want Obama denounced, as though he were the sole problem. There’s a whole mindset of Leviathan-worship that needs to be attacked, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.

And sure, Republicans would be preening hypocrites to make that argument. But by the rood, you’ve got to start sometime.

And the DNC will just be sad. Obama looking grey and tired, trying to light that crowd up by painting Mitt Romney as the Mormon Devil and Paul Ryan as his baby-raping accomplice. It won’t work. In 2008 the DNC was a place of Hope and Change; Fear and Loathing will not get the same reaction. Three months is a long time in politics, but I don’t know what plays Obama has left.

Watched an infuriating documentary last night about Lee Atwater called Boogie Man. Everything about it was offensive, beginning with the premise that Atwater made politics “dirtier” than it had been. Terry McAuliffe got to intone sonorously ad nauseam about how awful everything’s been in politics since. You ended up with enough crocodile tears to fill a rain barrel.

Here’s what I’d like to know:

What about the infamous “Willie Horton” ad was contrary to fact? Was Willie Horton not a convicted murderer? Did he not receive a weekend pass under a policy that Gov. Dukakis supported? Did he not, during said pass, stab a man and rape his wife?

And more to the point, why is this information off limits? Why, when violent crime was at a peak, as it was in 1988, was Gov. Dukakis’ crime policies not fit for discussion?

Ah, but raaaaacism! Fine. Pretend Willie Horton was a honkie. Imagine a white face glowering at the screen. What changes? What about the ad becomes less effective? Do we really think that white people are only afraid of black criminals? Why?

What I remember most clearly from the 1988 campaign was the widespread convicition that George Bush was a wimp. I seem to recall Dukakis saying those very words. I also seem to recall that George Bush was a bomber pilot during World War II, shot down more than once. How exactly was he a wimp? Was it that Connecticut accent, that soft-spoken, slightly nasal voice? Who came up with that particular rhetorical attack, and when does the documentary about him come out?

Really, Twisted Sister?

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You’re not gonna take it? No? You’re not gonna take it? Anymore?

You’re not gonna let Paul Ryan use your one hit to introduce him? That’s, like, beneath you? You have serious moral issues with that?

News flash, you aging no-homo drag queen: that piece of art you excreted all over MTV back in 1984 wasn’t exactly “Anarchy in the UK.” Hell, it wasn’t even “‘Wooly Bully.” It’s a damn football chant, which makes you all a slightly hunkier Gary Glitter.

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” is apropos of anything. It’s every vague rockin’ protest set to wax since Elvis did “That’s All Right, Mama.” It’s Two Minutes Vague-Oppositionality, Gosh Darn the Man, Who Keeps Us Down By Making Us Take Our Pledge Pin Off Our Uniform. It’s Bender in The Breakfast Club, who thinks because he razzes the Assistant Principal that it’s totally fine to dump all over the nerdy kid right after he admits to suicidal thoughts, because Bender’s “A” in Wood Shop is what’s really important right now.

I’d like to believe that Twisted Sister is really motivated by their commitment to Keynsian Economics and a woman’s right to be terrified that the GOP is coming for her ladyparts. But I rather suspect that someone’s kids found out about it, and went all “Republicans are Bad, mmmmkay?” whereupon someone’s booking agent smelled publicity, and then a most totally rockin’ cease-and-desist (the most hardcore of letters) was put in the U.S. Mail. Good Day, Sir!

So take your A in Wood Shop, Twisted Sister, and clutch it to your breast. Clutch it hard, because the unfeeling maw of Reality TV awaits, and you’re gonna need it. Yeah, you’re gonna need it. Evermore.

My Brain is Sluggish; it Must be Tuesday.

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It seems like the BBC is always offering New and Interesting studies that fail to be either. I don’t know if science in the UK is so devoted to AGW that there are no resources for anything else, or if the BBC can no longer tell what’s news and what isn’t. Of course, I have that complaint about almost every major news organ, and the science of every country, so please don’t infer criticism of Brits as such.

But I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to study weather people were any happier on workdays other than Monday. Of course they aren’t. Dragging yourself from bed to commute to desk does not become more pleasant by repetition. It becomes more tolerable on Friday only because you know you’re getting a break.

And what a break it is. Frankly, I’m tired of Saturday, the Domestic Workday. I can’t recall the last time I didn’t ask my wife, “Do we have something to do this weekend?” Because even if you aren’t Running Around, you’re grouting the thing and mowing the other thing. The only good thing about Saturday is recovering from sleep deprivation.

Which is what I’m suffering now. School ramped up again, and my mind has been un-writerly of late. I have projects, but the narrow sliver of time granted to them rarely seems long enough to get a good look at the problem, let alone accomplish anything. Which is no doubt just laziness rationalizing itself. In any case, I missed some sleep last night, and will likely again tonight. I’m only blogging this out of guilt. So maybe I’ll just cut to a video of some puppies:

 

The Convention. Feh. I can’t even sit through pep rallies, and they’re only an hour long. Nothing that happens at a convention matters. Sarah Palin had a perfectly fine speech in 2008; it availed her nothing. John McCain’s speech was okay, if kind of a wet fart at the end. But he was still doing fine in the polls until the economy tanked. I don’t remember what the hell Obama said at his convention; does anyone? Everything Obama has ever said could, if you were only interested in the content, have come out of the mouth of any Democratic politician from the last forty years. It was the feeling of Obama that mattered, the Presence, that MLK-light timbre in his voice. The voice is still the same, but the Presence seems diminished, and the feeling, well…

Thus Do We Meme, says the people who have nothing to do but fill the internet with joke versions of paintings in the fashion of an 80-year-old woman’s botched restoration of a Spanish fresco that was only 40 years old when she was born.

I suppose all art is self-portrait.

This is going to be funny for about 15 minutes, and then it’s going to go down deep in the earth to sleep until revived for VH1′s “I Love the Teenies” webcast in 2032 (incidentally, how odd is it going to be then when talking about The Twenties, and not meaning the 1920′s?). What I want to know is, who authorized the restoration, and what bishop is chewing him out right now as a result? There were times in the Spanish past where this would have been prima facie evidence of the need for an auto-da-fe.

Frankly, I don’t know why whoever decided to “restore” The Scream bothered:

And let’s have that image cap this long and rambling post. Happy Tuesday.

“Don’t Shoot Me, It Was Not About You, It Was About What This Place Stands For.”

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Dear Progressives,

You are allowed, given your insistence on your spiritual superiority, to treat violence as some kind of gaucherie that the Unwashed perform. Such is at least consistent.

But if you yourself stoop to violence, do not attempt, after being disarmed, to plead against violence on the grounds that your violence was only ideologically motivated.

It doesn’t make it better.

Yours Truly,

All Those Horrible Conservatives That You Are So Much Better Than

China Does Not Escape its History

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Mark Kitto, writing in Prospect Magazine, explains in a long article why he is leaving China, where he has lived for decades. His insights are manifold, and worth reading, but I noticed this:

The government is so scared of the people it prefers not to lead them.

In rural China, village level decisions that require higher authorisation are passed up the chain of command, sometimes all the way to Beijing, and returned with the note attached: “You decide.” The Party only steps to the fore where its power or personal wealth is under direct threat. The country is ruled from behind closed doors, a building without an address or a telephone number. The people in that building do not allow the leaders they appoint to actually lead. Witness Grandpa Wen, the nickname for the current, soon to be outgoing, prime minister. He is either a puppet and a clever bluff, or a man who genuinely wants to do the right thing. His proposals for reform (aired in a 2010 interview on CNN, censored within China) are good, but he will never be able to enact them, and he knows it.

To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas

When the dynasty is afraid, the collapse is not a question of if but when. Gradually the emptiness at the center of power invites threats, each one larger than the last. We have seen this movie.