October 7, 2001 -- October 7, 2011 (and not over yet)

In an alternate universe, there is actually a recognition that today is the tenth anniversary of the start of our longest war.
However, in the military states of the USA, I guess it just seems normal to most of us to be a nation at constant war. I'm home today, and I'm flipping randomly through television news channels and there is no mention of Afghanistan that I've seen. There is more concern with Michael Jackson's doctor, the 2012 political horse race, Amanda Knox, a missing baby in Missouri ... the news channels might as well be the soma of Huxley's Brave New World, helping us to forget that we responded to criminal religious fanatics with daisy cutter bombs and met one day of extreme violence in the US with ten years of war (and counting) around the world.
I was at a loss on how to respond to today's significance and our collective amnesia, so I dug back into this blog and found one of my very first entries -- almost a mission statement. It doesn't go all the way back to October 2001. But even in December 2004, I was afraid that the MYTH of universal consent to the Afghan war was already being written by the powers that be and their corporate media:

Friday, December 17, 2004
Peace bloggers
It occurred to me as I started this process to look up Weblog on Wikipedia. I didn't realize how recent the history was, with the first use of the word Weblog only dating from the end of 1997 and Blog from 1999. So, even starting this blog at this relatively late date (16 Dec 04) might seem early in some later blogger's eyes. The Wikipedia article is also interesting in the role it gives to the "war bloggers" supporting the Iraq fiasco in 2002.

I don't want to leave any doubt that this will be a place for peace blogging. I was working in Manhattan on 11 Sept 2001 and not only was I out marching against the criminal invasion of Iraq on the streets of New York before and after the war started, but I still believe that Osama bin Laden would be in custody if we had NOT invaded Afghanistan -- if we had instead brought continued international pressure on the Taliban government, which showed some desire to bargain for its survival. War is NEVER the right answer to any problem, and we've started two of them (and the phantom fictional "war" on terror) in this first Bush/Cheney administration. AND WE RE-ELECTED THEM???!!! That's the real reason I felt the need to jump into this messy and overpopulated blog fray. Because the thing I truly thought was impossible, the fact that the American voters gave a vote of confidence to these criminals, has come to pass.

While it's irresistible to be vehemently Anti-Bush, it's not enough, we have to NOW start defining ourselves by our labels, rather than letting THEM use our words as a wedge issue to divide us. We are liberals and we're proud of all that stands for. They're conservatives, and they want to destroy the UN, Social Security, and every trace of FDR's fingerprints on this country & world. We can't let it happen.

- True Blue Liberal

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Here's a great video of the late Steve Jobs (strange to use that formulation, with pancreatic cancer just having taken him today) in 1984, introducing my first home computer, the original Macintosh.

It's been a long time since I've used MacPaint, played Alice Chess, or heard that Mac speaking voice (which I now associate with Radiohead's "Fitter Happier"), but this presentation and its reception bring back exactly how revolutionary it seemed compared to the gray business machines of "real" computer companies.
Rest in Peace Steve.

"...many a year has passed and gone and many a gamble has been lost and won..."

The Guardian reports today that the "Nobel Prize odds a-changin' for Bob Dylan", with the chances of his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature dropping dramatically from 100-1 to 10-1. Bettors generally know more than I do, after all they're risking actual pounds sterling. I assume they received some sort of information from shady Scandinavian sources before rushing to their local betting shops.

I've tweeted on a number of occasions that I think this prize should go to Philip Roth, but I might -- no, I would -- be even more excited if Bob Dylan were recognized. His words and music have been part of the fabric of my life for more than forty years.

Here's a song of his that you may or may not know well, but which shows why Bob might deserve more than Grammys and Oscars. In Dylan's Visions of Sin, Christopher Ricks (also the author of books on Keats and Tennyson and editor of the most recent edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse) spends 15 pages comparing Dylan's "Not Dark Yet" to Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale". Hear the similarities?



Good Luck Bob!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE October 5 @ 9:45am EST:
The Guardian is now reporting that Bob is the favorite to win the Literature Nobel in the UK betting shops, with odds of 5/1!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE October 6 @ 8:00am EST:
The award from the Swedish Academy went this year to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.

Our Annual Liberal War on Christmas (LWOC) will start early this year

The Liberal War on Christmas is not (like Iraq) an offensive war of choice.



It's entirely defensive when you walk into a store on October 2 and it's already filled with Santas and nutcrackers and ornaments and candy canes and monogrammed red
stockings and aluminum Christmas trees in multiple unnatural shades. These pictures were taken by my phone at a Kohl's in New York State, but I'm sure that the same premature display of Christmas commerce is taking place all over the country, long before the traditional start date of Halloween (and I'm old enough to remember when you didn't see any Christmas crap on public display before Thanksgiving).

We're going to be sick of hearing Jingle Bells by Halloween.

All the Way With BHO?

As we get further and further in time from the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the parts of his legacy that stand out seem more and more impressive: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, & 1968, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1968 inspired by Ralph Nader, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. The list of programs falling under the umbrella of The Great Society read like a Teapublican's wish list of the main elements of America's 20th-Century liberal legacy that they are working so hard to roll back.

But I remember 1968, and Lyndon Baines Johnson for me was a symbol of everything that was old and illiberal and out of touch, bordering on evil. It was because of one issue that overshadowed EVERYTHING that he did on the domestic front: Vietnam. LBJ didn't start the war and he had wide bipartisan support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (416-0 in the House and only Morse and Gruening voting no in the Senate) that gave the green light for his escalations (think "Surges" in 21st-Century Newspeak), but it didn't take long for that police action in Southeast Asia to tear the country, and the Democratic Party, in half.

There are major differences between LBJ and BHO, beyond the fact that the Obama's Affordable Health Care Act doesn't hold a candle to the domestic achievments of Johnson. First of all, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will always be Bush's wars and the crimes of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib will always belong to the previous regime. But the biggest change between the war of my youth and these endless wars of the 21st century is the lack of a draft. If the privileged children of the suburbs planning on peaceful futures saw those futures usurped by their birthday drawing a low number in a draft lottery, then there would have been millions of young people in the street against these endless wars no matter who was living in the White House. There are some rumblings of direct action against the current corporate-controlled power structure which supports the current wars and leans from center-right Democrats to lunatic Teapublican fringe, but "Occupy Wall Street" is never going to motivate millions to hit the streets the way the Moratoriums and other mass marches against the Vietnam War.

He has almost closed down the illegal war on Iraq, but with Barack Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his willingness to impose the death penalty by remote control on American cititzens this week, his surge in Afghanistan, and his acceptance of the Patriot Act and other assumptions of the so-called "War on Terror", it may not be too long before responsibility for these awful foreign policies starts sticking to his administration. And until the military stops draining our national treasure, he won't have the resources to accomplish even one hundredth of what LBJ did domestically during his brief time in the White House.

"Corporations are people, my friend." -- Mitt Romney

I'm still so sorry that the heckler didn't take his cue from Terrance and Phillip and respond with, "I'm not your friend, buddy."

But seriously, the real responses to this idiocy of Mitt "Buddy" Romney's are myriad, but the more I think about it, the more I think that even if you accept the January 21, 2010, Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court that corporations have the same unlimited rights to free political speech of any other person -- and the rights to back up that speech with all their substantial resources -- the heckler should have followed up with, "But are they American citizens?"
Even if corporations are people, why should these people without a country, these supranational groups with unlimited resources that moves jobs, factories, and corporate headquarters offshore, have any say in the domestic politics of their former home? Or in the politics of any country in which they have some of their tentacles planted?

Social Notworking

There are a lot of Facebook pages visible on screens around my office this week, and not just among twenty somethings. There are pictures of Christmas puddings and snow drifts that just MUST be shared with all of one's "friends". I've avoided the Facebook so far only because they ask you to register your name when you're sent a link of someone's vacation snaps (and there are "friends" and relatives there to whom I'd prefer to remain invisible).


While looking for uses of the term "Social Notworking" just now, I stumbled on a British blog dedicated to the fad, "Social Notworking: Tired of the social networking malarkey?" at www.socialnotworking.co.uk. They have to be given special compliments for posting a couple of entries in 2007 and then losing interest in this stupid blogging fad as well.

I'm making "Social Notworking" my phrase for the fin de l'année, with the hope that looking at family slide shows online hasn't been replaced by something even more stupid by the end of twenty eleven. I still don't understand why the Facebook didn't die on the day that the first student was "friended" by a parent, but I think it's just an age thing. I don't know why college students of the 21st century call their parents on the phone either.

Happy New Year.

A Holiday Shopping Suggestion

This chart explains why I'm doing all my holiday shopping here or here.

Thirty Years Ago Tomorrow

It's hard to believe that it's been thirty years already since we lost this beautiful soul and voice of reason.

THERE'S  ROOM AT THE TOP, THEY ARE TELLING YOU STILL
BUT FIRST YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SMILE WHEN YOU KILL
IF YOU WANT TO BE LIKE THE FOLKS ON THE HILL


 A WORKING CLASS HERO IS SOMETHING TO BE

"There ya go baby!" or Sarah Palin alienates the vegetarian vote

What will Sarah kill next week?

By the way, this rugged-individualist self-sufficient hunting junket to kill a wild animal cost over $42,000, but image is everything and the people who like guns and death and camouflage will love this unrealistic reality-show image as much as they love her brainless flag-waving books.

Support The Right to Arm Bears!