Abandon Mythology

For two days my comments section has been under sustained attack by a low-down, dirty Czechoslovakian spam-bot. At least I assume it’s Czechoslovakian. When I inadvertently clicked on one of the links in one of the hundreds of spam comments I’ve received, the four naked girls I saw there were advertised as being from the Czech Republic. Lena, Marina, Sveta and Viktoria. Oh my.

Apparently this thing figured out a way around my resident spam killer, so I had to find another. It has since been installed and has been terminating link-spam at a rate of 10-12 per hour since last evening, with a 100% success rate thus far. We’ve turned the corner in the War on Terra naked Czechoslovakian girls with vowels at the end of their names. {/darth cheney}

While I was searching the intertoobz for a new spamulator, I somehow stumbled onto this blog, written by a take-no-shit Texas feminist with about as much respect for religion as I have. In one post she referred to jeebus as “the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick.” That’s so good it makes me want to steal it. I contemplated popping into her comments section to tell her so, but I chickened out. She and her readers have a very low tolerance for the penis-burdened and their opinions. I’m still trying to work up the courage to put her in my favorites list.

Michelle’s husband has been in office for over a year, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s fair game. I’m still a little hesitant to take my shots at him because he’s been getting pummeled from every direction for months now, but deservedly so.

This man campaigned brilliantly and eloquently, energizing millions of young people and motivating liberals of every stripe with his message of changing the way Washington works. That message, along with the fact that his nitwit predecessor presided over the destruction of our economy, our international reputation and our constitution, got him elected preznit.

But a year later, he still hasn’t shown up for work. In spite of all the screeching from the right-wing noise machine about socialism and communism and liberalism and Marxism and every other “ism” they can throw at him, he hasn’t really done anything leftist.

He has, in fact, been infinitely and oh so frustratingly patient, deliberate and cautious in the face of this constant barrage of nonsense and lies. His supporters on the left have been lulled to sleep by pragmatism, bipartisanship and compromise and they are not likely to wake up unless the preznit decides to man up.

Health care reform, the one liberal social issue that Michelle’s husband purportedly supported, was handed over to the Democrats in Congress, who jawboned it for most of a year, butchering it along the way, yet were still incapable of passing even the severely weakened legislation. Talk about getting your ass handed to you.

And while it is deplorable that the richest nation on earth does not provide universal health coverage to it’s citizenry, despite spending 3 to 4 times what all the other civilized nations do on health care, what I find truly despicable is that the politicians who stood in the way of this legislation will be able to sell it as a victory for the American people.

When the economy picks up this summer, as it inevitably will given the cyclical nature of our economic system, the right-wing will take credit for it, claiming it to be a result of their defeat of health care reform. And our preznit will let them get away with it.

I’ve been having trouble writing, and for once it’s not due to a lack of effort. The problem is, lately, when I sit down to blog — which I still do frequently, despite the lack of published posts — I write these long, rambling pieces that start with one subject, end with another completely unrelated subject, and travel everywhere (and nowhere) in between.

When I first started this site, I labeled my efforts here rhetorical masturbation and the metaphor is now even more appropriate. Like masturbation, blogging is not as much fun if you can’t finish.

My current wordy period and my previous policy of saving unfinished pieces for later revision have combined to produce a remarkable — albeit mostly digital — pile of bullshit that’s become too daunting to wade into, so I’ve spent the morning doing a purge, clearing out most of the stale ideas.

It is my intention, and hope, that I’ll now magically be able to write about any new ideas quickly and concisely. Perhaps not surprisingly, my mind, like my blog, is littered with the shards of past resolutions of just this sort.

Hopefully I’ll soon be posting more frequently again. For anyone interested, I’ve discovered that the RSS feed all the way at the bottom of the page actually works. So, rather than come here to see for yourself how lazy I am, it’s possible to subscribe and have any new posts show up in your e-mail just like spam advertisements for dick-bigger pills and Nigerian money laundering opportunities.

For many years I have carried around in my head an allegory of human time on earth. I can’t be arsed to look through my boxes and find it, but I’m pretty sure it comes from one of Carl Sagan’s books. In it, the age of the earth is represented by a hypothetical stack of sheets of paper from the earth to the moon, and the sum total of humanity is then represented by a single sheet of that paper.

It is a good, humbling image. Even more so when extrapolated down to the individual. A single human life is far less than a blink in time, yet as we study our own past we think of ourselves as ancient.

A long time ago — at least to us — back when all humans were still dark-skinned, mankind discovered farming and animal husbandry. The combination of those two discoveries allowed us to gradually take control of our own food cycle. All of modern civilization arises from the spare time created when we learned how to feed ourselves.

With our existence no longer simply a quest to stay alive, we were able to stop wandering and establish our own permanence. We created cities in which to live, languages with which to communicate and learn. We brought ourselves in from the wilderness.

Unfortunately, we brought with us the violence native to our existence in that wilderness. As we were building civilization, we were also building armies and weapons of war. In northeastern Syria, at a place called Tell Brak, archeologists have spent years excavating one of the oldest and largest cities ever discovered. From Discover magazine:

Close examination reveals the settlement extending over an astonishing 136 acres in the period of 4200 to 3900 B.C., larger than other settlements of the time, with the sole exception of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.

The site is rife with information about early urban civilization, and many discoveries are yet to be made. One of their latest finds is evidence of a mass slaughter, hundreds of bodies dumped into pits, nearly 6000 years ago.

The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that the conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in this conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies’ bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.

Our concept of time is limited individually by our short lifespan and cumulatively by our brief total time of existence, so it is impossible to fix our own position (or course) on the evolutionary scale. There can be no sense of direction, but that’s never been a bar to speculation.

As for me, I take some small comfort in the fact that we have always been as bloodthirsty and incapable of compromise as we are now. Knowing full well that from within the confines of a single sheet of paper in a stack reaching to the moon, “always” is meaningless.

Well, the calendar shows today is December 25th. I’ve heard no reports from the front, but I guess that means Bill O’Reilly’s forces have prevailed in Fox News Outrage Channel’s annual “War on Christmas” despite the best efforts of myself and my fellow insurgents. 

This year my cell was assigned the vital and dangerous task of infiltrating several area Wal-Marts and saying “happy holidays” to unsuspecting patrons.  We struck a mighty blow, but alas, the world goes on pretending jeebus was born during the pagan winter solstice celebration. Maybe next year.

This year’s Giftsmas season found me a little more flush than usual. My grandmother passed away and a small sum of money unexpectedly made it’s way into my hands.  

Now where I come from, money that falls into one’s lap out of nowhere is called ”found money” and tradition holds that it must be spent. Not saved or invested. Spent. Preferably in such a way as to have nothing to show for it after the fact but a wicked hangover, a few shiny baubles and a suspicious rash.

So it was somewhat in defiance of tradition that I took half of the money and had some engine work done on my scoot, purportedly increasing the horsepower by 25-30%. I say purportedly because, as I write this, Pearl is not running well. She sits forlornly in my garage awaiting a warm enough and dry enough day for a return trip to the shop.

Obviously I couldn’t take a chance on any more bad juju with the remainder of maw-maw’s money. I had to stay true to my Arkansas white-trash roots. I had to get more frivolous… so I bought a big-ass teevee.  

My plan is now to monitor the Tiger Woods scandal very closely. At least until Brittany gets caught without underwear again or my motorcycle starts running right.

In the small Arkansas town in which I was born, there is an Emerson Electric plant that has been manufacturing fractional horsepower electric motors for all of my life. Many of my friends and relatives have worked there; it was at one time the towns largest employer and may still be, but over the last several years the company has been gradually moving jobs overseas, and everybody knows it’s just a matter of time before the plant closes.

It is, of course, a story that’s being repeated in small towns all over our country. It is not a new or unique phenomenon. Sadly, the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas workers is the logical outcome of our own aggressive capitalism. It is, in fact, the continuation of a standard business practice. The pursuit of cheap labor is what brought those jobs to rural, right-to-work America in the first place. I can accept that. I don’t like it, but at least I understand it. What I don’t understand is how rabid capitalists like Emerson Electric CEO David N. Farr can continually get away with blaming the government for the results of that pursuit.

Last week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran this op-ed in which Farr sounds the alarm about America’s declining standard of living. A paragraph from early in Mr. Farr’s op-ed provides a nugget of truth:

Emerson has expanded globally to diversify and ensure that it can continue to win against intense global competition. We are well positioned to grow profitably in the United States and in international markets, including China and India.

Statements backed by these numbers from a speech Farr gave a few weeks ago in Chicago:

Emerson,… will keep expanding in emerging markets, which represented 32 percent of revenue in 2009. About 36 percent of manufacturing is now in “best-cost countries” up from 21 percent in 2003,

That’s right, Mr. Farr moved 11% of his companies manufacturing overseas between 2003 and 2009. But watch how his op-ed seemingly builds a case for why this was caused retroactively by Michelle’s husband and health care reform that does not yet exist. Farr lists three reasons for his concern. He begins by blurring the line of fiscal responsibility between our new preznit and his predecessor.

Federal debt: Over two administrations, the United States has created debt that is forecast to exceed $20 trillion within 10 years.

Over two administrations? Yes. For the purposes of assigning blame, the right-wing noise-machine has created a new math in which 11 months is greater than or equal to 8 years. Farr then moves on to something of a veiled threat:

Emerson provides health coverage to employees and their families in the United States — more than 100,000 people. Emerson would like to continue to do so. However, the bill that passed the House of Representatives and the proposed Senate bill could raise costs on private-sector plans. Basic economics could force many businesses, like Emerson, to seriously consider exiting employer-sponsored plans, requiring employees to shop for coverage or move to the government-based plan.

Nice health care plan you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it. The bill “could” raise costs, therefore Emerson would be “forced” to dump all their employees health care onto the taxpayers. Farr follows up with an outright lie.

Tax policy: Major competitors in the European Union and Asia are taxed at lower rates than U.S. companies. That may be hard to believe, but it’s true,…

No David, it’s not true. It’s bullshit. The top US corporate tax rate is nominally 35%, but after factoring in all the tax breaks, loopholes and exemptions in our immense tax code, the effective tax rate is 25%, which is about the same as China and lower than most of Europe. Farr continues with this:

Emerson pays a substantial tax bill every year, as it should.

Sigh. Mr. Farr relies on the ignorance of his target audience, crying about how government policies are destroying his company knowing full well the rubes are too lazy to connect the dots and realize that since taxes are only paid on profits, a company paying ”substantial” taxes must necessarily be doing very well.

Despite Mr. Farr’s attempts to distract attention from capitalists doing what capitalists have always done, the declining standard of living of which he speaks is very real. As is our country’s slip into ”second-tier economic status.” It is not, however, merely a risk. It is an inevitability. It is, in fact, a work in progress. In a world of finite resources (what us lefties like to call the real world), globalization leads mathematically to some form of wealth redistribution, a more uniform dispersal of available resources.

The world simply cannot sustain a billion or more human beings leading the middle-class lifestyle most Americans have enjoyed for the last half century. What I see in my home town is a microcosm of working class America. As manufacturing jobs steadily disappear and wages decline, complacency turns to impotent anger.

David Farr and the rest of our corporate oligarchy engage in deflecting that anger away from themselves. I write a blog post and fling it onto the intertoobz. A modern variation of howling into the wilderness.

For a man who’s been feeling the effects of age so much lately, it’s a bit disconcerting to find this on the wall of my gym. The fact that it was put there by my 16 year-old daughter makes me feel very proud. And more than a little sad.

I could still get through a workout like this, if I had any idea what a “superman” and a “single-leg good morning” are.

I could still get through a workout like this, but I’d walk like a cripple tomorrow.

I could still get through a workout like this, if I could get excited about it enough to even begin. I still come down here once a week or so and move some weights around, but it’s more from ritual than purpose. There’s no energy behind it.

Still, I can’t help but notice that question mark beside “pull-ups.” I can pull my rickety, fat old ass up there 10 times on a good day, so I guess it’s still my gym for now…

I haven’t been blogging lately because I’ve been spending most of my spare time on primarily two tasks; making another guitar and arguing with teenagers parenting. I’m enjoying some success with the former. The latter? Time will tell, but right now … not so much.

This is my second guitar, and the first that will have been built completely from scratch. I purchased a bending iron and I’ve been teaching myself how to bend wood. Here’s a poor photo of some early results:

Whether I’m easing these thin strips of maple and rosewood into circles for inlaying around the sound hole or muscling the wide, flat, side pieces into that classic big-bottomed-woman guitar shape, there’s a certain knack required for the process. A knack from which I can’t help drawing parallels to my aforementioned child-rearing challenges.

I’m dealing with three high-schoolers right now, all possessed of that typical American teenager’s arrogance coupled with an assumption of knowledge that borders on delusional. As they fumble their way cluelessly toward adulthood, my efforts to provide guidance are endlessly frustrating and seemingly futile, but I persevere. A man propelling a sailboat with his own breath.

Fatherhood, like bending wood, is about applying just the right amount of heat and pressure. Each child, and each piece of wood, is unique, requiring a different mixture of delicacy and firmness and patience. I am forced to proceed largely by feel, often reflecting on my own father’s lamentation that ”Kids don’t come with instructions.”

When working with the iron, there is a certain point when the wetted wood is very hot — just before it dries out and begins to burn — where it becomes somewhat elastic for a few moments. My fingertips dance about, avoiding the heat, as the wood almost seems to relax and submit to my will. (That never happens with my kids.)

With wood bending, my effectiveness is immediately apparent; the wood either bends or it breaks. It’s a much slower process with my kids. All I can do is keep applying pressure and heat and hope for the best. At least the wood never says anything to me that threatens to make the top of my head blow off.

Fall is upon us here in Misery. In a cycle as old as life itself, cool nights, warm days and that certain something in the air signal the coming winter to every living thing. As the foliage begins to fade, the activities of all creatures seem to take on more purpose, an air of preparation. The squirrels are cutting hickory nuts, the birds are flocking for migration, and I’ve laid in a supply of dark beer. Readiness is key.

Darkness comes not only in the form of beer, though. The days grow shorter, the nights longer, the increasing gloom augmenting middle-age melancholy as my thoughts drift inexorably toward mortality.

My maternal grandmother came to visit me recently. She is my last living grandparent, and won’t be around much longer. In truth, a lot of her is gone already. Her body and her mind both grow smaller and frailer with each passing day. The numbers tell the story; 86 years old, weighing 61 pounds. What sad irony that the woman who was once a large part of my world is now too small to activate the automatic air bag sensor in the passenger seat of a car. It is but one of many ways she no longer counts as an adult.

It is not often I consider the short life-span of my father’s side of my family a blessing, but I began to do just that while gazing upon my grandmother sitting in my living room, her body nothing more than translucent skin stretched over a bent and brittle skeleton, her mind aware of, but unable to follow or participate in the conversations going on around her. There are worse fates than dying young.

Michelle’s husband gave a speech on Wall Street today. Check it:

Marking the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, which set off a series of events that led to last fall’s financial crisis, Obama cautioned Wall Street to step lightly as the economy and financial sector recover.

It was a “series of events” alright, but it started long before Lehman went under. Over the course of several years, our nation’s financial industry perpetrated a fraud on the entire financial world by creating extremely complicated (bogus) investment securities and their accompanying massive — albeit temporary — profits, all from thin air. Then, when the inevitable happened, and the bottom fell out, the right-wing noise machine rushed in to blame it all on niggers borrowing more money than they could afford to repay.

No one went to jail over this crime. In fact, when our government ponied up a trillion or so taxpayer dollars to stave off the next depression, the people who ran the whole system into the ground began passing out bonuses like frat boys pouring tequila shots. (Woo-hoo, make mine a double!)

So today our preznit stood before these titans of finance and told them a thing or two:

“Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we are still recovering, they are choosing to ignore them. They do so not just at their own peril, but at our nation’s.”

That ought to teach them. I just hope he didn’t go too far and do anything uncivil like shake his finger at them.