Abandon Mythology

I’ve been following the madness that is the Republican presidential primary race again. I don’t know why, I just can’t help myself. The weapons-grade imbecilism on display reinforces my inner sense of superiority. My resulting smugness, however, is damped down by a healthy dose of fear. One of these assholes will ultimately have a good shot at becoming our preznit because, let’s face it, within the confines of our dysfunctional two party system, no matter which one wins the nomination, they already have 40% of the vote locked up.

Sadly, I won’t get to cast my vote for Michele Bachmann as I had planned. After getting humiliated in Iowa, she decided to pack up her crazy and head on back to Minnesota. But even with Herman Cain already out of the race, there’s still plenty more crazy to go around.

My primary vote doesn’t matter anyway. Here in Misery, the state Republican party, being collectively too pig-ignorant to understand the national Republican party rules, scheduled our primary for February 7th in direct violation of those rules. Then, after realizing their mistake, they were unable to pass bills through the legislature that they control to change the date of the primary or to cancel it altogether.

So now Misery will spend a couple million dollars to hold a meaningless primary on February 7th, the results of which will be ignored, and the state Republican party will instead choose delegates using a caucus system in March. This is teabagger politics in action: Government is not the solution, government is the problem. Elect us and we will prove it to you.  

Which brings me around to my point. The Republican party has reached a crisis point. For 30 years the right wing has conducted a long, slow war of words on our government. The message: Government is bad, and by extension, people who believe in good government (liberals!) are also bad and want to destroy our country. Thanks to Fox News Outrage Channel and hate radio, that message has been hugely successful. For the average conservative/libertarian/teabagger/patriot it is not just common knowledge, it is gospel.

One need only consider the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination to see what this doctrine has done to the party. We can look at what they have in common — aside from intense dislike for Michelle’s husband and any policy he promotes — to discern the core principles of modern conservatism.

They debate which of them would eliminate the most departments of the government, which would reduce regulatory oversight the most. This plays well to the rabid base, but even the slightest application of logic leads to the inevitable conclusion that government (i.e. regulation) is a prerequisite for a safe, stable society. Imagine for a moment what this country would look like after a generation without the Department of Education, the FDA, the EPA, FEMA and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, just to name a few. Ignorant, toxic, poisonous and radioactive doesn’t even begin to describe how bad it would be. Government is civilization, and lack of government is chaos. As proof, look to the libertarian paradise of Somalia.

Another subject on which all the candidates agree (and another attack on government) is universal opposition to taxes on the wealthy job creators. Republican candidates are still required to worship at the altar of Reagan and trickle-down economics. I think many of them actually believe it works, even in the face of three decades of proven failure. Corporate and individual taxes are now at a modern-day low and our country is suffering mightily for it. There is a certain level beneath which you lower government revenue where everything begins to come apart. We are plus-or-minus one tax cut away from the point where our country rolls over like a turd and begins circling the bowl.

The area where the Republican candidates are most in agreement is opposition to our social safety net. They are unanimous — and ruthless — in their desire to take our country back to a time when there was no Social Security, no Medicare, no welfare or food stamps. No matter how effective these programs have been, no matter how dramatically they have improved quality and length of life and eased socioeconomic disparity, Republicans believe the poor and elderly and underprivileged shouldn’t have any help, any entitlements, because they are “unproductive” members of society.

For these candidates, and the plutarchy they fight for, the idea of the average American working until he is no longer capable of working, and then dying homeless and hungry, sounds like the good old days. For those of us living in the reality-based world, countries without a functioning social safety net are considered “third world.”

As I said above, the Republican party has reached a crisis point. It is a crisis of success. Their long war on government has gradually taken shitty, stupid right wing policies based on selfishness and greed and elevated them to the status of noble political ideology, while simultaneously redefining compassion and altruism as character flaws.  

It is as if rationalism no longer applies. The fact that these policies will not work, and would, in fact, prove disastrous for the great bulk of our citizenry will not keep them from being implemented should these modern “conservatives” win their war and take full control of our government. To the victor go the spoils. And spoiled it will be.

But I am at heart an optimist. I know they already have their 40%, but no matter how much they wrap themselves in the flag and carry a cross, there’s just no way my fellow citizens in the other 60% will elect someone whose stated purpose is to tear down our government, right? Right?!?

It’s hard to believe, but some time this past September, my little blog turned five years old. I don’t know the exact date because, like a teenager with a new hot rod, I was overzealous and wrecked it after only a week or so, losing my first few masterpieces posts. No matter. The anniversary went unnoticed not so much because I don’t actually know the date, as because I haven’t been paying attention. I’m just not feeling it.

Anger, that is. My primary motivator when I started blogging was simple anger. Righteous indignation at what dubya and his gang of neo-conservative hawks were doing to my country and the world, coupled with seething frustration at the inability or unwillingness of average Americans to notice or care that our country was abandoning its ideals of equality and justice for a Orwellian corporatist authoritarianism. Whether it was rampant cronyism (no-bid contracts to Halliburton), mercenarism (Blackwater etc.), extraordinary rendition (kidnapping), enhanced interrogation techniques (torture), or just the general dumbfuckitude of our preznit, I was pissed off about it.

Not so much any more. Even as I watch the rape of our democracy by the economic oligarchy continue unabated, I can’t seem to get fired up about it. Maybe I am just getting old, but I no longer go looking for things up with which I shall not put. It wasn’t even intentional; it just seems as if my body has recognized an unhealthiness in prolonged anger. Nowadays, my mind instinctively navigates away from the right-wing noise machine. It’s purely accidental now if I hear hate radio or watch Fox News Outrage Channel, and even then it’s never for more than a few seconds.

Still, it’s not as if I have buried my head in the sand. One can smell the cesspool without swimming in it. I’ve merely accepted that the cesspool will always be there, and stopped trying to sustain the anger necessary to continue arguing with assholes whose ideas have no basis in rationality. For the denizens of that cesspool, there is no truth, only relativistic opinions. They live in a world where everything has two sides — their side, and that of their enemy.

There is a evangelical religiosity to their arguments that prevents facts from carrying any weight. They seem to believe that through loud, incessant, angry repetition of what they want to be true, they can somehow create their own facts through force of will. It is a mythological worldview fueled by anger. Sadly, they don’t have to nurture their anger because it arises naturally from ideology in conflict with empirical reality.

I have fled Misery for red dirt country again, mere days ahead of the inevitable wave of despair coming out of St. Louis due to the Cardinals’ impending mathematical elimination from post-season play. Again. Still. {Maybe next year, he thought, not feeling particularly hopeful.}

Speaking of hopeful. I heard on the radio that Oklahoma is now the seventh most obese state, with an adult obesity rate of 31.4 percent — and rising. So much so that it is projected to be number one by 2018, with an obesity rate topping 50 percent. Go Sooners.

I also heard a bit of Texas governor goodhair’s sermon speech at Liberty University. I’ve been searching the intertoobz high and low for a transcript with no luck, so I’ll have to paraphrase, but I swear he said something very much like this:

What I learned as I wrestled with God was that I didn’t have to have all the answers, that they would be revealed to me in due time and that I needed to trust him. My journey is not one of someone who turned to God because I wanted to, it was because I had nowhere else to turn.

Something about how worshipfully he said that had me running it back through my brain with the name Lance replacing the word God. Why, it’s simply the thinly veiled plot of a gay porn movie! Could there be scandal in the governor’s future? (That would be in addition to the ongoing one, in which he is slowly being revealed as the dumbest shit-kicker to ever run for preznit.)

I may very well wind up voting for this nimrod. The Misery primary is scheduled for February 7th and I really want to cast my vote for Michele Bachmann, but I fear crazy-eyes may be out of the race by then. Perry has really taken the wind out of her sails. He’s my second choice, but I so want her to win the Republican nomination. She perfectly epitomizes the teabagger mentality, that volatile blend of righteous indignation, smug ignorance and evangelism.

It probably won’t happen, but I can dream, can’t I? Just imagine what a debate between Bachmann and Michelle’s husband would be like. A smooth talking, educated intellectual vs. a batshit crazy abortion activist way out of her depth. I want America to have a choice that stark. I’m optimistic Americans will make the right decision, but the decision will be that much easier to make if they can see clearly the insane, destructive path down which the teabaggers wish to take our country. Michele Bachmann delivers that in spades.

But my second choice may do almost as well. I have already heard several people refer to the current front-runner as dubya without the brains. Say what???

I was driving down the road today, and as I approached one of the busier intersections here in my little corner of suburban Misery, I spotted a group of people gathered in the little strip of grass between a gas station parking lot and the sidewalk. At first all I noticed was sunlight reflecting off a lot of very pale, skinny legs sporting too-high socks and I thought maybe a group of residents had wandered off from the old-folks home just down the street. Then I noticed they were all holding signs, but I couldn’t yet read them because I didn’t have my glasses on. I was just wondering to myself if I had ever seen an old-folks home throw a car wash when I  spotted a Gadsden Flag and realized {gasp} I was looking at a herd of teabaggers!

I got caught by the light and rolled to a stop close enough to take it all in. There were about 20 of them in all, most of them waving and hooting and hollering about something. I couldn’t quite hear whatever foolishness they were shouting over the noise of all the automobiles moving through the intersection and it’s probably just as well. I felt my blood pressure going up just in the minute or so I spent reading their signs.

They had one big banner proclaiming themselves to be some sort of patriots, several smaller mass-produced Tea Party this and Tea Party that signs, and then a bunch of hand made placards with this weeks’s hate-radio turds. A partial list: 

Save The Constitution

Cut Spending

Obama Inherited a AAA Rating

Don’t Spend Our Future

Obama’s Goal: Destroy America.

Sigh. Among all my fellow Americans, these are probably the ones who piss me off the most. Of an age with my own parents, they are probably the generation that benefitted the most from a burgeoning America. They spent their working lives in an industrial empire on the rise, collecting good union-wrought wages with health benefits and paid vacations.

Now, as the empire crumbles due to corporate greed and political corruption, and they collect their pensions and Social Security and Medicare, they have nothing better to do than listen to Rush and Beck and Hannity all week and then come out on Saturday to advocate for taking those benefits away from succeeding generations. Tellingly, the courage of their convictions only extends to the affluent, white suburbs where the vast majority of their audience agrees with them. Here, they don’t have to think past the simplistic three or four word slogan they’ve scrawled on a piece of cardboard or come up with any real ideas about fixing our government or making our country a better place for all of us. They just sit on the sidelines and bitch.

When the light turned green and I began to pull away, I contemplated flipping them a bird just to let them know they don’t have 100% approval, even here, but I didn’t. Those old codgers can get violent. They might have thrown their teeth at me and scratched my truck 

When the iPad first came out — and I obediently lined up with all the fanboys to purchase one — I was disappointed by a lack of selection in the reading material available in Apple’s iBooks store. It has since greatly improved, but in the beginning it was slim pickings, so I downloaded both the Kindle and Nook apps to gain access to Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s e-book inventory.

I liked both readers and decided to purchase books for each of them. Right away I ran into trouble with Barnes & Noble. Their website is difficult to use, requiring the customer to set up an account with a credit card, even if, like myself, all the customer wants to do is redeem a gift card his mother gave him for his birthday.

I don’t use credit cards. I haven’t owned one in 25 years or more. For most of that time I made purchases using cash or a check, but a few years ago I succumbed to the convenience and speed of plastic and began using a debit card. (It was the pay-before-you-pump gas stations that finally broke my will.) I now use it regularly for one-time internet purchases, but since it is linked directly to my bank account, I’m uncomfortable providing any business with open-ended access.

I remember sending Barnes & Noble an e-mail pointing out that they were shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to do business with anyone who doesn’t have a credit card while, over at Apple, any ten-year old with an iTunes gift card can buy books and music hassle-free. My e-mail was probably ignored; it didn’t even generate an auto-reply. I went ahead and provided my debit card number because the card was due to expire in a month or so anyway, and I was really itching to spend Mom’s gift card. Over the next couple of weeks I purchased three books, burning up the gift card and putting a few bucks on the debit card. The debit card soon expired, but no big deal, I’m already down the road reading my three books, not planning to do business with Barnes & Noble again, unless or until they change their account policy.

So here we are a year later. I’ve read two of the three books I purchased and started on the third a few times. (It’s James Kunstler’s post-peak-oil treatise The Long Emergency. It’s so depressing I’m having trouble finishing it. I’ll blog about it if I ever do.) Anyway, everything was fine until last week. I updated several apps on my iPad, including the latest version of the Nook reader. Now it doesn’t work. I can’t even read my three previously purchased books.

Assuming I had perhaps gotten a bad install of the new software, I contacted Barnes & Noble’s technical support with what I thought was a technical issue. After a frustrating hour on the phone, I have learned that this is not a bug, but a feature. The service reps I spoke to referred me to their Terms and Conditions of Use where, down in the fine print and legalese, I found first this little nugget:

Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right to automatically update, modify and/or reinstall the Barnes & Noble eReader Software.

Not so bad, right? I’ve got no problem with them updating their own software. It is, after all, their property. But the other shoe soon drops. The update wipes out the e-reader’s content, forcing users to access the Barnes & Noble website to re-download all previous purchases:

Your purchased Digital Content will be stored in, or accessible from, your NOOK Library on the Barnes & Noble.com Site.

Despite what their name states, Barnes & Noble are not so much “booksellers” as they are book renters. Since it is their policy to require a valid credit card number on an open account associated with a valid mailing address before allowing customers access to books they already own, I fail to see how their use of the word “purchase” in this context is anything but outright fraud. I cannot “own” these books unless Barnes & Noble has access to my bank account? The word I used on the phone with the service reps for this type of ownership was “horseshit.”

Bookstores are dying; the dead-tree versions are doomed. The big chains are having trouble moving into the digital age. Borders has failed and Barnes & Noble is circling the bowl. Until today I felt sorry for them, but if they are stupid enough to continue walling off content from people like myself, who choose not to use credit cards, then they deserve their fate. Fuck ‘em.

Score one for Michelle’s husband. Back during the campaign, he was pilloried by the right-wing noise machine for stating unequivocally that if he received actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets, he would not hesitate to take military action inside Pakistan. On Sunday, he kept his word.

If ever there was a zealot who needed killing — and there are many, in my opinion — Osama bin Laden was one. Albeit a couple of decades late in coming, it was a fitting death for a mass murderer; a surprise raid in the middle of the night, shot in the head and body dumped in the ocean. Good riddance.

The thing is, in the back of my mind, I had assumed that bin Laden was already dead. Even though I know how hard it is to keep a secret in our military, it just seemed completely implausible to me that we would pursue the perpetrators of the greatest crime in our history into the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan and then just quit, in order to go put some shock and awe on Saddam Hussein.

I’ve been giving dubya the benefit of the doubt all these years, figuring we nailed bin Laden with a bunker buster at Tora Bora or thereabouts. It turns out he was a bigger knucklehead than even I imagined.

I’ve been thinking about the military a lot lately. My oldest daughter will soon graduate high school, and not long after, enter into a military career. Like most young people in her position, she doesn’t fully understand what she’s getting into or where it will lead her in life. She’s stepping blindly into the future, chasing that most fabled and illusory concept: opportunity. In doing so, unlike most young people, she’s taking the advice of virtually every adult in her life — mine in particular.

I am a veteran. I don’t often mention it, because, first of all, I am not a combat veteran. Most of the suffering I endured in the military was due to homesickness or hangover. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I don’t want to be confused with a certain type of veteran that I like to call the bumper sticker veteran. You know who I’m talking about, the middle-aged white guys who drive around in pickup trucks listening to hate radio, displaying their patriotism via a bunch of stickers on the back glass of their camper shell. Stuff like “Enjoy your freedom? Thank a veteran” or “Freedom is not free.” (What does that one even mean, anyway?)

These are the guys I think about when I contemplate the potential downside of my daughter entering military life. Percentage-wise, there are at least as many shitheads in the military as in civilian life. And despite what many of our politicians would have you believe, our military is not sacrosanct; sometimes we really are the bad guys. This Rolling Stone article shows just how wrong things can go when the shitheads are left unsupervised. Reading it, and looking at the accompanying photos, left me with a profound, almost nauseating sadness.

Yet I encouraged my daughter to make this decision. I want her to have the motivation, self-discipline and leadership skills that military training provides. I want her to experience honor and commitment to principle, and, as cliché as it sounds, I want her to understand what it means to take an oath to defend our constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I unabashedly and unashamedly want these things for my daughter, these benefits of military life, while at the same time I would like to see drastic cuts in the size and function and use of our nation’s military.

As we struggle with the Great Recession and politicians argue over spending cuts and threaten to shut down the government or force a default on our national debt, serious cuts to defense spending aren’t even on the table. The empire is bleeding out and the answer to our fiscal problems is staring us in the face. Notwithstanding three generations of politicians pretending otherwise, it has been roughly 66 years since our military conducted operations against a true, existential threat to our nation. For that entire time, our military spending has been increasing. It’s time for the beast that is our military-industrial complex to be caged.

I believe at some point in the not too distant future, this decision will be forced upon us. The United States will cease being the world’s only remaining superpower because we will no longer be able to afford to do so. By that time the massive cuts in defense spending will have taken care of themselves, and will probably be the least of our worries. Our cowardly political leaders will do everything in their power to postpone the inevitable, maintaining the superpower infrastructure at all costs, ultimately destroying what’s left of our economy in the name of defending it.

For now, it’s like the old saying; if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is the world’s most powerful military, diplomacy looks like war. I see big changes ahead, for both my daughter and the military she will enter. This country is going to need real leadership. As a parent, all I can do is hope she will be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. After all, when it comes right down to it, parenting is mostly hoping anyway.

But I bet the parents of the soldiers in the Rolling Stone story I linked to above hoped for the best for their children, too. I think about what it must feel like to learn that circumstance or training or environment or something buried in your child’s mind, or some combination of all of these things, led them to commit such atrocities.

And I bet the Afghani parents who lost a loved one to these soldiers also had hopes. I’m sure our military did what it always does in these situations now; it “compensated” the families. Some senior officer rolled in and gave them a few stacks of hundred dollar bills — more money than they’ve ever dreamed of — and an apology. I think about how it must feel to lose a child and win the lottery the same day.

For a couple of years now I’ve been whining about chronicling my sporadic and unsuccessful attempts at understanding exactly what caused our ongoing Great Recession. I’ve sworn off economics books because I just can’t get past the problems arising from the fantasy of infinite growth, and besides, they weren’t much help in answering the one question I kept coming back to: How can the simple lumping together and packaging and reselling of home mortgages bring the entire world’s financial system to it’s knees?

I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book by Michael W. Hudson that answers that question. The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America — and Spawned a Global Crisis tells the whole sad and sordid tale of the subprime mortgage debacle. It reads like a mystery novel, except, of course, the whole world already knows how it ends.

When I think of a mortgage, I think of my own conventional home loan; a fixed number of payments over a fixed amount of time at a fixed rate of interest. Borrowers with a decent credit score and a steady income get this type of mortgage and a lower — prime — interest rate because they present less risk of default to the lender. The subprime mortgage is an altogether different and much less desirable loan. As the name implies, the interest rate is subordinate to (higher than) prime and often not fixed, but in addition, subprime mortgages usually contain extra fees and closing costs for the borrower. The whole mess stems from those high fees, but ultimately it was simple greed at the center of the implosion.

Contrary to what Glenn and Rush and the rest of the right-wing noise machine would have you believe, millions of inner-city black people didn’t somehow band together to use their combined magic negro powers to force lenders to grant them loans they could not afford, thus bankrupting Amurka. The problems did sort of begin in the ‘hood, though. In The Monster, Hudson details how some of the survivors of our last big financial disaster — the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s — arose from the rubble and began looking around for a new way to make (as in manufacture) money, and began marketing high interest loans in low income, largely minority neighborhoods.

The subprime mortgage machine billed itself as extending credit to borrowers who would otherwise not have access to the credit market thereby “helping” them achieve the American dream of home ownership, or renovate an existing home, or just get out from under credit card debt. The reality was boiler rooms full of young, aggressive salesmen using high-pressure sales tactics to dupe the elderly, the ignorant and the trusting with bait and switch interest rates, exorbitant hidden fees, balloon payments and early repayment penalties. And since there is probably no more unscrupulous creature on the face of the earth than a salesman working on commission, fraud in the form of phony documents, forged signatures and inflated appraisals was the norm from the start, and things only got worse with success.

And they were successful. Here’s Hudson, writing about the early days at Long Beach Savings and Loan, which later became the top player in the subprime game as Ameriquest:

The second-mortgage business took off. It performed so well that the S&L ran out of cash to bankroll its home loans. The nest egg created by customers’ savings deposits simply wasn’t big enough. There was only one thing to do: go to Wall Street.

Successful, indeed. Individual lenders were generating these loans in such volume that they created a very profitable income stream from the fees alone, so the loans were bundled together — securitized — and sold to investors, which allowed the lenders to further increase their volume of lending and collect still more fees. Profit from borrowers’ monthly payments on long-term, high interest loans was no longer the purpose of making the loans in the first place. When Wall Street money relieved lenders of the burden of holding the loans they generated, it simultaneously removed any motivation to act responsibly in generating those loans. The fraud grew like a cancer and a two decade long financial train wreck was under way.

But, you ask, what about due diligence from Wall Street? Why would investors put their money into the shady loan business? The simple answer is greed. More Hudson:

The attraction for investors was twofold. First, pooling thousands of loans into a mortgage-backed securities deal provided a cushion against the impact of borrower defaults. If some borrowers didn’t pay, the income stream from other loans in the pool would cover the losses from the loans that had gone bad.

Even with a lot of bad loans in the mix, the return on investment for a shitload (technical jargon) of 15 to 18 percent (or even higher) loans was still substantially better than investors could get from Treasury securities or other safer, more mundane investments. Hudson continues:

Second, securitization decreased information costs for investors. By pooling mortgages an having ratings agencies affix a grade to the securities, investors could get a prediction of expected returns without having to investigate whether each borrower or each lender was on the up-and-up.

This is what is known as “dumb money.” Investors are just as lazy and incurious as us proles. They don’t really want to understand what they are investing in, they just want to make more money, so they line up to buy securities based on a rating agency’s “prediction of expected returns.” But that prediction is essentially purchased by the seller of the securities:

None of this alchemy would make any difference if Moody’s and other credit rating agencies weren’t willing to give their seal of approval to the deal. Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch played a crucial role in putting together securitizations. The veneer of propriety they provided helped assure pension funds, insurers, and other major investors that the securitizers were indeed turning high-risk assets  subprime mortgages  into the safest investments money can buy. The fees that the ratings agencies collected buoyed their profits; just as subprime mortgages were more profitable for the lenders than A-credit mortgages, the agencies made three times as much money rating complex securitizations than they made rating traditional corporate bonds. The pressure to play ball and give good ratings to mortgage-backed securities was enormous.

At the height of the subprime feeding frenzy, these fraudulent ratings kept increasing demand for mortgage-backed securities from investors all over the world. This, of course, created demand for ever more subprime mortgages, which in turn led to ever more relaxed lending standards and ever increasing fraud, to the point where outrageous amounts of money were being lent via “stated income” loans on fraudulently appraised or even non-existent homes. Since the whole enterprise had always hinged on keeping the overall percentage of “questionable” loans down by constantly increasing the total volume of loans, it was only a matter of time before the bubble burst.

It seems I’ve circled back to my problems with the economics of infinite growth. The bubble metaphor is particularly apt for the subprime mortgage crisis; there was an appearance of industry on the surface, but underneath there was no genuine economic activity. The only real “profits” made were by the now defunct lenders at the bottom of the food chain, and those profits were mostly just a pillaging of the largest, and often only, asset many Americans possess: the equity in their homes.

The subprime mortgage crisis is not over yet. Banks are dragging their feet in taking the inevitable write-downs on millions of over-appraised, foreclosed properties. Eventually, the rest of us, all the homeowners of America, will be taking that write-down too. Until then, we can’t know exactly where the bottom is, or exactly how much of our “wealth” is a facade built on over-indebtedness.

I have harbored a dislike for mobile phones since well before they became ubiquitous in our society. In fact, for several years now, I have been the only adult I know who willingly forgoes the myriad conveniences of owning one. Truth is, even as I have watched these devices usher in an era of connectivity like nothing ever experienced before, I have always hated the damned things.

Recent events in the Arab world have highlighted the advantages of this connectivity. One dictator after another has fallen as the entire world watches and supports peaceful demonstrators seeking social justice and government reform. It is a truly amazing thing to see, and without mobile phones, it almost certainly would not have happened.

My problems with mobile phones stem from my interactions with the everyday American user. While it is now possible for every one to be every where, in reality no one is ever fully present anywhere any more. The price of our vast connectivity is universal distraction and a resultant, simple rudeness that is seemingly only recognizable by an outsider like myself. For years I have howled into the wind about people ignoring one another face to face.

But that argument is lost. A basic civility drowned by a technological tsunami. I must adapt or be left behind. So, two weeks ago I succumbed. I got a mobile phone. In fact I got a slew of them, enough for the whole family. And a plan to go with them. Sigh.

My first impression was not one of satisfaction, but rather of having brought an infant into my life again. I felt the need to keep it with me at all times, buy it things, protect it and tend to its needs. I’ve since gotten past that and begun leaving it at home when I go to the park for exercise or go out for a couple of beers. But just as when I did that with my own children, when I return it’s crying and, although there’s no dirty diaper, there’s still shit to deal with.

And just as with my other seven four children, I must soon decide whether to keep it or toss it in a dumpster.

My Congressman periodically sends out an e-mail to constituents detailing what a great job he’s doing for us in Washington. It’s usually just a collection of the latest Republican talking points arranged around the ever-present call for more tax cuts. The reader is invited to click a link and tell the Congressman what they think. I’ve done so a few times, but I’ve never received an acknowledgement, let alone a reply.

The latest “Akin Alert” contains a short bulleted list of things Republicans plan to accomplish in the 112th Congress. Down the list there are a couple of pieces of legislature aimed at repealing health care reform which are dead on arrival at the Senate, and a couple more items about cutting House spending, which I’m guessing Republicans will make a lot of noise about without actually doing anything.

But it’s the first two bullets that really caught my attention. Here is the first in it’s entirety:

For the first time ever, this session of Congress will begin with a public reading of the U.S. Constitution.

Surprising if true, politicians being politicians. Nevertheless, by itself that sentence is not so bad. The problem is, it’s followed immediately by this:

In the new Congress, floor time will not be spent on symbolic resolutions.

Sometimes I think surely they are just fucking with me.