As I was writing my last post, I felt like I was wandering around aimlessly looking for my own point and I never really got there. Today, over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall nailed it in one paragraph.

I think the perceived need to exercise de facto physical control over these oil resources points to a different goal, a different perception of the kind of world system we're trying to build and where we fit into it. It suggests that we no longer believe we will continue to have the sort of economic and political clout that will allow us to maintain our standards of living and power in the world. So we need to lock down physical control of the oil now with our military power -- the lagging indicator of national decline. In other words, we need to use it before we lose it. It's a very pessimistic vision. And a strategy that's really not panning out so well.

Yeah. What he said.

It looks like Cindy Sheehan is throwing in the towel on her anti-war activities.

"I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful," she wrote. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.
"It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most."

That's some brutal honesty right there. Cindy put everything she has into protesting the war and ran smack up against the wall of intransigence that our two-party system of government has devolved into. I've been suffering from the same malaise myself of late. I blame the Democrats. The American people demonstrated their discontent with the war preznit and his party in the 2006 elections by giving the Dems control of Congress. They did so because a solid majority of Americans have decided it's time to get out of Iraq. So after taking control of Congress, the Dems responded to this clear mandate by cutting off funding for the Iraq occupation, forcing dubya to begin immediate troop withdrawals. No wait ... that's not what happened. No, instead they took a page out of dubya's playbook and put lipstick on a pig. They utterly capitulated to the preznit, giving him the funding to continue prosecuting his imbecilic blunder, and declared victory in doing so. It's just mind-boggling to think about.

My neighbor and I were discussing the different ways a liberal government and a conservative government utilize resources when he said "It all depends on what you think a government is for. Is it about corporate growth or about the people?" That sums it up pretty well for me. Lincoln described our government as being of the people, by the people and for the people, but with the vast majority of our lawmakers (Democrat and Republican) dependent on corporate cash for election financing, the will of the people has long since been supplanted by that of "the economy" as defined by corporate America. There is no liberal government option for the people to choose. Cindy Sheehan is perceptive enough to see past all the rhetoric and posturing and realize that in today's environment of bottom-line governance, the pursuit of peace is not even part of the calculation.

"I am going to take whatever I have left and go home," she wrote. "I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost.
"I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble."

The paradigm she refers to is our government's long-standing (and entirely bipartisan) policy of maintaining US economic superiority through military means. That's what Iraq has always been about. Initially, there was quite a long list of rationales offered up for our invasion, with the big scary WMDs at the top, but over time that list has been pared considerably. Stripped of bullshit about nukes and terrorist training camps and pipe-dreams about spreading freedom and democracy, the list comes down to one basic truth; Empire. Sure, it's couched in the form of platitudes about protecting US interests and maintaining stability in the Middle East for national security purposes, but the logic behind this line of reasoning is perfectly circular; We must use our vastly more powerful military to threaten and/or invade and occupy other nations to ensure our continued access to some 25% of the world's oil supply, and we must ensure access to the oil to protect our economy because if our economy falters we won't have the ability to maintain our vast military superiority (and then, of course, the terrorists come and take away your jeebus).

I know people who feel there is nothing wrong with American empire, that in fact our leaders have the responsibility to ensure Americans continued access to cheap and plentiful energy using any means necessary. Aside from the sheer arrogance and stupidity of this we-deserve-it-because-we're-Amurka-goddammit mentality is the fact that our government isn't actually maintaining the status quo. Or rather they are doing so on credit, by running a massive deficit. The whole thing has an artificiality about it that reminds me of a pyramid scheme. We're borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to finance the War on Terra. Around 40% of the money has gone to American corporations, so on paper "the economy" is thriving, but you don't have to be an economist to see that this can't go on indefinitely. Sooner or later the bills must come due and corporate America's name isn't on any of them.

A few years ago my daughter began taking violin lessons. After a year or so of renting an instrument from a local music store for $25 dollars a month, I went searching online for an instrument to purchase. Somehow I stumbled on to a site for violin makers and wound up ordering a violin kit. Here it is, right out of the box.



I had never played or built a musical instrument of any kind. I cannot read or otherwise identify a single musical note. Nevertheless, with confidence built solely of 20 years as a woodworking hobbyist and redneck pride (and probably a few beers), I decided I could build a violin. Piece of cake.

When the kit arrived, I pulled it out and looked it over and read through the instructions a couple of times. The illustrations were hand-drawn and annotated in German with metric dimensions. The instructions were very terse, rather obviously written by someone practicing English as a second language, and written for someone who had constructed violins before. Things like

6. Cut off the excess purfling and make a flute in the top with a gauge.

left me baffled. Purfling? Flute? Gauge? Luckily, procrastination is in my genes, so I was able to rely on one of my most ingrained principles: Whenever you find yourself in way over your head...stall. The kit got shelved and I busied myself with other projects more compatible with my skill level.

A couple of months back, I pulled the thing out again. My daughter switched to piano more than two years ago, so there was no pressure to get it done quickly or even correctly (that's the way I like to work). I've been working on it off and on for weeks now, spending a lot of time online looking at violin makers websites like this guy's, learning as much as I can. Learning a little about the difference between pushing planks through a table saw and serious woodworking. The difference between carpentry and craftsmanship. Long story short, I completed it today. The finish came out a good deal lighter in color than I had intended and the neck joint, while functional, is ugly. But it seems to actually be playable. My daughter tuned it sitting at the piano plinking keys and plucking strings and then, once again, our house was filled with the sound of someone pulling rusty nails from an old sheet metal barn to the tune of Mary Had A Little Lamb. I'm pretty proud of myself. Chimpanzee-that-built-a-bicycle proud.

I've been traveling interstate Amurka this week, but I made it home in time to make my doctor's appointment today. I've been having knee pain. Turns out I have the same thing that Mark McGwire had. Patellar tendonosis (or some such thing). I guess my career as a home run hitter is over.

On Tuesday I was somewhere in the heartland when I felt a great disturbance in the dark side of The Force. It was as if the voice of millions of haters had suddenly gone silent. It wasn't until Wednesday morning that I learned from my complimentary hotel copy of USA Today that Jerry Falwell had died. I'm sure there's already another intolerant, gay-bashing snake-oil salesman stepping into his shoes, but I couldn't help thinking that way out there past the decimal point, the percentage of goodness in the world took a little bump upward.

Dammit! I had a whole Falwell spiel wrapped up with a pink bow and burning hotly on my brain when my keyboard batteries suddenly followed him into the light. I immediately checked the old green Tupperware container where we store such things in this household, and I was actually able to find the required 4 AA batteries for my keyboard. The problem is that they were three different kinds of AA batteries and I just could not force myself to use them. It's one of those weird little personality quirks I inherited from my father; it's the If-A-Job-Is-Worth-Doing-It-Not-Only-Must-Be-Done-Right-It-Must-Be-Done-In-A-Completely-Anal-Retentive-Manner Disorder. It flares up sometimes, leaving me spitefully filleting my own nose while my face looks on in embarrassment. Not only can I not mix battery brands within any one device, I can't put 2 different kinds of motor oil in my vehicles. I also can't mix water with whiskey or buy cheap tools.

So then it's off the store to buy batteries. Feeling a little chagrined at my inability to use the batteries I have, I decided to swallow my pride and punish myself by patronizing the local, recently super-sized Wal-Mart (It's also nearby and I was in a hurry to write my Falwell screed). I held my head high and tried to look disdainful as I strolled to the electronics department in the back of the store. My disdainful look needs work though. I caught my reflection in the door of a microwave and I looked more constipated than anything. Anyway, when I finally found the batteries I found quite a large selection, including some very expensive ones that were supposed to last up to 7 times longer (7X LONGER!!). My disorder was still in mid flare-up when I decided these were definitely the batteries for me. Reasoning that my kids don't need to eat every day, I grabbed a pack and headed for the checkout. But the batteries wouldn't come off the peg! They were on these special pegs that don't allow the customer to pull them off. I guess you have to get help from one of their associates to buy the high-dollar batteries. I don't know because I didn't buy them. Anger clears my head and nothing pisses me off like a business blatantly passing on their security responsibility to the customer. Gas stations that make you pay before pumping are at the top of that particular shit list for me.

So not only did I not buy the expensive batteries, I didn't buy the cheap ones either. At least not there. Instead I left there mumbling about fricking, fracking Wal-Mart and made a 20 mile trip to buy the same cheap ones at the Not-Wal-Mart store two towns over. And of course my wise and wonderful Jerry Falwell beat-down is long gone. It's no wonder people sometimes look at me funny, I often don't understand myself and I work at it. Sigh. I think I'll go see how well I can hold down a bar stool.

It looks like foreign policy consisting of nothing but bluff and bluster (and bombs) is wearing thin with Arab countries in the Middle East. Darth Cheney's recent tough-talking trip through the region didn't have the desired effect. Juan Cole has some excerpts from the Jordanian papers. There's this:

"The US Administration under Bush and his Vice President Cheney has lost credibility and Cheney in particular is no longer taken seriously even in his country. Now he hopes to be taken seriously in the Middle East where he has committed the biggest mistake of attacking Iraq and destroying an independent country that had nothing to do with terrorism."

And this:

...under the headline " The Old Hawk and The Impotent Politician" saying that Dick Cheney landed in Baghdad in the midst of stringent security measures and wearing a bulletproof vest "to prove to the Americans that Iraq is secure and that the Iraqis bask under Bush's good deeds and enjoy freedom, democracy, and reconstruction. Cheney might lie to some segments of the US people who are not aware of what is actually taking place in Iraq" and the "old hawk can lie to the old impotent politician Al-Maliki but cannot lie to the Iraqis because they are aware of the truth and know the objectives the occupation armies have come to achieve." The article concludes: "Cheney has the right to repeat what he wants, deceive, and maneuver to cover up for the defeat of his party, army, and administration, conceal the objectives of the occupation, and defend the behavior and crimes of his forces, but what is surprising is that his acolytes in the green zone agree with him and support his lies and defend the virtues of the occupation, and consider Iraq as an independent and free country."

Ouch! And that's coming from a country that the preznit claims as an ally in his War on Terra. Of course the monarchy in Jordan probably only backs him so he won't get any bright ideas about expanding his democracy-spreading enterprise into their neck of the woods. And speaking of lying your ass off talking about spreading freedom and democracy while carefully ignoring the fact that your allies are dictators, it looks like Pakistan is about to explode. This is yet another consequence of dubya's failure to finish the job he started in Afghanistan/Pakistan before embarking on his Great Iraq Distraction.
So here we are in the fifth year of this grand adventure. Various groups of Iraqi insurgents are ambushing and kidnapping and killing our soldiers while the rest of the population continues to escalate the sectarian bloodbath. It's wholesale slaughter right in the face of The Surge and even though dubya talks about progress in every speech he bumbles his way through, I honestly can't think of a damn thing that could actually be labeled as such. The right-wing noise machine likes to say that removing Saddam from power made the world a safer place, but repeating it endlessly just doesn't make it so. I'd take a mulligan on this one in a heartbeat. In retrospect, Saddam seems pretty tame.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to put pressure on myself to write more often, attempt to create a habit, and maybe work on that novel that's been percolating around in my head for twenty plus years. They say a writer writes every day. I guess a proper corollary for that would be that middle-aged men with aspirations of authorship who are too fucking lazy to put ass in seat for an hour per day, despite the best of intentions, are never going to be writers. A glance at my Bob's Transmission and Automotive Service calendar shows that this is my first post under the sexy Heather Locklear-ish gaze of Miss May, and it forces my acceptance of the simple truth. And I do accept it. I'm probably never going to write that novel and it doesn't even hurt that much to admit it. Probably because it's far from the first time I have disappointed myself. I'm really more disappointed that I'm not disappointed than anything. The fact that I can live with being a mediocre and intermittent blogger in a sea of mediocre and intermittent bloggers is just another example of my life-long lack of ambition. It fits into the overall structure of the person I've constructed from the life that I have lived. A life of wasted potentialities begets many hobbies and no professions.