The Peristaltic Testator

I'm not one to harp in endless postings about the political and the current, but this Tuscon shooting and the froth and blather it has prompted is lacking, as far as I can tell, in one telling literary parallel. So far, no one in the mainstream media has compared Jarod Loughner to Lord Exton from William Shakespeare's Richard II.

( Oh, damn it, not a Shakespeare post! What has he got to do with those of us who speak English?!? )

In my very early twenties -- the first year, in fact -- I was (as they say in the vernacular) shooting the shit with a friend over cheap beers. (Muscles, if you're curious, bleaknemesis, and near the Sprinker Rock.) My friend had made a tired joke. Though I try to avoid tired jokes myself, it was giddy enough or late enough or I had consumed beers enough to respond with a tired reply to a tired joke. I said, "That's as old as my grandma, and she farts dust." Wracking my brains, it might have been the second or third time in my life I used that line. For reasons that should become clear, it was definitely the last.

My friend responded with some correction. "Parts the dust," he said.

"What?"

"My grandma parts the dust. That's the saying."

This was getting a bit bizarre, even for me. I repeated with greater emphasis, "What?!?"

My friend explained, as if to a child, "That's as old as my grandma, and she parts the dust."

If I recall correctly, I just stared. If grandma is dead, he reasoned, her body would lie in the ground, thus separating, or parting, the dust. The comeback was therefore a poetic reference to age as represented by death and burial.

I sincerely expressed my reservations about the veracity of his correction. The expression refers to a woman so old that she passes not gas but, well, dust. I asked him where he got his version.

Now less sure of himself, he explained that he had heard that rejoinder when he was about six from a slightly older kid, probably nine years of age. As a quirky six-year-old, he completely debunked his later nickname of Muscles by trying to reconstruct a mis-heard juvenile rejoinder with one fraught with poetic and philosophical imagery.

I was by this time more than a bit incredulous. Using again the vernacular, I called bullshit. While possibly true, I explained, how many nine-year-olds reflect on the cycles of life and death with enough mental reflection and depth to poetically remember, let alone create, such a non-childish return? I then imitated said juvenile, intoning with a sniveling whine the first "That's as old as my grandma," then deepening my voice into a Shakespearean basso profundo and raising a Yoric-skull-holding claw for the final "and she . . . parts . . . the dust."

Muscles had to accept the likelihood of my explanation. In fact, I think my explanation caused him to briefly and sharply snort Rainier through his nose.

( So what does Muscle's brainy reconstruction of a witticism have to do with reality? )

Just finished Douglas Rushkoff's Life, Inc., a book that chronicles the rise of the corporation over the last few centuries. According to Rushkoff, small businesses were garnering way too much economic power near the end of the "Dark" Ages (actually a very good time to be a peasant, but that's another story) from the established royalty. To combat this rise, monarchs granted monopoly authority over corporations for the exploitation of previously unexplored and unexploited lands. This freed the monarchy from the cost of funding expeditions, and guaranteed no pesky competitors for the explorers. About the only thing the royals had to do, in fact, was provide some military protection for the exploited lands later, after the coin started rolling into the realm.

The British East India Company was just one such corporation enjoying the monopolistic exploitation of the New World, backed by the Lobsterbacks of the British military.

The East India Company lobbied vigorously for laws that would help it quell any competition from the colonists (in the North American British colonies it established). This was a particularly easy sell since the royals and governors they were lobbying also happened to be shareholders. Laws forbidding colonists to actually fabricate anything from the resources they grew and mined made self-sufficiency or local economic prosperity impossible. "An Act for the Restraining and Punishing of Pirates" defined the import of tea from anyone other than the Company as smuggling. The Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 helped the Company unload a surplus of tea accumulated in British warehouses by removing all barriers to trade as well as granting tax exemptions. "No taxation without representation" -- the rallying cry that led to the Boston Tea Party -- wasn't about voting as much as about Britain's passage of tax laws to the exclusive benefit of the East India Company. The American Revolution itself was less a revolt by colonists against Britain than by small businessmen against the chartered multinational corporation writing her laws.

This is why the founders so carefully limited the reach and scope of corporate power in newly independent America.

(Douglas Rushkoff, Life, Inc., Random House, 2009, pp. 11-12.)

Rushkoff goes on to list very convincing examples of this corporate limitation in early founder literature, including -- this surprised me -- the "invisible hand" comment of Adam Smith:

It was these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalents of no-bid contracts to Halliburton that led Adam Smith to write Wealth of Nations. While celebrated today by corporate libertarians as philosophical justification for free-trade policies, the book was meant as an attack on the scale and effects of chartered monopoly. By arguing -- now famously -- that "self-interest" might promote a more just society, he was speaking in the context of an economy already heavily tilted against individual human agency. "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry," Smith explains of the average person, "he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

Smith assumes that people would be biased against international trade, naturally preferring the security offered by sourcing goods locally -- and that his readers would agree with him on this point. Like the founders of America who may have differed on almost everything else but this, Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another and guided by the enlightened self-interest of individuals. This was not a reaction to "leftist" regulations on corporate power, but against the unfair practices of early transnational corporations, which were operating on a level completely removed from the real affairs of people and the proper stewardship of resources.

(Rushkoff, ibid, pp. 33-34, emphasis by the author.)

Getting to the present, we can take these historic examples and apply them to the current tea bag protest movement:

It turns out that that the tea baggers, led in part by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and the Coward Rick Santelli, are politically more in line with the tax policies of King George than the views of the Sons of Liberty and the colonial patriots. The tax baggers emulating a protest against a corporate tax cut -- but, oddly, in support of tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Furthermore, King George was against a corporate bailout loan. And so are the tea baggers. And I don't think it'd be a stretch to suggest that many of the tea baggers are recipients of the president's middle class tax cut.

Not only that but the tea bag revolutionaries are being urged to buy thousands of corporate tea bags, rather than horking them from Lipton trucks -- Griffin's Wharf style. . . .

So in keeping with a long, embarrassing history of ill-conceived, contradictory or just plain self-defeating marketing ploys, the tea baggers seem to have adopted a concept that completely and utterly contradicts what they claim to stand for.

From a group that shouts for the right to keep the goddamn government from meddling in medicare, I guess I shouldn't be looking too hard for informed nuance.

The December 4 episode of On The Media got me in a huff, yet again. They interviewed another media/newspaper professional. He spoke of "progress" developing a revenue stream for news in an era of collapsing papers. And he focused again on financial dogma dredged from the turn of the last century; revenue from advertisements and subscriptions.

I must be blunt. Both concepts must be ass-raped. Hard. With a 50 grit dildo.

I've already mentioned why paying for news with ads is bad. I'll be mentioning it again and again, I can assure everyone. In a nutshell, what happens to the intrepid reporter that stumbles upon the Story of the Century only to find the trail of evidence leads directly to the news outlet's chief advertiser? Those stories get squashed, or buried. Or the reporter gets fired. What ever way it happens, the story fails to become news. Large revenue sources become their own way of saying "Shut up." Trust me, this happens. I'll be mentioning a few actual instances where it happened to disastrous consequence in later posts.

That leaves subscriptions, ( which suck, suck, suck. )

Addendum, the Next Day: I was mulling this post at work today and had a thought (one most likely caused from the fasting I needed to do for a damned blood draw): Maybe the newspapers have got this all wrong.

I know, I know, that much should be obvious.

What I considered was not that newspapers are trapped in an old business model that just doesn't work today, but that maybe they ( need not look to the kindness of strangers. )

I'll first make an up-front declaration of bias: I hate the anti-vaccination crowd.

For those of you unfamiliar with actress, comedianne and centerfold model Jenny McCarthy's hobbies, she has been probably the most visible and outspoken celebrity to endorse the vile lies that childhood vaccines, especially those containing mercury-based preservatives like Thimerisol, cause autism.

I call her positions on vaccine "vile lies" for good reason: At least four peer-reviewed studies have failed to show a connection. That doesn't stop folks -- including celebs like McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Bill Mahr and a raft of others -- from flogging the Thimerisol horse corpse.

Ms. McCarthy, of course, has reason to be angry at autism; her son suffers from the condition. In this case, though, she has gone completely off the deep end attacking vaccines, even going so far as to suggest that the inevitable preventable deaths that follow people refusing to immunize their own children are a price worth paying to avoid an autism connection that (once again) has been debunked.

Let's really add to evidence of her dissonance. Though she has on more than one occasion likened vaccines to "poison," take a gander at what she had to say about one of the most deadly poisons known to man:

“I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally so I can still move my face. But I really do think it’s a savior.”

Anyhoo, I'm not posting this just to rant. I was responding to alobar the other day. I think the Hygienic Hypothesis might be a more likely culprit, and said so. He asked a good question: Why now? ( Why are we facing an explosion of autism? )


Edit: Link and floppy verbiage corrected October 8, 2009.

I commented in cargoweasel's LJ today. Looking back, I typed hastily and in anger, something that led me to make a comment that frightens me some hours later. For that, I apologize.

I'm reminded of Sam Kinneson (sp?) and his very early stand up. On spousal abuse, he said (in so many words) I don't condone wife beating . . . but I UNDERSTAND IT!!!

Well, when violence strikes from a perceived area of interest, people take notice. By now, all have heard of the census worker hanged in Kentucky with the word "fed" written on his body. Many have pointed out that the rage leading to this attack can be rightly attributed to the right-wing noise machine attempting to mobilize their base, all part of their effort to undermine in any desperate way any momentum the perceived left has made in the last few months.

What happens when that violence becomes more commonplace? What is the most appropriate response?

You see, I feel that is, as Zappa used to say, the crux of the biscuit. The right feel they are, well, right. They feel their positions on issues have been ordained by The Creator of All. They feel the violence they undertake -- be it the hanging of a substitute teacher or the gunning down of a doctor or the shooting of a black guard in a museum -- is justified as punishment for the fact that someone dared defied their god.

The left . . . what response have they? And herein lies the rub.

While looking into the matter, I've learned that the left tends to view more than just two sides of any given issue, tending instead to immerse themselves in the complexity and nuance, details that defy simple vilification. The left tends also to eschew violence, be it torture, assassination, what have you. There are many reasons for this. Despite the lessons Jack Baur may teach, torture, for example, doesn't get good information from the tortured. It almost never does. Think about it: If someone is willing to die for his cause, what is a little pain (in the short term) going to prove? In the long term, his information is probably of no value. Really, this should be obvious, given the lessons other countries have to offer. If Israel has abandoned torture as a means of interrogation, it's a good bet they tried it and failed to see the value. Lesson learned.

So when the right targets the left, what defense does the left have, well, left?

I was debating a good friend on such an issue years ago. He felt my position on (IIRC) global climate change was pussy-esque. He didn't agree on the very premise, and tried the ol' "Why don't you kill yourself?" ploy. It's a classic. If people are the biggest cause of global warming, one argues, why don't those that care about the issue off themselves?

Ah, I pointed out, not so fast. If a person cares enough about the issue, he or she should take down the biggest polluters, the biggest carbon output sources, as quickly as possible, all while living as carbon-free a lifestyle as they can manage. Down go the Hummer drivers, for starters. The coal plant operators get it next, followed by anyone who lobbies for Big Oil, Big Auto, what have you. This will reduce the pollution much more quickly than simply reducing the number of people who are striving to make a difference. As solutions go, it's an effective and compelling argument.

And that's the problem.

Any issue can be reduced to Us v. Them. It could be Kanye jumping onstage being a dick or the neighbors massing troops on the border. It doesn't matter what it is, really. What happens when Them just get too visible, too successful? What happens when Them starts a'winnin'? The knee-jerks in all of us reach for a handy blunt instrument and a nearby melon to crack. And if we swing and connect, score! Our side wins a round.

But we don't. Our side ultimately can lose in so many ways.

I will say if I as a lefty get targeted by melon-seeking object-swinging righties, I'll use whatever means at my disposal to defend me and mine. That's not even an issue. Go, Second Amendment!

But when it comes to avenging a teacher in Kentucky, I really have to calm the fuck down and remember that, given time for the issue to ferment, that stupid, stupid, stupid act is likely to do more damage to Beck and Bachmann and the rest of the paid rabble rousers . . . as long as we never let them forget it.

I've just heard a pair of interviews on the Skepticality podcast that illustrate for me very clearly what might be happening here in the United States, something that seems to be all but absent elsewhere. We here in the States can't miss it without forgoing any and all media reporting. There's a frenzy of folks up in arms to resist the "socialization" of health care (like we did to fire and police protection generations ago) by (as they confusingly put it) a Nazi President, one who may or may not have been born in Kenya, one who many of those same protesters are sure is either an closet Muslim or (worse) an atheist. Just about all of the most vocal are convinced he is a racist.

I am convinced this is not happening in a vacuum. Phenomena this wide-spread never do. They are helped along by people who know what they are doing, who know exactly what buttons to push and how often. Don't be fooled: This is a power struggle backed by millions of dollars with many more billions of dollars at stake. On that most can agree.

What is less clear is how this is happening.

To illustrate what I feel is happening now, I'd like to mention a few facts about the Columbine High School incident ten years ago, facts I found startling and surprising. Did you know:

-- Bombs were supposed to be the main killing weapons, not guns.

-- Harris and Klebold were not members of the Trench Coat Mafia.

-- Harris and Klebold were not quiet "outcasts" picked on by "jocks."

-- The morning they and so many others died at their hands, the two did not go bowling.

Surprised at any of these revelations? I was. It's amazing to note what happened ( verses what everyone outside of Littleton thinks happened. )

This can't be emphasized enough. To quote Rachel:

Americans are showing up at these events to shout down the discussion and to chase their congressmen. And they are enraged. And they're enraged, at least in part, by over-the-top conspiracy theories about health care. And they're being orchestrated by the corporate interests that do this for a living and do it very well.

The problem? Too few people know when they're being duped. Or dupes.