A Fool and His Gun

Calhoun’s Cannons for April 13, 2012

The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.

                                    William Faulkner

             On that dark rainy night, The Neighborhood Watchman didn’t watch.  He didn’t have to. He had a gun, you see, and when you have a gun you don’t have to just watch.  Especially when you live in a shoot-at-will, stand your ground state.  So just watching wasn’t part of the dramatic script unreeling in his head.  He could be Shane and save the neighborhood from a suspicious black kid in a hoodie. The police dispatcher told him not to get out of the car.  To wait and watch until the real police could arrive.  But a man with a gun does not wait.  He doesn’t have to.

            On that dark rainy night, The Kid was walking back from the store to his Dad’s place, which was located in a townhouse community that felt it had a need for a formal Neighborhood Watch program.  The Kid was walking while black, after dark, in a “gated” community, in a shoot-at will state and had unthinkingly compounded his peril by wearing a hoodie.  Worse, he was armed with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea.  In America, that can be a lethal combination.  The Kid noticed the Watchman following him.  He called his girlfriend.  He was worried.  He told her he thought he was being stalked, followed, and threatened by the man with the gun. Was he frightened?  Surely, he was frightened. Then something bad happened.

            And for weeks, the authorities did nothing. Why should they?  They had a Watchman armed with a gun in a shoot-at-will state and a dead black kid in a hoodie.  Case closed.       

                        And from those events, amplified by the hungry media, there soon rose the sounds of an old American anthem played on the black and white keys of a country that has never come to terms with its dark history. And buried deep in that anthem is the call and response hymn of the terrified white slaveholder, outnumbered by his living property, always hearing the muffled footfalls in the kudzu vine the jungle music of Nat Turner and his sharpened cane knives coming to the big mansion in the night.  

            It’s found in the ubiquitous racial dog-whistle music, the theme song of an unreconstructed  south, north, east and west, the unacknowledged original sin whose stain permeates everything even though no one dares speak its name.  The fear is America’s crazy Uncle locked up in the attic whose mad song can always be heard beneath the blare of the God Bless America ooompah band. Or slyly amped up enough to be heard while still remaining ingenuously deniable by unscrupulous political demagogues feeding the dark beast to get their votes. Or ratings.  Or the whispered reasoning behind shoot-at-will, stand your ground laws:  A chicken in every pot, a gun or two or five in every home, because America is a place filled with dark shadows and who knows what is lurking in that kudzu?

            A black kid in a hoodie, for one.

            And so the song continues.  We elected a black man as our president for the first time and pretended we were living in a post-racial world.  But with Obama’s election, gun sales skyrocketed, because, well, you know.  Unspoken, but sizzling on the internet was the belief that Nat “Obama” Turner is coming to the big house to get your guns.  And your women. It was subconscious dog whistle music happily manipulated by the unholy alliance of the NRA and ALEC, and it fueled the spread of shoot-at-will laws into twenty-two states, all urgently needed because there is no problem, no sick, irrational fear in the American heart that cannot be solved or soothed with more guns.    

            And soon the ugly spirit of the Know-Nothings that has always infested the American psyche became a lively talk-radio back beat.  Rush Limbaugh called the President a “thug” (Yes, Harvard is known for graduating thugs and gangstas.), while candidate Gingrich declared that he was the “food stamp president,” wink-nudge (Ah, the eternal Welfare Queens in their Cadillacs.  That one never gets old.), and Tea Partiers waved a poster of Obama with a huge Afro and a bone through his nose, Har-har-har. 

             And now America has another O.J. Simpson moment, a 24/7 televised trial, an over the top media-fest that will let us pretend that we’re having a national dialogue about race.  But it will be another phony conversation.  It always is.  The self-inflicted wound our Founding Fathers brought down on this nation has never been healed or cleansed.  It festers still.  One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War and Jim Crow, fifty years after the civil rights marches, black parents are still giving their sons “The Talk.”  It is a speech that Emmet Till would have understood perfectly: If you’re a young white man, copping attitude will get you an eye-roll.  If you’re black, it may get you a bullet.  Be careful of what you wear, how you walk, how you stand.  Guard the expression on your face.  Don’t run, be respectful, say Yes sir, No sir, Yassir, Yassir. 

             That’s the Black American Anthem, playing still on the black keys.  It’s a song you need to understand if you want to survive if you’re black in a world of Watchman who don’t watch, a country of shoot to kill laws written by scared, ginned-up, armed-to-the-teeth citizens who perceive their world as a terrifying place filled with kudzu and the clink of the cane knives in the dark.

            And all it takes to start the music is one damned fool.

            And his gun.             

Spending Spree

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for February 3, 2012

Happy Days are heeeeere again, The sky’s of blue are cleeeeear again

            Oh, thank goodness.  We’re saved!  Our economic woes are finally over.  The worst crash and burn since the Great Depression is about to lift.  We’ll soon be rolling in money.   The mighty economic engines of our various newly formed political super PACS have been unleashed in the recent Republican primaries and if the waterfall of moolah keeps up at the same pace it did in Florida, we’ll all be on Easy Street.

            Who would have thunk?  Here we’ve all been mooning around begging for Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Begging somebody, somewhere to plueeeze, plueeze bring manufacturing back, restore our great Rust Belt, put people to work. And all the while, there it was, staring us in the face all along --the greatest Rain Maker in history, thanks to the Supreme Court.  Yes, the Super PACSs!

             Mitt Romney’s “Restore Our Future” super PAC blew through nearly $17 million in Florida alone, while Newt Gingrich’s “Winning Our Future” super PAC got a good run at spending its $10 million donation from gambling tycoon, Sheldon Adelson. Talk about Trickle Down.

            And look what all that money bought: Ron Paul mostly skated outside the thundering elephant rumble, poking the candidates with sharp pointy “issues” questions that nobody wanted to address. Rick Santorum was exposed as a dead-baby-hugging, gay-on-dog homophobe loony who can’t wait to nuke Iran to keep it from getting nukes. Mitt exposed his primary rival as a hypocritical, bloviating, philandering, sleazy, untrustworthy Washington lobbyist whack-a-doodle who wants to colonize the moon.  Newt exposed his rival as a flip-flopping, hypocritical, wooden-headed, tin-eared, job-destroying, blood-sucking Bain Capital predator Mormon who loves to fire people.  Oh, and a . . Massachusetts Moderate.

            Well, who knew?  In total, the GOP candidates and/or their PACS have spent about $53 million, with $25 million on TV ads alone. Oh, lucky Florida and South Carolina!  Heck, even comedian Stephen Colbert’s PAC has reported out that it raised $1.02 million and spent a nice chunk of that in Colbert’s South Carolina faux campaign. All that nice money raining down on the primary states.  Keep that up for a few more months – next up, Nevada! Arizona! - – and single-handedly the Republican PACS will lift the economy, state by state, all without raising a single tax. 

            And soon, President Obama’s campaign war chest and PAC, which is nearing $82 million in donations, will meet up with “American Crossroads,” Karl Rove’s Pac, which already has over $51 million, with more coming in, and you’re looking at a real job-creating economic engine of unimagined power.

            Think of all the trickle-down jobs what will be created – precinct walkers, phone callers, mailer stuffers, poster printers, Quick Response Teams of copy writers, rumor mongers (and rumor blockers), and all those jobs required to create TV ads stuffed to the gills with innuendo, spin, flat out Swift-Boaty lies and scary music.

            And what will we get for all that money?  Well, we’ll learn that President Obama is a Kenyan muslim socialist who wants to make abortion mandatory, kill old people with his “Obama Care death panels,” give rich people’s money to dirty, lazy, undeserving Saul Alinsky poor people, become a surrender monkey by appeasing Iran and turn America into . . . France.  While Mitt Romney will destroy the unions, reduce the minimum wage to zero, turn the major corporate players of American business into one big Bain Capital predator which will devour all small business, destroy Medicare and Social Security, fire the 99% to further enrich the 1% (his peeps) and make Mormonism the official national religion.

            And frugal little Ron Paul with his tiny war chest will nimbly keep dancing just off stage asking annoying “issues” questions that nobody will answer.

            But, really, who cares if all that money is basically going to be wasted on sheer crap?  Or that the American electorate is about to be badly served, at best, or grotesquely misled, at worst. Or that the voters still seem blissfully unaware that Congress is still the dog that wags the presidential tail; unless they change Congress, they’ll just end up with more do-nothingness.  Which is what happens when the focus moves away from imperfect real people imperfectly trying to solve real problems and becomes the faked-up persona in thrall to the deadly Cult of Political Purity  – election autos-de-fe, American style.   

            No, nobody cares about all that.  It’s raining money and for a few minutes, which seems to be the maximum extent of our attention span, happy days are here again. Until the political money rain stops and it becomes clear once again that despite the billions, the balloons, the confetti, the clowns with their toootle horns, the wolf is still on the doorstep.         

Movie Time

Do yourself a favor and get on down to the Palm Theatre to see "The Artist""  It's a wonderful conceit: a modern old-timey silent movie, a mash-up of every old, hoary Hollywood movie cliche in the book -- the meet-cute, true love thwarted, the Perils of Paul, Asta the Dog saves the day, true love revealed, boffo ending.  All done with a wink and a nod.  Too clever by half.  And great fun.

Also too clever by half is another nearly silent movie -- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Gary Oldman is marvelous as George Smiley, all owlish eyes, watching, watching, and patiently finding and fitting one small piece of the puzzle after another. The film itself is as fragmented as a puzzle dumped out on a table, a muddle of fragments, brief scenes that mean nothing by themselves, intercut with more fragments of imagery, obscure bits of meaningless dialogue, and through it all, Smiley asking a question here, finding a document there, until all the bits and pieces slowly come together to reveal the mole that Smiley is hunting.

It's a clever bit of film making, all this cutting back and forth in time, from puzzle-bit to puzzle bit.  But for me, it all quickly turned into a long, intricate shaggy dog story, a clever bit of business -- a film about making a hunt-for-a-spy film rather than a film about characters in peril, which means it's ultimately a film with no heart.  By the time the mole is revealed, my response was, "Well, O.K., nicely done." And when the mole gets his just desserts, the only reaction I had was, "Well, no loss there.  Now, let's go home." Which is a huge contrast to Le Carre's "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold."  That movie (and book) was all character and peril and heartbreak in the ugly world of realpolitik.

Except I did feel a good deal of satisfaction when Smiley, inscrutable as ever, gets his job back -- vindicated as the master of a game played by vipers in an ugly world of secrets and sleazy betrayals.

If you're an Elmore Leonard fan, he's got a new book out ("Raylan") and season two (three?) of "Justified," is starting on FX with couple of great bad guys added to the cast.  If they come close to his previous nemesis, the late, great apple-moonshine-making Mags, from last season, this year promises to be a great one. Actor Timothy Oliphant ("Raylan") is lucky to have both great screen writers and a fabulous supporting cast.  And he's particularly lucky to have Walton Goggins ("Boyd Crowder") as his ongoing antagonist.  Both Oliphant and Goggins, like early "NYPD Blue" David Caruso (before he went all fake poseur on "Miami Vice") or Ryan Gosling (in "Drive," or almost anything else he's done), are one of those rare actors you can't (don't dare) take your eyes off of because you have no idea what they're going to do next. It's a rare quality and has got to put all their fellow actors on their best game.

And finally, Performance of the Year, Political Class:  Newt Gingrich's deliciously faux outrage while he feasted on debate moderator CNN's John King who dared to ask about Newt's  performance in "My Three Wives; The Three-Way."  Actually, Newt takes a Newtie (a fake gold statue given for Biggest Bold-Faced, Flat-Out, Flip-Flopping Lie" for just about anything he says and does.(" I am not a lobbyist; I'm a historian.") Plus he gets extra points for being absolutely without shame when uttering his 180's.  In short, he's the Jon Lovitz of the political world -- the "fact" changing prevaricator of SNL who repeatedly, cheerfully, shamelessly, continually changed his story when his lies became untenable -- without missing a beat, Jon would switch one whopper with another equally improbable one until his whole tower of babble lies spun off into the realm of the pure comic.

For Jon, it was all comic gold.  For Newt, his continued performance will depend on whether the voters remain oblivious to his Jon Lovitz act. It's just possible that Newt will tell one hilarious whopper too many and the voters will finally figure out he wasn't being intentionally funny, he was just plain old lying, and The Hook! The Hook! will fly out of the wings and yank him unceremoniously off stage. In comedy, as in politics, there must be a basic "truthiness" to the comic character you're creating -- lose that and you lose the audience.  In comedy as in politics, timing is all. 

Snack Time

               Ummm, grab your knives and forks.  It’s time for a feast.  The Republicans are dining on one another and Iowa is just a preview of what’s to come in South Carolina. Ummm.  Delicious. 

            Consider, Newt Gingrich whining because Romney’s PAC was running ads that said mean things about Newt.  Newt whining?  Newt is the father of the PAC and the father of formalizing mean things to say that will demonize your opponent.

            And, surprise, Rick Santorum “wins” Iowa and is now chugging off, suddenly a serious candidate.  Rick Santorum?  The guy who went from the topic of gay marriage straight to man on dog sex in zero steps.  What kind of mind keeps that connection rattling around in his brain so in no time he can go there?  I mean, before I’d be able to make that connection and come to that kind of  conclusion, I’d have to make a whole bunch of steps and think seriously to find anything resembling the “six degrees of separation” connections needed to make that leap.  But not Rick.  Nope.  Apparently equal marriage rights for gays equals man on dog sex.   Eeeuuuuu.  Creepy Brain Time.

            Well, South Carolina should be a hoot. We’ll have our Man On Dog Santorum, Can’t Remember S—t Perry, PAC-man Newt, and “Lurch” Romney.   And LOTS of secret corporate money, none of it accountable to the public, thanks to the Robert’s Supreme Court.

            Does it get any better than this?

What If?

            Interesting article in the L.A. Times by Marc Lifsher reporting that about “a dozen companies are the first in state to apply to become ‘benefit corporations.”

            “A dozen companies committed to maximizing social good while turning a profit have filed papers with the state to become California’s first ‘benefit corporations.”  Amazingly enough, California has a new law that “gives companies a way to legally structure their businesses to consider social and environmental efforts as part of their missions.

            “While that may sound like marketing hype, it’s important from a legal standpoint because it helps shield benefit corporations from lawsuits brought by shareholders who say that company do-gooding has diluted the value of their stock.

            “California becomes the seventh state to adopt this relatively new corporate structure.

            “Until now, California corporate law mandated that shareholders’ interests trump those of all other parties. . . . . Benefit corporations offer for-profit companies a way to do well and do right, said Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) . . . ‘There is a way to create jobs and grow the economy while raising the bar for social and environmental responsibility.”

            If you want to understand one reason why we have, as a country, been heading down the drain, it’s because our corporate structures are legally required to put maximum profit ahead of all other considerations.  That focus on profit above all is the source of so many of our woes. That and the total focus on quarterly reports as opposed to long-term business/economic health.

            In short, we have set up an economic system now that behaves like a bad germ – a virus that kills its host too quickly.  In nature, the goal of a smart germ, like a smart parasite, is to keep its host alive as long as possible so it can feed and reproduce.  A dumb germ/parasite, gobbles it all, kills its host to soon, and therefore dies as well.  That’s been our model – gobble and die.  Not smart.

            But a benefit corporation?  Ah, that allows a corporate parasite a good way to feed heartily but still keep its host alive for years and years.  Think what a transformation would happen in this country if long-term planning and social/environmental considerations became part of the business mix – companies that understood, for example, that keeping their employees healthy and happy paid off financially.  Companies that understood that toxic waste actually is a resource that’s worth money and can be profitable for them.  Corporations that were allowed to factor in long-term thinking instead of simple Grab ‘n Run greed.  

            The story finishes thusly:  “The growing interest in benefit corporations reflects a sense that there’s a better way of doing business out there,” said John Montgomery, a Melo Park lawyer who helped draft the new California law.”  . . .  “Patagonia [one of the the new benefit corporations] is trying to build a company that could last 100 years . . . Benefit corporation legislation creates the legal framework to enable mission-driven companies like Patagonia to stay mission-driven through succession, capital raises and even changes in ownership by institutionalizing the value, culture, processes and high standards put in place by founding entrepreneurs.”

            Imagine that.

On the Other Hand    

           

            Of course, creating a decent society may be all moot.  According to some folks, the Mayan Calendar tells us that the world will in 2012, so why bother?

            It never ceases to amaze me how in love with World Death so many people are. Apparently the earth is such a hideous place for them that it becomes a deep-seated need to fantasize about and long for its violent end.  Armageddon! Mayan Calendars!  Wheeeee, destroy it all!  Even the hummingbirds and sweet-smelling lemon blossoms.  Wipe them all out.

            I don’t get it.  If those folks are so in love with world destruction, there’s a quick shortcut to that end: Suicide.  One bullet and your whole world ends.  Problem solved, while still leaving this beautiful, magical, extraordinary place intact for others to enjoy.

A reminder

            Well, since the world won’t end, despite what the Mayans say, on Wednesday January 18 from 6 pm – 7 pm at the Monarch Grove Elementary School, 348 Los Osos Valley Rd) there’ll be a public meeting to review “The restoration of your neighborhood streets and roadways following the installation of the waste water collection system,” wherein you’ll see a 45-minute overview of the repair, restoration and enhancement efforts for your streets.”

            With any luck, maybe everybody will speak up and push for “low impact” type pavement that will help get every drop of rainwater back down into the ground instead of having it all flood down the street.  Though on my street, we do end up with some quite spectacular lakes that you can float a boat on.  Which is great entertainment for the dreary winter months. 

 

             

Palinov's Dogs

Calhoun’s Cannons for June 3, 2011 

Humans are the only animals who will follow unstable pack leaders
                                             Cesar Milan, The Dog Whisperer

The political silly season – summer – started early. First we got the full-throated press pack baying after Donald Trump every time he popped his fox-red furry noggin up past the petunias. La Donald was flogging his TV show by pretending to run for the Republican presidential nomination. “ I’d be yOOOge, yuOOOge!” promised the Donald. But the only thing yOOOge was La Donald’s ego, his hairpiece and, as most people guessed, his 60-million dollar “Celebrity Apprentice” salary which trumped even fake political ambition.

This delightful romp was followed by the next distraction: the mystery of who hacked his Twitter account and publicly posted a photo of a crotch that may or may not be Congressman Anthony Weiner’s weenie. (Oh, Dear God, plueeeze don’t tell me we have another Pesky Political Penis running amok again. Are we going to have to only elect eunuchs in order to get anything done in Washington?) Well, the vital national security issue of Weiner’s Weenie will carry the 24/7 news cycle for a few days until it’s time for the Next Pointless Thing to distract and amuse an ADD nation.

And that rumble you hear comin’ over the hill, diesel fumes in the mornin,’ fumes that smell like . . . Victory, by golly!, well that would be the Queen of Silly, who has and will continue to top them all: Sarah Palin’s Yes I’m Not Running For President ‘12 tour is on the road in a ginormous bus with a huge “One Nation” and a flag painted on it, with the press pack, like Pavlov’s dogs, tongues running out, baying right behind it. And already La Palin’s faux complaining that the press is harassing her, that she and her family are on a little vacation, just like any other heartland family.

Oh, absolutely. You see those heartland “real” Americans all over the road during summer: Dad, who’s been out of work for a year and Mom, who is working two jobs to keep their underwater house afloat, regularly rent a huge, incredibly expensive bus and then have it hand-painted with a flag so they can then take the family on a meet-‘n-greet celebrity photo-op tour vacation to eat pizza with La Donald in New York and make little impromptu stump speeches at various historical American sites. Just like all hard-working real American families do when they go on vacation, you betcha!

All of which, in Palin’s case, is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette who costumed herself and her ladies-in-waiting to look like milkmaids so they could all troop off to a newly created faux farm on the grounds of Versailles to play at being peasants.

And so the Silly Season Summer dance begins, as structured as a pas de deux: Palin pops up, the media bays. They can’t help it. Their jobs depend on it. To their corporate masters, La Palin is pure ratings gold. And to La Palin, those ratings translate into real gold as well. Fake political campaigns, as La Donald and La Huckabee and La Gingrich and the other assorted well paid La Pols on Fox News have discovered, pays waaaayyyy better than public service.

As for the public, well, they demand their daily dose of celebrity as well. It now seems hard-wired into our popular-culture psyche and we are helpless in its grip since the human eye is programmed to scan for and focus on novelty – that unexpected movement in the shrubbery that demands attention.

You see the phenomenon at work every time a TV camera is doing an on-the-street interview, for example. Invariably, somebody will pop into view making a face or yelling something or holding a dumb sign. And try as you might, it’s impossible to ignore that action. La Palin has that pop-up strategy down to a fine art form. Nobody knows how to effectively surf the 24/7 news cycle schedule better than she and her handlers do. Masters at the game.

Is our country on the brink of financial ruin? Default only weeks away? Are the effects of climate change already upon us and because we have dithered, we are totally unprepared and will pay a fearsome price for our folly? Is a nuclear-armed Pakistan riding the Taliban tiger and now can’t get off? Is an Al Qaeda-infested Yemen now on the brink of chaos and civil war?

Well, pay no attention. It’s not important. What’s important is fake news, Dancing With The Stars, missing wieners and now the constant novelty of pop-up, Wack-a-Mole celebrity political theatre. That’s what Americans want, and what Americans want, they get.

Meanwhile, Democrats, comedians and pundits are praying – praying – for a Palin/Bachman GOP presidential ticket. It couldn’t possibly get any better than that: Politics as Farce.

Quick, Grab the Garlic. And a Mirror. Cross? Wooden Stake?

Well, there’s good news and bad news. First, La Donald has decided he likes show business better than being President so he’s out of the race. His announcement was all very anti-climactic. For a while there, you couldn’t turn on the television or open a paper without La Donald bloviating about some ridiculous topic or another. Hilariously, he ended up being hoist by his own “birther” petard when the President produced his long form birth certificate, (topic over), then at the Washington Press Corps Dinner, Obama stuck a few pins into the Comb-over King and SNL Weekend Update’s Seth Meyers went in for the coup de grace. La Donald was not amused.

A few days later the news came of Osama Bin Laden’s death and La Donald was heard no more. And who says God does not listen to prayers?

Mike Huckabee, another birther, decided God didn’t want him to run. More likely, it was God and Mamon now that he’s one of the well-paid Faux News Fellows.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is running around doing his version of I Voted For It Before I Voted Against It, declaring that the Massachusetts health care plan, which apparently is working very well and liked by most people in the state, is o.k. for them, but the nearly identical ObamaCare means the death of the republic and can’t be allowed for other people in other states.

And finally, we now have Newt Gingrich. Really. Newt? Seriously? He wants to be president because, well, he wants to be president. And once people see the wonderfulness of Newt in all his glorious bloviating gas-baggery they too will flock to bask in his breathtaking gloriousness.

Really. Newt. Dear God in Heaven.

Two? Now there’s TWO?

Recent headline announces that there has been a “second rape in less than a week involving Cal Poly students,” both victims “reportedly intoxicated and unconscious during the attack.”

I don’t know why they bother putting these stories on the front page. Clearly when it comes to some students and booze, Nobody Learns Anything. These young women are lucky they didn’t die of alcohol poisoning, and if they don’t end up pregnant or with an STD (or worse) they should consider themselves lucky. The young men, if they get caught, will find out how changed their lives will become, and not for the better. And the whole thing will Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Which is why Mother Calhoun can’t even get worked up over the whole issue.

But two? Really? That goes from Unfortunate Incident to, Aw, Just How Dumb ARE these Girls, Anyway?

Speaking of Dumb

The May 13 Tribune got around to writing about the May 5-6 Regional Water Quality Control Board Ag / Atascadero water pollution issues (reported here on the May 6 entry). If reporter Tonya Strickland attended the meeting, she clearly missed Chairman Young’s dog-whistle message. The City of Atascadero missed it, that’s for sure. The story quotes City Council-woman Roberta Fonzi as saying, “We’re not happy with the way the decision went. Their rules will be very expensive for us, and we don’t see the need for them.”

Hahahahahah. Councilwoman Fonzi doesn’t understand the game she’s now trapped in. When the State Water Board approves the stealth rule changes, the trap will be set.

In my blog report on this topic, I had two words for the dear Aggies and Atascadero: Los Osos.

Both Chairman Young and the Board’s attorney gave the game away but clearly nobody in the room was listening. And the Tribune missed the real story. As usual.

Freedom Riders

Don’t know if any of you had a chance to watch PBS’s “American Experience” program last night on the Freedom Riders, young black and white college students, many members of CORE (Congress on Racial Equality) who were trained in the principals of non-violence and set out to challenge Jim Crow laws in the south as they applied to interstate travel. In the late 40’s the Supreme Court had ruled that interstate travel could not be subject to segregation, a ruling that was utterly ignored in the south, which meant Whites-Only and Colored-Only bus station facilities throughout the state.

It was this situation the kids set out to challenge by riding on Greyhound and Trailways busses into the 1961 heart of darkness. And dark it was. The KKK-fueled mobs met the kids at their stops. One bus was fire-bombed, the riders nearly burned to death, other bus stations were scenes of riots, the kids severely beaten while local police stood by and/or arrested them (not the men assaulting them) and in the case of Mississippi, betrayed by a “deal” cut by the Feds and the Mississippi Governor, sent them not to city jail, but to prison. All of it documented by some equally brave newsmen.

The two-hour documentary is riveting, the bravery of those young students absolutely breathtaking (Imagine talking back to Birmingham, Alabama’s Commissioner of Public Safety, “Bull” Conner, an out-of-control psychopath who was even feared by the state’s governor. Astonishing.) The footage is often sickening in its accurate portrayal of the hatred and bigotry that was part and parcel of the “southern culture.” (And found in a more polite form outside the south.) And in the willing to face this danger in order to change the world, the documentary echoes events in Egypt’s Tarhir Square: Young kids, fearful, at terrible risk, who still go on, determined to change their world.

For someone born in the ‘70s or later, the documentary would likely look like ancient history that happened on some other planet occupied by ignorant, evil troglodytes. But for me, the film brought back so many memories of how the world was within my lifetime. I remember reading of the Freedom Riders, seeing the shocking images of “Bull” Conner and his police dogs attacking protesters, cringed at the ugly racial stereotypes, the easy use of the N-word, the hatred that usage implied. That was the given reality of the world the film so beautifully depicts; a world where, in many states, black people couldn’t get a cup of coffee in a J.J. Newberry’s, couldn’t use a “white” restroom in a Greyhound bus station, couldn’t even vote, let alone get elected dog catcher. And now, a black man sits in the White House.

Thanks to the young Freedom Riders, thanks to so many extraordinarily brave people willing to risk their lives to make the Constitution a living reality, that world changed utterly. And changed almost beyond recognition within my lifetime.

Which is what made watching the “American Experience” documentary so amazing; as a child and young adult, I lived in one world. Now I live in another world altogether.

That’s how quickly things can change when good people stand up.

Just How Dumb Are We?

Calhoun's Can(n)on for Oct 1. 2010


. . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. . . .
                                    W.B. Yeats

What Yeats forgot to mention is that the passionate intensity is now filled with an astonishing amount of pure dumb. I mean, really. Has a good chunk of America started wearing tin-foil hats? Consider:

--The corporate media, as bad as it is, debunked the “death panels” rumor over 40 times. You remember that one? The lie that had folks terrified that the health care bill would result in the government killing Granny. Nonetheless, an Associated Press poll shows that 25% of those polled still think Granny’s gonna get offed.

--It gets worse. In a Pew poll, 18% of the public thought Obama was a Muslim, while 43% didn’t know what his religion was. In addition, a CNN poll found that 27% thought Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country.

--All this gets worse for Republicans. A new poll reported in Politico.com. of 2,0003 self-identified Republicans, showed that 63 percent believe President Obama is a socialist, 24 percent think he wants terrorists to win, 36 percent do not believe the President was born in this country, 31 percent agreed with the statement that Obama is “a racist who hates white people,” while 23 percent want their state to secede from the union.

So, a good chunk of Americans apparently think Hawaii is now a foreign country, have forgotten the hysterical dust-up over President Obama’s pastor and spiritual mentor, the very Christian Reverend Jeremiah Wright, while a huge number are dreaming about the windfall inheritance soon to be coming their way every time Grandmaw starts looking peaked.

Plus, a scary percentage of deluded Republicans, while waving the flag and tub-thumping about the sacredness of the Constitution, nonetheless want to secede from the very union they claim as sacred?

And now, into this bizarre blend of Dumb and Forgetful comes a Republican Rerun – the un-new, un-improved retread of Newt Gringich’s old 1994 “Contract with America.” The “Pledge to America” is a cynical ploy that may well work because, beside Dumb, Americans also suffer from a serious case of short term memory loss. For that reason alone, they won’t bother to ask the critical question required of this new “Pledge:” If the issues listed in this “Pledge” were so important to Republicans and to the nation, then why weren’t they passed into law during the eight years that Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency?

The answer, of course, is that this rhetorical retread is just another cynical plan that will allow politicians and voters to pretend they’re doing something without having to actually do it. Because doing something about the problems we face means we’d all have to make some real changes. And that’s the one thing Americans don’t want to do.

Instead, we get the cynical in league with the willfully uninformed in order to avoid doing the necessary while both sides self-righteously play the victim card.

So we continue to dumbly vote for meaningless platforms that will never deliver any effective results. (Case in point, the Pledge’s promise to “End the practice of packaging unpopular bills and advance legislative issues one at a time.” Complete hokum as neither party will ever, EVER, “advance legislative issues one at a time.” Hiding unpopular bills inside popular bills gives politicians plausible deniability when they have to make hard choices. It’s the soft conspiracy of the unspoken lie that voters love since they regularly punish congressfolk who are honest enough to make those tough votes public.)

The result is we end up with spineless political weasels, dishonest “Pledges,” more political theatre, wealthy players, unions and corporations hiding behind affinity PACS in a system awash with huge secret, non-reported political “donations,” hours of Fox Noise’s misinformation inadvertently churning out fodder for John Stewart’s satirical “Daily Show,” great swaths of Corporate Media’s lazy misinformation further confusing an already dumbed-down and actively misinformed and forgetful electorate, while a comedian shows up in character to satirize our hypocritical farm labor policies during another useless window-dressing Congressional hearing while pundits pretend to be outraged by the stunt.

In short, we are entertaining ourselves to death, all of which will surely result – as it always does – with the sound of gunfire followed by bullet holes appearing in a huge number of feet: Bang! OW! Bang! OW!

And as for the “tea party” darling-du jour, Senatorial candidate from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell? In 2007 she excitedly claimed as fact that “American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains!”

Close, Ms. O’Donnell. But you reversed the brain/body order.