Off Base

Calhoun's Canon for June 3, 2013

There was weeping and gnashing of teeth in Comedy Land when the news came in. Oz was tumbling.  There would be no more joy in Satiric Mudville. The Queen of Crazy was abdicating. Beset with ethics investigations and falling poll numbers, Minnesota Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, was packing her bags.  Her fourth term in Congress would be her last, which prompted certain people to ask, "She got elected four times? In Minnesota? How is that possible?"

I think it was possible because in 9/11, America had a nervous breakdown when the Twin Towers fell (just as Osama bin Laden predicted)  and a massive upwelling of darkness in the American psyche began a self-destructive flow that swamped the country in irrational fear, ugly bigotry, high-octane rage, deadly war-mongering, know-nothing unholy Apocalyptic religiosity, all of it a deadly brew that unleashed and justified America's Paranoid Style, only this time it was paranoia on steroids.

Toss in an economic meltdown and the election of a black President and for a certain segment of the population (helped along by corporate interests feeding and manipulating the fear and rage for their own purposes) it was all too much.  And so the Era of the

Republican Crazies was upon us. 

And what a crop they were. What a show of ignorance, idiocy, misogyny (Who can forget "legitimate rape?"), anti-science stupidity, mind-numbing foolishness (Birthers?  Really?  Birthers?)  and jaw-dropping demagoguery. And these folks were actually running the store (Congress and Senate) or running so they could shut down the store, or showing up in eye-popping numbers for try-outs for the little theatre production of, "I Want To Be President Just Because I'm So Wonderful!"  

A national Clown Show by and for the deranged, while outside the hallowed halls of government, citizens (ramped up, funded and run by the likes of the Koch Brothers or Republican operatives like Dick Armey, Grover (drown-government-in-a-bathtub) Norquist and Karl Rove) threw Tea Parties and frightened, distressed citizens showed up dressed in tricorn hats, guns on their hips, carrying posters with photo-shopped pictures of President Obama with a bone through his nose. And lots of befuddled, oxymoronic cries of,  "No Socialized medicine!  Keep your hands off my Medicare!"

The media loved it.  Comedians loved it.  It was party night in Bedlam, while the country bled out its wealth and sent more of its finest off to bleed out in one big endless War on Terror. The country was sick and in its deranged state, weirdly elected and re-elected representatives who would vote to inflict the maximum amount of punishment on themselves (Main Street), while administering the maximum amount of soothing salve to the wealthy (Wall Street).  It was one long self-inflicted Medean act of fury: Take that, you mooching 47-percenters! 

While the political Kings and Queens of Crazy vied to see who could grab the most headlines and raise the most funds with their "Can You Top This?" stupidities.

And now, the Queen of Crazy is folding her tent. The comedians are in mourning.  And I can only pray that soon, soon, a sufficient number of Americans will wake up, shake their heads in wonder, and ask, "What the hell were we thinking?"

And the long nightmare will be over.

   

Paper Bag Time

Calhoun’s Cannons for Nov 16, 11

I watched as many of the Republican debates as I could stand without having to arrest myself for cruel and inhumane punishment, something candidate Michelle Bachman is four-square in favor of. So it’s clear to me its paper-bag-over-the-head time because nobody has any sense of shame any more since most of the candidates are suffering from The Sarah Palin Syndrome: no real-world assessment of self except some glowing, aggrandized version of, “ Of course I’m qualified to be President! I’m Wonderful Me!”

Even worse, I don’t think the public has any sense of shame either, which likely comes from too many people watching too many Mean-Girl, Gong-Show “reality” programs. In that world, talent-bereft, unqualified, humiliation-proof narcissists are the norm. And when those shameless characters show up on the political/public stage, the voters clearly don’t hear alarm bells going off in their heads. I mean, in a sane world, most of the Republican candidates wouldn’t have any poll numbers higher than zero.

So, it’s paper bag time for cowboy Rick Perry. He can’t even remember what he’s supposed to be adamantly opposed to. This is a guy whose brain can barely manage to operate on bumper-sticker slogans. Paper bag over the head for him.

And Newt? Really? Newt? He’s a hack who truly knows no shame. His overweening sense of his own wonderfulness has allowed him to shamelessly spend years turning up like a bad penny to haul his tired old failed ideas out of his portmanteau for all who will listen, blissfully unaware that the sane people in his audience are rictus-smiling and nervously edging out of their seats. Shhh, don’t make any sudden moves. Keep smiling. The door’s that way. That guy has so much shameful baggage, he doesn’t need a paper bag. He needs a Luis Vuitton suitcase the size of New Jersey, all charged to his $500,000 revolving Tiffany account. Paper bag him.

Ditto for Herman Cain. He needs a whole lot of paper bags to carry the lists of names of all the ladies who are coming out of the woodwork to complain of his improper canoodling. Plus, during a sit-down with newspaper editors from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he apparently had trouble understanding which Lybia was under discussion. Oh, Gaddafi, right, you mean that Lybia? In a reasonable world, his polling numbers would be minus-zero

As for More Water-boarding Michelle? Please. Paper bag.

And it doesn’t stop with presidential candidates. Jack Abramoff has hired some big PR flaks and will soon be staging a comeback. You remember Casino Jack, corrupt and corrupting lobbyist who would sell his grandmother to his mother then sell them both down the river? Major player in Bush’s Washington who has been spending time in jail for his efforts? Well, he’s coming baaaaccckkkk. And, unlike Nixon’s hatchet-man, Charles Colson, who found God while in prison, while Jack is claming a similar enlightenment, he isn’t planning to return to a quiet life of private penance for his sins. Oh, no. Jack’s back. Shameless. No paper bags for him. But will the public care? Will they boo and hiss and demand he go away? Not likely. Not in “Jersey Shore America.”

Not in Penn State America, either. Before the growing list of victims has even been identified, the alleged molester, Jerry Sandusky, appears on TV brazenly soft-soaping and justifying his behavior as “horseplay,” while the first reaction to all this by some Penn State students was to riot to protest the firing of their legendary Coach who did “as little as possible” to protect the boys, thereby doing “as much as possible” to protect the man who was preying on them. And now everyone is changing their stories, scrambling to cover their bare behinds with gym towels that are now suddenly the size of a micron.

Have we really come to this? Has our common sense, our basic sense of decency, our critical sense of what’s real versus what’s fake been so corrupted that we no longer know the difference? Or care? If so, then it’s time to bring back the paper bag.

In the Nov. 24 Rolling Stone magazine article, Matt Taibbi observes that the Occupy Wall Street movement “was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it.”

Gold star for Matt. He’s got it just about right.

The Stuck Brain

Ever get an annoying snippet of song stuck in your brain and there it stays annoying you for days?  The same thing happend while I was watching the Nova special on building the 9-11 memorial.  The project is huge and impressive, the new WTC skyscraper astoundingly beautiful.  Then therei's the memorial footprint pool.  Quite amazing with the carefully constructed weir's allowing a soft fall of cascading water that flows down into a reflecting pool and from there the pooled water falls down a square hole in the middle. (I gather people can go under the pool and look up out of the hole as well.) The architect who designed the pool wanted to try to create a presence of absence, to create a kind of rememberence of that which is now gone. 

But watching the memorial in action, the water slipping over the weirs and down the walls and heading for the square hole in the middle, I suddenly had one of those awful, unwelcome brain glitches and now here's what I keep seeing everytime I see that memorial pool: Instead of a vast pool the exact footprint of the missing World Trade Towers with the whole vast, unbroken shimmering surface reflecting the sky, reflecting emptiness, reflecting absence, now all I keep seeing is a giant kitchen sink with the ghostly presences all being constantly washed down the square drain.

Which isn't what the architect had in mind and isn't exactly the image you want to present in a memorial.  But there it is, stuck in my brain. Kitchen sink.  Drain.

At Least Michele Bachman Fixed Her Hair   

In the last GOP debate, Bachman was really scary looking.  She's got problem eyes.  They're deep-set and squinty when they're not looking wild and barking mad, and when you add in a giant helmet of hair surrounding those squinty eyes and the piranah-teeth smile, the whole effect is scary.

Thank goodness, in last night's debate, somebody got hold of Bachman's hair and tamped it down and back, which softened her whole face and made her look much calmer and more pulled together. All of which, when you think about it, is weird.  These pols have access to and can afford the best make-up people in the world. (For God's sake, call the folks from "What Not To Wear."  The hairdresser on that show would have whipped Bachman's hair into shape months ago.) But too often, I suspect they just don't avail themselves of that expert advice and the result can be disastrous.

It's all about the visual nowadays, body language, clothes, hair, make up, and not just for women pols either. We humans lead with the gut, that instant judgement that often defies explication, but there it is.   You could have the greatest ideas in the world, have the most impressive resume, but if you're visually too short, too fat, too frumpy, too old, and too wussy and wonky, you're doomed. It's all about the visual, the gut instinct.

Kabuki theatre, actors hiding behind symbolic costumes and masks posturing on a stage, highly stylized symbols, gesturing.  And that's who voters vote for. God help us.

Cap Doff To The Trib

No, honestly.  The Tribune's been running "Fact Check" under its reports on the debates.  Thank you for that.  One of the most frustrating things about these debates is the amount of pure bull crap that gets shoveled out to the audience, none of it corrected or even foot-noted.  Since so many voters don't read, aren't policy or political wonks and junkies, about all the information they get is in media selected "sound bites" and misleading campaign stump speech snippets -- Bulls--t, in other words.  Vast carloads of it.  The perfect environment to create, grow and plant false narratives (see Frank Luntz, the most dangerous man in America) and invent The Big Lies that, if repeated often enough, become received Truth in the minds of the voters. So, more "fact checks," please.

Place Yer Bets, Ladies and Gentlemen

President Obama has sent his jobs plan to the Republican-controlled Congress.  It's his "pass this bill, now" bill and it will pay for jobs fixing schools, bridges, etc. by raising taxes by limiting itemized decuctions for charitable contributions for people making over $200,00, close loopholes for those poor oil and gas companies (who everyone knows are really suffering financially), require fund managers pay higher taxes on certain types of their income (Wall Street fund managers are also poor and suffering, Lord knows), and change the taxing on corporate jets.

So, lay your bets: Will Republicans vote to fix schools and bridges (thereby putting regular, non-rich people back to work so they can pay their rent, buy food and perhaps buy a widget or two thereby causing the widget factory owner to hire a few more widget-makers) or will they stand fast with millionaires, corporate jet owners and oil companies?

And Now, The Question

Ah, the stock market is dropping like a stone.  Guess who makes money when the stock market drops like a stone?  Guess who makes money buying up tons of blue-chip stocks cheap when the market drops like a stone, then waits for the market to return and thereby makes pots more money?

Working people?  Poor people? Middle class people who are out of work and underwater on their mortgages, their 401K's shreds?  Why, Nooooo.  Not them. They lose their jobs as multi-national companies dump them and move those salary-savings (and the jobs) offshore.  Speculators?  Really, really rich speculators?  Like Wall Streeters? 

Ah, yes. Lots of quick money to be made when economies crash.  Lots of money to be made by, uh, helping economies to crash, too. So, let's all give a big shout-out to the Tea Party who were instrumental in getting this Wall Street party started in the first place. Yippee! Yo, Michelle Bachman, you were right.  Claiming defaults and downgrades would be harmful to our economy were all a big Democratic lie. Rich people, who are the only ones that count, are gonna get richer and if regular people get hurt?  Talk to the hand.  

In America, "regular" people don't matter any more. They're not the demographic American business is looking for.  Brazilians are.  Brazilians, for example, are in an expanding economy, having lots of babies, setting up households.  Lots of money to be made by American companies who move their operations (and jobs) offshore to focus on their new customers and grow their new business.  And those new customers aren't Americans. Who are broke and so not buying what American companies produce any more. So the hell with them.

Unless, of course, Americans can be turned into non-union, cheap-wage sweatshop workers hired by multi-national American companies to produce products for, say, Brazilians. Hey, maybe the tag "Made in America" will once again mean something.  O.K., maybe that wouldn't quite mean what it used to mean, but heck.  In a third-world country like America, a sweat shop job is better than nothing. 

Meantime, happy days are here for the big cash-boys.  Mo' money, mo' money.  Let the good times roll and God bless the child. . .

Nope, Republicans Reeeely, Reeeeely Aren't Fit To Govern, Nope, Nope, Nossir.

Poor John Boehner.  Stuck herding crazed extremist Republican/TeaParty right wing batshit crazy feral cats.  Crazed extremist Repbulican/TeaParty right wing batshit crazy feral cats funded by AstroTurf groups financed by folks like the Koch Brothers and voted into office by addled, misinformed and frightened voters who have been unhinged by 9/11,  by the horror! the horror! of having a black president (OMG), and with their final mental meltdown arriving with the bursting of the economic Wall Street bubble. Unhinged!  So unhinged, old grampy, grumpy John McCaine went on the floor of the Senate to crankily point out that the Tea Party mentality was now residing in "Lord of the Rings" fantasy land.  Which is perfectly illustrated by Presidential candidate, MoonBeam Michelle Bachman, blandly declaring that defaulting is no big deal, nothing will happen, don't worry, it's all a liberal lie, thereby proving that she is unfit to govern whatever office she's running for. 

So here we are: a nation unhinged, angry, bellowing like a blind bull, but still held hostage by elected crazed extremists -- economic terrorists if you will -- funded by corporate interests, a country self-destroyed by fake Republican "trickle-down" economics, fake "job creation myths," our wealth gutted out by outsourcing multinationals, the massive profits moved up into fewer and fewer hands -- America the Oligarchic, from sea to shining sea.  All supported and voted into being by the American people, the most astonishing suicide pact the world has seen.  An immolative auto de fe set alight when the twin towers fell.

Yee, haw!

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.