This wickedly sly bit from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, James Tate, from "Selected Poems,"

Prose Poem

I am surrounded by the pieces of this huge
puzzle; here's a piece I call my wife, and
here's an odd one I call convictions, here's
conventions, here's collisions, conflations,
congratulations.  Such a puzzle this is! I
like to grease up all the pieces and pile
them in the center of the basement after
everyone else is asleep.  Then I leap head-
first like a diver into the wretched confusion.
I kick like hell and strangle a few pieces,
bite them, spitting and snarling like a mongoose.
When I wake up in the morning, it's all fixed!
My wife says she would not be caught dead at
that savage resurrection.  I say she would.

Rumble in the Mumble

Calhoun’s Cannons for October 12, 2012

Unlike the previous debate, Joltin’ Joe, the Veep, at least showed up wide awake.  O.K., he grinned far too much, which, on the split screen made his wide flashing of enormous teeth look almost maniacal.  But he was scrappy and awake and in pit bull mode and soon had his opponent skittered into silence. 

Which was about the only place Paul Ryan could go. Youthful earnest vagueness and meaningless political clichés are no match for an old guy talking about actual realities on real ground. So advantage almost always goes to incumbents who can bring to the game a real sense of how cliché gets trumped when it goes from a tidy sound bite into a messy reality.

And if there’s one thing that makes our PAC-run, TV-fake, hyped-up, poll-driven political campaigns so fatuously destructive it’s this: Cliché and sound bites and FrankLuntz talking points stop all thought cold.  That’s what they’re designed to do – hit the amygdala, shut the rational brain down, juice up the adrenaline, stop complex thought. But what then goes missing when its needed most are the “what-ifs” and the “then-whats” that are required in order to follow the cliché down the rabbit hole to track how it will play out in the real world.

And the Veep debate was particularly interesting to me because there was a real contrast between young Ryan spouting neat, clean clichés and Biden who brought in his messy sack of history to show how things really work – We did this, then we had to do that because this went ker-blooey, so then we had to figure out how to do that.  All of which repeatedly brought home how buzz words simply hide a constantly shifting bag of snakes and surprises. Realpolitiks.

Bags of snakes and surprises and  logical and unintended consequences is why voters really need to get their own heads out of the clichés fed to them by the political strategists and insist their representatives track down those rabbit holes. They can start by becoming semanticists and constantly ask: “What, exactly, do you mean by that word?  Be specific and please illustrate how that would play out in real time.” 

For example, in an effort to make themselves seem tough, Romney and Ryan – the dynamic duo of Warrior Princes  -- have been beating the war drum clichés about preventing Iran from getting the bomb or showing “leadership” in the middle east. O.K.,   fair enough.  That’s what candidates do.  And a mostly unified world is also concerned about Iran and the killing going on in Syria. But what the Duo have so far refused to answer – and Ryan skated away from last night – is exactly how they would accomplish that.  It’s the one question that no American politician wants to answer.  Instead, they want the war drum music to play in the background in order to give their listeners the subliminal impression of how military tough they are, without getting into the cold realities of what their cliché is hinting at.  And the voters also happily buy into that little piece of theatre by never asking themselves just what cliché means either. 

Except during the debate when Joltin’ Joe finally let slip a hint of what’s being coyly alluded to in that war-thump music:   Bombing Iran, an act of war sure to loosen a huge bag of very deadly snakes that nobody wants to face, and putting boots on the ground in Syria, an act sure to destabilize an already unstable region.  Anybody in America up for that?  If so, please step to the front.  The Army recruitment center is just down the road.

If not, then it’s back to the voter to ask themselves follow-up questions involving the words, “exactly,” and “be specific,” “How would that work out in real terms?” and “What’s the downside of this?” 

If this debate illustrated anything for me it was this: The pragmatic brain understands that the world is a constantly shifting place of hard edges and fuzzy illusion where doing nothing is often not an option and doing something too often comes with costly built-in penalties. The cliché brain doesn’t understand that complexity; it’s happy with smiley-faced simplicity.

Which set up the final question of evening: Which brain will show up in the voting booth come November 6^th?   

   

Your Sunday Poem

Fifty years ago, Don Marquis, a writer for the Evening Sun in New York, created a free-verse writing cockroach -- Archy -- who created his poetry on Marquis' typewriter late at night by leaping down head first onto he keys. Since it was too laborious to jump down on the shift key all the time, Archy wrote in lower case.  Archy had a friend, Mehitabel, "an alley cat of questionable character," and wrote poetry that was often mordantly critical about the human condition. My husband and I named our first cat Mehitabel, even though she was of sterling character.  Come to think of it, we also named our first car, a beat up VW van, Mehitabel, too.  

men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn

Oh, Well, that explains it

This was sent from a friend of mind.  Well, that certainly explains a lot.  And I just thought Romney wanted a pony. Well, they do have one thing in common, ponies and Gish Gallops:  BS.

And I knew what tactic Romney was using in the debate, but did not know they had a name for it... 

Romney's fast speaking pace and ticked off numbered "factual" points are classic indicators.

The debate tactic is called the "Gish Gallop"

the clean website is:  http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

But I like the Urban Dictionary better, it calls BS by its name:

Named for the debate tactic created by creationist shill Duane Gish, a Gish Gallop involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it. To make matters worse a Gish Gallop will often have one or more 'talking points' that has a tiny core of truth to it, making the person rebutting it spend even more time debunking it in order to explain that, yes, it's not totally false but the Galloper is distorting/misusing/misstating the actual situation. A true Gish Gallop generally has two traits.

1) The factual and logical content of the Gish Gallop is pure bullshit and anybody knowledgeable and informed on the subject would recognize it as such almost instantly. That is, the Gish Gallop is designed to appeal to and deceive precisely those sorts of people who are most in need of honest factual education.

2) The points are all ones that the Galloper either knows, or damn well should know, are totally bullshit. With the slimier users of the Gish Gallop, like Gish himself, its a near certainty that the points are chosen not just because the Galloper knows that they're bullshit, but because the Galloper is deliberately trying to shovel as much bullshit into as small a space as possible in order to overwhelm his opponent with sheer volume and bamboozle any audience members with a facade of scholarly acumen and factual knowledge.

Meh

Calhoun’s Cannons for Oct 5, 2012

To be persuasive, we must be believable.  To be believable, we must be credible.  To be credible, we must be truthful.

                                              Edward R. Murrow

I made sure I was appropriately dressed for the occasion by wearing my special Presidential Debate tee shirt.  The one with Meh emblazoned on the front, which is about all the enthusiasm I can conjure up for this overlong, overblown, overpriced, ridiculous Bataan Death March of a political campaign.

The debate was not without its moments.  The moderator was asleep at the switch while the President looked like a distracted boulevardier slouched gracefully against a lamp post, one leg casually canted behind him.  No need to stand firmly on two feet – this one could be phoned in.  And Mitt Romney nearly rattled his careful coiffure off center when he launched into his rat-a-tat-tat imitation of a frustrated but wildly agitated 11 year-old boy desperately trying to get his Dad to buy him a new pony – “All you need to do is raise the rates, lower the base, widen the top, cut the bottom, it won’t cost you a penny, it’ll be revenue neutral, I have a plan, I have another plan, I have two plans, I’ll explain later, just trust me, please, please, puhleeeze.”

Until I wanted to smack him and holler, “Get a grip, Mitt!” and send him to his room. I mean, wide-eyed enthusiasm is one thing, but the quivering near hysteria of a hyper-ventilating salesman desperate to close is quite another. Plus, I couldn’t help thinking, Jeeze, I don’t want that twitchy guy on the other end of a red phone at 3 a.m.

But the biggest Meh of all in this election is the utter refusal of all parties to address The Rest of The Story.  President Obama hasn’t “fixed the economy” for two critical reasons.  First, nobody could fix this mess in four years.  Boom and bust cycles have their own time tables and this one is particularly complicated.  Claiming otherwise is simply dishonest. And two, everybody keeps ignoring the one huge elephant in the room: a Republican Congress whose leaders had one – and only one– priority: Making sure this president would be a one term president.  Period.  That was it, from day one.  The result is we ended up with a Congress bent on knee-capping and monkey-wrenching, not repairing and rebuilding.   

Like all presidential debates, this one was filled with spin, fudged numbers and worse -- Big Lies.  That’s been a particular problem because we now live in Republican strategist Karl Rove’s World, where nothing is true, reality is simply what you say it is, and arithmetic is obsolete.  It’s all New Math now, baby.

Which makes it nearly impossible for a democracy to govern itself.  How can it when all information is politicized and branded as false, facts become fungible and Edward R. Murrow’s “credibility” is now an irrelevant anachronism. 

Wednesday night’s debate was a perfect example.  Both candidates came in for plenty of fact-checking smacks.  But what the hell was Romney doing dragging in the old infamous fake $700 million “cut” from Medicare story?  That lie had been killed off, debunked, ‘splained repeatedly, loudly, in public, yet there Romney was, shamelessly dragging it on stage like a dead zombie.  Or, worse yet, conjuring up the ghost of Sarah Palin’s destructively false “death panels” and “government takeover of health care.” Romney knows those fake talking-points are lies that have but one purpose:  to deceive rather than to illuminate. But he was willing to present them as fact to an audience he believes to be idiots.  

Or consider the poor voter having to try to deal with a candidate that believes in Policy as Vapor.  Debate night we in the TV audience were astonished to learn that Romney now has a “new” budget plan, the details of which are totally unknown because it’s, like, all new, with details to be added later. (Another plan?  Is Romney a Fuller Brush salesman with a suitcase full of little vegetable brushes, each one a different color? You don’t like blue?  Oh, well, here’s a purple one?) Shape shifting vague makes dishonest campaigning easy but it doesn’t work well if you’re a voter trying to decide which candidate’s stated policies you want to vote for.   

And that’s because the devil’s always in the details.  Which is where the real problems facing the American people lie and why this election is being touted as the struggle for the soul of America. 

There are two forces at work now: 1% Corporate America and 47% Useless Mooching Public America.  The vested interests of both do not necessarily coincide.  Indeed, there is more than ample evidence that the interests of one too often bring great harm to the interests of the other.  Bain Capital comes to mind.  So does Wall Street. The Koch Brothers.  Outsourced Jobs.  Tax breaks for the rich.  All great for Corporate America, not so good for Main Street. The Koch Brothers have their Congressmen in place to guard their interests.  But who is there to guard and defend the interests of We the People, you know, the Useless Mooching 47%?    

As it stand now, what we’ve created is a world of Karl Rovian fakery, dishonest math, shape-shifting policies, etch-a-sketch personalities, erasable histories, fantasy realities, ridiculous apocalyptic thunderations, missing time-lines, poisonous partisanship, predatory corporations and a total lack of common sense. Not to mention a Republican party that sadly sold its soul to a guy named Grover Norquist, a congress filled with corporate hacks (and genuinely science-challenged ignoramuses), and a population too willing to believe in fairy stories that always end with free candy raining down from the sky on all the good children.

And now a candidate who promises to fix the budget by killing off Big Bird. 

Which is why my Great Debate tee shirt says it all and says it best:  Meh.