Reading between the conventions’ lines

Reuters photo

Repugnican Tea Party Speaker of the House John Boehner shakes the hoof of right-wing New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan after Dolan gave the closing prayer at the Repugnican Tea Party Convention in Tampa, Florida, on August 30. Not to be outdone in wingnuttery, the Democratic Party had the right-wing Dolan also give the Democratic National Convention’s closing prayer, in which Dolan expressed his and the Catholick church’s opposition to abortion and to same-sex marriage. Yet the shameless Democratic Party hacks cry foul when those of us who are sane and who reject evil pieces of shit like Dolan claim, correctly, that the two right-wing, pro-corporate parties (which I can think of only as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) are becoming more indistinguishable from each other day by day.

About the last thing that you want to pay attention to at the Coke Party’s and Pepsi Party’s quadrennial conventions are the politicians’ speeches.

The vast majority of political speeches are just shameless propaganda, false proclamations of actually giving a shit about the average American, and are not an actual reflection of reality (what it has been, what it is now or what it will be).

No, you look for other clues at the partisan duopoly’s conventions to inform you as to what’s really going on.

The two things that you have needed to know about the Repugnican Tea Party convention are that a black camerawoman for CNN had food thrown at her by white delegates and was referred to as an “animal,” and that an addled, doddering, grumpy old man who wants to take us back to the 1950s (or before) in a way-back machine still is the face of the Repugnican Tea Party. (It was John McCainosaurus in 2008, and Clint Eastwood this time.)

Of course, if you watched any of the Repugnican Tea Party convention coverage (even just brief clips, as I did), you saw, as the camera panned across the convention attendees, that it was a sea of lily-white faces. Seriously, why don’t they go ahead and don their pointy white hoods already? We all know that they want to.

I’ve seen only snippets of Mittens Romney’s acceptance speech. He wore way too much makeup, which only made him look even faker than he already comes across, and his whisper-like, condescending, faux-compassionate voice makes me want to hurl.

This man is a multi-millionaire Mormon. He cares only about his fellow millionaires and his fellow Mormons. If you believe otherwise, then there is something seriously the fuck the matter with you and your grasp of reality.

I don’t need to listen to Mittens’ words. I have only to listen to the strong voice within every time I see even a brief clip of Mittens: This uber-phony man is evil. He has to be phony because if he showed us his true self, enough of us would be repulsed that he’d never win the election. It wouldn’t even be close enough for him to steal it, as appears to be his party’s game plan, a la 2000.

Not that the establishmentarian, Clintonesque Democrats are much better.

I haven’t bothered to watch even a brief clip of Barack Obama’s convention speech. Why? What would be the point? We know what we’re going to get with four more years of Obama: more broken promises, more of the same, more concessions to the corporations and to the right wing, more excuses as to why Obama absofuckinglutely refuses to head an opposition party, which is what the Democratic Party used to be until the slimy baby boomer Bill Clinton destroyed it, as the greedy, corrupt, talentless baby boomers have destroyed or are about to destroy all of our nation’s best institutions (including, of course, Social Security and Medicare. [They destroyed even capitalism, too, but of course, capitalism needed to be destroyed]).

We know that while of course Mittens would be worse than would be Obama (except for Mittens’ fellow Mormons and his fellow millionaires, of course), the prospect of another four more years of Obama is nothing to be excited about.

There were two stand-out events at the Democrats’ convention that, for me, tell me what I really need to know about the party. And again, you won’t find this shit in politicos’ propagandistic speeches.

First, there was Barack Obama once again capitulating to right-wing and “Christo”fascist criticism, demanding that the Democratic Party’s platform, which the delegates had already democratically approved, be changed to add the word “God” and to add that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

As I wrote, the selfish, anti-democratic actions of the convention’s chair, the slimy Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, were repugant. Clearly Villaraigosa didn’t have the two-thirds voice vote by the delegates that he needed for the alteration of the platform to pass, but he shoved the changes to the platform down the delegates’ throats nonethefuckingless.

The Los Angeles Times today published Villaraigosa’s “defense” of his repulsive actions. He said:

• “It was a lot of ado about nothing.”
• When he was told that others didn’t hear a two-thirds voice vote, he replied smart-assedly, “That’s nice to know. I was the chairman and I did, and that was the prerogative of the chair.”
• “It’s more a media concern than a delegate concern. I can tell you this — the president of the United States said, ‘Wow.’ The president said, ‘You showed why you were speaker of the California Assembly.’ The president, the vice president, Mrs. Obama, all of them acknowledged the decisive way I handled that.”
• “The president of the United States and the leader of my party asked me to do this, and so I’m proud I have a president who believes God and Jerusalem should be in the platform, and so do I.”

What a fucking weasel Antonio Villaraigosa is. To call a blatantly anti-democratic move “decisive” is sick. No, Villaraigosa, you are not “decisive.” You are a fucking self-serving coward.

And it was not “a lot of ado about nothing” and not only a “media concern.” (Blaming shit on the media is quite Palinesque of Villaraigosa, however.) It was the hijacking of the platform that already had been democratically approved, and that is a serious matter. I’m not even a registered Democrat — because of slimeballs like Villaraigosa I’m a registered Green Party member — and I wasn’t even there, but when I watched the clip of Villaraigosa’s actions, I was incensed — as were many delegates who were there, for whom the lying Villaraigosa pretends he can speak. (It wasn’t a “delegate concern” — because he says so!)

“I was the chairman and I did [hear a two-thirds vote], and that was the prerogative of the chair,” Villaraigosa huffed. Bullshit. He did not hear it, which is why he had to hold the voice vote three fucking times (watch the clip yourself), and so when he claims that he did hear it, he fucking lies, but then immediately after his lie, he inadvertently tells us the truth: “that was the prerogative of the chair.”

I’ll translate that from the weaselspeak that Villaraigosa speaks into English: “I was able to abuse my position of power and trust, and so I did so. Fuck you for even questioning my authority.”

And then, Villaraigosa does even more quite inadvertent truth-telling: “The president, the vice president, Mrs. Obama, all of them acknowledged the decisive way I handled that,” and “The president of the United States and the leader of my party asked me to do this, and so I’m proud I have a president who believes God and Jerusalem should be in the platform, and so do I.”

Well, yes, indeed, Barack Obama (and, if Villaraigosa is telling the truth — it’s hard to know, because he’s such a fucking liar — Joe Biden and even Michelle Obama) wanted Villaraigosa to ram the last-minute, “Christo”fascist- and wingnut-placating changes to the party’s platform down the delegates’ throats, and so Villaraigosa the shameless fucking sellout dutifully did so.

But that is a “defense” — that he pleased his puppeteers? That makes what he did OK?

And what does it fucking matter what Barack Obama and Antonio Villaraigosa believe? The party platform already had been democratically approved by the convention delegates. Why bother to have the delegates at all if they can be overriden by power-drunk autocrats like this?

I’ll never give the slimeball Antonio Villaraigosa my vote even for dog catcher. He has demonstrated his character amply.

As has Barack Obama, of course.

Not content that he had alienated enough of his base by anti-democratically using his tool, the fool Villaraigosa, to change the party’s platform against the wishes of the delegates (who clearly are just window dressing, if that), Barack Obama decided that it would be a swell fucking idea to have the right-wing, anti-choice, anti-same-sex-marriage Catholick Cardinal Timothy Dolan give the closing benediction at the Democratic National Convention.

The “Christo”fascist Dolan said these two things in his “benediction” to the Dems:

• “Thus do we praise you [he's talking to "God" here, you see] for the gift of life. Grant us the courage to defend it, life, without which no other rights are secure. We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected.”
• “Empower us with your grace so that we might resist the temptation to replace the moral law with idols of our own making, or to remake those institutions you have given us for the nurturing of life and community.”

If you claim that these are not thinly veiled references to the Dark-Ages Catholick church’s “Christo”fascist stances on abortion and same-sex marriage, then you are a fucking liar or you are a fucking moron. (Or both.)

Dolan also talked about “freedom” and “liberty” in his “benediction” (“bene” is from the Latin word for “good,” but Dolan is evil, so to call it a “benediction” is a contradiction), but in Dolan’s and the Catholick church’s worldview, women may not have the freedom and liberty to make their own fucking reproductive choices, and same-sex couples shall not have the freedom and liberty of marriage equality, but are to be continued to be treated as less than equal human beings, as they have for centuries.

“Freedom” and “liberty” are reserved only for those who agree with Dolan and the right-wing, dying dinosaur that is the Catholick church under the command of Pope Palpatine, you see.

Know that this is how much brazen contempt Barack Obama and the ossified Democratic Party (the best of which it can do is wheel out the right-wing fossil that is Bill Fucking Clinton every once in a while) have for you: to invite a known — a well-fucking-known — right-wing, misogynist, homophobic, patriarchal piece of shit like Timothy Dolan to give the closing “benediction” of the Democratic National Convention.

Barack Obama isn’t concerned in the fucking least about delivering for his base.

He never fucking has been and he never fucking will be.

Barack Obama is way too busy catering to the right wing, you see, pushing the Democratic Party further and further to the right, making it more and more indistinguishable from the Repugnican Tea Party, and his stance toward you is the same arrogant, power-drunk stance that Antonio Villaraigosa has toward you:

Fuck you.

It’s his prerogative.

What are you going to do about it anyway?

WTF is the matter with Mittens? He’s a multi-millionaire baby boomer, for starters

Associated Press image

A London tabloid expresses its opinion of Mittens’ visit to London on the occasion of the city’s hosting of the 2012 Olympic games.

The 2012 Olympics have gotten off to a great start — and I’m not even into sports. (Well, men’s diving and men’s gymnastics are OK…)

As others have noted, all that Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney really needed to do in London this past week was (1) to just show up and (2) to not make a total ass of himself. But very apparently, he could accomplish only one of those two objectives.

The mind of Mittens is a terrifying place to explore, but my blogger’s psychoanalysis of Mittens is that his London Olympics trip was meant to underscore the fact that he was in charge of the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City and was meant to show that he — and not Barack. Hussein. Obama. — is the man who should be representing the United States of America abroad. (I hate it when someone like Mittens acts like a shadow president — it’s deeply undemocratic, since we have not elected Mittens to act as our shadow president.)

And the wingnuts’ view of foreign relations, of course, is much closer to George W. Bush’s than it is to Barack Obama’s. And that view is that the United States of America must act like a drunken, aggressive, narcissistic frat boy, treating others in the manner of a complete and total asshole. 

On that note, I just signed on to this open letter to the people of the United Kingdom:

An open letter to the people of the United Kingdom:

We are writing to express our concern over Mitt Romney’s recent comments, and to let you know that he does not represent how most Americans view your great country.

First, we do not believe, as Mitt Romney implied in 2007, that you have become a second-tier nation. Rather, we are impressed at how the United Kingdom has consistently been able to punch above its weight on the world stage.

Additionally, we do not share the opinion which Romney expressed in his 2010 book, No Apologies, that “England [sic] is just a small island,” and that “with few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy.” Please continue sending us your many wonderful products, especially the upcoming third season of “Downton Abbey.”

We look forward not only to the London Olympics, but also to many years of continuing the special relationship between our two nations. Rest assured we will do our level best to prevent Mitt Romney from becoming our next president.

Cheers!

I hope that before the organizers send the letter on to the Brits, they delete that reference to “Downton Abbey”* — that bad joke seems actually to reinforce Mittens’ contention that the UK is not a serious contender on the world stage — but I agree with most of it. (If you want to sign on, you can do so by clicking here.)

Of course, when we state that “we are impressed at how the United Kingdom has consistently been able to punch above its weight on the world stage,” we need to be careful that with such broad statements we are not endorsing some of the UK’s atrocities, which include the subjugation and in some cases even the decimation of the natives of Africa, Australia, India and neighboring Ireland, and which also includes the UK’s government’s support of the Vietraq War, in which the United States and the UK were partners in war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Indeed, if the U.S.’s rap sheet of atrocities is shorter than the UK’s, that’s only because the U.S. is a much younger nation.)

All of that said — and all of that reinforcing  yet another reason why it was an incredibly poor idea for a henchman of Mittens to assert earlier this week that Mittens Romney better understands the “Anglo-Saxon heritage”** shared by the UK and the United States than does Obama — it was incredibly pompous for Mittens, as a guest of the UK, to state his opinion just before the opening of the 2012 Olympics that London wasn’t ready.    

My guess is that such boorish behavior comes from the fact that Mittens is an American baby boomer — as a group, these selfish narcissists vastly overestimate their talents, abilities and worth, and as a group, they know no fucking shame — and from the fact that as a overprivileged (Daddy was chairman and president of American Motors Corporation from 1954 to 1962, governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969, and secretary of U.S. Housing and Urban Development from 1969 to 1973, and Mommy ran for the U.S. Senate for Michigan in 1970, for fuck’s sake) multi-millionaire (from his vulture capitalism) who is used to others sucking up to him, Mittens is uncomfortable in any other role than being the uber-alpha male, the frat-boy asshole on crack.

My guess is that Mittens feels like he’s in charge wherever he is, and that he saw nothing wrong with telling his hosts on the topic of hosting the Olympics: “You’re doing it wrong!”

Of course, again, those on the right subscribe to the George W. Bush School of Foreign Policy, so it’s not like in their eyes Mittens did anything wrong. They want their president to be the biggest bully on the international stage. Unless the U.S. president is hated worldwide, he isn’t doing his job — that’s their credo.

So, as usual, in November it will come down to the “swing voters.”

I don’t imagine that a huge chunk of them really cares either that Mittens conducted himself like a jackass in London this week, since their area of concern usually doesn’t extend more than a few miles’ radius, but if Mittens gets the reputation as a bumbler on the world stage — because he is — that might cost him a significant number of votes.

We’ll see, but in the meantime, it is instructive, I think, to examine Mittens’ personality traits that have been on display on the world stage this week and to ask ourselves what these personality traits would mean for us here at home should he ever sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Of course, we Americans just allowed George W. Bush to blatantly steal the White House in late 200o — what bad events possibly could follow a blatantly stolen presidential election? — so of course we can’t write presidential wannabe Mittens off.

–

*I purchased and watched the first two seasons of PBS’ “Downton Abbey,” and my impressions of the television show are that one, while the series is watchable, the first season was better than the second, and that two, “Downton Abbey’s” American target audience seems to be limousine liberals. (That said, I’m quite middle- and working-class myself. I’ve never even been inside of a limo.)

“Downton Abbey” seems to be making structural and institutional socioeconomic equality seem OK because the lord and lady of the manor are fairly decent individuals, are not individually abusive to their servants. Of course, the whole setup — an overprivileged class that is served by an underprivileged class – is abusive, but apparently we are to overlook that.

Thus, again, “Downton Abbey” should be a fave among the limousine liberals, like my baby-boomer uncle, who owns several homes and is a U.S. military contractor but who nonetheless in all seriousness calls himself a “socialist.”

**While I haven’t studied my own genealogy, I suspect that I primarily of am British stock, as many white Americans are. (Wikipedia notes that “German Americans [16.5 percent], Irish Americans [11.9 percent], English Americans [9.0 percent], Italian Americans [5.8 percent], French Americans [4 percent], Polish Americans [3 percent], Scottish Americans [1.9 percent], Dutch Americans [1.6 percent], Norwegian Americans [1.5 percent] and Swedish Americans [1.4 percent] constitute the 10 largest white American ancestries.”)

While there is much about the UK that I admire — such as the incredibly useful and expansive English language, of course — I think that it’s vital to recognize a nation’s wrongdoings as well as its successes. Thus, when Mittens said this in “defense” of his henchman’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” remark, it was not a save: “It [the United States' and the UK's shared 'Anglo-Saxon heritage'] goes back to our very beginnings — cultural and historical. But I also believe the president understands that. So I don’t agree with whoever that adviser might be, but do agree that we have a very common bond between ourselves and Great Britain.”

Yes, among other things, the United States and the UK have in common their colonization of other nations, the raping, pillaging and plundering of other, militarily weaker nations (including, of course, slavery) so that the UK and the U.S. could maintain a standard of living much higher than that of the average member of Homo sapiens on planet Earth. (And for this so-called “Anglo-Saxon” “success” you will get no apologies from Mittens Romney!)

When the British empire waned, the American empire rose up to replace it, and now the American empire wanes.

And you gotta love Mittens’ assertion, “So I don’t agree with whoever that adviser might be.” How much control, exactly, does Mittens have over his own campaign?

Why I don’t blog for the baby boomers

Infanticide suddenly seems like a good thing…

Most people who read blogs probably assume that most bloggers want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible — and therefore, never to (gasp!) offend anybody.

Not me.

I don’t think that I’ve ever come out and said it, but for these past almost 10 years of blogging, I’ve been writing primarily for those in my age group (Generation X) and younger.

If some baby boomers or even older folks read my blog, fine, but if they don’t, perhaps that’s even better, since I don’t write for them. I long ago stopped looking to the baby boomers (generally identified as those born between 1946 and 1964, but to me the cohort really spans from about 1944 to 1960) to be agents of positive change, and I look to those in my age group and younger instead.

Most of my critics turn out to be (I see from their blog avatars) baby boomers. Before I take their criticism to heart, I look at their mugshot avatars. Chances are, they’re boomers (who apparently think that an Internet presence makes them young again [it doesn't], and who of course have to plaster their faces on their blogs, being spotlight hogs). If they have a bio, I read that, too. Chances are, from their bios I surmise that they’re people I wouldn’t like in person, so it comes as no shock that I’ve written something that (gasp!) offends their delicate sensibilities. (People who act as though they have the fucking right never to be offended in the least bit – they’re interesting. [Psychiatrically, I mean.])

I could write a book on the fucking baby boomers, but I’ll try to keep this to a blog post, albeit a long one.

George W. Bush (born in 1946) could be the poster boy for the baby-boom generation.

He accomplished nothing on his own, but coasted on his family name. If George Sr. hadn’t been president first, there’s no way in hell that George Jr. would have been governor of Texas and then the second president named George Bush.

Not only that, but George Jr. in 2000 stole office (with the help of his brother Jeb, who then was the governor of Florida, the critical state that George Jr. “won”; with the help of then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who infamously disenfranchised voters by deeming them felons when they were not; and with the help of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, which stopped the recounting process in Florida). George Jr. didn’t even win the presidency outright.

Then, once in the Oval Office, George W. thoroughly trashed the nation, among other things allowing 9/11 to happen (remember the August 2001 presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”?), allowing Hurricane Katrina to kill hundreds of Americans, taking the nation to a bogus war for the no-bid federal-government contracts for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other oily subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, and giving giant tax breaks to the filthy rich. George W. Bush had received the nation in good shape from Bill Clinton and the prosperous 1990s, and delivered it to Barack Obama in January 2009 on the brink of collapse.

That, in a nutshell, is the baby-boomer modus operandi: inherit your power and your wealth from your parents, squander it selfishly and recklessly, and leave nothing behind for those who follow you, not even the polar ice caps.

Baby boomers unabashedly display a bumper sticker that reads “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance.” (I’ve seen this bumper sticker on cars driven by boomers several times.)

This is supposed to be funny. Ha ha.

Except that the baby boomers’ parents, the members of the so-called “greatest generation,” didn’t spend their children’s inheritance. They gave their children — the baby boomers – their inheritance.

Not so with the baby-boom generation, the first generation in the history of the United States of America that did not care in the fucking least about at least trying to leave things in better shape for those who must follow them.

The baby boomers, endlessly doted upon by their parents, had no problems going to college and getting good jobs. Hell, they didn’t even have to go to college to live well. (Neither of my baby-boomer parents has a four-year college degree, but neither of them during their young to middle adulthood ever struggled with buying homes and cars. My four-year degree, on the other hand, which I worked hard for, was worthless when I received it — along with considerable student-loan debt — in 1990 during the first George Bush recession, and I gave up on having a paid job that allows me to make good use of my skills [without doing evil and without completely being exploited by some talentless plutocrats] and I gave up on home ownership long, long ago.) If the boomers put just a minimal effort into attaining a college degree, a good job, a home, a nice car, these things were theirs for the taking. The members of the “greatest generation” made sure of that.

But do the baby boomers today give a rat’s ass about our young people of today?

Hell fucking no.

This is from The Associated Press today:

The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees. …

Again, when this Gen X’er received his worthless bachelor’s degree in 1990 — a journalism degree, which in the face of mass newspaper layoffs at the time was worthless (and still would be mostly worthless today, although as a blogger it gives me a leg up) – there were not, to his recollection, any news stories about the fact that in the face of the recession, college degrees were worthless, and newly minted college graduates had to take jobs that greatly underutilized their talents and abilities — and struggle with student loans they couldn’t afford to repay. (Massive student loan debt was something that the boomers did not experience when they were of college age and young adults because their parents saw them as young people to be fostered – not as cash cows to be milked dry.) 

It would have been nice to get the media attention then that today’s struggling young college grads are getting today — in my day, for instance, crushing student-loan debt wasn’t seen as any problem whatsofuckingever, since my generation always has been viewed by the boomer majority as wholly disposable, but today, both the Democratic and the Repugnican candidates for president are promising to work on the suddenly-now-obvious problem of crushing student-loan debt — but, I suppose, better late than never. (And ah, well, as my fellow Gen X’er Ted Rall has noted, we X’ers indeed are the “leapfrog generation,” the generation [between the boomers and Generation Y] that has been passed over entirely.)

Why have Gen-X and younger college grads struggled so much in the job market since at least the First Great Bush Recession (circa 1990)?

It’s not just the economy, although the greedy, get-mine-and-get-out boomers fucked that up, too.

It’s the boomers’ sheer numbers — 76 million of them, according to Wikipedia — that alone would create at least some amount of scarcity in the American job market (and indeed, the majority of the plum jobs have been taken by the boomers for decades now), but their sheer numbers are coupled with the fact that, unlike the generations before them, they refuse to leave the fucking stage when their act has long been over. The boomers view their jobs just like the U.S. Supreme Court “justices” view theirs: We’ll have to pry their cold, dead fingers from their desks.

Other generations of Americans knew when it was time to hand over the reins. And they handed them over. Not the boomers.

Witness baby boomer Madonna (born 1958), whose latest big video has her playing a high-school cheerleader. She’s fiftyfuckingthree. It apparently kills her to fucking pass the torch already. And she’s typical of her generation, thinking that she’s some hot shit acting and trying to look decades younger than she is, when in fact, she’s just fucking pathetic, refusing, like Peter Pan, to grow the fuck up already.

With the baby boomers we have and will continue to have a nation full of old people, but not old and wise people.

Baby boomers whine that they can’t retire because they can’t afford to retire. Bullshit. Most of them can afford to retire — it’s that they want to live in excess and opulence (“enough” isn’t in their vocabulary) and it’s also that, whether they will admit it or not, out of their egotism they must believe that we younger folk can’t get along without them.

As Wikipedia notes of the boomers (emphasis mine):

One feature of boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about ….

Yes, indeed, all of that rhetoric from the boomers in the 1960s about changing the world, and boy, have they. They fought against the Vietnam War, only to create the Vietraq War themselves. (Apparently the only reason that they opposed the Vietnam War was to save their own skins. They were perfectly OK, however, with bogus warfare in Iraq. After all, it was someone else doing the dying for the baby boomers’ profits.) The American empire, which is being sucked dry by the vampires who comprise the corporate-military-prison-industrial complex (the majority of them boomers, of course), is on the brink of death, and even the North Pole is melting. The baby boomers ushered in change, indeed.

The baby boomers are the first generation of Americans in the nation’s history who are leaving things much worse off for the generations that follow them.

Before the boomers it always had been the American ideal that the current generation in power leaves things in better shape, not in worse shape, for the generations that follow them. And congratulations, boomers; your generation very apparently is the one that, history probably will record, destroyed the American empire. You fucked it all up on your watch.

Point out these obvious truths, and the boomers almost invariably will tell you (the post-boomer) how “Angry!” you are, as though you’re defective for being angry about obvious injustices.

No, when you are being raped in the ass with ground grass for lube, you have every fucking right to be ANGRY!

The boomers are taking everything with them, shamelessly – and even bragging about it in their “funny” bumper stickers.

Here’s another cheery story from The Associated Press today (emphases mine):

Social Security is rushing even faster toward insolvency, driven by retiring baby boomers, a weak economy and politicians’ reluctance to take painful action to fix the huge retirement and disability program.

The trust funds that support Social Security will run dry in 2033 — three years earlier than previously projected — the government said [today].

There was no change in the year that Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is projected to run out of money. It’s still 2024. …

At age 44, I’ve been paying into Social Security and Medicare since I began working when I was a teenager, but I don’t expect to see a fucking penny of either. The baby boomers are poised to blatantly steal my money — and slam me for being “so angry!” while they do it.

The boomers are leaving those of us who follow them with less than nothing, but we’re supposed to think that they’re great fucking people nonetheless. (Or, at least, we’re supposed to keep our fucking mouths shut while the boomers screw us over like no other generation in U.S. history has screwed over the next generation ever before.)

That’s part of the baby boomers’ mass narcissistic sociopathology — they are a “special” generation, indeed – and the reason that I put the “greatest generation” in quotation marks is that I don’t see how you can assert that the parents who created the most spoiled generation in the nation’s history comprise the “greatest generation.” No, in producing the baby boomers, the members of the “greatest generation” fucked up big-time. It’s almost impossible to overstate what awful parents the members of the “greatest generation” were. Regardless of what their intentions might have been, the results of their parenting have been catastrophic for the nation — and for the world.

And the boomers’ bumper sticker sums up their credo, their manifesto, indeed, their raison d’être, neatly: “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance.”

Yes, I got that long, long ago. Consequently, I stopped looking to the boomers long ago. The ones who created the colossal mess aren’t the ones to fix it. The boomers exist to cause problems, not to solve problems, and to consume, not to produce. They are the problem, not the solution. They are, essentially, dead to me. That’s why I could give a flying fuck if a single baby boomer ever reads a single blog post of mine.

I look not to the boomers, but to my fellow members of Gen X and to those poor souls who have to follow us. (I’d thought that my generation had it bad, but today’s young people are even more screwed, apparently, than has been my generation. They do have one thing that my generation didn’t have, however, and that’s a national conversation about how badly today’s young people have it.)

We, the post-boomers, are the clean-up crew. It’s not a job that we wanted. It’s a job that the boomers have forced upon us.

What the baby boomers probably should do while those of us who have had to follow them perform the incredibly difficult work of cleaning up after their decades-long wholesale trashing of the nation is shut the fuck up and be very thankful that the national conversation has not yet turned to the elephant in the room, to the root of our nation’s problems: the baby boomers and the increasing burden on the nation that they are. And that we post-boomers have not yet begun to seriously discuss a much, much better use for the baby boomers: something along the lines of Soylent Green.

Documentary ‘Bully’ flawed but spurs vital conversation

Film review

Alex and Kelby, above, are two of the victims of school bullying who are featured in The Weinstein Company’s documentary “Bully.” Alex, who was born prematurely, in the documentary is portrayed as being called “Fishface” and routinely physically assaulted at school and on the school bus, and Kelby left her school because of very apparently coordinated anti-lesbian discrimination. Below is 18-year-old Sawyer Rosenstein (who is not featured in “Bully”), whose school bully put him in a wheelchair when he was 12 years old. Sawyer and his family just settled with the board of the New Jersey school district for more than $4 million. In the settlement the school board denies that the school failed to protect Sawyer, even though its failure to protect him is quite fucking obvious.

The documentary “Bully” should be required viewing for every American, even those who, like me (a gay man), don’t have a son or daughter in a public school and (most likely) never will.

“Bully” is not only about how cruel and abusive some students can be toward other students, but it’s about how chronically victimized students routinely are failed by the adults in their lives who are supposed to foster and to protect them — not just by school teachers and school administrators, but also by their parents.

An assistant principal featured in “Bully” especially is clueless and worthless — she’s a baby boomer, and it’s all about the baby boomers, so there you go.

In one scene, the assistant principal forces the victim to shake the victimizer’s hand, as though that superficial action were any true solution to the long-term problem of the one student chronically bullying the other. The assistant principal in this incident apparently makes the common, unthinking person’s error in basically asserting that whenever there is a conflict, both sides must be equally guilty. (Actually, that bullshit belief just comes out of the sheer laziness to actually sort it all out and see who truly is at fault, but instead to just try to sweep it all under the carpet.)

In another scene, when a couple of parents come to the assistant principal after having viewed actual video footage of their child’s being seriously, violently bullied on the school bus, the assistant principal (again, a baby boomer) surreally manages to make it all about herself, even whipping out a photo of her grandbaby, stating that of course she cares about all of our babies (of course, the student who is being bullied is not an infant).

The assistant principal also declares that she has ridden that bus herself and that there is no problem whatsoever on the bus. Never mind the facts that there is video footage of the serious problems with violent bullying on that bus and that of course the students are going to behave themselves on the bus when the assistant principal is on board.

What the fuck? With brazenly incompetent, self-interested school administrators like these in our schools, administrators who are more interested in playing politics and in portraying a false portrait of how things are rather than actually being responsible to the students in their care, no fucking wonder bullying is such a problem.

It’s not just the school administrators, of course. The United States of America’s number one spending priority is not its schools, but is the bloated-beyond-belief military-industrial complex.

If enough Americans truly cared about what was going on inside our schools, our schools would be much, much better — including being adequately staffed so that incidents of bullying would be reduced significantly. We have the resources to greatly improve our students’ lives; it’s not a lack of resources, but it’s a lack of caring, including a nationwide public apathy that just allows the powers that be to steal our tax dollars and spend them not on what we need, such as good, safe schools, health care and environmental protection, and to take care of the least among us, but to blow our tax dollars on the military-industrial complex, which is not about defense, but which is about making filthy, treasonously rich swine even richer than they already are through such avenues as colossal military contracting waste and waging bogus wars for corporate expansion, such as how Iraq has been opened to the profiteering of Big Oil via the illegal and immoral Vietraq War.

“Bully” raises these important issues, at least indirectly, but as a documentary is flawed.

“Bully” focuses on bullying that has occurred in public schools in the Southern and Midwestern states of Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Georgia, and ignores bullying that happens elsewhere in the nation. Bullying is a national problem. My guess is that it’s significantly worse in the red states than it is in the blue states, but it happens eveywhere.

“Bully” probably focuses too much on one child, the 12-year-old Alex, who was born prematurely and who, while he’s an affable kid, is different from the others (who call him “Fishface”) and who thus is bullied. That said, Alex’s life is an excellent example of a child who has been failed by most of the adults in his life, not only by his bus driver and his draw-droppingly awful assistant principal, but even by his own father, who advises him to just fight back, even though Alex is fairly slight and probably can’t effectively fight back physically.

Alex’s father tells him that if he doesn’t fight back, his younger sister will be bullied, too — and that’s putting way too much pressure and responsibility upon a minor, and letting the adults continue in their dereliction of duty.

Even Alex’s mother, who apparently is the most genuinely concerned about him, probably should have concerned herself more about what was happening to him at school and on the school bus before she found out through the documentarians’ film footage.

Another flaw of “Bully” is that while we don’t need grotesque details, it sure would be nice to be told in more detail why, exactly, some of the victims of bullying-induced suicide took their own lives. The young man named Tyler, for example. Why was he bullied? Was he gay or suspected to be gay? In “Bully” we are told a lot about Tyler, who hanged himself in his bedroom closet at age 17, but we’re not really told about why he was bullied.

For the most part, “Bully” doesn’t tell us what to think, but lets us come to our own conclusions. The story of Ja’Maya, a black teen who says that she only brought her mother’s handgun with her on her school bus because she wanted to scare the kids who had been bullying her, reeks of racism/white supremacism as we watch yet another stupid white male, baby-boomer sheriff — who perhaps never has been a victim of bullying himself, but perhaps has been a bully his entire life (bullies are, after all, drawn to law enforcement) – declare that no amount of bullying could justify what Ja’Maya did, and we are left with the sense that if Ja’Maya were, say, a white male jock instead of a 14-year-old black female, the “criminal” “justice” system where she lives would have treated her very differently.

Kelby, the 16-year-old lesbian who is featured in “Bully” is eloquent and intelligent and strong, but “Bully” probably doesn’t say enough about the bullying that happens to gay and lesbian and non-gender-conforming students, who comprise probably the most-bullied group of students.

“Bully” should be an invitation for us not only to declare jihad upon bullying in our public schools, but to tackle the bullying that happens in our workplaces as well. In many if not even most workplaces, bullying occurs on a regular basis. The belief that adulthood in and of itself automatically erases the dynamics that we saw in our public school days is a fucking myth.

The perpetrators of bullying in the workplace know better than to get physically abusive/violent in most cases, but verbal abuse/harassment, sexual harassment/sexual abuse and the abuse of power can make the workplace just as hostile as a public school. And just like bullies in school are careful about bullying when no one in authority is present, workplace bullies most often do their deeds when there is no one who might do something about their bullying is around.

Hopefully more documentaries about bullying will be made, although after “Bully,” school administrators might be much less willing to appear on camera.

Stories of bullying abound, such as the current news story about Sawyer Rosenstein, who became paralyzed from the waist down when a bully at school punched him when he was 12 years old. Sawyer, now 18, is in a wheelchair and just settled with the board of the New Jersey public school district for $4.2 million.

Admittedly, most individuals who are punched don’t become paralyzed — Sawyer apparently was the unfortunate victim of a freak medical event (a blood clot) — but Sawyer’s case illustrates how seriously dangerous bullying can be.

At least three months before his bully put him in a wheelchair Sawyer had informed his school’s administrators that he was being bullied, but even after Sawyer’s life-changing injury at the hands of his bully, msnbc.com reports,

The [New Jersey public school district's] board denied [in its settlement statement] allegations that it or its employees had “failed or compromised its responsibility to develop and to implement effective policies and procedures to protect the safety and rights” of the school community, … noting that the district “prides itself for the role which it has played in recognizing and developing an awareness of the dangers of bullying, intimidation and harassment in the school setting.”

Bullying can’t be addressed if school administrators, in order to save their own skins, won’t even fucking acknowledge it.

It’s our own collective fault, however, that brazenly incompetent and self-interested school administrators like these remain in power and that our schools don’t have more resources, such as adequate staffing to supervise students, to combat bullying.

And until school administrators and teachers stop saying that it’s the parents’ responsibility, and parents stop saying that it’s the schools’ responsibility, and school administrators stop saying that it’s law enforcement’s reponsibility, and law enforcement stops saying that it’s the schools’ responsibility – and all of us (even those of us without children of our own) take responsibility for the well-being of our young people — our public schools will continue to be more like prisons than like places of learning and personal growth.

My grade: B-

You have to be brain-damaged to celebrate what they’ve just done to you

Associated Press image

Your future is being dismantled, chunk by chunk, by the partisan duopoly in D.C. – but hey, look! There’s Gabrielle Giffords!

No offense, but what does it say that a literally brain-damaged congressperson voted “yes” on your legislation?

But seriously, apparently the “feel-good” “news” story of the day is that Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was capped in the head by yet another white male psychopath/sociopath in Tucson in January, returned to the U.S. House of Representatives just in time in order to give her thumbs-up to the Capitulator in Chief’s latest selling out of yet another huge chunk of the store to the plutocratic and pro-plutocratic right wing.

Reports The Associated Press tonight:

Washington, D.C. — Crisis legislation to yank the nation past the threat of a historic financial default sped through the [U.S.] House [of Representatives tonight], breaking weeks of deadlock. The rare moment of cooperation turned celebratory when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords strode in for the first time since she was shot in the head nearly seven months ago.

The vote was 269-161, a scant day ahead of the deadline for action. But all eyes were on Giffords, who drew thunderous applause as she walked into the House chamber unannounced and cast her vote in favor of the bill.

A final Senate sign-off for the measure is virtually assured on Tuesday. Aside from raising the debt limit, the bill would slice federal spending by at least $2.1 trillion, and perhaps much more.

“If the bill were presented to the president, he would sign it,” the White House said, an understatement of enormous proportions.

After months of fierce struggle, the House’s top Republican and Democratic leaders swung behind the bill, ratifying a deal sealed Sunday night with a phone call from House Speaker John Boehner to President Barack Obama.

Many Republicans contended the bill still would cut too little from federal spending; many Democrats said much too much. Still, Republican lawmakers supported the compromise, 174-66, while Democrats split, 95-95.

“The legislation will solve this debt crisis and help get the American people back to work,” Boehner said at a news conference a few hours before the vote.

The Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was far less effusive. “I’m not happy with it, but I’m proud of some of the accomplishments in it. That’s why I’m voting for it.”

So, too, many of the first-term Republicans whose election in 2010 handed the GOP control of the House and set the federal government on a new, more conservative course.

“It’s about time that Congress come together and figure out a way to live within our means,” said one of them, Sean Duffy of Wisconsin. “This bill is going to start that process although it doesn’t go far enough.”

The measure would cut federal spending by at least $2.1 trillion over a decade — and possibly considerably more — and would not require tax increases. [Emphasis mine.] The U.S. debt limit would rise by at least $2.1 trillion, tiding the Treasury over through the 2012 elections. …

I’m happy that Giffords is doing better these days, but does that fucking erase the fact that, chunk by chunk, my future as a forty-something, as a member of the crew that has to follow with shovels the elephants in the parade that are the fucking baby boomers, is being destroyed by the overwhelmingly self-serving, legacy-ignoring baby-boomer “leaders” in Washington? And that Capitulator in Chief Barack Obama is happily helping them in the name of “bipartisanship”?

Oh, we’re seeing a lot of “change,” all right — the decimation of Social Security and Medicare, which I’ve been paying into since I was a teenager, and other public benefits sure the fuck is a change, just not the change that I’d hoped for, and certainly not the change that President Hopey-Changey Obama had promised us.

But I suppose that I’m a heartless ogre if I am not mindlessly distracted by the “feel-good” fact that Gabrielle Giffords was there to vote “yes” on the further destruction of my nation, to endorse the further widening of the gulf between the rich and the poor in the rapidly crumbling United States of America.

I haven’t blogged on the “debt ceiling crisis” until now for many reasons:

One, I’ve come to expect Barack Obama to sell us out. He consistently and predictably sells us out. He is committed to selling us out. (He always has wanted to be the next Ronald Reagan, remember. He is succeeding spectacularly.)

Two, I’ve always figured that “at the last minute” they (the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party — and if you can’t tell the difference between the two, well, don’t feel badly, because most of the rest of us can’t, either) would announce some “breakthrough” “deal,” thus “miraculously” averting “economic Armageddon!”

Three, I’ve always figured that this has been bullshit all along, that this always has been just an elephant-and-donkey show, that the Democrats and the Repugnicans are in bed together and that a “last-minute deal” always was in the script, that the fear-mongering was meant to create the illusion among the masses that there’s actually some struggle for the soul of the nation going on in D.C. — and not, say, the collusion of, for and by two duopolistic parties that don’t give a flying fuck about you or me that’s actually going on.*

Fuck, they even threw The Return of Gabrielle Giffords into the script.

If I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist before (and I wasn’t), I think that I am now.

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*No, this statement is not an endorsement of “Americans Elect.” “Americans Elect” is evil. The Wall Street weasels who have caused our economic collapse are not the ones to turn to for solutions.

Perry a potential Repugnican Tea Party insurgent to be reckoned with

AFP photo

Texas Gov. Rick Perry addresses the Wingnuts’ Ball (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Washingtion, D.C., in February. Perry reportedly is testing the presidential waters.

I hate Repugnican Tea Party Texas Gov. Rick Perry. I hate Texas. I hate the Repugnican Tea Party. I hate baby boomers (most of them, anyway) and Rick Perry is one of them.

But putting my broad-spectrum hatred aside, I think that Perry has a great shot at winning the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination.

Perry is the demonic hybrid (hey, if Ann Cunter can use “demonic,” I can, too) of Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

Romney is a Richie Rich frat boy who has the support of the Repugnican Party Old Guard (or maybe that should be Old Money), because he promises to protect and to expand their fortunes, to further enrichen the already rich and to further impoverish the already impoverished.

But the “tea party” traitors aren’t so keen on Romney, in no small part because his Mormonism isn’t in step with their brand of “Christo”fascism, but for other reasons, too, such as that he was, in their eyes, the too-moderate governor of the blue state of Massachusetts. (This — the ability to win in a blue state — actually would be a strength for a Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate in actually winning a national election, but the worst of the wingnuts probably don’t see it that way.)

Bachmann, who is an abject lunatic, replete with eyes like a deer’s in headlights, is the “tea party” darling, but she doesn’t have the support of the Repugnican Party Old Guard, in no small part because unlike Romney, she doesn’t come from Old Money, but also because, let’s face it, she’s just embarrassing. (For someone who wraps herself in the flag so much, she struggles to get a single fact about American history correct. And that’s for starters.)

Perry’s biography doesn’t indicate that, like George W. Bush does, he comes from Old Money, but Perry has the gravitas of Old Money nonetheless — at least in stark contrast to Bachmann, who is Sarah Palin’s Mini-Me.

In a political pinch, like the pinch that they are in now (there is doubt that Romney can beat Barack Obama), the gravitas will do for the Repugnican Party Old Guard, methinks.

Perry also is a “tea party” darling. He has called forth the specter of Texas seceding from the Union, after all (to which I say Good fucking riddance, but that’s another blog post).

Perry has two main obstacles to the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination, that I can see: He doesn’t have Romney’s money and political and fundraising network (Romney has been running for president for years now), and there are and there will be the inevitable comparisons of Perry to the last Texas governor who became president of the United States.

But, in the end, Rick Perry is not George W. Bush.

It’s true that Perry started out as Bush’s lieutenant governor in January 1999 and became Texas’ governor when Bush went to the White House even though he had lost the presidential election to Al Gore, but Perry went on to win the Texas governorship in his own right in 2002, in 2006 and in 2010, “an unprecedented feat in Texas political history,” according to Wikipedia, which adds that Perry is “the longest continuously serving current U.S. governor and the second-longest-serving current U.S. governor after Terry Branstad of Iowa.”

And Texas is the nation’s most populous state only after California. (It’s a distant second, however; California has more than 12 million more residents than does Texas, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.) Texas is the most powerful of the red states, as California is the most powerful of the blue states. Both behemoths have millions and millions of dollars of potential campaign contributions and millions and millions of potential votes.

And while he hasn’t been running for president like Romney has, Perry isn’t exactly a political neophyte, having been governor of the most populous red state longer than anyone else ever had before him, apparently.

And, of course, Perry is a late-middle-aged white “Christian” guy, the kind of candidate that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors prefer.

Romney matches Perry on that one, but Romney’s Mormonism and Massachusetts political roots are, I think, no match for Perry’s Texas roots (he’s a fifth-generation Texan, per Wikipedia), and while (per Wiki) Perry at least nominally is a Methodist, he caters even to the way-off-the-deep-end Pentecostals, since it’s politically beneficial. (Perry, among other things, opposes women’s right to control their own uteri, denies the fact of global warming, and of course he opposes same-sex marriage and loves the death penalty. I mean, Texas.)

Perry is, I think, for a political party that has seen the milquetoast Mitt Romney as its best hope for months now, the best of both worlds: He can get the “Christo”fascist vote without turning off Old Money.

It seems to me that if he fights for it, the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination is his.

P.S. Some perhaps-not-so-trivial Rick Perry trivia: According to Wikipedia, Perry began his political career in Texas as a Democrat and even “supported Al Gore in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries and was chairman of the Gore campaign in Texas.” In 1989, Perry switched to the Repugnican Party, according to Wiki.

‘Tree of Life’: For critics or for viewers?

Film review

“The Tree of Life” (which contains all of the images above, among many, many, many others): Great art or the self-indulgent, inaccessible pretensions of a baby boomer growing ever closer to death?

It is telling that (as I type this sentence, anyway) Yahoo! Movies shows American director Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” as having garnered an “A-” from film critics — and only a “C+” from the common folk.

The question then becomes, I think, whether the film is flawed or whether the film is just above the audience’s head.

“The Tree of Life” spectacularly peculiarly alternates between the very apple-pie story of a white middle-class family in the suburbs of Texas in the 1950s, patronized by Brad Pitt – and “2001: A Space Odyssey”-like grand views of the cosmos, views of dramatic geological events here at home (lots o’ lava, that is), and micro-views, such as that of a developing embryo (which we also saw in “2001,” and the same guy who did the special effects for “2001” [which was released the year that I was born] was involved with the special effects for “The Tree of Life,” and thus the deja vu). And throw in a lot of surrealism involving our real-life characters, such as an apparent family reunion in the afterlife on an ephemeral beach. Oh, and dinosaurs, too.

In “Tree of Life” Sean Penn plays the grown-up eldest son of Pitt’s character — and Penn apparently is the stand-in for Malick, kind of like one of Woody Allen’s stand-ins for himself – but Penn actually isn’t in the film all that much. It’s mostly Pitt, but Pitt does a great job, as he usually does, and the child actors also impress with their very natural acting.

The main problem with “The Tree of Life,” I think, is that the previews make it look like a Pitt-and-Penn vehicle with a little bit of artsy-fartsy stuff thrown in there, but the actual film is two hours and 15 minutes of an awful lot of artsy-fartsy stuff thrown in there. American audiences, at least, aren’t, I surmise, ready to go back and forth among watching Brad Pitt playing a family man in 1950s suburbia and Sean Penn playing his reminiscing grown-up son and watching Carl-Saganesque grand cosmic events and more down-to-Earth lava flows and even dinosaur politics.

(The French, however, have loved “The Tree of Life,” which they awarded the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival…)

Don’t get me wrong. The dinosaurs in “The Tree of Life” are quite well done, perhaps the best technically done dinosaurs to hit the silver screen thus far in cinematic history. I’d love to see a feature-length film about dinosaurs made by Malick — even if the dinosaurs aren’t anthropomorphized, even if there is no plot, so to speak, even if it’s just the dinosaurs hanging out and being dinosaurs. (Actually, I don’t like it when critters are inappropriately anthropomorphized, such as in Disney’s “documentary” “African Cats,” even though its target audience is children.)

And the story of the humans in “The Tree of Life” probably would have made a much better stand-alone film, stripped of the “2001”-like surrealism of cosmic vomiting and universal diarrhea, in which creation often rather violently explodes all over the place.

Indeed, not long into “Tree of Life” it occurred to me that just as they hand you your 3-D glasses before you view a 3-D movie, they should give you a joint to inhale (or maybe a bong would be less cleanup afterward) before you view the surreal “Tree of Life.” Then you’ll love it.

I suppose that there are two general camps when it comes to art. One camp maintains that art is whatever the artist wants it to be. Therefore, highly personal art is perfectly acceptable, probably even more preferable to art meant for the masses, to this camp. The more inaccessible, the better – the more artistic/“artistic” – some if not most of those in this camp seem to believe.

The other camp, which I favor, believes that art should be accessible, that art should communicate, or at least touch those who experience it, and that if the artist does not touch his audience, then the artist has failed.

It probably isn’t an over-generalization to state that we might call the camp of artistic/“artistic” inaccessibility the French Camp and the camp of accessibility the American Camp. Those in the American Camp often view those in the French Camp as pretentious. Those in the French Camp don’t really understand the incomprehensible art that they claim to understand, those in the American Camp believe (and thus the charge of pretension), and I tend to agree.

But art doesn’t have to be comprehensible, doesn’t have to be logical and rational and linear. As I stated, as long as the art touches you, in my book, then the artist has succeeded.

It is true that with American audiences, Malick had an uphill battle making such an impressionist film that would be well received (if he really even cared at all how it would be received by American audiences, indeed). Americans aren’t used to impressionism in their movies. American audiences are used to realism, to literalism, to fairly clear, point-A-to-point-Z plots.

“The Tree of Life” has elements that succeed, but in my eyes with the film Malick fails as an artist because his film goes on for so long, and becomes so ponderous and so difficult to experience, that he loses his (at-least-American) audience. In the audience that I was in, I think that most if not all of us were ready for the film to be over at least a half-hour before it actually ended, and at the end of the film we felt only the type of satisfaction that a long-suffering cancer patient might feel during the last few moments of euthanasia.

I’m down with the dinosaurs, and I am open-minded enough to be able to give a chance to a film that tries to capture Life, the Universe and Everything, but in my book when the viewer just wants it all to be over already, please please please God just make it end!, the artist probably has done something wrong.

I get the impression with “The Tree of Life” that the 67-year-old Malick had two films inside of him trying to claw their way out of his chest cavity like identical twin aliens a la “Alien,” but that he was concerned that if he didn’t put them into one film, he might not live long enough to get both films made, so he put both of the films into a blender.

Again, either of these two films probably would have been or at least could have been great, Malick’s ode to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” (and to “Jurassic Park”) or Malick’s very personal (perhaps too personal) recap of his own childhood as an American baby boomer having grown up in Texas.

Malick’s fellow baby boomer Roger Ebert ate up* “The Tree of Life,” which, while apparently is accessible to white American baby boomers who grew up in families that were at least middle class, isn’t as accessible to the rest of us. (I, as a member of Generation X “raised” by and surrounded by baby boomers, had quite a different experience growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Yeah, my memories of childhood are not so fucking idyllic.)

So we come back to the question as to whether a film succeeds even if it loses most of its viewers (here in the United States, anyway, since I am an American writing this review primarily for my fellow Americans). I say that it does not. (Again, the French, apparently, say that it does [indeed, a good number of them apparently believe that if a film is comprehensible, then it is shit].)

So, while I appreciate Malick’s technical achievements — again, love those dinosaurs, and he directed his child actors masterfully — I cannot ignore the fact that as patient as I am, “The Tree of Life” wore out its welcome, wore out my patience, and apparently wore out my fellow audience members’ patience even more so and even more quickly than it wore out mine. A good film, it seems to me, makes you regretful, not relieved, at having to leave the movie theater at film’s end.

And again, unlike Roger Ebert, I cannot ignore what doesn’t work in “The Tree of Life” — such as the apparently uber-pretentious scene, among many apparently pretentious scenes, that has Sean Penn walking through a door frame that is erected in the middle of nowhere — and focus on how great it is to take a stroll down Baby-Boomer Memory Lane, because I think that I can relate to the lives of the dinosaurs a lot more than I can relate to the reportedly idyllic childhoods of the baby boomers, who made my childhood much less idyllic than theirs.

“The Tree of Life,” as a whole, fails (at least here in the United States of America) because it loses its (American) audience.

And the grade for failure is an “F.”

My grade: F

(I surmise that Yahoo!’s commoners give the film an average grade of “C+” only because some people will give a movie a decent grade if there are at least some scenes that they liked and because there are plenty of pretentious, “artistic” people who will claim to have appreciated and understood an incomprehensible film.)

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*Ebert swoons:

I don’t know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. In uncanny ways, the central events of “The Tree of Life” reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me. If I set out to make an autobiographical film, and if I had Malick’s gift, it would look so much like this.

Yeah, like I said, I had a different life experience…

Wazzup in Wisconsin? (Part 2)

I don’t live in Wisconsin (I live in the great state of California), but I’m paying fairly close attention to what’s going on in the Badger State (which has become the nation’s No. 1 laboratory of democracy and where, except for the rather extreme cold, I could see myself living). Here are three news items that have caught my attention:

(1) Progressive JoAnne Kloppenburg yesterday requested a recount of the April 5 election results for the race for the seat on the state’s Supreme Court, since the official results put her at less than 0.5 percent behind her right-wing opponent David Prosser. Prosser has an official 7,316-vote lead out of about 1.5 million votes cast, but ever since the surprise announcement of thousands of more votes that materialized in Repugnican Tea Party-dominated Waukesha County after Kloppenburg initially had been given a preliminary 204-vote lead, doubt has been cast as to the integrity of the election results at least for that county.    

Kloppenburg not only asked for a statewide recount, but she asked the state to appoint a special investigator to look into the “actions and words” of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, whose suprise announcment of more than 14,000 votes to be added to the preliminary vote count put Prosser up by more than 7,000 votes.

“With a margin this small — less than one-half of 1 percent – the importance of every vote is magnified and doubts about each vote are magnified as well,” Kloppenburg said in announcing her request for a recount, the first statewide recount in more than two decades in Wisconsin but to which Wisconsin state law entitles Kloppenburg. “If there are problems, we need to identify them and fix them. If there is doubt, we need to remove it. If there was misconduct, we must hold those who perpetrated it accountable.”

Team Prosser is criticizing Kloppenburg for having requested the recount, even though state law entitles her to it.

Unless the members of Team Prosser are afraid that fraud might be found, I don’t know why they would criticize Kloppenburg’s decision to utilize the democratic process that the right-wing nutjobs apparently like only when it delivers to them what they want. On that note, I have little doubt that if Kloppenburg were up over Prosser by less than 0.5 percent — the threshold for a candidate to request a statewide recount free of cost to the candidate — then Team Prosser would request a recount, just as Kloppenburg has.

Even if Prosser is declared the eventual winner of the election for the seat that he holds on the state’s Supreme Court, at least the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Wisconsin have been put on notice that they are being watched for any attempts at committing election fraud.

(2) The media report that while recall-election petitions have been filed against three Democratic Wisconsin state senators, recall petitions already have been filed against five Repugnican Tea Party state senators. Eight Democratic and eight Repugnican Tea Party state senators, by state law, have been subject to recall efforts that anyone might have chosen to launch.

If the Democrats can maintain their current number of seats in the state Senate and flip three state Senate seats from the Repugnican Tea Party to the Dem Party, they will take control of the state Senate, greatly politically weakening Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker.

(3) Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has been named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people on the planet.* Shouldn’t he be listed as one of People magazine’s most beautiful people instead? I mean, here is the photo of Dreamboat Ryan that Time used:

Time.com photo

Damn, he looks so harmless, doesn’t he? Cuddly, even!

Anyway, as if Ryan’s inclusion in Time’s top 100 most influential weren’t bad enough, who composed the little write-up for Ryan? None other than Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker.

Here is “Dead Man” Walker’s ode to Ryan:

Paul Ryan, 41, came of age down the road from me. Although we didn’t know each other at the time, it’s clear now that growing up in south-central Wisconsin during the Reagan years had a lasting impact on both our political philosophies. Like our 40th president, Paul has always stuck to his core beliefs: in limited, effective government; individual liberty; and making the hard decisions so our children will inherit a country at least as great as the one we did. Overnight, his economic plan has redefined the nation’s conversation about public spending.

It has been said that there are two types of people in politics: those who want to be somebody great and those who want to do something great. Paul Ryan is the latter, and our country is better off because of that.

Let’s be clear: Ronald Reagan sucked. His pro-plutocratic, social Darwinist policies, including his union-busting and his “trickle-down” bullshit (the rich only “trickle down” on us to piss all over us), began our national economic collapse — including the largest gap between the rich and the poor seen since the Gilded Age.

And yes, putting forth a so-called “path to prosperity” that has the rich and the super-rich paying even less in taxes than they are paying now and that destroys Medicare as we know it sure has “redefined the nation’s conversation about public spending,” just as how if I were to put forth a proposal that every fucking baby boomer be exterminated at age 65 (which is pretty fucking generous, as in “Logan’s Run” the age of extermination is 30) – an actual path to prosperity, but never mind that — it would redefine the nation’s conversation about retirement.

And to claim that Paul Ryan, who wants to destroy Medicare, is “making the  hard decisions so our children will inherit a country at least as great as the one we did,” is a great big fucking joke, since one, my generation, Generation X (to which, unfortunately, both Ryan and Walker also belong), inherited a nation in much worse shape than it was when the baby boomers first got their greedy grubbies on it, and two, Ryan’s plan for dismantling Medicare grandfathers those who right now are 55 or older but screws the rest of us – including, of course, “our children.”

Today’s old farts vote, you see, but the Repugnican Tea Party traitors very apparently believe that they can fuck over the rest of us without a fight.

Maybe Ryan doesn’t spend enough time in his home state of Wisconsin. Otherwise, he would know that we, the people, are in a fucking fighting mood.

–

*Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota also made Time’s top 100 list (Archie Bunker-like blowhard Rush Limbaugh wrote the little piece for her, beginning it, “I don’t mind telling you that I’m a great admirer of Michele Bachmann’s,” which of course suggests that he at least somewhat does mind telling us that) — and so did androgynous teen-girl heartthrob Justin Bieber – so it’s not like it’s a Nobel prize or anything, but still…

On blogging fatigue and revolution

Of course, what I have is more like life fatigue, but this is a blog, so we’ll call it blogging fatigue.

I blog when I am moved to blog. I don’t believe in blogging on a schedule. I can’t see anything of worth being produced that way. Not consistently, anyway. My best blogging comes when the spirit moves me, and so if the spirit doesn’t move me, I don’t blog.

I haven’t been blogging much lately because what is there to blog about these days anyway?

Egypt looks like it’s on its way to freedom, and hell, maybe even Iran, too, but we’re a long way from freedom here at home — in no small part because once you mistakenly believe that you’re already free, you see no reason to pursue freedom.

How free are we here in the U.S.A. when the next several years are so fucking predictable?

I predict with a significant degree of confidence that the Richie Rich frat boy Mitt Romney will emerge as the 2012 Repugnican Party presidential nominee. I once thought that his being a Mormon would prove to be an insurmountable obstacle for him, but it’s pretty clear that the Repugnican Party is going with the youthful (well, in comparison to John McCainosaurus, anyway) white male now, as evidenced by the fact that last month Repugnican National Committee chair Michael Steele was dumped and replaced by some youthful white guy whose Richie-Rich frat-boy name no one can pronounce (or spell).

(Yeah, I know, Repugnican Rep. Ron Paul just won the wingnuts’ straw poll — again — but the wingnuts’ ball was packed with Paul supporters. He doesn’t have the Repugnican Party’s backing, so he’s going nowhere.)

No real Democrat will emerge to challenge Barack Obama for the 2012 Democratic presidential nomination — or if one does, it will be one who has a snowball’s chance in the rapidly melting North Pole, like Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich – and so Barack Obama will be re-elected in November 2012.

I predict that Romney will do at least a little bit better against Obama than McCainosaurus did, due to Romney being more photogenic than McCainosaurus and due to Obama having lost his luster of “hope” and “change,” but that Obama will get his second term.

There is no reason to believe that at any point in his presidency Obama will change his game significantly. He always takes the path of least political resistance. He thinks that slogans are a substitute for testicles.

I wholeheartedly agree with Andrew Sullivan, who recently wrote:

[Some U.S. senators] have to lead, because this president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In [his recently released federal] budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short-term political interests.

Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short-term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.

To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: He just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the U.S. will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far, far more for far, far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.

Yup. Not only does Obama refuse to stand up to the baby-boomer and senior citizen lobbies, which are perfectly happy to leave much less than nothing for those of us who follow them — and it’s not just those of us under the age of 30 who are getting screwed, but those of us in our 30s and 40s, too — but, as Sullivan also notes, Obama refuses to stand up to the military-industrial complex’s bloated-beyond-belief budget as well.

On one hand, the spineless, politically self-serving Obama, by refusing to push for what needs to be done, is only continuing the damage done to the nation by the unelected Bush regime, but on the other hand, Obama’s utter ineffectiveness in solving the nation’s problems demonstrates to us Americans that we’re foolish to continue to leave our nation’s fate in the hands of the ossified system in D.C. — a system that certainly doesn’t have our best interests at heart now, if it ever fucking did (any more than U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak ever had the Egyptians’ best interests at heart).

Out of this realization that our government in D.C. is useless, real revolution, like what we’ve just seen in Egypt, just might take hold here at home.

Of course, revolution is a tricky business.

How many of us who are itching for revolution actually are going to take the advice of those who say, “OK, you throw the first Molotov cocktail!”?

Still, that first Molotov cocktail needs to be thrown.

After all, I need the inspiration to blog regularly again.

P.S. Another reason that I have blogging fatigue is that the nation is so fucking bogged down in high-schoolish diversions that few Americans are willing to have a dialogue about anything that actually fucking matters.

For instance, Salon.com, The Huffington Post and Media Matters – all of which are supposed to be robust members of some progressive media – all have reported that the Archie Bunker-like wingnutty liar Andrew Breitbart’s website has depicted Michelle Obama in a cartoon as — gasp! — fat!

Media Matters notes that “this is the sort of stuff most of us left at the grade-school playground.” True, but Media Matters also not only reports on the unfunny cartoon, but reproduces it, thus elevating the level of our national discussion — not.

Meanwhile, our nation’s and our planet’s problems, such as the fact that the military-industrial complex and the baby boomers are draining the lifeblood of our nation and the fact that Homo sapiens’ continued existence is threatened by global warming, go unaddressed because we’re talking instead about the stupid fucking cartoon in which Michelle Obama is portrayed as fat.

Along these lines, you might want to read Salon.com’s Michael Lind’s little piece, which he begins:

What dumb thing did Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck just say? You don’t need to watch Fox News to find out. The progressive media will tell you. The economy is still in a coma, revolution is rocking the Middle East — but you can be sure that Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews will take time to snicker at something silly that Palin or Bachmann or Beck said in the last 48 hours.

Is the constant mockery of these bloviating right-wing demagogues really the best use of precious center-left media time? …

As Lind writes, attacking every stupid thing that comes from the circus freaks on the right, among other things,

[Is] a reactive strategy that gives the initiative to the right. When progressive opinion leaders wait for conservatives to say something stupid and then pounce on it, they cede the choice of topics in national debate to their enemies. No doubt this drives ratings, attracting hyper-partisan Democrats whose greatest pleasure in life is the rather low one of picking apart the statements of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck…. But it’s no substitute for a liberalism that tells its own story, on its own timeline, and lets the right react.

and

[Is] a waste of effort and attention. We are mired down in two wars in the Muslim world and suffering from the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The last time things were this bad, in the 1930s, American liberals and leftists were debating the nature of capitalism and government and world politics and putting forth their own, often contradictory plans. Liberal politicians and journalists devoted little, if any, time to dissecting the errors of right-wing crackpots of the period, like the radio priest Father Coughlin.

If nothing else, the crackpots on the right do their corporate paymasters’ bidding by creating diversions from the national discussions that we should be having. These diversions maintain the status quo.

And I, for one, am sick and tired of the back-and-forth that doesn’t change a fucking thing. I can’t even visit the politics section of a bookstore anymore because I already know what to expect: the same old tired arguments that aren’t going to change anyone’s minds. (Or, in a word, gridlock.)

We need actual movement now, not more pointless debate that only keeps us in stasis.

This is our BIG T-shirt moment!

The new Team Obama T-shirt is yours for a donation of $25 or more!

Confession: I purchased and I wore a white-lettered-on-black “got hope?” T-shirt before Barack Obama was elected in November 2008. In public. Repeatedly.

That was back when I had hope.

Now, Team Obama, I see from a shameless fundraising e-mail that I received today, is asking us to wear a T-shirt (pictured above) that reads: “WE DO BIG THINGS.” With the “BIG” really BIG.

“We do big things” comes right from Obama’s recent State of the Union address, of course. He ended his address thusly:

…We do big things.

From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That’s how we win the future.

We are a nation that says, “I might not have a lot of money, but I have this great idea for a new company. I might not come from a family of college graduates, but I will be the first to get my degree. I might not know those people in trouble, but I think I can help them, and I need to try. I’m not sure how we’ll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we’ll get there. I know we will.”

We do big things.

The idea of America endures. Our destiny remains our choice. And tonight, more than two centuries later, it is because of our people that our future is hopeful, our journey goes forward, and the state of our union is strong.

Thank you, God bless you and may God bless the United States of America.

Sadly, the State of the Union address apparently now is just a vehicle with which to roll out new empty slogans to slap on T-shirts and other campaign gear.

As I recently noted, “hope” and “change” — or, as Repugnican Tea Party queen Sarah Palin once put it, “that hopey-changey stuff” — doesn’t cut it anymore, so now we have “winning the future” and “we do big things.” (Palin once again has mocked the shameless sloganeering, pointing out that “winning the future” would be “WTF.”) 

What we have with Team Obama, unfortunately, is marketing slogans, not presidential leadership. (And when Sarah “Inflammatory Political Rhetoric Endangers No One But Your Inflammatory Political Rhetoric Endangers Me” Palin is making valid criticisms of you, you’re in trouble.) 

Worst of all where Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address is concerned, the state of our union is not strong, and Obama has neither the stomach nor the balls to seriously confront what I see as the nation’s three main problems (not in a particular order):

• Corporateers whose tentacles now reach into every imaginable aspect of our lives and who won’t stop until they privatize absofuckinglutely everything – and who would charge us for the very air that we breathe if they could.
• War profiteers and others within the military-industrial complex who keep us at perpetual war for perpetual war profiteering. (The members of the Repugnican Tea Party were fine with the BushCheneyCorp’s runaway government spending because it benefited the war profiteers, but any government spending on the people – having the audacity to use the people’s money to benefit them – the ringleaders of the Repugnican Tea Party cannot abide.)
• Millions of baby boomers who are poised to wipe out Social Security and Medicare and other resources, leaving nothing for those who follow them.

These are powerful, intertwined lobbies, and without standing up to these lobbies, there is no solving the nation’s real problems — such as the federal budget deficit, which is caused by runaway spending by the military-industrial complex (with all of its corporate contractor cronies) and by treasonous tax evasion by the corporateers and the super-rich, and climate change, which many if not most of the boomers don’t care about because they figure that the worst of it will come after their lifetimes, and about which the polluting corporations don’t give a shit, because they put their profits far above both people and the very planet itself. 

But standing up to these lobbies Team Obama refuses to do. Team Obama would never offend the boomers or the corporateers and the war profiteers who are destroying the nation, as Team Obama wants their campaign contribution$ and their votes.

Instead, the members of Team Obama wax nostalgic about about “Sputnik moments” and “winning the future” — even while their staunch refusal to confront our real problems dooms our future.

We can’t “do BIG things” when we can’t even do the comparatively little things, such as provide our citizens with meaningful, well-compensated work (no, long stints as cannon fodder in the Middle East don’t count), decent health care that doesn’t put them into bankruptcy, and an affordable, quality college education free of the corporate student loan sharks and the textbook industry butt-rapists that surround our young people, viewing them only as victims to bleed dry. 

It’s enough to make one proclaim: WTF?