Bailout from Iceland
My colleague Kjartan Arnorsson, from Iceland, did this. It says it all. Why we should have buckets of hot tar and feathers waiting for any congressman or senator who pays a penny.
Thanks for the advice
How DARE they?
It’s being demanded I sacrifice for a war, when I’ve been sacrificing all my life for the environment, and the people who want the war have never tried until now. I’m just a bit ticked off about it. I’m not swearing because I did all my swearing at the radio last night.
The Downscale people are finally coming to the conclusions the Upscale people have known all the time.
Downscale, of course, are those childish minds who think they can solve everything by war: The Kill To Cures, the Patriots, The Right People. They voted for Reagan and smugly smiled when he tore the solar panels off the White House. They didn’t know the deserts they were damning their own kids to.
Upscale are those of us who can’t be classified because we can actually think. Our opinions look gray because they’re based on the situation at the moment, on questions based on more than just one Approved Truth. I buy the solar panels from the Danish and Swedish companies who used to be American companies but lost their funding under the Oil War presidents.
Downscale loves war. They think they can simply wipe out the Bad Guy and burst their problems like a pimple, instead of keeping up a schedule of regular hygiene. They never seem to get it that both sides think they’re the Good Guy. They get all surprised when the other bad guys shoot back and start wiping out their DNA. They don’t start thinking until they’ve lost the chance to have grandchildren.
Upscale knows that war is what happens when you screw up. We don’t need to be “forged in the fires of experience” to figure something out. We know that interfering with other people’s lives will lead to instability, social collapse and war. Bullets kill. War is expensive. Lots of women and kids get killed. Soldiers – when they come back at all – come back crippled and/or screwed up in the head. Both sides lose, lose, lose.
We’ve lost every war we’ve been in. We lost the war with Great Britain; it was only a war to loosen up taxes and give the right of choice to white males.
We lost the civil war, a war the Upscale would never have fought, because Upscale knows slavery is wrong. We don’t have to see our fellow human beings whipped and degraded to know this isn’t what a decent human being does. Downscale is still mad about it, and doesn’t want any more colored immigrants; they had to have their Jim Crow laws taken away from them like a handful of linty candy.
We lost our wars with the First Peoples – the people we call the Indians. We’ve been left with a shattered environment we hardly have the resources to repair, and our wars with sick, dying peoples have made us think we’re invincible. The First Peoples have known who we are all along, right out into the islands of Hawaii, and the northern territory of Alaska.
We lost World War One when we got involved, and stirred up the pot that would just lead to more bad soup. We lost World War Two when our men came back and started to act the drill sergeant to their children and families; our children are raped in huge numbers and wander the streets just to get away from Dad, and blame our gay communities because of what their own blood did to them. We beat small, exhausted countries who had already been battered to pieces against another empire and added to our own legend of invincibility, in our own minds.
The women of Japan tied their babies to their backs and jumped into rivers and off mountains when they heard the Americans were coming, because of what the American Marines had done to Haiti in the 1920’s. America practiced torture in all the defeated countries, gaining experience for the Cold War.
We lost the Cold War when Russia went down the path we’re going down now. Our belief we’d won chained us to them, and is dragging us toward the same cliff. For the same resources, in the same places.
I won’t have to list the following quotes for the Upscale, but the Downscale might want to know before they start thinking their own experience is special.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Experience is a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.”
Goethe said, “He who will not hear, must feel.”
Robert Frost said, “War is for everybody, for children, too.”
Bring Your Own Snakes
The conversation in our house, after listening to NPR’s Morning Edition (and the first cups of home-roasted coffee):
NPR (Paraphrased): “Some people still think Obama is a Muslim.”
Me: “That’s just code for him not being their version of a Shoutin’ Religion.”
Hubbie: “Obama’s a member of a church that’s just the black version of The Assembly of God.”
M: “Yeah, but he’s not trying to using his church to form government policy.”
H: “The only difference between his church and Palin’s is his church probably has a better choir.”
M: ‘And they don’t have snakes.”
H: “Not fair! There are no poisonous snakes in Alaska.”
M: “That’s not kind! Are you saying those people are so poor and backward they can’t import their own snakes?”
H: “How many Alaskan ERs have anti-venom laying around?”
M: “They could import it with the snakes.”
H: “They only need it for those rare occasions when an Okie bites somebody in an Anchorage bar fight.”
M: “I guess the churches just have to make some more new converts; that’s why those’re proselytizing religions.”
NPR And The Monkey Trial
A letter to NPR’s Morning Edition:
The listener who was confused by your use of the audience-definition terms Upscale (for Obama) and Downscale (for McCain) didn’t get it because she’s Downscale.
Those of us in Upscale got it. To clarify to your listener:
it’s not money, it’s education. It’s the ability to think.
There IS a culture war in this country, and it’s those who are willing to face realities vs. those who have to be fed pablum. The education system is doing its best to dumb down the population, but those kids are on the internet asking questions of The Thinking Class. Believe me, they ARE.
Obama’s speech today to the “blue-collar workers” as Morning Edition stated it, made my point. He used language such as, “I won’t take away your shotguns!”
These are the people who are being tempted to vote for a member of the Assembly Of God — one of the sects my husband says were always referred to in his childhood as “Holy Rollers” or “Shoutin’ Religions.”
We’ve got the choice of Elmer Gantry vs. Clarence Darrow.
I’m not voting for snakehandlers and shell-shock victims.
Note to Parlor Tricks
I have a political email list and this is in answer to recent comments:
HI, Parlor Tricks:
At least two voices on the list have pointed out that Palin is a distraction, and we should stick to what Bush and McCain will do.
Most of what I’ve gotten is FROM people on the list. The right wing is displaying their values through her — they’ve chosen a pretty young mom as a stalking horse. They don’t believe anyone can debate her, because in their minds You Don’t Hit Girls.
This is part of their worldview that sees women as breeders to be controlled, and to be paid less — even to be paid nothing — for the same work or volunteer work. They are not our friends.
This IS their strategy, not mine. She’s being used the same way they used Rice and Powell: “Let’s get us one of them Black People thingies.” They do not give a damn about women. By choosing Palin they’re displaying their values in their most raw state. And their followers are displaying theirs.
Call it a culture war or a class war — it’s not going away. It’s the dumb, mean, frightened and servile vs. the educated, caring, brave and independent. We’re not afraid of education or tolerance, and we’re not going to disappear.
As for Palin’s environmental record, she is from a largely rural state. Believe me, rural people would burn through resources until they had nothing but desert without environmental controls. I come FROM these people and these places, and they have no idea of what they’re destroying or throwing away. They think it’s limitless because they’ve never seen anything else. As long as they can get the last tree and the last deer and fish, they’re good with it. When it’s gone they all whine about The Good Old Days, and blame themselves, but by then it is too damn late.
I’m perfectly happy to keep forwarding interesting and important political articles, but what is important to ME is the environment and gay rights — because what they do to LGBT they’ll do to me.
You want nothing but the Green Gay list?
=8O <<<= 8=
(I’m going to hell for that emoticon)
Let Me Use Words Of One Syllable.
Okay. Let me make it very very plain.
McCain’s choice of Palin ticked me and so many other women off because he never, never would have chosen her if he didn’t think that women would vote for Any Ol’ Woman. The R’s would NEVER have looked at a woman if they weren’t trying to get the Hilary voters.
It would have been just as obvious if McCain had simply grabbed Whatever Black Guy. The Repubs don’t remember that Cindy Rice and Colin Powell and all the rest of the blacks they picked up didn’t make a particle of difference. It’s a matter of issues, not of skin color or gender.
Palin is anti-choice, anti-gay, and anti-environment. She is a hunter and fisherwoman — people who commonly brag about “killing trees, killing fish and killing deer.” To many rural people, the wilderness is an enemy, to be used up with both hands, as fast as they can. The only way Palin has been out of step with the right-wing agenda is that she stood up to the oil companies because they weren’t drilling FAST enough.
Palin hasn’t seen what happens when a state loses its natural resources, and has no clue what it’s like to live when the developers concrete over the forest and set the rivers on fire. Oh, it’s all very well to mourn the bad choices once they’ve happened — as happened in the towns where I grew up — but nobody in Alaska has seen it, and is no more able to see it than the people who whipped up their horses during the Oklahoma land rush.
She wants no sex education in the schoos; she wants absolute abstinence. She is against choice, even in cases of rape or incest.
She believes in creationism, as valid science, and wants it taught in classrooms as a science subject.
She’s a member of the NRA, an organization that does not care about the damage weapons do, as long as they get to shoot stuff.
She is NOT a reformer; she’s more of the same.
Do we want to live with the same choice rights as Iran or Ireland, the environmental policies of China, the gun-laws of Afghanistan, and the scientific mindset of Kansas?
