Some people work very hard,
But still they never get it right.
Well I’m beginning to see the light.
Dec. 21 was the winter solstice, the shortest and dreariest day. The world seemed a dark, pitiless place where you couldn’t find a glimmer of hope, or even a cheap cup of coffee. Was the the end of days upon us, as the Mayan calendar allegedly predicted?
I woke up today and the world was still here, which made me feel even worse until I remembered this is the second shortest day, that the days grow longer from now to the first day of summer, that I shouldn’t feel bad about feeling bad this time of year.
I remembered that the solstice marks the return of the light, and so what if the fiscal cliff and environmental disaster loom. So what if people are walking around in football jerseys, babbling to themselves or their hidden phones. The doors of perception are opening. Soon we’ll see the light, and the divine plan will be clearer.
And I said, oh shit, maybe we’re better off in the dark.
Frank Rich says America’s love affair with guns is something that will have to be chipped away at; that guns…
…have always been intrinsic to the very idea of America and “freedom” – enshrined in our Constitution’s Second Amendment (however one chooses to read it), romanticized in our glorification of both our revolutionary and frontier past, and a staple of our popular culture not just in this era but every era: from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows through The Birth of a Nation, Zane Grey, Stagecoach and The Wild Bunch, gangster movies and gangsta rap, Bonnie and Clyde and Zero Dark Thirty, The Untouchables and The Sopranos…
Exactly. One of my favorite movies is Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, because it’s beautifully filmed, features some great old actors, and is imbued with a healthy contempt for big business and its role in corrupting American government. I know Peckinpah’s gun-slinging outlaws are romanticized, but I prefer them to the so-called captains of industry who ended up owning this country and exploiting most of its workers.
Rich used the phrase “gun-worship” at one point, so I wasn’t surprised when, a few sentences later, he referenced the excellent column in which Garry Wills explained why it is so hard to get through to the “guns don’t kill people — people do” crowd:
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.
Wills is right, of course. Gun zealots are death-obsessed and paranoid. On the other hand, it’s hard to explain away their contention that government for the rich and powerful, at the expense of the rest of us, is no good.
Rich again:
If we are going to start to find our way out of gun-worship, it’s going to take many leaders over time to affect that change, just as in, say, the abolitionists’ movement or any other major political or social movement that changed our country and helped it grow up.
Right, Frank, but where are those leaders? Arguably, gun-worship in contemporary America is mostly about feelings of impotence; an admission that all our other gods — democracy, the free market, the justice system — have failed. So far as I can see, the leaders in our dismal two-party system, whether for or against gun control, merely reinforce those feelings.
My e-mail yesterday included links to the “most recommended content about the Connecticut school shooting from the Daily Kos community.” Forgive me, Daily Kos, for not reading the articles. I’m sure the writers had good intentions, but only so much light can be shed when the story is about carnage, especially when most of the victims are children. What’s the point of reading about a massacre, once you’re aware of the basic facts? (And yes, I know, it took the media a while to get the facts straight.)
Titillation is the point. The news peddlers know we can’t resist stories in which gruesome things happen to people for no good reason. We gawk at the wreckage and think oh, those poor children, they could have been my children, I’m so glad they weren’t!
Before long the news peddlers are milking the story for all it’s worth, with photos of slaughtered kids, and interviews with their classmates and relatives. Yes, but how does it make you feel knowing Joey was shot in the face a mere 10 feet from where you were standing?
The news peddlers stoke our pity and fear, because that’s where the money is. In this regard they’re a lot like the gun merchants, who stoke our fear then peddle the idea that assault weapons will keep us safe. I’m thinking of words on the Web site of the company that made the rifle used by the killer in Connecticut:
With a Bushmaster for security and home defense, you can sleep tight knowing that your loved ones are protected. Bushmaster offers everything you need to ensure the safety of you and your family. Our high-quality pistols, carbines, and rifles are extremely reliable, easy to shoot, and include lightweight carbon models that are perfect for women. And with their intimidating looks, all Bushmasters make a serious impression. Any gun will make an intruder think. A Bushmaster will make them think twice.
.
A friend of mine posted the gun maker’s message on Facebook yesterday. I wouldn’t be surprised if the person who wrote it is a former reporter.
Footnote: And please don’t tell me media coverage will help us reach a tipping point in the struggle to impose stricter gun control laws. That’s like saying politicians are getting ready to become less corrupt.
Officials at the retail monster called Walmart couldn’t install emergency exits at the Bangladesh factory where more than 100 workers died in a Nov. 4 fire. Too cash-strapped, it seems:
… In a meeting last year, Walmart officials decided against agreeing to pay suppliers more so that they could upgrade their manufacturing facilities and pay for the costs of safety improvements. “Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories,” Walmart officials said in documents obtained by Bloomberg News. “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”
More than 300 Bangladeshi garment factory workers have died since 2006. Walmart reported a 9 percent increase in third-quarter net income, earning $3.63 billion.
Vicious cycle: Clueless consumers shop at Walmart to save a few greenbacks. Walmart grows even more profitable and diverse, forcing even more smaller retailers to either go out of business or lower wages in order to compete. As wages continue to decline, more and more people seek out bargains at Walmart, or at other big-box chains that offer similarly poor wages and benefits.
It’s no surprise that corporate profits in America have hit a record high and worker wages a record low, or that workers at companies that help feed the monster are treated even more shabbily than the monster’s “associates.”
In actuality, [Sheldon] Adelson’s fealty to the GOP stems primarily from the fact that his “Las Vegas Sands Corp. is being scrutinized by federal investigators looking into possible money-laundering in Vegas, and possible violation of bribery laws by the company’s ventures in China, including four casinos in the gambling mecca of Macau.”
Maybe, but do you have any idea how much money must have changed hands in Adelson’s successful effort to establish casinos close to hundreds of millions of Chinese? I’ll bet you all my chips that Obama’s so-called Justice Department never brings charges against the gnome, just as it never charged any of the corrupt power brokers on Wall Street.
Footnote: The Brian Eno video is from the 1970s, in the very early stages of China’s transition from a Communist monster to a capitalist monster.
Is must be asked — what sort of “ambitious measures” could possibly hold back the ocean? From The Raw Story:
Sea-level rise is occurring much faster than scientists expected – exposing millions more Americans to the destructive floods produced by future Sandy-like storms, new research suggests.
Satellite measurements over the last two decades found global sea levels rising 60% faster than the computer projections issued only a few years ago by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres – such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida – or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said…
The big news in the Big Apple this week may be what didn’t happen.
There was not a single reported slaying, stabbing, shooting or knifing in any of the five boroughs on Monday, according to the New York Police Department…
[skip]
“The city hopes to finish out the year with the lowest homicide rate sine 1960,” said [Deputy Police Commissioner Paul] Browne.
If only NYC could find a way to lower the gentrification rate without raising the homicide rate.
Glenn Greenwald, reminding us why the Israeli military is able to be so brazenly aggressive in its treatment of Gaza, which Noam Chomsky has called “the world’s largest open-air prison:”
…That the Netanyahu government knows that any attempt to condemn Israel at the UN would be instantly blocked by the US is a major factor enabling them to continue however they wish. And, of course, the bombs, planes and tanks they are using are subsidized, in substantial part, by the US taxpayer…
Why such unswerving support of Israel? Because the U.S. is honor-bound to bolster the only true “democracy” in the Middle East? But what good is democracy at home if your foreign policy is oppressive and destabilizing to the point where a major war is always a possibility?
Just asking questions the mainstream media diligently avoid.
Mitt Romney, in a conference call to donors, blamed the usual suspects for his loss to Barack Obama:
…Obama, Romney argued, had been “very generous” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students on their parents’ insurance plans well into their 20s. Free contraception coverage under Obama’s healthcare plan, he added, gave an extra incentive to college-aged women to back the president…
Nothing from Romney about the possibility that voters came to know he’s a compulsive liar with no values that aren’t related to making money.
Alan Grayson’s tie is goofy, but I like what he has to say about the false need for a so-called Grand Bargain: “An artificial crisis is being instituted to steal from us, to steal from the middle class, and to steal from people in need.”
Odd Man Out 