Seven Sons

Less than 30 hours to go in this decade.  No idea what we’ll decide to call this decade.  It’s not like they ever decided what they should call this one.  And now that we’re ready to shuffle the corpse of this one off in a few more hours in a haze of alcohol and bad decisions, it seems as appropriate a time to being writing the epitaph for the next one as ever.  The 2000’s haven’t been complete rubbish. Only mostly rubbish.

I for one navigated the chasm between my third and fourth decade on the planet only to find that in retrospect my thirties were a relatively useless span of years.  I changed jobs, gained weight, and started going gray.  Also it bears mentioning that for the modern American male, you spend the majority of your professional career while in your 30’s being viewed alternately as an overly ambitious career climber and an inexperienced whippersnapper.  Most often by people younger or older than you by less than a decade themselves. There’s something settling about forty.

But the past decade—like my past decade—is wholly remarkable for its utter lack of utterly remarkable things. Yes, yes, yes– there are images of the 2000’s forever burned in our collective memories.  The attacks on 9/11. President Bush and the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of the aircraft carrier declaring the end to a war that we’re still fighting. Paris Hilton’s eyes lit up like a raccoon sifting through a trash can on her “accidentially leaked” sex tape. Notoriety is the new black.  It goes with everything. Sheryl Crow hit it earlier in the decade—”We got rock stars in the White House, and all our pop stars look like porn.”

Ford brought back a Mustang that looks like a Mustang, and Pontiac ceased to be. We have our first black president to close the decade. One that ironically began with our first special ed president. We spent ten years getting more. Too much actually.  And I suppose the challenge is to see if we can pay for it all in the next ten. My bold prediction is that we will have to learn to do without. Money, much like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed. Yet no one can seem to figure out where it’s all gone.

Banks have failed.  Automakers have failed—oops, covered that one already. Even Jay Leno—the most infuriatingly populist of the no-talent late night hosts—has failed. Jay has failed because he’s the ideal American product. Loud. Rich. Smarmy funny in that used car salesman way. But we’ve stopped buying American cause we’ve come to view the product as crap. We’re lucky Jay failed.  If he hadn’t, then all original scripted programming would’ve vanished into the air like the settlers at Roanoke. And we’d have been subjected to a Malcolm McDowell-like cavalcade of night-time viewing more fitting for an ill-thought through remake of A Clockwork Orange.

America makes art for the dinner theater crowd.

This photo speaks for itself; what it says, I suspect, is entirely up to the listener. The man in the picture is picking up loose change off the street. Thanks to ChezWhat for keeping a cell phone cocked and ready for photo opportunities like this.

Hope for Change

Story on CNN.com today, out of the blue, about how sex scandals can be bipartisan. Thank you for reminding us that Democrats also have dicks (if they only had balls to go with them). Blatant overcompensation–the second Dem example is Gary Hart, whose scandal was barely pre-dated by the most recent Scritti Politti album. There are legally-drinking college graduates who were not alive when that happened. The other Democratic examples were Spitzer and that drunk senator who flipped for the stripper in 1974. The Pinto debuted in 1974 so, yeah, that’s timely. Assinine.

Here is a great representation of the ideological history of the Supreme Court.  Click on the image to go to the web site and start playing with the data. It is interesting that our activist court is quite firmly in the red, on average.

The Martin-Quinn ideological scores of Supreme Court justices

Fucking Krauthammer. Apparently the results of our glorious liberation of Iraq didn’t work, so why not get involved in Iran? Is he seriously this stupid? “The entire trajectory of the region is reversed?” Where have I heard that before?

Fucking moron. We keep our mouth shut because otherwise the reformists are tarred as being in league with foreigners, aka the Great Satan. Anything we do openly would undermine what we want to achieve. The Bush team learned this the hard way. Apparently K can’t follow the lesson. We’ve got techies here helping the Iranians communicate through the internet, but for the US gov’t to get involved directly would be sheer idiocy.

Most of us have had to deal with the “last day of school.” How much are you going to learn when you’re brain has already checked out for the summer? This has to be the best way ever to blow off the last day of school.

Yeah, it wasn’t your neighbor’s cable line when three black SUVs turn up within minutes of you saying “That wasn’t suppose to be here.”

Classic move on AT&T’s part to try and stiff the construction company with the bill for the repair bill for a line not on the map.

No idea what I’m talking about?

Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’ via Wired.com

And it will be pathetic.  “We want to ask the American people what their hopes and dreams are”?  Spoken like a guy wanting to get in a girl’s pants, but then again they are certainly out to fuck us.

Look at the list of losers that will be leading this effort and taking the GOP show to the people.  It’s the same pack of narcissistic jagoffs that have been running the GOP in Congress for the last 5 years.  Why would anyone think they are capable of new ideas and new thinking?  They are like GM in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s–”OK, so what you are telling me is that Buick is a piece of shit?  Great feedback.  Now, what if we painted it blue?”

There was a piece on the radio show “The World” today about Sitara Achakzai, a woman born in Kandahar and relocated to Canada, a refugee of the Soviet war. During her early years, she grew up in a very different Afghanistan, one more like the first few chapters of The Kite Runner than the war-torn poppy producer of today’s headlines. She was encouraged to go to school and to walk into town without a viel by her father who taught her that “Rights are not given – they must be taken.” That seems universally and historically true – in our country we have honored that truth with a revolution, a bill of rights, myriad amendments to the law of our land, treaties and movements that have culminated in new laws.

Sitara Achakzai - Afghan champion of women's rights

Sitara continued to fight for the rights of Afghan women, moving back to Afghanistan in 2004 to become a provincial councillor. She spoke up for women and spoke out against such laws as the legalization of rape within marriage.

At the risk of sounding trite (which is not my intention), I would love to hear Ms. Achakszai’s opinion on gay marriage. Unfortunately that won’t be possible, as she was gunned down in cold blood in Kandahar this month.

Personnally, I shall  seek advice from wise minds that have gone before as I think about the cruelty of her death. Alfred Lord Tennyson would have seen the good fight continue in spite of the loss of “The Warrior.”

To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should’st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
“What is it makes me beat so low?”

Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
All night below the darken’d eyes;
With morning wakes the will, and cries,
“Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.”

Pat Toomey, a former corporate shill head of the Club for Growth (motto: “rich people really shouldn’t have to pay taxes”), is challenging Arlen Specter in the 2010 primary. This, despite a former head of the Pennsylvania chapter of CFG begging him not to do so. Why not? Well, no reason…other than:

–Pennsylvania is clearly now a blue state, and the moderate Republican (by the current to-the-left-of-Jefferson-Davis standard) presidential candidate John McCain lost to Barack Obama by 10 points last November despite McCain and moose hunter VP Candidate Sarah Palin basically living there the last month of the campaign

–right-wing butt boy Rick Santorum got absolutely hammered in 2006 and lost by 18 points despite being the incumbent, and Toomey is to the right of Santorum somehow.

–any Democrat worth his salt can beat a Republican these days in Pennsylvania or most anyplace else in the Northeast, because the holy-roller anti-government Southern redneck image of the GOP scares the !@#$ out of people everywhere else in the country. And Pennsylvanians are old, right after Florida on the old scale, and that’s saying something. So you have a state of old people too poor to move to Florida who need services.

Absolutely asinine. A good opportunity for the Dems, because Toomey may well win the primary as all the former moderate Republicans around Philadelphia have fled the party in recent years. And he will get killed in a general election, probably by 25+ points.

Added bonus: one of the sweetest images I ever saw, politically, was Rick Santorum giving his concession speech in 2006, and his strangely dressed daughter (I hate the prosti-tot look as much as anyone, but this girl looks like a 12-year-old Mormon-cult third wife) bawling next to him. And I remember thinking, hon, your father equated homosexuals with people who f*** dogs. Someday, you will look back and realize your father is a dick.

I wonder if she has yet realized that.