Thanks to "Seedy Pete" at Worldwide Hippies

I loved this response to a "Gawker" column at Worldwide Hippies: President Orders College Kids To Do Something. 

Here's the deal, Mr. President. 

I am going to vote Democrat in the midterms. Not because I believe you or your party will accomplish a single goddamned thing that I care about; they are clearly inept to the point of ridiculousness and your fetish for compromise would be laudable if the other party shared it but since they have openly stated they are unwilling to negotiate on anything it's an enormous handicap. But I will vote Democrat, because the alternative is actually horrifying. 

I am disappointed that the public option was dropped without a fight in favor of drug price fixing deals with Big Pharma and a mandate to purchase insurance from the same handful of companies whose monopoly on insurance is why we have a WHO score on par with a third world country in the first place. I am disappointed that your party has rolled over on fighting the crooked Bush tax cuts, or extending health benefits for 9/11 first responders, or repealing DADT. Want to know what those four things have in common? They were all overwhemingly popular with the public during a period when your party had a majority (briefly even a supermajority) and yet without exception the Democrats in Congress either traded away core parts of their party platform in exchange for absofuckinglutely nothing or just completely bobbled the ball and let the GOP control the debate. You people are sexually attracted to failure. 

Just a few years ago the GOP passed spectacularly unpopular legislation with considerably less votes in Congress...granted, unlike you they were able to count on the fact that the opposition party was so spineless they'd vote for things they claimed to oppose out of fear of being painted as unpatriotic. But the Democrats don't have the advantage of getting to fight against Democrats, so at some point you people are going to have to grow a goddamned backbone. 

So why vote Democrat at all, if your party is determined to fail at everything you try? Because at least you're trying, and the opposition party is a veritable death cult with no plan beyond getting back into power so that they can do the exact same things that ran the country off the rails in the first place. 

But don't expect me to get excited about it. Don't expect me to volunteer my time and money to help Democrats get elected the way I did in 2008. You squandered every opportunity we gave you, ignored your professed values, punted on the first down at every opportunity, and ignored your base in order to court the votes of people who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Then election season rolls back around and suddenly you remember to pay lip service to our values? Piss off. You don't get another dime from me until I see you people care about progress sometime other than election season. And stop mistaking my disgust for apathy, or my expectation that Democrats in Congress do their goddamned jobsfor unrealistic magical thinking. No one expected a magic wand to be waved and the trainwreck the GOP spent 8 years created to be undone in 2, but what we did expect was that you would at least make an effort. Your party has failed to meet the already exceedingly low expectations I set for it. 

Stop mistaking my disgust for apathy … Do I have an AMEN?

Why I didn't go to the Obama rally …

President Obama spoke in my hometown yesterday, and I had a hard time mustering much enthusiasm for him. I made some comments on Facebook to that effect, and a friend of a friend commented that liberals shouldn't be blaming him for his failure to right the wrongs of the Bush administration's 8 years in just 20 months -- something which I have heard often. It led me to want to clarify why I am so disappointed in the Obama presidency, to find a way to put it into words so I don't just sound like a disenchanted liberal who feels that Obama has failed to deliver the goods fast enough.

The essence of it is this: Aside from the backpedaling on campaign promises (which I consider to be standard political fare,) I resent that the Obama White House treats people on the progressive left (like me) as part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Because the ideas that we champion -- ideas such as universal single payer health care, a WPA-style employment recovery plan, removing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan -- are common sense, good for the country, and tried and true. We are not obstructionists, nor are we naysayers. We are the yea-sayers, the ones who would happily pick up the mops and get to work, as Obama exhorted his critics to do last year.

We are the ones who got to work to elect this guy.

And they treat us as if we are, at best, inconsequential. Irrelevant. Then we are chastised for not wanting to come to the rallies to hear the pretty words. And it disturbs me greatly that so many who do the chastising are other progressives.

Obama is charasmatic. He is smart, and a good speaker. However I am wary of the cult of personality that continues to surround him. I want action in the right direction on his administration's part. I want acknowledgement and respect.

BTW, this doesn't mean that I am not voting in November. I am quite aware that people in other places die for the right to vote. But let me remind other liberals who might criticize my stance, questioning my government is also a right we hold dear -- or used to.

INDOCTRINATION!!!

I finally saw President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren in its entirety. It was bad enough that children were being forced to listen to subversive messages like, "Obey your parents and teachers" and "Do your homework." But when he said, "Wash your hands so you don't get sick," well, I felt downright unclean.

(It was shown at our first all school assembly of the school year. One youngster was escorted out in tears. When the principal questioned her about why she was crying she said, "I'm - I'm just so happy he's president, it makes me cry.")

Hostile Takeovers of the Corporate Kind, a book review

I have been a fan of the more recent writing of Jon Katz, and I was curious to read some of his earlier writing. Sign Off: A Novel of Men and Work was published in 1991. It chronicles the hostile takeover of United States Broadcasting (USB), a fictitious television network, as seen through the eyes of Peter Herbert, the executive producer of a nationally syndicated morning news program. UBS is taken over by David Nab, a self proclaimed "condo king" who has made a fortune in real estate and wishes to have the prestige that goes with owning a television network. Herbert watches in horror as, in a few short months, Nab lays waste to the network news, as well as the careers, and indeed the lives of his longtime associates, always wondering when the ax will fall on him.

This was a really compelling read. As a lowly Midwestern schoolteacher who has never aspired to the kind of lifestyle that Katz describes, I experienced a kind of guilty pleasure in reading about these people. It was a little like reading a Kitty Kelly tell-all.

Beyond the story however, I think that Sign Off made some important points. If the slash-and -burn mentality that Katz describes is accurate -- and I have no reason to believe otherwise; he did a stint as executive producer of the CBS Morning News -- it speaks volumes to the miserable failure of the mainstream media to take on the corporate culture of American politics, which we saw flourish under the Bush Administration, and sadly continues under Obama.

The novel also underscores something that I have thought about a lot in the last couple of years, watching people I love -- mostly middle-aged men -- struggle with unemployment. I believe from the bottom of my heart that a covenant was broken with American workers, people who spent the better part of their adult lives working hard and paying into "the system" only to be discarded as if they were yesterday's garbage. If you haven't been there, let me tell you -- it shatters a person's sense of self like nothing else can and has enormous impact on family relationships as well.

Furthermore, I question whether when businesses say that they are "losing money" is it really a matter of having a smaller profit margin? I think, in many cases, yes, absolutely. When corporations "downsize" or "cut the fat" it is all about increasing the profits for the stockholders. Tell me, where in the Constitution does it say that stockholders have a right to make huge profits?

Reading Sign Off, I would almost say that Katz was prescient. What happened to television news has also happened in print media, and in fact has reached into almost every corner of our society. I suspect though, that he was just observing the beginning of the corporatization of the U.S. (and the world.) Michael Moore was certainly talking about it and Ralph Nader, of course.

It was also utterly fascinating to see the anatomy of a hostile takeover. It is a term I have heard plenty of times, but really only had the most superficial understanding of what it meant. It strikes me that, among the provisions of that most horrible No Child Left Behind legislation are the sanctions for "failing schools" that include "reconstituting" a school's staff. That's nothing more than a hostile takeover -- welcome to corporatized America. (Don't get me started on Obama and education. I can hardly write about it, I am so furious.)

Sign Off is a very well-written, illuminating, and entertaining book. After many years of writing memoir, Katz is once again returning to fiction. I am looking forward to it.

Recommended, but it might take some digging to find it. It's worth the search.

Still Moved

These pictures of President-elect Barack Obama, particularly the ones from election night, still move me to tears.

Pico Iyer, in his book The Open Road: the Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, says,

"No one at the beginning of 1989 expected that, by year's end, the Cold War would effectively be over, and no one imagined when Mandela emerged from prison, that apartheid would soon be driven out of his country. The Dalai Lama reposes his faith on such surprises -- the sudden result of what has been building invisibly for years -- as if to say, as he put it once, "Until the last moment, anything is possible."

I couldn't help thinking about election night (was it only a month ago?) as I read that passage.