Independence Day thoughts

I’ve been at work on Independence Day every year of my working life, and will be again tomorrow, so I don’t give much thought to the traditional recreational activities associated with it, and generally take the grouchy view that the holiday is little more than a flimsy excuse for non-service sector people to get an extra day off from work (even when it’s on a Saturday). I do, however, like to affirm my patriotism which expresses itself in two major forms: 1) my appreciation for and willingness to fight for our country’s remarkable and resilient Constitution, and 2) my concern and compassion for our military personnel abroad who are in increasing danger as both of the wars enter new phases. Things I don’t do: festoon the house in flags and placard my car with “support the troops” stickers. The first is a phony me-too gesture and the second is useless.

A(nother) moronic political event has happened in my temporary home state that seems well-timed for this holiday. It’s often said that the people get the leaders they deserve. If that is true, then the people of Oklahoma must be some real scumbags. Or at least two thirds of them, the percentage of the electorate that tends to vote for the likes of Jim Inhofe and Sally Kern. Let me tell you about Sally Kern, because you will not have heard of this slavering beast since you do not live here. She’s an OKC-area state legislator who made some news last year with her insistence that homosexuality is a worse threat to America than terrorism. Yesterday she conducted a press conference unveiling her Oklahoma Citizens Morality Proclamation. If you can stand to read this prose-form turd (it’s torture), and if you can get past the first paragraph with all the lurid religious boilerplate, complete with eighteenth-century-style capitalized nouns as if it’s the Declaration of Independence, you will notice two things:

1) It is laced with both direct and indirect references to homosexuality. This is my favorite passage: “WHEREAS, deeply disturbed that the Office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior.” Aside from the gibbering dumbassity of that statement’s apparent meaning, please note also its clunky syntax, its amateurish style, its near incomprehensibility. The whole document is like that.

2) It is one of those typical, ever-more-common attempts to make a raving nutcase Christian fundie statement sound like it would be endorsed by the Founders by means of cherry-picking quotations or creating dishonest paraphrases of things that people like Thomas Jefferson said. It has become a standard line from the fundies that America is a “Christian nation” founded by “Christians” (and so should always be a country only for Christians, by which they means racists and homophobes—make no mistake: this is a publicly acceptable cloak for white supremism and neo-fascism with all their attendant prejudices such as anti-Semitism, gay-bashing and Muslim-baiting).

Here’s something that Thomas Jefferson—the Founder of Founders, non-Christian deist and the author of the document that Kern’s proclamation parodies—said about it: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.” Here’s something else: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” And he said many, many other things about the topic, not one of which ever endorsed a position the likes of which Kern and her baboons in human guise proclaim. In fact, he was so doubtful about the usefulness and veracity of the Bible, he famously created his own version of it by excerpting the passages that he liked and discarding the rest. Jefferson was no fundamentalist and neither were his contemporaries. Yet this myth persists and is propagated once again by Kern’s stupid proclamation. No real American historian (and by “real” I mean a PhD-holding published professor at an accredited non-sectarian college or university who has studied history from primary sources) advocates or would even be bothered to consider this fundie revision of American history. Let me say that again in a slightly different way, just to make sure that my meaning is clear: the exact number of real scholars who believe in the Kern concept of American history is as follows: zero. It’s one of these made up, phony-baloney debates that the extreme right makes their whole domain of discourse. They make up a debate topic and then blab about it on the 700 Club and their silly grunting radio shows until the general public starts thinking that it’s a real debate. Another example: Creationism. No debate exists about this among scientists—none at all—and hasn’t for a century, yet the fundies have created one and have convinced the majority of Americans (who don’t study it and don’t really know much about it) that there is some kind of epic debate in the realm of science that will be settled in their favor any day now. Another example: Torture. No debate exists about this among people who have studied it, yet the majority of people have been persuaded that torture is a valid debate topic and that on Independence Day, our great nation can somehow remain great if we engage in such behavior.

On Independence Day this year, I am making my own proclamation, or maybe it could be called a secular prayer: “WHEREAS Stupidity has beset and overwhelmed the Nation and the People and eaten out our Sanity, we strive for the Restoration of Reason to the Land.”

[The images are of Marines in Helmand Province (Afghanistan) and Sally Kern in OKC (Dumbfuckistan) asserting her Constitutional rights...that those troops are defending. Hardly seems fair.]

The future crept up on us

When I waste a post on Real World Crap (TM), I generally apologize for it. This time, however, I intend to offend a certain segment of the population, specifically two-thirds of the voters in my temporary home state and probably nearly all of the non-voters.

Though The Future--the fabled Twenty-First Century--as day-dreamt of by a little boy in the 1970s (me) has not offered the space stations, Lunar colonies, Martian cities and alien invasions for which I had hoped, it has offered some "futuristic" episodes.  Do you remember Paul Verhoeven's classic film Robocop? It depicted an America gone into severe and permanent decrosion, where the Constitution and the rule of of law had been suborned by self-serving corporate interests, where power rested not with the people but with a class of political nincompoops who lived in the crotch-pockets of monied assholes, where ridiculous gas-guzzling automobiles roamed the streets as gigantic surrogate penises for their shrunken-balled, limbic-brain-driven drivers. Fiction on film in the 80s.

Then, in December of 2000, W was appointed President of the United States in a 5:4 decision by the Supreme Court. (Remember, this was well before the Terminator became governor of California) Our first court-appointed President's administration seemed, at first,  one that would pass rather inconsequentially. He had no serious agenda other than the usual GOP-type tax cutting and budget-wrecking, and seemed content to wile away his Presidency being on vacation 3 out of 7 days (not counting weekends). Then the 9/11 horror happened and the country lost its collective mind.

Fast-forward to November 2004: W is elected President (elected this time, not court-appointed). And America has become a country in severe decrosion, a land where the rule of law has been suborned by self-serving corporate interests, where all power is held and exercised by a class of crass political nincompoops, where ridiculous gas-guzzling vehicles roam the streets as gigantic surrogate penises for their shrunken-balled, reptile-brained drivers. And where we send kids to die on a daily basis in a war of choice, designed by men who want to line their pockets with its filthy spoils.

Fast forward again. In 2008, the genius of the Founders and their Constitution saw their  greatest validation in the election of a new leader who was then able to peacefully displace the old one.

Yesterday when I was listening to the highlights of President Obama's speech in Cairo, I was repeatedly struck by how the plain-spoken, common sense things he said were a lot like...well, what a smart person would say. You know, like someone who has thought about stuff for more than a minute and has maybe read some books in his life, and maybe paid attention in school a couple times. A few years ago, when I dreamed of an imaginary future President who was not a Book-of-Revelation psychopath, I imagined a man or woman who would say things about how progress toward peace on Earth will not be made by wallowing in the drooling, blithering, Texas-sized dumbassity of the past, how America and the so-called "Islamic World" need not be at war, how Hamas needs to quit being a bunch of rocket-firing suicide-bombing fuck-bags, how the Israelis need to unambiguously stop their goddamned colonization activities in the occupied territories, how Ahmadinafuck needs to quit denying the Holocaust, and so on. And that's actually what the real-life President of the United States said in Cairo in the year 2009 (albeit in slightly different language). It felt futuristic, kind of like the Bush election, but in a good way. The old hopeful kind of feeling about the future that I had as a boy.

Well, in Oklahoma, most people beam with pride over their U.S. Senators, Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe. They're both right-wing Froot Loops complete with striped novelty toucan beaks,  and they are all-around douche-bags from the heyday of the Massengil era. If there were ever a Senate vote that went 98-2, you'd know who the two were without needing to Google it. But of the two of them, it's Inhofe (prick, pictured above left) who is the real piece of Frankenstein work. Coburn at least makes a serious and principled--if nearly always factually and ideologically  erroneous--stand against wasteful government spending. That's his brand, and he is semi-credible at it. Inhofe, on the other hand, is a classic Washington fat-head with an Okie accent: he is one of the biggest pork-barrelling, pig-shit-shoveling "conservatives" in the entire Congress. I don't have all day here, so I can't list (or even summarize) all his grotesqueries, so I'll limit it to these few examples: today he carries the right-wing water by complaining about government spending all day while at the same time fighting hammer-and-tongs to preserve Okiehomie's share of Pentagon waste that even the Pentagon doesn't want anymore (think weapons to fight the Soviet Union in WWIII in 1985); in the Dark Times, when the GOP controlled Congress, he was the unlikely head of the Senate environment committee where it seemed to be his main job to deny and denounce science that has long since been conceded by everyone on Earth save for Limbaugh, Coulter and a few other extra-chromo mutant throwbacks; he routinely uses public money to go on religious junkets abroad and doesn't even bother to apologize for it (cuz it's for JuhEEzus, y'know); and now, just today, he is all over the local news calling President Obama a traitor, and wondering "whose side he's on" for telling the fucking truth.

Senator Inhofe, aside from his other excesses, opposes equal civil liberties and equal justice under the law for all Americans, and, in so doing, violates his oath as a Senator and rejects the founding principles of this nation. It is he who is un-American, is a friend to extremism, and it is he whom I flip off with a big foam novelty hand with extended middle finger and say that he can get the frak out of my country right now and go join his nutcase buddies in "the border regions of Pakistan." Yeah...that's what I mean exactly: this guy's outlook on the world--with its intolerance, social-issues stick-up-the-assedness and religious bigotry--is much more similar to that of our nation's arch enemy, Osama bin Laden, than it is to the traditional values that most Americans cherish. So suck that, wingnuts.

Which brings me, at blessed bloody last, to the bitter conclusion of this screed. The truth, of course, is that it's not merely Senator Inhofe who is a joke. He is the duly elected representative of the people of his state, and it is they, the Okie voters, who are the real problem in this whole affair.  I lack the sulfuric-acid tongue and rhetorical fire to properly address them, so I will rely, as I often do lately, on quoting Harlan Ellison, when he said of an entirely other group of people: "I do not think I malign them too much by characterizing them as eminently average...I do not think I demean them much by perceiving them as creeps, meatheads, clods, fruitcakes, nincompoops, amoeba-brains, yoyos, yipyops, kadodies and clodhoppers." [An Edge in My Voice, 126]

Where to live?/ Taboo

1) When Jeff and I moved to OKC, we decided we'd commit to it for a minimum of two years. The two-year point will be reached in September, so we've accepted that it's probably more like a three year period that we will live here. We had about five thousand bucks to move with when we came here and more than blew through it all before we had new income happening, so we figure we need at least 10K for the next move. So far, our savings stand at zero. That being said, I've decided it's not too soon to start researching our next home town--and, of course, the future home of the M-Brane Tower (pictured on left), the brane's world headquarters (I expect to hear solicitations from chambers of commerce any day now, don't you know...).  Moving back to St. Louis has not been taken off the table completely, but we're more than open to other options.

Our criteria for a fresh new city include: 1) a climate relatively free of winter weather, or at least no more than what we endure here; 2) a dense city center with goods and services, including our residence, within short distances; no suburbs need apply; 3) a reasonable cost of living because we're not likely to be rich any year soon; 4) sufficient ethnic/immigrant diversity to allow for ethnic grocery stores (we're cooks, and need that selection close at hand, and both STL and OKC have been great in that regard); 5) cultural/ religious/ political diversity, or at least a population that is not ninety percent right-wing fundamentalist Christian and feel that they need to tell me about Jesus every day. STL was fine in that regard, but OKC gets a D-minus for it. We understand that criteria 1 and 5 run into conflict often in this country, but I'm sure there are options for us.

2) Feel free to keep talking about the taboo subject (last post).  I'm still trying to think up a real hair-bleaching, paint-peeling, vapors-inducing shocker of a premise, and when I do, I'll post it in the comments (but y'all'll need to provide your own smelling salts).

TIN

Sometimes I get titles for new stories stuck in my head, often based on my mis-hearing of something in conversation or on the radio.  If I could actually write more stories to match all my titles, I could have written by now several anthologies worth of stuff.  In Oklahoma, it seems that a large percentage of the population pronounces the number "ten" exactly the same way as the metal "tin." On the radio this morning, during a tedious segment about this year's state legislative agenda, they discussed a bill that is apparently moving forward to authorize the erection of a monument displaying the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol.  (That's the kind of shit that our state legislature pushes to the top of the agenda, while deciding to do nothing about making health insurers provide some help for parents with autistic kids). Anyway, I got the idea for a story called "The Tin Commandments." I imagined it could be some kind of robot story set in a steampunk milieu.  That's as far as I've gotten.  I am half-seriously considering announcing an M-Brane contest with this challenge: write the best version of "The Tin Commandments."  Speaking of contests, there's barely a month left until the Baen deadline. [The image is of the sentient space-going lifeform Gomtuu, from the Star Trek: TNG episode "Tin Man."]