Last evening The Rachel Maddow Show had an absolutely brilliant piece detailing the extents to which two of the biggest death merchants in the history of this country will go to avoid answering for their actions.
For decades the tobacco industry produced a product specifically designed to create an addiction in their users for that product. Nicotine levels were purposefully manipulated to guarantee that the vast majority of their users would be unable to stop. The industry was less than subtle when it came to advertising their product to children, knowing full well that the younger you can get a smoker hooked, the more likely you will have a customer for life, even a life that will be significantly shortened by use of the product.
With the full cooperation of the popular media, especially Hollywood, the tobacco industry made sure their product was portrayed as an essential part of American life, a birth right to which everyone was entitled. It was turned into a symbol of class, glamour and sophistication.
But when medical and scientific evidence began to mount concerning the link between smoking and many of the most severe health issues affecting the population, Big Tobacco began to get nervous. Through the courageous actions of pioneers like former Surgeon General C. Everett Coop (recently deceased), the harsh spotlight of public attention was being shone on the cigarette makers, and not in a flattering way.
It was starting to get hot, so the tobacco industry decided they needed a "heat shield" to protect themselves from this increasingly aggressive scrutiny, so they created and funded a bogus organization which they called the National Smokers' Alliance.
Ostensibly cast as a spontaneous, "grass roots" organization of fine, upstanding Americans who were seeking nothing more than the freedom to exercise their god-given right to get cancer, the NSA received millions of tobacco dollars to act as national apologists for the tobacco industry. They came up with completely preposterous pronouncements such as "Accommodation and common courtesy would solve this problem," meaning that the answer to all the health concerns is for everyone to mind their own business and pretend nothing bad is happening.
But it was hard to ignore the huge costs of tobacco addiction, and a number of high-profile, big-dollar lawsuits against the tobacco makers were beginning to get a lot of attention. And some of that attention came from a Senate investigating committee, which at one famous session summoned a number of top tobacco executives to answer for many years of lying to the American public. The gig was up for the phony National Smokers' Alliance, and it quickly disappeared from the national scene.
This was an example of a "heat shield" that did not work. Now, an example of a heat shield that DOES work:
The corporations that make and sell guns found themselves in a similar situation to the tobacco industry. Their product is produced solely for the purpose of murdering people. Guns can't be used for anything else than that. Knives kill people too, but knives have other legitimate uses. You can kill someone with a baseball bat, but bats can be used for their intended purpose, in a baseball game. Guns have one and only one use.
The gun industry did not want to have to deal with the messy business of gun violence and the carnage it wreaks on American society. The daily slaughter of innocent people of all ages was something they did not want to rationalize. They needed something to take the heat for them and deflect the public anger away from them, to provide cover for the continued sale of their product and rake in many millions of dollars of profit. Enter the National Rifle Association.
The NRA would like you to believe they are comprised of four million stalwart American citizens who seek nothing but the ability to defend their family and property from vast legions of vicious, bloodthirsty criminals, undocumented immigrants and an increasingly Fascist government that wants to invalidate the Constitution. The NRA just wants to make sure the Second Amendment stays firmly in place and every obese, ignorant hillbilly who wants to have a half-dozen automatic rifles in their filthy double-wide should be afforded that opportunity.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution contains exactly 27 words and was written at a time when the newborn country was just getting on its feet. Those 27 words have been mangled and stretched beyond recognition, and I am certain the Founding Fathers could not dream that it would someday cover mass-produced, insanely powerful weapons like the AR-15 or the AK-47.
The truth is, the NRA receives an enormous amount of funding from their "corporate partners," a veritable who's-who of gun manufacturers. Their decrepit zombie of a CEO, Wayne LaPierre - purposefully as repellent and obnoxious as humanly possible - acts as a very effective lightning rod for the all the criticism coming at the gun makers. The NRA has one of the most powerful lobbying machines in Washington to make sure that cowardly members of Congress remain firmly in their back pocket and resist any sort of gun control legislation.
The NRA also relies on the ignorance of their own members, who have been duped into thinking that the NRA is really interested in defending their Second Amendment rights from all the socialist Muslims who want to do heinous, vile and un-American things like ban high-capacity magazine clips or close ridiculous loopholes in gun sales. In reality, the NRA could not care less about gun rights, beyond the extent that gun rights can be used to maintain and increase their sales margins, and it exists only to make sure there will be an insatiable market for more and more guns in this country.
But, NRA members seem to be perfectly happy and content with being stooges, dupes and idiots, blatantly manipulated by gun industry proxies and being played like cheap violins. No doubt they are laughing insanely in the NRA board room at how easy it is to make really stupid people do exactly what you want them to.
No doubt the National Rifle Association has learned well from the example of the National Smokers' Alliance on how to be an effective heat shield. Whether or not it is going to save them from the same fate as the Smokers' Alliance remains to be seen. We are starting to see little cracks in the NRA heat shield today. We can only hope that these cracks will grow and eventually, the NRA will be seen as the cruel, cynical scam that it has always been.
Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts
Friday, March 8, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Digital Melting-Pot
Digital technology has sped up the reaction time of everyone, and nowadays it's very common for something to happen in the world and almost instantaneously, reactions and comments pop up on Facebook.
Twenty years ago, none of this was even imagined, let alone remotely possible. And back in the day, when I was young, news came from either the newspaper, the radio or national televised news shows. We got our news basically twice a day, when the newspaper was thrown on the front porch, or when the evening news programs came on.
Today, we are immersed in news from the second we awake to when the nights go out at night. Instead of a couple of places to get news, we have many dozens. The internet has brought an astonishing, incomprehensible amount of information to our fingertips, pretty much for free, day and night. But so much of this information comes not from independent, credible news sources, but from thinly-disguised echo chambers of political entities for whom journalistic truth is the enemy, not an ideal to which to aspire.
In the vast, global, digital melting-pot that is Facebook, there is always something cooking. The media stew it serves up can be a smorgasbord of interesting, funny and enlightening photos and comments from my Facebook friends - whom I genuinely appreciate and enjoy reading - to a witches' brew of insanity, paranoia and batshit-craziness from the darkest gutters and cesspools of the American psyche.
Politically-inclined FB pages are public pages, and that opens up the floodgates for all the virulent strains of craziness that seem to be running rampant in this country. In particular, conservative trolls are ever-ready to inflict their narrow-minded, pointless slander and undisguised racism into any and all discussions, even if they are not even slightly political. No insult is too cheap, no snide remark too juvenile to make when it comes to denigrating our President.
Disclaimer: I have certainly put in my time as a liberal troll, and I spent a fun-filled two weeks after the elections last November carpet-bombing political pages and websites with all the eat-shit-and-die liberal gloating I could muster. I gleefully and mercilessly rubbed as many conservatives noses as I could into the messy bowel movement that was the Romney campaign, with completely predictable results. Heads exploded everywhere, and the bile and hatred I elicited was quite impressive. I felt that if I could raise conservative blood pressures to stroke-inducing levels and ruin as many of their days as possible, I was doing my job and life indeed was wonderful. It was almost too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel, but eventually it ran its course and I don't do it anymore. At least not as much.
The Sandy Hook elementary school shootings in mid-December brought a whole new array of crazy conservatives to the forefront, and these were the extra-paranoid, gun-nut variety. It really is something when you find out how many of our fellow citizens spend their lives gripped by an intense, irrational fear that someday, vast armies of criminals, armed to the tits with AK-47s, are going to march down every street in every town and city in this country and storm the doorway of their home in a enormous Armageddon-type apocalypse, and the only way they can hope to survive is to make sure everyone in their family, from little two-year-old Nutley to ninety-year old Grandma, has a couple of automatic rifles at their disposal to dispatch all these bloodthirsty felons to the lower depths of hell where they belong.
I was surprised to find out that a lot of people take seriously the notion that their individual liberty and freedom are in constant, grave peril, either from armed, highly-organized criminals or from our own government. Paranoia and conspiracy theories go hand-in-hand, and these people can see heinous, nefarious plots in every single thing that happens. Evil socialist Muslim Kenyans are behind everything, and they are well on their way to converting every Starbucks in this nation into Islamic indoctrination centers, and Walmart will start selling burkas any minute. Actually, it would really be a good idea if some of Walmart's customers wore burkas.
These pathetic, disturbed individuals have a doomsday scenario playing in an endless loop in their heads, that they will someday have to engage in mortal combat with a mysterious Fascist movement which will suddenly rise to power and all the U.S. military forces will fight blindly for the prophet Mohammed, despite nearly 250 years of Judeo-Christian culture and government influence. How little faith these people have in their fellow citizens, and in the form of government which has produced the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and has gotten us through a bloody Civil War and two World Wars as well as numerous other skirmishes. To these hopeless paranoids, it's just a tiny step to go from an established, representative democracy to Sharia law.
The Republican party, along with their mangy, yappy little attack dog the NRA, is expert at cultivating and empowering such mindless paranoid fantasies, and there seems to be no limit to the number of gullible dupes and stooges out there who are ever-so-eager to swallow this claptrap. Personally I feel it's indicative of the extreme intellectual laziness that has taken hold in his country. Why make the effort to learn about the world and the things that are happening in our culture, when you can sit comfortably on your couch with your TV and a giant bag of Doritos, and let blowhards like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the dimwitted hacks of Fox News fill your head with whatever garbage they choose, because somehow it sounds like they might be right, or at the very least their drivel seems to fit into your personal delusions and biases? They are the professionals when it comes to providing very simple-minded, ineffective, populist solutions to complex problems. Why bother thinking about stuff on your own when you can let someone else do the thinking for you?
There is a herd-mentality aspect in people that makes them want to be a part of something bigger, which seems counter to the famed American "independence of spirit." People want to align themselves with other like-minded people, because there is safety in numbers and comfort in shared attitudes. Going out on a limb and actually deconstructing problems in order to understand them is scary and way too much work, and many people just do not have the mental capacity, experience or inclination for critical analysis, thanks to our failing educational system. They instead opt for the demagogues who speak in terms that sound familiar, or at least non-threatening, and engender an us-and-them separation that puts their followers clearly on the "us" side, and anyone who doesn't agree with them or maybe challenges their long-established biases and prejudices are the "them" that they have to be afraid of.
What people don't understand they fear, and that's been true throughout history. Overcoming fear requires courage, fortitude and persistence. Sadly, sometimes it seems all too clear that people are not being enlightened by reason and understanding, but instead are turning their backs and marching into the darkness.
Twenty years ago, none of this was even imagined, let alone remotely possible. And back in the day, when I was young, news came from either the newspaper, the radio or national televised news shows. We got our news basically twice a day, when the newspaper was thrown on the front porch, or when the evening news programs came on.
Today, we are immersed in news from the second we awake to when the nights go out at night. Instead of a couple of places to get news, we have many dozens. The internet has brought an astonishing, incomprehensible amount of information to our fingertips, pretty much for free, day and night. But so much of this information comes not from independent, credible news sources, but from thinly-disguised echo chambers of political entities for whom journalistic truth is the enemy, not an ideal to which to aspire.
In the vast, global, digital melting-pot that is Facebook, there is always something cooking. The media stew it serves up can be a smorgasbord of interesting, funny and enlightening photos and comments from my Facebook friends - whom I genuinely appreciate and enjoy reading - to a witches' brew of insanity, paranoia and batshit-craziness from the darkest gutters and cesspools of the American psyche.
Politically-inclined FB pages are public pages, and that opens up the floodgates for all the virulent strains of craziness that seem to be running rampant in this country. In particular, conservative trolls are ever-ready to inflict their narrow-minded, pointless slander and undisguised racism into any and all discussions, even if they are not even slightly political. No insult is too cheap, no snide remark too juvenile to make when it comes to denigrating our President.
Disclaimer: I have certainly put in my time as a liberal troll, and I spent a fun-filled two weeks after the elections last November carpet-bombing political pages and websites with all the eat-shit-and-die liberal gloating I could muster. I gleefully and mercilessly rubbed as many conservatives noses as I could into the messy bowel movement that was the Romney campaign, with completely predictable results. Heads exploded everywhere, and the bile and hatred I elicited was quite impressive. I felt that if I could raise conservative blood pressures to stroke-inducing levels and ruin as many of their days as possible, I was doing my job and life indeed was wonderful. It was almost too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel, but eventually it ran its course and I don't do it anymore. At least not as much.
The Sandy Hook elementary school shootings in mid-December brought a whole new array of crazy conservatives to the forefront, and these were the extra-paranoid, gun-nut variety. It really is something when you find out how many of our fellow citizens spend their lives gripped by an intense, irrational fear that someday, vast armies of criminals, armed to the tits with AK-47s, are going to march down every street in every town and city in this country and storm the doorway of their home in a enormous Armageddon-type apocalypse, and the only way they can hope to survive is to make sure everyone in their family, from little two-year-old Nutley to ninety-year old Grandma, has a couple of automatic rifles at their disposal to dispatch all these bloodthirsty felons to the lower depths of hell where they belong.
I was surprised to find out that a lot of people take seriously the notion that their individual liberty and freedom are in constant, grave peril, either from armed, highly-organized criminals or from our own government. Paranoia and conspiracy theories go hand-in-hand, and these people can see heinous, nefarious plots in every single thing that happens. Evil socialist Muslim Kenyans are behind everything, and they are well on their way to converting every Starbucks in this nation into Islamic indoctrination centers, and Walmart will start selling burkas any minute. Actually, it would really be a good idea if some of Walmart's customers wore burkas.
These pathetic, disturbed individuals have a doomsday scenario playing in an endless loop in their heads, that they will someday have to engage in mortal combat with a mysterious Fascist movement which will suddenly rise to power and all the U.S. military forces will fight blindly for the prophet Mohammed, despite nearly 250 years of Judeo-Christian culture and government influence. How little faith these people have in their fellow citizens, and in the form of government which has produced the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and has gotten us through a bloody Civil War and two World Wars as well as numerous other skirmishes. To these hopeless paranoids, it's just a tiny step to go from an established, representative democracy to Sharia law.
The Republican party, along with their mangy, yappy little attack dog the NRA, is expert at cultivating and empowering such mindless paranoid fantasies, and there seems to be no limit to the number of gullible dupes and stooges out there who are ever-so-eager to swallow this claptrap. Personally I feel it's indicative of the extreme intellectual laziness that has taken hold in his country. Why make the effort to learn about the world and the things that are happening in our culture, when you can sit comfortably on your couch with your TV and a giant bag of Doritos, and let blowhards like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the dimwitted hacks of Fox News fill your head with whatever garbage they choose, because somehow it sounds like they might be right, or at the very least their drivel seems to fit into your personal delusions and biases? They are the professionals when it comes to providing very simple-minded, ineffective, populist solutions to complex problems. Why bother thinking about stuff on your own when you can let someone else do the thinking for you?
There is a herd-mentality aspect in people that makes them want to be a part of something bigger, which seems counter to the famed American "independence of spirit." People want to align themselves with other like-minded people, because there is safety in numbers and comfort in shared attitudes. Going out on a limb and actually deconstructing problems in order to understand them is scary and way too much work, and many people just do not have the mental capacity, experience or inclination for critical analysis, thanks to our failing educational system. They instead opt for the demagogues who speak in terms that sound familiar, or at least non-threatening, and engender an us-and-them separation that puts their followers clearly on the "us" side, and anyone who doesn't agree with them or maybe challenges their long-established biases and prejudices are the "them" that they have to be afraid of.
What people don't understand they fear, and that's been true throughout history. Overcoming fear requires courage, fortitude and persistence. Sadly, sometimes it seems all too clear that people are not being enlightened by reason and understanding, but instead are turning their backs and marching into the darkness.
Friday, January 11, 2013
I Am OZ, the Great and Powerful
There are some movies which are called "classic" and really deserve that title; one of them is the 1939 film, "The Wizard of Oz." Starring Judy Garland in her timeless role as Dorothy Gale, the flick is an absolute feast for the eyes and the imagination of people of every age.
There is amazing stuff from start to finish. Initially the film is in black and white, and it shows the quintessentially American life of Dorothy and her Auntie Em and a couple of hangers-on living on an idyllic farm in Kansas. Then wealthy, elitist Bitch-From-Hell Ann Romney, I mean Elvira Gulch, shows up with an order from the sheriff to confiscate vicious hell-hound Toto. Dorothy finds herself having the Worst Day Ever, and just when she thinks things can't get any worse, a tornado blows in and really screws everything up. This is the part that used to completely terrify me as a child; I remember being unable to breathe, paralyzed in fear, watching the thrashing, writhing tornado funnel bearing down on the Kansas farm like some huge dinosaur marching across the flat Kansas plains under a black sky.
Dorothy is not amused when she finds herself locked out of the storm cellar and runs inside the house for shelter. She gets knocked on her butt by a flying window frame and hallucinates this extremely intricate dream about the whole farmhouse getting sucked up into the tornado vortex and transported to a place called Oz. Still in black-and-white, there is a neat cinematic trick after she crash-lands La Maison Gale on top of an innocent pedestrian who turns out to the Wicked Witch of the East: when Dorothy opens the door onto Oz the screen explodes into mind-blowing Technicolor, an effect which is considerably muted when you only have a black-and-white television.
After being flash-mobbed by weirdly-dressed midgets called the Munchkins and getting her marching orders - not to mention a fabulous pair of red-sequined Espadrilles - from Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, Dorothy starts out for the fabled Emerald City to find the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who reportedly has an awesome GPS system and can get her back to her bland, boring, black-and-white life as a hopeless farm slave in Kansas. She picks up some friends along the way, all with their own issues, including another wicked witch with anger-management problems and a whole squadron of flying monkeys. If you think pigeons are messy, you should try to clean up after a bunch of airborne chimpanzees.
Eventually they do find themselves in the stunning art-deco audience hall of the Wizard of Oz, who proceeds to scare the bejeezus out of them with a lot of hollering and bellowing, and special-effects like blasts of flame and clouds of acrid smoke. Dorothy and her crew completely buy into the all-powerful-wizard scam, but not Toto, who pulls a back curtain open to show a dumpy old man working all the bells and whistles that make the Wizard so gawd-awful scary and Wizard-y. It turns out the Wizard relies a lot on reputation and overblown bluster and is not nearly as powerful as he would like you to believe.
What's the point of all this, you probably asked yourself three paragraphs ago? Anyone who reads Careless Whispers knows that "making a valid point" in any blog post is entirely optional and when it does happen, should be considered unexpected good fortune, like finding a $20 bill on the street. But oddly enough this post does have a point, which is we are seeing a variation of this Wizard story playing out in the raging gun control debate following the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.
Playing the role of Dorothy we have the American public, thoroughly traumatized by gun violence, and seeking a way back to a world where 20 grade-school kids are not mowed down by a psycho with an assault weapon. Obama is the Good Witch of the North, pointing the way to a sensible, middle-road solution like banning those weapons and high-capacity ammo clips. Congress is there too, playing the role of the Munchkins, a role they play so very well - a bunch of annoying, helium-voiced douchebags that you just want to slap the crap out of.
The choice role of Wizard is played by the National Rifle Association, which for many years has relied on its reputation as the most powerful lobbying machine ever, and who uses gross intimidation, threats and blatant coercion to maintain its iron-clad stranglehold on members of Congress. The NRA would have us believe they are all-powerful and anyone who dares to speak up to them and challenge their authority will surely get slapped down and ground into dust like some disgusting bothersome insect. You mess with the Great and Powerful at your own risk, and punishment will be sure and swift: you will find yourself thrown out of office faster than you can say, "There's no place like home."
All the cross-dressing midgets in Congress tremble and cower in fear of the Wizard/NRA and consider it a privilege to grovel in the Wizard's presence and do whatever they're told. But the Wizard just might have finally met his match in the shock, anger and disgust that have swept the nation as it awakens to the horrific, awful things that gun violence causes in the life of this country. People are beginning to feel that this problem is getting progressively worse, and that the answer is not what the Wizard wants - which is more guns everywhere in the United States, especially in the schools themselves. The answer, which will by no means eliminate all gun violence, seems to be to take these automated weapons of mass killing and huge ammo clips and make them much more difficult to fall into the hands of the mentally deranged, while leaving responsible gun owners access to the firearms which make sense for level-headed people to own.
Bottom line is, what we have been doing up to this point when it comes to guns in this, the most heavily-armed nation in the world, is not working. The answer, in spite of the horrendous screaming and yelling of the Wizard, is not more guns for everyone. The public seems to be figuring out that the Wizard is all bluster and bombast, and there has never been a better opportunity to pull the curtain away from the Wizard, and see that his power is just an overblown illusion.
There is amazing stuff from start to finish. Initially the film is in black and white, and it shows the quintessentially American life of Dorothy and her Auntie Em and a couple of hangers-on living on an idyllic farm in Kansas. Then wealthy, elitist Bitch-From-Hell Ann Romney, I mean Elvira Gulch, shows up with an order from the sheriff to confiscate vicious hell-hound Toto. Dorothy finds herself having the Worst Day Ever, and just when she thinks things can't get any worse, a tornado blows in and really screws everything up. This is the part that used to completely terrify me as a child; I remember being unable to breathe, paralyzed in fear, watching the thrashing, writhing tornado funnel bearing down on the Kansas farm like some huge dinosaur marching across the flat Kansas plains under a black sky.
Dorothy is not amused when she finds herself locked out of the storm cellar and runs inside the house for shelter. She gets knocked on her butt by a flying window frame and hallucinates this extremely intricate dream about the whole farmhouse getting sucked up into the tornado vortex and transported to a place called Oz. Still in black-and-white, there is a neat cinematic trick after she crash-lands La Maison Gale on top of an innocent pedestrian who turns out to the Wicked Witch of the East: when Dorothy opens the door onto Oz the screen explodes into mind-blowing Technicolor, an effect which is considerably muted when you only have a black-and-white television.
After being flash-mobbed by weirdly-dressed midgets called the Munchkins and getting her marching orders - not to mention a fabulous pair of red-sequined Espadrilles - from Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, Dorothy starts out for the fabled Emerald City to find the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who reportedly has an awesome GPS system and can get her back to her bland, boring, black-and-white life as a hopeless farm slave in Kansas. She picks up some friends along the way, all with their own issues, including another wicked witch with anger-management problems and a whole squadron of flying monkeys. If you think pigeons are messy, you should try to clean up after a bunch of airborne chimpanzees.
Eventually they do find themselves in the stunning art-deco audience hall of the Wizard of Oz, who proceeds to scare the bejeezus out of them with a lot of hollering and bellowing, and special-effects like blasts of flame and clouds of acrid smoke. Dorothy and her crew completely buy into the all-powerful-wizard scam, but not Toto, who pulls a back curtain open to show a dumpy old man working all the bells and whistles that make the Wizard so gawd-awful scary and Wizard-y. It turns out the Wizard relies a lot on reputation and overblown bluster and is not nearly as powerful as he would like you to believe.
What's the point of all this, you probably asked yourself three paragraphs ago? Anyone who reads Careless Whispers knows that "making a valid point" in any blog post is entirely optional and when it does happen, should be considered unexpected good fortune, like finding a $20 bill on the street. But oddly enough this post does have a point, which is we are seeing a variation of this Wizard story playing out in the raging gun control debate following the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.
Playing the role of Dorothy we have the American public, thoroughly traumatized by gun violence, and seeking a way back to a world where 20 grade-school kids are not mowed down by a psycho with an assault weapon. Obama is the Good Witch of the North, pointing the way to a sensible, middle-road solution like banning those weapons and high-capacity ammo clips. Congress is there too, playing the role of the Munchkins, a role they play so very well - a bunch of annoying, helium-voiced douchebags that you just want to slap the crap out of.
The choice role of Wizard is played by the National Rifle Association, which for many years has relied on its reputation as the most powerful lobbying machine ever, and who uses gross intimidation, threats and blatant coercion to maintain its iron-clad stranglehold on members of Congress. The NRA would have us believe they are all-powerful and anyone who dares to speak up to them and challenge their authority will surely get slapped down and ground into dust like some disgusting bothersome insect. You mess with the Great and Powerful at your own risk, and punishment will be sure and swift: you will find yourself thrown out of office faster than you can say, "There's no place like home."
All the cross-dressing midgets in Congress tremble and cower in fear of the Wizard/NRA and consider it a privilege to grovel in the Wizard's presence and do whatever they're told. But the Wizard just might have finally met his match in the shock, anger and disgust that have swept the nation as it awakens to the horrific, awful things that gun violence causes in the life of this country. People are beginning to feel that this problem is getting progressively worse, and that the answer is not what the Wizard wants - which is more guns everywhere in the United States, especially in the schools themselves. The answer, which will by no means eliminate all gun violence, seems to be to take these automated weapons of mass killing and huge ammo clips and make them much more difficult to fall into the hands of the mentally deranged, while leaving responsible gun owners access to the firearms which make sense for level-headed people to own.
Bottom line is, what we have been doing up to this point when it comes to guns in this, the most heavily-armed nation in the world, is not working. The answer, in spite of the horrendous screaming and yelling of the Wizard, is not more guns for everyone. The public seems to be figuring out that the Wizard is all bluster and bombast, and there has never been a better opportunity to pull the curtain away from the Wizard, and see that his power is just an overblown illusion.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
2012 Year End Review: Part 1
2012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end. The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond. 2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:
Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition): The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse. It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable. Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention. Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds. It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment. Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone. The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair. Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country. It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something. At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.
2012 Douchebag of the Year: Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared. Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year. Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land. Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on. At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years. Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann. Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist. I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades. You just know she used the N-word a lot.
Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle. Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire. But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays. Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems. Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem. Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year. Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation. According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns. It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.
Death We Regret The Most: Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things. Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do? Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation. It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.
More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!
Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition): The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse. It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable. Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention. Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds. It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment. Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone. The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair. Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country. It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something. At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.
2012 Douchebag of the Year: Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared. Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year. Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land. Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on. At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years. Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann. Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist. I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades. You just know she used the N-word a lot.
Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle. Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire. But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays. Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems. Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem. Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year. Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation. According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns. It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.
Death We Regret The Most: Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things. Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do? Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation. It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.
More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!
Sunday, December 16, 2012
A Monstrous Evil
A monstrous evil has again been visited on the country. And again, it comes from of the unholy, explosive nexus of guns and mental illness. And as always. the most innocent among us are the tragic victims.
I'm not going to detail the Sandy Hook school shootings of December 14th. That has been and still is being reported by the media. Rehashing the details in my head is far too debilitating and difficult.
In the supreme, ultimate act of cowardice, the shooter took his own life after gunning down 20 children. Someone told me that was good, he deserved to die. Obviously that's true but he needed to ANSWER for his horrific deed. He had to stand up in a court of law and tell the world why he did what he did. He needed to look into the shattered, hollow faces of the parents and be made to realize the incalculable damage he wreaked on totally innocent families. He had to understand that he not only took 20 lives who had not yet reached their eighth birthdays, he destroyed the lives of their mothers, their fathers, their siblings, their grandparents and extended families, their friends and neighbors, and those of the community in which they lived. For many families, the holiday season will be forever stained by the memory of this act. The total damage will be incomprehensible and will be felt for decades, maybe even generations.
I can't help thinking that for everyone in that town, December 14th was just another day. Kids got dressed and hustled off to school, parents went to work or tended to their household chores. Maybe the kids were getting pre-occupied by the approaching holiday season, and were resolutely counting down every single day until Christmas Eve. I know I did when I was that age; December seemed to drag by achingly slow and it felt like Christmas would never get here. I would run to get the newspaper every evening and check down in the lower-left corner of the front page where they would have a little cartoon box that said, "11 Days until Christmas!" Then after what seemed like a whole year, the next evening's paper would declare, "10 Days until Christmas!" Thus it went until the little cartoon finally said, "1 Day until Christmas!" and I knew the excruciatingly long wait was almost over.
These 20 children will never have the joy of tearing into Christmas presents, of spending time with their families, of running in joyous abandon through a snowfall, feeling the entire world was a big Christmas card. They will never dance, laugh and sing again. They will never feel the love of their favorite pet, or feel their parents' embrace. They will never feel like they are so filled with love they are about to burst. They will never see a beautiful sunset, a dark night sky glittering with countless starts, the first blooms of spring, endless warm summer nights, swimming in the ocean, or watching the scarlet, gold and orange leaves of autumn fall and cascade and spin down from the trees and pile up on the sidewalks. All that was taken away, by one deranged, cowardly individual, and the gun culture which puts the "right" to own an assault rifle above any sort of common sense or interest of public safety.
There were also adults massacred in this horrendous tragedy, and one must take care to ensure their loss is noted. They were doing what they loved to do and many died while trying to protect as many children as possible from the rampaging evil. Their loss would have been terrible enough, but there's something awful, horribly, incredibly wrong when a child is murdered. People who know me know that I am not particularly fond of children, but this incident had me choking back tears. No one in their right mind would inflict such a soul-killing, life-destroying horror on anyone, but that's the whole point, isn't it? No one in their right mind would do that. But we're not talking about someone in their right mind.
I've read a lot of second-amendment gun fanatics, isolated from this tragedy by distance and just plain luck, sitting a home with their families around them saying that the problem is not with too many guns, but not enough mental illness treatment facilities. The bottom line is this: if the gunman's deceased mother had not had an excessive number of high-power weapons, readily available to her son whom she knew full well had mental-health issues, these 26 people would still be alive. I don't care what anyone says, citizens do not need high-powered automatic weapons or high-capacity ammo magazines, whose only purpose is to kill as much as possible. By attempting to deflect the blame for this outrage to the mentally ill, the gun lobby in this country is showing that they care absolutely nothing about the death of innocents, but only about their "rights" under the second amendment.
Everyone is calling for stronger measures to keep this from happening again. I have no hope that anything will be done. Over the next week or so, other news stories will push this awful, still-unfolding story off the front pages, and everyone will get swept up in the holiday hub-bub. Members of Congress are far too cowardly and beholden to the gun lobby to ever pass any kind of legislation which would make something like this even marginally less likely to occur. We will never be rid of the scourge of mental illness, and we will always have guns, because that is an immutable part of the American culture, but the very least we can do is try to make it much more difficult for the wrong kind of weapons to fall into the hands of the sick, the damaged and the psychopathic. But I really don't think anything like that will happen. That would be too sensible, and the gun nuts believe any measure to control their gun ownership is about as acceptable as widespread, government-sanctioned child molestation.
Much air-time and print will be used up trying to explain the inexplicable, comprehend the incomprehensible, and fathom the unfathomable. We've already started to see sad, painful stories of parents remembering their dead children. We will be seeing photos of impossibly gorgeous little girls, and handsome, bright little boys. So much promise, so much potential - utterly squandered.
Where an answer will be found, if at all, is impossible to know. Is the answer down one of the endless, dark corridors of the lethal labyrinth of mental disease? Or is it a peculiar twist of American culture that innocents are sacrificed so someone can exercise a "right?" Would our freedoms be so diminished by re-instating a ban on assault weapons? The world didn't end the first time, and it won't happen again.
It will be only a matter of time before some other slaughter of innocents will push the Sandy Hook incident further down the list of horrible, awful crimes, involving guns and mental illness. The critical question is, have we learned anything at all, and have we gained the courage to do something about it?
I'm not going to detail the Sandy Hook school shootings of December 14th. That has been and still is being reported by the media. Rehashing the details in my head is far too debilitating and difficult.
In the supreme, ultimate act of cowardice, the shooter took his own life after gunning down 20 children. Someone told me that was good, he deserved to die. Obviously that's true but he needed to ANSWER for his horrific deed. He had to stand up in a court of law and tell the world why he did what he did. He needed to look into the shattered, hollow faces of the parents and be made to realize the incalculable damage he wreaked on totally innocent families. He had to understand that he not only took 20 lives who had not yet reached their eighth birthdays, he destroyed the lives of their mothers, their fathers, their siblings, their grandparents and extended families, their friends and neighbors, and those of the community in which they lived. For many families, the holiday season will be forever stained by the memory of this act. The total damage will be incomprehensible and will be felt for decades, maybe even generations.
I can't help thinking that for everyone in that town, December 14th was just another day. Kids got dressed and hustled off to school, parents went to work or tended to their household chores. Maybe the kids were getting pre-occupied by the approaching holiday season, and were resolutely counting down every single day until Christmas Eve. I know I did when I was that age; December seemed to drag by achingly slow and it felt like Christmas would never get here. I would run to get the newspaper every evening and check down in the lower-left corner of the front page where they would have a little cartoon box that said, "11 Days until Christmas!" Then after what seemed like a whole year, the next evening's paper would declare, "10 Days until Christmas!" Thus it went until the little cartoon finally said, "1 Day until Christmas!" and I knew the excruciatingly long wait was almost over.
These 20 children will never have the joy of tearing into Christmas presents, of spending time with their families, of running in joyous abandon through a snowfall, feeling the entire world was a big Christmas card. They will never dance, laugh and sing again. They will never feel the love of their favorite pet, or feel their parents' embrace. They will never feel like they are so filled with love they are about to burst. They will never see a beautiful sunset, a dark night sky glittering with countless starts, the first blooms of spring, endless warm summer nights, swimming in the ocean, or watching the scarlet, gold and orange leaves of autumn fall and cascade and spin down from the trees and pile up on the sidewalks. All that was taken away, by one deranged, cowardly individual, and the gun culture which puts the "right" to own an assault rifle above any sort of common sense or interest of public safety.
There were also adults massacred in this horrendous tragedy, and one must take care to ensure their loss is noted. They were doing what they loved to do and many died while trying to protect as many children as possible from the rampaging evil. Their loss would have been terrible enough, but there's something awful, horribly, incredibly wrong when a child is murdered. People who know me know that I am not particularly fond of children, but this incident had me choking back tears. No one in their right mind would inflict such a soul-killing, life-destroying horror on anyone, but that's the whole point, isn't it? No one in their right mind would do that. But we're not talking about someone in their right mind.
I've read a lot of second-amendment gun fanatics, isolated from this tragedy by distance and just plain luck, sitting a home with their families around them saying that the problem is not with too many guns, but not enough mental illness treatment facilities. The bottom line is this: if the gunman's deceased mother had not had an excessive number of high-power weapons, readily available to her son whom she knew full well had mental-health issues, these 26 people would still be alive. I don't care what anyone says, citizens do not need high-powered automatic weapons or high-capacity ammo magazines, whose only purpose is to kill as much as possible. By attempting to deflect the blame for this outrage to the mentally ill, the gun lobby in this country is showing that they care absolutely nothing about the death of innocents, but only about their "rights" under the second amendment.
Everyone is calling for stronger measures to keep this from happening again. I have no hope that anything will be done. Over the next week or so, other news stories will push this awful, still-unfolding story off the front pages, and everyone will get swept up in the holiday hub-bub. Members of Congress are far too cowardly and beholden to the gun lobby to ever pass any kind of legislation which would make something like this even marginally less likely to occur. We will never be rid of the scourge of mental illness, and we will always have guns, because that is an immutable part of the American culture, but the very least we can do is try to make it much more difficult for the wrong kind of weapons to fall into the hands of the sick, the damaged and the psychopathic. But I really don't think anything like that will happen. That would be too sensible, and the gun nuts believe any measure to control their gun ownership is about as acceptable as widespread, government-sanctioned child molestation.
Much air-time and print will be used up trying to explain the inexplicable, comprehend the incomprehensible, and fathom the unfathomable. We've already started to see sad, painful stories of parents remembering their dead children. We will be seeing photos of impossibly gorgeous little girls, and handsome, bright little boys. So much promise, so much potential - utterly squandered.
Where an answer will be found, if at all, is impossible to know. Is the answer down one of the endless, dark corridors of the lethal labyrinth of mental disease? Or is it a peculiar twist of American culture that innocents are sacrificed so someone can exercise a "right?" Would our freedoms be so diminished by re-instating a ban on assault weapons? The world didn't end the first time, and it won't happen again.
It will be only a matter of time before some other slaughter of innocents will push the Sandy Hook incident further down the list of horrible, awful crimes, involving guns and mental illness. The critical question is, have we learned anything at all, and have we gained the courage to do something about it?
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