And now we see that mere political ideological differences may result in more than just words.
Yesterday, Maxine Waters said, in part, "Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere." And then, "We want history to record that we stood up, that we pushed back, that we fought and that we did not consider ourselves victims of this president."
In any other universe, Maxine Waters would be guilty of incitement to riot.
But in the current political environment, where falsehoods and overexaggeration are reported as fact, where pictures are taken out of context or cropped to inflame passions, and where the tactics of bullying and intimidation have been normalized and are now expected, it is hard to find truth.
Where facts are absent, truth is hidden. When those charged with reporting fact report falsehood instead, truth is impossible to find.
And when those trusted with leading this nation peacefully begin speaking in terms of violence, the worst is about to happen.
I once posited that this nation would not survive in its current form past 2050. I still believe that - only now I worry whether my prediction was too far in the future.
When law is ignored because it is "inconvenient", lawlessness reigns. And what we are seeing is the beginning of lawlessness on a grand scale - and the call to lawlessness is coming from elected representatives to Congress.
This is madness. The same people who were elected to debate the merit of new bills, pass bills into law, and examine whether existing law should be repealed, are now proposing that "inconvenient" laws should be ignored rather than changed. They have abdicated their offices, given up, surrendered, and are leading this nation to ruin.
Congress has the power to change law. It should do so, rather than using a crisis merely to inflame.
But we all know why Congress will not act. It will not act because it would be "inconvenient" to act. It will not act because the same representatives who passed the original laws might have to admit that they may have been wrong. It will not act because action would require courage, and our elected representatives to Congress have revealed themselves to be cowards.
And now, political shaming has led to calls to insurrection.
This cannot end well. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Those who oppose current policy have been given license to act in violent ways ("...we fought...").
No, that's not merely political hyperbole. As Ms. Waters continued to speak, her speech became more and more reflective of a demand for civil disobedience of a physical nature.
Someone will be hurt. The response will include firearms. And the worst will begin.
Monday, June 25, 2018
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Hey NFL, QuitCherBitchin
Received via email from a friend. Yes, it's a "chain letter". But as a 10 year Navy vet, I completely agree. I won't change the text or address, but - in my opinion - this goes for the NBA as well.
===
To the NFL and its players,
If I have brain cancer, I don’t ask my dentist what I should do. If my car has a problem, I don’t seek help from a plumber! Why do you think the public cares what a football player thinks about politics? If we want to know about football, then depending on the information we seek, we might consult with you, but even a quarterback doesn’t seek advice on playing his position from a defensive tackle!
You seem to have this over inflated view of yourselves, thinking because you enjoy working on such a large scale stage, that somehow your opinion about everything matters. The NFL realizes the importance of its “image” so it has rules that specify the clothes and insignia you can wear, the language you use, and your “antics” after a touchdown or other “great” play. But somehow you and your employer don’t seem to care that you disgrace the entire nation and its 320 million people in the eyes of the world by publicly disrespecting this country, its flag, and its anthem! The taxpaying citizens of this country subsidize your plush work environments, yet you choose to use those venues to openly offend those very citizens.
Do you even understand what the flag of this country means to so many of its citizens before you choose to “take a knee” in protest of this “country" during our national anthem?
You may think because you are paid so much that your job is tough, but you are clueless when it comes to tough. Let me show you those whose job is really tough.
You are spoiled babies who stand around and have staff squirt GatorAid in your mouths, sit in front of misting cooling fans when it’s warm, and sit on heated benches when it's cold. That’s not “tough” that's pampered.
You think that you deserve to be paid excessively high salaries, because you play a “dangerous" game where you can incur career ending injuries. Let me show you career ending injuries!
You think you that you deserve immediate medical attention and the best medical facilities and doctors when injured. Let me show you what it’s like for those who really need and deserve medical attention.
You think you have the right to disrespect the flag of the United States, the one our veterans fought for, risked limbs and mental stability to defend, in many cases died for. Let me show you what our flag means to them, their families, and their friends.
You believe you are our heroes, when in reality you are nothing but overpaid entertainers, who exist solely for our enjoyment! Well, your current antics are neither entertaining nor enjoyable, but rather a disgrace to this country, its citizens, all our veterans and their families, and the sacrifices they have made to ensure this country remains free. You choose to openly disgrace this country in the eyes of the rest of the world, yet with all your money, still choose to live here rather than in any other country. People with even the slightest amount of “class” will stand and respect our flag.. Where does that put you? You want to see heroes… here are this country's heroes!
You can protest policies, the current government, or anything else you choose, that is your right. But when you “protest” our flag and anthem, you are insulting the nation we all live in and love, and all those who have served, been injured, or died to keep it free. There is nothing you can do or say that can make your actions anything more than the arrogance of classless people, who care about themselves more than our country or the freedoms for which our veterans and their families have sacrificed so much, to ensure you have the “right” to speak freely. Our country is far from perfect, but if you can point to any other country where your freedom and opportunities are better than they are here, then you just might want to go there and show respect for their flag!
===
To the NFL and its players,
If I have brain cancer, I don’t ask my dentist what I should do. If my car has a problem, I don’t seek help from a plumber! Why do you think the public cares what a football player thinks about politics? If we want to know about football, then depending on the information we seek, we might consult with you, but even a quarterback doesn’t seek advice on playing his position from a defensive tackle!
You seem to have this over inflated view of yourselves, thinking because you enjoy working on such a large scale stage, that somehow your opinion about everything matters. The NFL realizes the importance of its “image” so it has rules that specify the clothes and insignia you can wear, the language you use, and your “antics” after a touchdown or other “great” play. But somehow you and your employer don’t seem to care that you disgrace the entire nation and its 320 million people in the eyes of the world by publicly disrespecting this country, its flag, and its anthem! The taxpaying citizens of this country subsidize your plush work environments, yet you choose to use those venues to openly offend those very citizens.
Do you even understand what the flag of this country means to so many of its citizens before you choose to “take a knee” in protest of this “country" during our national anthem?
You may think because you are paid so much that your job is tough, but you are clueless when it comes to tough. Let me show you those whose job is really tough.
You are spoiled babies who stand around and have staff squirt GatorAid in your mouths, sit in front of misting cooling fans when it’s warm, and sit on heated benches when it's cold. That’s not “tough” that's pampered.
You think that you deserve to be paid excessively high salaries, because you play a “dangerous" game where you can incur career ending injuries. Let me show you career ending injuries!
You think you that you deserve immediate medical attention and the best medical facilities and doctors when injured. Let me show you what it’s like for those who really need and deserve medical attention.
You think you have the right to disrespect the flag of the United States, the one our veterans fought for, risked limbs and mental stability to defend, in many cases died for. Let me show you what our flag means to them, their families, and their friends.
You believe you are our heroes, when in reality you are nothing but overpaid entertainers, who exist solely for our enjoyment! Well, your current antics are neither entertaining nor enjoyable, but rather a disgrace to this country, its citizens, all our veterans and their families, and the sacrifices they have made to ensure this country remains free. You choose to openly disgrace this country in the eyes of the rest of the world, yet with all your money, still choose to live here rather than in any other country. People with even the slightest amount of “class” will stand and respect our flag.. Where does that put you? You want to see heroes… here are this country's heroes!
You can protest policies, the current government, or anything else you choose, that is your right. But when you “protest” our flag and anthem, you are insulting the nation we all live in and love, and all those who have served, been injured, or died to keep it free. There is nothing you can do or say that can make your actions anything more than the arrogance of classless people, who care about themselves more than our country or the freedoms for which our veterans and their families have sacrificed so much, to ensure you have the “right” to speak freely. Our country is far from perfect, but if you can point to any other country where your freedom and opportunities are better than they are here, then you just might want to go there and show respect for their flag!
Friday, June 1, 2018
Unfriendly Persuasion (yes, a cinema reference)
Roseanne is Roseanne. Her shtick hasn't changed in forever. She's been rude, crude, offensive, and intentionally provocative over her entire career. One wonders whether she was like that before beginning her career, but it doesn't matter: we knew exactly what to expect when Roseanne was in the spotlight. This is neither to condone nor condemn her recent tweets. It is merely to note that, with Roseanne, "you get what you pay for".
Samantha Bee is Samantha Bee. Although relatively new on the scene, her shtick hasn't changed either. She clothes her insults in the vestment of political "satire". Just like Roseanne, it's hard to separate Bee's political policy ridicule from personal insult.
America has always had "insult comics". My personal hero is Don Rickles, whose act was all about making gentle fun of members of his audience. But gentle fun: people loved being a target of Mr. Rickles because they knew that he wasn't being personal. He was being funny. He never used profanity, he never broke the wall separating "public" from "private", and he always ended his show by thanking his audience for being "in on the joke". Always funny - but never truly insulting.
Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield - even Groucho Marx, whose ad-libs were both clever and hilarious - made us laugh without feeling uncomfortable. Insult comics all, and all were funny. How many of us walked away laughing after hearing their routines, and repeating some of the funniest lines to each other?
But over time, the separation between "political" and "personal" became blurred, and today we have people like Barr and Bee who intentionally offend in order to make a point. It's instructive to watch their audiences. There are a lot of uncomfortable laughs ("Should I find this funny? Should I laugh?"), but not much else. And those laughs are mostly the result of an inventive way of using some form of profanity. Neither Barr nor Bee is truly funny.
I have a theory about that.
It goes something like this: "You're not listening to me and you won't agree with me, so I'm going to embarrass you in public to force you to agree with me and to force you to do what I say."
The problem is that the person who is being attacked is often not the person being embarrassed. In point of fact, the person making the attack ends up apologizing. Any political point of the attack has been lost in the meanness of the words being used. It has been both hidden and erased by the ferocity of the words used.
And that, I think, is the point: to destroy any reasonable political discussion by poisoning it with personal animus. The political becomes personal - and the personal becomes the point of the attack.
This is nothing new. The use of "forcing the political to become personal" has been going on forever in American politics... or has everyone forgotten about Hamilton's duel with Burr? Personal disgust between two political opponents ended up with one of them dead and the other's career destroyed.
(Heh - it's a good thing that dueling was outlawed hundreds of years ago. I can think of dozens of political opponents who would willingly face each other with single-shot flintlocks at 30 paces!)
One can make the argument that the election of Trump has changed the face of political discourse, but I prefer to think otherwise. I think the election of Trump has uncovered the cross-party and cross-ideology hatred that has been simmering all along, and Trump's use of non-traditional media to bypass the left-controlled traditional media "wall" has only uncovered the pot.
It has been said that Trump is not the disease: he is a symptom. In that, I somewhat agree. But I think Trump is less a symptom than a result: after being ignored by those who espouse ideologies that play well in coastal liberal enclaves but not in "flyover country", and after a compliant media that assisted a leftist ideology while hindering a conservative ideology, the reaction was the election of someone who had no history in the political "swamp" (unfortunate term, but DC was built on a swamp after all) and who could not be easily "controlled" by either side.
Trump's election is not a rejection but an acknowledgement of the coarsening of political discourse, of which Barr and Bee are partly responsible. But they are only two. There are dozens of others who have been provided media platforms and encouraged to insult their ideological opposites, and who only make themselves seem silly and childish when doing so - while also failing to convert anyone on the other side of the aisle.
Barr and Bee are both the result of the "if you don't listen to me, I'll get personal" school of politics. They both probably know that they probably won't convince anyone, as their form of persuasion is anything but gentle. But they continue in the hope that "somebody will listen".
A word to both: to convince, cajole.
Samantha Bee is Samantha Bee. Although relatively new on the scene, her shtick hasn't changed either. She clothes her insults in the vestment of political "satire". Just like Roseanne, it's hard to separate Bee's political policy ridicule from personal insult.
America has always had "insult comics". My personal hero is Don Rickles, whose act was all about making gentle fun of members of his audience. But gentle fun: people loved being a target of Mr. Rickles because they knew that he wasn't being personal. He was being funny. He never used profanity, he never broke the wall separating "public" from "private", and he always ended his show by thanking his audience for being "in on the joke". Always funny - but never truly insulting.
Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield - even Groucho Marx, whose ad-libs were both clever and hilarious - made us laugh without feeling uncomfortable. Insult comics all, and all were funny. How many of us walked away laughing after hearing their routines, and repeating some of the funniest lines to each other?
But over time, the separation between "political" and "personal" became blurred, and today we have people like Barr and Bee who intentionally offend in order to make a point. It's instructive to watch their audiences. There are a lot of uncomfortable laughs ("Should I find this funny? Should I laugh?"), but not much else. And those laughs are mostly the result of an inventive way of using some form of profanity. Neither Barr nor Bee is truly funny.
It goes something like this: "You're not listening to me and you won't agree with me, so I'm going to embarrass you in public to force you to agree with me and to force you to do what I say."
The problem is that the person who is being attacked is often not the person being embarrassed. In point of fact, the person making the attack ends up apologizing. Any political point of the attack has been lost in the meanness of the words being used. It has been both hidden and erased by the ferocity of the words used.
And that, I think, is the point: to destroy any reasonable political discussion by poisoning it with personal animus. The political becomes personal - and the personal becomes the point of the attack.
This is nothing new. The use of "forcing the political to become personal" has been going on forever in American politics... or has everyone forgotten about Hamilton's duel with Burr? Personal disgust between two political opponents ended up with one of them dead and the other's career destroyed.
(Heh - it's a good thing that dueling was outlawed hundreds of years ago. I can think of dozens of political opponents who would willingly face each other with single-shot flintlocks at 30 paces!)
One can make the argument that the election of Trump has changed the face of political discourse, but I prefer to think otherwise. I think the election of Trump has uncovered the cross-party and cross-ideology hatred that has been simmering all along, and Trump's use of non-traditional media to bypass the left-controlled traditional media "wall" has only uncovered the pot.
It has been said that Trump is not the disease: he is a symptom. In that, I somewhat agree. But I think Trump is less a symptom than a result: after being ignored by those who espouse ideologies that play well in coastal liberal enclaves but not in "flyover country", and after a compliant media that assisted a leftist ideology while hindering a conservative ideology, the reaction was the election of someone who had no history in the political "swamp" (unfortunate term, but DC was built on a swamp after all) and who could not be easily "controlled" by either side.
Trump's election is not a rejection but an acknowledgement of the coarsening of political discourse, of which Barr and Bee are partly responsible. But they are only two. There are dozens of others who have been provided media platforms and encouraged to insult their ideological opposites, and who only make themselves seem silly and childish when doing so - while also failing to convert anyone on the other side of the aisle.
Barr and Bee are both the result of the "if you don't listen to me, I'll get personal" school of politics. They both probably know that they probably won't convince anyone, as their form of persuasion is anything but gentle. But they continue in the hope that "somebody will listen".
A word to both: to convince, cajole.
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