American Psyche Archives · Page 31 of 32

November 28, 2011

Guy Fawkes

To tell the truth

November 29^th 2011

I was reading the latest on the Leveson inquiry, which is the British investigation into the sometimes horrible excesses of Britain’s tabloid newspaper culture. Front and center in the investigation, headed by Lord Justice Leveson, is an examination of how much damage was done to individuals who were spied upon and betrayed by the tabs. In a more general way, the panel examines how much damage these newspapers have done to British culture. Among other things the Lord Justice is tasked with is determining what, if anything, needs to be done to bring these entities to heel.

It’s the type of situation that cries out for a good dose of irony, and it came in the form of a website called “Guido Fawkes”, which published the formal statement of a witness scheduled to appear before the inquiry, three days before that scheduled date. The judge is demanding that Paul Staines, the owner of Guido Fawkes, reveal the source(s) that leaked the statement to him, and is considering what punishment is appropriate to the case, which violates the law much in the way revealing empaneled grand jury deliberations is in America.

Where the irony comes in is that Guido Fawkes, better known to English children as Guy Fawkes, is the man who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605, had his plot discovered on November 5^th 1605, and was executed several months later. The fifth of November is commemorated in England as “Guy Fawkes Night,” a cheery holiday – considering – that features bonfires and fireworks and combines Halloween and Fourth of July. It is the Guy Fawkes mask that was worn by Prisoner #5, better known as “V” in “V for Vendetta” and has since gone on to become a symbol of Anonymous and Occupy. Continue reading “Guy Fawkes”

November 12, 2011

Now is the Winter of our Discontent

And oh, look! It’s started to snow!

Matt Tiabbi hit it out of the park with a piece this week entitled “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests” (available at the Rolling Stone magazine site here: http://tinyurl.com/7q9f4zh)
Tiabbi summed up the motivation behind the Occupy protests succinctly: “People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.”
Continue reading “Now is the Winter of our Discontent”

October 29, 2011

The 99% Solution

The target isn’t “the rich”

October 29^th 2011

A few days ago, Michael Moore, the documentarian and author, wrote a piece for his blog entitled “Life Among the 1%”

Moore, who has gross income – or is it just revenues? – in the region of $50 million since 1989, qualifies as a one percenter.

Now somehow, in the heads of the apologists of the GOP, that means that the 99%ers are supposed to hate Michael Moore. The idea is that he’s an eeevil plutocrat who, true to his class, feels entitled to strip America of all her assets, giving nothing in return. An idle coupon clipper who feels his justification lies in his inherited wealth. A speculator who leaves millions in poverty so he can make untold millions jacking up the price of daily necessities for personal profit. Maybe he sends hundreds of lobbyists to persuade Congress not to pass laws that might impact insurance companies, such as a decent health care program, or to understand the profits of war make a few thousand dead American kids more than worth while.

Continue reading “The 99% Solution”

October 5, 2011

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy America

October 6^th 2011

I’ve just come back from reading the responses of a group of right wingers who were discoursing – if that’s the word for it – on the #OccupyWallStreet movement. These same people, who loudly cheered the demonstrations by the so-called Tea Party in 2009, are now utterly furious that this motley collection of “grubby, out-of-work hippies” are doing much the same thing. One even compared the moral worth of the two groups by noting that a lot less Teabaggers got arrested, compared to the Occupiers. That sort of led to a discussion on what sorts of behavior warrant arrest, and if Teabaggers, with their guns and placards comparing Obama to Hitler or the Joker, were really much better a group of protesters than the Occupiers, who usually showed a higher ability to spell their messages correctly, if nothing else.

Of course, it overlooks the basic fact that whereas the Tea Party never was anything more than a phony grass roots ad campaign cooked up by the Koch Brothers and Faux News, the Occupiers, with their slogan “We are the 99%”, actually do represent a groundswell of sentiment in America.

And that has the Teabaggers, dupes of the wealthy elite the Occupiers oppose, very nervous and upset. How dare this rabble publicly disrespect the Masters?

Continue reading “Occupy Wall Street”

September 25, 2011

The Death Penalty

Killing time

September 25^th 2011

The main problem with the Troy Davis execution wasn’t that the man was almost certainly innocent of the crime he was being killed for; the problem was that no civilized nation should have the death penalty in the first place.

I’m not going to discuss the particulars of the Davis case. If you somehow haven’t heard about it, there’s a million places on the web to find thousands of different opinions, pro and con.

Instead, I’m going to discuss the guilt or innocence of the people who murdered him. That would be you and me, since it was done in our names.

Troy Davis is far from unique. There are 140 men walking free today who had been on death row, found guilty of a capital crime by twelve peers on a jury and sentenced by a judge. Through the work, not of the justice system, but legal volunteers, mostly in the Innocence Project, all 140 men were saved from execution by proof that they did not commit the crime. Witnesses lied. Cops fabricated evidence. In some cases, everyone was simply mistaken. Cops, anxious to close a case that was stirring public passion, arrested someone who might plausibly by the suspect, and witnesses, anxious not to have to spend months on the case, testified with far more certainty than they felt.

Continue reading “The Death Penalty”

September 19, 2011

Teabags

No longer just under the eyes

September 19^th 2011

It was a sign of the times. Even as they ignored demonstrations in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, CNN breathlessly reported that in a totally meaningless straw poll in California, Ron Paul was the winner! Nearly 834 votes were cast (833, actually), and Paul got 44.9% of them, or 374 votes. Rick Perry was second with 29.3%, or 245 votes. Mittens was a distant third with 8.8%, or 73 votes. The poll didn’t break down the rest of the votes (141) but I would be very surprised if Jon Huntsman, the only other GOP candidate who isn’t a whirling loon, got ten votes. So, assuming that Mittens and Huntsman can qualify as sane, that means that out of 833 GOP delegates, 10% at most voted for candidates who are possibly sane.

Slow news day. No mechanical-orchestra type ‘debates’ from the GOP in flag-bedraped caverns that Jon Stewart memorably described as “looking like Betsy Ross’ vagina”. No Democratic politicians caught in minor sex scandals. And they didn’t care to discuss actual news stories, like the unfolding Greek debt crisis, or the UN vote on Palestine, or that Obama wants to tax capital gains like regular income.

Continue reading “Teabags”

September 11, 2011

9/11 Times Ten

Al Qaida lost. But so did America

September 11^th 2011

A lot of people are observing the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Most simply want to remember the people who died that awful day, and to resolve to make such events a remote part of human history. Some want to use it to spread hate, usually against Moslems, sometimes against Jews. (That crackpot theory about how all Jews were told not to report to work at the Twin Towers on 9/11 is still making the rounds, and a lot of people still believe the Iraqis had something to do with it.)

Others simply want to keep Americans scared and docile.

It’s right and proper that we mourn the innocent dead, and condemn the sort of sick thinking that leads to such attacks. We’ll celebrate the heroism of the first responders, and those on Flight 93.

Many will question exactly what did happen that day, since much remains unresolved and unknown. The Truthers will clamor for attention even as their numbers slowly ebb.

Continue reading “9/11 Times Ten”

September 9, 2011

Girl Geniuses

Mixing the sublime and the outlandish

September 8th 2011

Time to take a break from Politics. Ron Paul is the leading GOP candidate this week, Obama is giving a speech on labor that has unions ready to bolt the Democratic Party, it doesn’t get much crazier than that, so let’s take a break.

Have you ever had a situation where you encounter two new things in your life that both strike your fancy, and even though they have little or nothing to do with one another, they become inescapably wedded in your mind, so that you can’t enjoy one without thinking of the other?

In my instance, the two items are a folk album by a Danish artist virtually unknown in the United States, and a comic book. About the only thing they have in common is that the central person involved in each is female.

Continue reading “Girl Geniuses”

August 28, 2011

Goodnight, Irene

Strong winds and flooding came, not from the storm, but the media

August 27th 2011

Hurricanes can be a real problem. Insular Americans will immediately think of Katrina, and some will even believe that was the worst storm damage in recent memory. Folks in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba will all beg to differ, having recently taken damage from storms that dwarfed Katrina. And then there is China and Japan, who have their share of war stories.

It’s only a matter of time before a major hurricane hits a major American city squarely, as Katrina did New Orleans, and does at least as much, if not more damage. Not only is this statistically inevitable, but the odds of it happening in any given year increase as global warming makes the likelihood of really big storms greater.

Continue reading “Goodnight, Irene”

Category: American Psyche