Now lemme hear an amen from the choir!
I open with the words of Paul, from his letter to the Romans, chapter 16, verses 18 and 19: “For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple. For your obedience is come abroad unto all men. I am glad therefore on your behalf: but yet I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil.” And I turn to his first letter to the people of Corinth, chapter 2, verses 4 and 5: “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”
And what I would have you do, friends and neighbors, brothers and sisters, is go out into the world of blogs and the mediamilieu and see for yourselves what enticing words, good and fair, have been deceiving the hearts of the simple these past few days; I would have you seek out this wisdom of men and women and judge it for yourselves. —Go, read the words of Jeanne D’Arc, as she muses on the differences between a politician with a spine, and a politician without. (A spine is a spine, friends and neighbors, for all that it’s not found till the last minute of a long, dark midnight.)
Read for yourselves what Dwight Meredith says, when he tells us that getting things done is the only reward we need to do more things, and read for yourselves the signs he’s selected to prove to himself (and you, brothers and sisters) that things are, indeed, getting done.
Read the words of those who ought to be simple concerning evil, and who yet have the temerity to ask troubling, complex questions, about the actions we take against those we have named our enemies, and the actions taken against those who exhort us to stop. Read the words of those few who even have the temerity to ask troubling, complex questions of those who speak and preach in demonstration of power.
Come, read the burden that Sisyphus has shrugged off before you, and ponder the meaning of these two little words, so simple when it comes to doing good: Never again.—And if I might be permitted a moment to shrug off my own conceit, Prof. Reynolds: perhaps the Canadians and Europeans are so “sanctimonious” because they aren’t haphazardly proposing the unthinkable crime of locking up people whose only crimes are the colors of their skin, the countries of their origin, the names of their religions. If the Europeans and the Canadians are feckless in this regard, sir, then feck is something I never want; it is something utterly antithetical to the ideals of the country I thought I was in. Never again means never again. Not nohow, noway, nobody.
Ahem.
Then, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, I would ask you to hearken to the words of William Rivers Pitt, when he says to us, “In my faith, I stand on the precepts of the religion, and not upon any innate worthiness within the hierarchy. I do not do so because I am some sort of rebel. I do so because the truth that first breathed life into the Church is still worthy, even as the mortals who pretended to carry its banner are not. I did not leave the Church. It left me.”
How breathtaking in its arrogance, this wisdom of women and men! Exhorting us to show mercy and compassion, even to the least among us, even to those the law has condemned to die; affirming that the struggle is its own reward; demanding that our other cheek always be ready, no matter how foolish or dangerous it might seem to turn it. Urging us to set aside the words of those who serve only their own bellies. (Concerning those who ask complex and troubling questions of evil, evil in the face of which we are told to be simple, I can only offer up a question of my own: how can we be wise unto that which is good if we are not also wise in what we name to be evil?)
We fight, or so we are told by some, to preserve our way of life, the fine Judeo-Christian values which built this nation and made it strong. Let’s for the moment allow it; let’s set aside the many (and valid) arguments against this simple assertion. But set aside with it those notions of Judeo-Christianity drawn from the strictures of Deuteronomy or the comforting fevre dreams of Revelations. (I do not trust Biblical exegesis from those who can’t even read Tolkien properly.) Instead, let’s turn to Paul—crabby, vicious, mean-spirited, priggish Paul, nèe Saul the Pharisee, the tax collector; let’s take up what are perhaps the finest words he ever wrote, in that first letter to those immoral, deplorable Corinthians:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
“Charity.” Some translate it as “love,” but I find this a pale echo of what he meant: agape, Paul wrote; an open love, a social love, a love for your fellow humans. A charitable love. The greatest of that which abides.
If this is the Judeo-Christian value that we’re fighting for: charity; if we keep that always in mind, if we understand that when we speak we speak only our parts and that when we see the world around us we see it imperfectly, unclearly, through a dark glass; that none of us can ever know the whole of any of it, and so we must all in all our dealings act with charity, with the benefit of our doubts (though they may be legion)—if charity is what we’re fighting for—
Well, hell. Sign me up.
(Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose—)
One down (again).
Matt’s right; this is a killer argument against Pickering. Now: let’s dig into Owens. Shouldn’t be too hard…
Further fall-out from miscellaneous internet research.
Boning up for Becca’s game (Anamnesis, it’s called, and there’ll be more to say later, in a variety of fora; in the meanwhile, go read what John and Chas, who’ll also be playing, have to say to each other [and Emily, and Vince] about gaming in general, and I’ve got something rattling around in the back of my head about the four stances and how any truly postmodern art needs to take them into account—is that sufficiently hubristic? But for the moment, I’m distracted—ooh, shiny!), in which I’ll be playing a rather (for me) odd character; then, it’ll be an odd situation in a number of respects: it’s been four years? five? since I’ve played in a role-playing game, and much longer since I’ve played in one I didn’t also have a vested interest in as a GM. (But since the terms probably don’t mean that much to most of you reading this, I’ll skip for now the whole discussion of how the way we went about it ended up making the distinction between GM—the “gamemaster,” running the scenario and presenting the world—and players—the ones playing individual agents reacting to that world—problematic at best.)
But! That isn’t why I fired up TexEdit to type up a new post. No, it’s this article I stumbled over from the rations Journal on urban lessons learned from the Russian experience in Chechnya. There’s 57 lessons, starting from the very general and strategic (Lesson 4: Overall Russian command lacked continuity and was plagued by too much senior leadership at the operational level) to the very specific and tactical (Lesson 52: Helicopters need stand-off weapons), but it’s the first one that makes you stop and go, huh:
Lesson 1: Military operations could not solve deep-seated political problems.
You don’t say.
Oh: and if you think I’m thinking there’s several more of these strategic and operational lessons that Yankee chickenhawks will have an opportunity to learn for themselves in Iraq, well, you’re every bit as smart as I thought you were.
The perfect murder.
Indeed, under federal law, causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules—a misdemeanor with a six-month maximum prison term—is a less serious crime than harassing a wild burro on federal lands, which is punishable by a year in prison.
If you aren’t reading the New York Times’ series on McWane, Inc. [1] [2] [3], you should be.
Boom and Bust.
Via TalkLeft (who got it from the Horse): most Americans believe that between 1 and 5 million people live in poverty in the US. It’s actually more like 33 million, at or below the poverty level.
What’s truly astonishing about this astonishing number is that most Americans are also far more generous (and far more realistic) in setting the poverty level than the federal government: 47 percent of the respondents believe that it takes almost $35,000 a year to just adequately feed, clothe, and house a family of four.
The Census Bureau classifies a family of four as poor if its cash income is below $18,104 a year.
(A family of three: $14,128. A couple: $11,569. On your own: $9,039.)
So a lot more people are making a lot less money than most Americans realize.
When you couple that with the fact that 19% of Americans believe their income puts them in the top 1% of income earners, and another 20% hope to be 1%ers when all their hard work finally pays off—
Suddenly, it becomes a bit more clear how Rush can get away with this garbage when the reality of American taxation looks a lot more like this.
A lot’s been bandied about regarding Bush’s unguarded assertion that the dwindling of the long-since-squandered surplus will create “a fiscal straitjacket for Congress”; that the administration’s “real” goal in running up unsupportable deficits while slashing and burning taxes is to force reductions in “unnecessary” government services. The result is a sort of Machiavellian vision of wasteful tax-cut-and-spend Republicans who depend on being voted out of office every now and then (because long term, everyone’s voted in and out of office now and then) so that the hard choices and the unpopular service cuts and meager tax hikes are actually made on the Democrats’ watch. (Since the Bush administration still shows absolutely no sign of curbing spending themselves.) —I think we need to take an even longer view. I think Professor DeLong is quite right to note:
Deep in the core of American ideology and culture is a constellation of beliefs and attitudes: belief that the future will be brighter than the present; that what you accomplish you make with your own hands; that individuals should rely on themselves, not the state; that people can cross oceans and mountains to make for themselves a better life; and that those who succeed do so not through luck and corruption but through preparation and industry. These are not beliefs conducive to social democracy.
We think we’re richer than we are. We think we all have more of a shot at striking it rich than we do. We don’t want to think about how much of our lives is dependent on contingency and luck; we don’t want to think about the one bad day that could be between us and the street. We willfully do not want to see how many people live in poverty, and we don’t want to think about how crushing that poverty really is. We don’t want to admit it could ever happen to us, and even if it has, we want to plan to secure what will happen to us, someday. When all our deserving hard work finally pays off. Any day now.
DeLong is right: this ignorance and moonshine is not conducive to notions of sharing the wealth and leveling the playing field.
So it’s not that Republicans depend on deficit-hawk Rubinomics Democrats to come along and clean up after them. We all depend on Republicans to run the whole shebang into the ground and on the rocks from time to time so that things get so bad our better instincts reluctantly kick in, and we get New Deals and Great Societies and some small measure of economic sanity. A different sort of Boom and Bust.
It’s just—how far off are those rocks? How much further till the bottom? 33 million are there already. How much larger does that number need to get before we see it?
Maybe we all need to get out more.
Tomorrow belongs to—
Friday, 10 January 2003—the special registration deadline for Group 2: male citizens or nationals of Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, born on or before 2 December 1986.
Remember what happened to Group 1?
Via Boing Boing, here’s Lisa Rein’s invaluable page of resources for those who want to keep the pressure on. “Our security is not enhanced by the targeting of innocent people who report voluntarily to the authorities,” she writes. “This is has resulted in a chilling effect on the cooperation of law-abiding, concerned citizens and immigrants with federal agencies as these agencies are increasingly being seen as over-zealous and, in many cases, all too willing to violate the civil and human rights of the people they come in contact with.”
“I’m totally scared,” says Chedli Fathi, a Tunisian whose student visa expired in 2001. “Because after Jan. 10 there is no exception or excuse for not showing up. But if I go, I can get arrested, and if I don’t go, I can get arrested. In both cases, it is bad for me.”
Those quick to leap on Fathi for staying on an expired visa—and thus being in violation of a law—need to keep in mind what an incompetent bureaucracy the INS is.
Look folks—imagine you’re dealing with your DMV. Imagine Flunky #1 messes up your driver’s license application and tells you to come down to the office. Then, when you do go down to the office as requested Flunky #2 notices you drove there AND you don’t have your driver’s license (because, well, they screwed up your application). Flunky #2’s boss recently decided they now had a no-tolerance policy on such things and he has you arrested and thrown in jail.
Then, of course it doesn’t stop there. The special DMV judge operates his own special DMV court which has its own rules. Speedy trial? Nah. You could be there awhile. Who will support your family? Who knows. Chances for appeal? Not really.
The DMV judge deports you back to a country you haven’t lived in for 10-15 years. Your American children wave goodbye, as does your wife.
But, enough of that, I’ve got to go work on my next Tech Central Station column about the inconveniences of airline security for business travelers and my Fox News column about startling new evidence that Michael Bellesiles is a pedophile.
—Atrios
For what it’s worth: the INS’s own page on Special Registration requirements for Groups 1 – 3.
The other 157,999.
The first casualty, of course, is truth. —Here’s what some of the others looked like. (For those all het up to kill the Iraqis in order to save them, to murder civilians in order to improve their quality of life, to overthrow a dictator by destroying and displacing his citizens: where have you been the past 12 years?)
Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.
Which comes from Donna Ladd’s take-no-prisoners jeremiad against the very idea of nominating Charles W. Pickering, Sr., to the Fifth Circuit Court. “Apologists are actually giving a would-be circuit judge an ovation for once prosecuting the low-life scum of the KKK,” she wrote, holding up to the light one of Pickering’s strongest claims to having reconstructed himself. —This was written, mind you, back before Lott stuck his foot in his mouth and got demoted from Senate Majority Leader to chair the Senate Rules Committee; back before Frist, Lott’s replacement as Majority Leader, vowed to turn the Lott imbroglio into “a catalyst for unity and a catalyst for positive change.”
Well, Bush has just handed him a doozy of a test for those catalysts. —It’s time to dust off the Case Against Pickering, again:
Judge Pickering’s opinions on the bench also raise questions about his commitment to fairness and to the federal courts’ historic role as dispenser of equal justice. Many of his civil rights opinions betray an indifference, and even outright hostility, toward those seeking to remedy perceived injustice. Judge Pickering displays a tendency to inject his personal opinions and biases about the state of the law, the losing plaintiffs, or judges in other cases, raising serious questions about whether he is ruling based on personal views or on the dictates of the law. He has also acted in other ways that call into question his commitment to fairness, including refusing to appoint another judge to decide whether he should be recused when a party alleged that he had a personal bias and threatening or imposing sanctions in cases in which sanctions did not appear to be warranted. He has been reversed by the 5th Circuit Court over decisions in which he not only failed to follow controlling legal precedent, but failed even to mention it.
Set aside for the moment the question of his commitment to civil rights, if you like; refuse to contemplate his past actions, papers written in law school, his support for the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee. Forget that the Fifth Circuit has the highest minority population by percentage of any circuit in the country, yet only one black judge and two Hispanic judges. (We are, after all, a color-blind society, with no need for such corrective action.) Forget the whole Trent Lott deal; he was an isolated case, and anyway, John Ashcroft is still Attorney General. Forget all of this and ask yourself the big question, you know, the one on merit:
Is this man even competent to ride the Fifth Circuit?
The Free Congress Foundation says yes, on the basis of three of over a thousand decisions—and writes off Pickering’s paper used to strengthen enforcement of Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation laws as “an academic treatise on a legal question” and support and even use of the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee as a vote between sealing or burning the Committee’s records.
Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.
The questions to ask yourself, now; is the appalling hubris of renominating Pickering to better grease the skids for the renomination of Priscilla “Enron” Owens? Are both nominations designed to draw attention away from the unabashed looting that’s the centerpiece of the Bush plan for “economic recovery”? Is the whole mess nothing more than a contrived bundle of awfulness to distract us from North Korea? Why hasn’t Tom Ridge declared a mauve alert yet? And how much more cynical do we have to get to keep up?
It’s all starting to come together.
Barry’s got a good summation of pithy, meaty posts from other people about the hows and the whys of the Bush “stimulus” package; Atrios types up a revealing table from the New York Times of who will save how much—but it’s Ted Barlow who points out what will, perhaps, prove the most chilling of unintended consequences. At least, I’m hoping it’s unintended. It’s easy enough to believe this White House is utterly unaware of the snarling, snapping wolves at the doors of about 50 statehouses and countless counties and cities and other municipalities. Right? —The alternative is that Wile E. Coyote’s in charge. Which, come to think of it, would be an improvement.
Synonyms: accessory, accomplice, affiliate, ally, auxiliary, branch, buddy, chum, clubber, co-operator, cohort, collaborator, compatriot, comrade, confederate, consort, fellow, mate, offshoot, pal, partner, peer, playmate, sidekick.
When he sat down with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in a Chicago hotel suite on July 18, former Missouri Senator John Danforth assumed he was the only one in the room being considered for Vice President. After the intense three-hour meeting ended, Danforth came away thinking he might be offered the job. It never occurred to him that Cheney, the man in charge of Bush’s selection process, was also his competition. “Cheney flew [me] up to Chicago,” Danforth recalled last week. “I took that to mean Cheney had declined it.”
—from “How Bush Decided: His choice of Cheney says a lot about how the Governor sees himself and what he learned from Texas and from his father,” 1 August 2000, cnn.com.
It is assumed you’re reading Talking Points Memo on a daily basis; certainly, he’s a must-read on North Korea, as he has been on South Dakota, as he has been on Trent Lott, as… You get the point. But I wanted to take a moment to make extra special sure you all read “Vice Grip,” his latest for The Washington Monthly. —Paradigm shift begins at home, after all.
États Rouges, 2050.
She was not a particularly bad bishop. She was, in fact, quite typical of Episcopal bishops of the first quarter of the 21st century: agnostic, compulsively political and radical and given to placing a small idol of Isis on the alter when she said the Communion service. By 2037, when she was tried for heresy, convicted and burned, she had outlived her era. By that time only a handful of Episcopalians still recognized female clergy, and it would have been easy enough to let the old fool rant our her final years in obscurity. But we are a people who do our duty.
I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved that at last, after so many years of humiliation, the majority had taken back the culture. Civilization had recovered its nerve. The flames that soared about the lawn before the Maine statehouse that August afternoon were, as the bishopess herself might have said, liberating.
According to Fichte a “real völkische community” would egalise itself once the nationalist consciousness started growing. All members of this community would be entitled to a fair and sober existence, if they would keep themselves far away from “foreign influences” and “decadent luxury.” Just like Fichte, the Khmers believed the “völkische” body to be a biological organism that could only remain healthy when completely isolated from “foreign countries.”
“Daddy says the ethnic cleansing is an obsession to the Angkar. The Angkar hates everyone who is not a real Khmer. The Angkar wants to clean the democratic Kampuchea from all other races. They are seen as the source of all problems, all corruption and all injustice. Only when they are gone, the real Khmer culture wil florish again,” Ung writes in her book. She must keep at distance from “ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and other minorities that are racially depraved.”
—Eric Krebbers, quoting in English the Dutch translation of Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father.
Via Atrios, Archpundit, and Joe Conason. “The first Civil War was, on the whole, a gentlemanly affair,” writes Bill “Brother Number One” Lind; “the second one wasn’t.” —Well. The first time is a tragedy, the second a farce; and those who do not learn from history are doomed to end up on its slag heap.
Rule No. 1.
Not to be a kill-joy, but rule no. 1 in any online community is this: Do not feed the trolls.
They crawl out of the woodwork, these trolls, to say things intended only to stir up trouble. They want you to get angry. They want you to fly off the handle. They love it when you go off in a high dudgeon at great length and with furious vituperation. They don’t care what you say, how clearly you hold the moral high ground, how you raze their pathetic arguments to the foundations and salt the very earth they stand on. They just know if they say something outrageous, they’ll get attention, and when the current furor dies down, they’ll just say something outrageous again. Moreso, maybe. Try to top themselves. (You remember your T.A. for Tots? It’s a classic case of confusing Warm Fuzzies and Cold Pricklies. If the PC Police didn’t exist, they’d have to invent them—wait a minute—)
So: in case you hadn’t figured it out: Ben Shapiro is a stone-cold troll. —For fuck’s sake, Jerry Falwell apologized for saying this shit. (Whether he really meant it in his heart is between him and his God and immaterial to the matter at hand.)
It’s become hip in certain circles to refer to “the Virgin Ben” when dealing with Shapiro—mostly because of how he spun this lifestyle squib. —This is a classic case of feeding the troll. It’s not so much red meat as the Goblin Queen’s appropriately righteous indignation, but running gags like “the Virgin Ben” will feed his persecution complex and give him enough of a crusader’s high to keep him going for weeks on end. (Why, if he’s lucky enough, maybe he’ll break out of the blogosphere and get his own Working For Change profile.)
Of course: online, if you don’t feed the trolls, they eventually go away. Not entirely—we will always have trolls with us—but it’s possible to maintain a civil discourse over and around them, through them and past them; if you can’t resist, if you give in to temptation and the troll gets what the troll wants, well. You can always ban IP numbers.
Out here in the real world, if you don’t feed the trolls, the Heritage Foundation will still give them columns.
Life is unfair. Dammit.
Do the good work. Do the substantive work. Speak truth to power and all that jazz; turn over what rocks you can and tell everyone what you find there. Take responsibility for your news and hold accountable the official voices who are supposed to bring it to you. When the chattering classes swallow unquestioned the latest bile from entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, demand better. (Because trolls who get others to agree with them are the most dangerous trolls of all.) But Ben Shapiro? The Virgin Ben? Come on.
I mean, it’s like kicking a puppy. You know?
Further reason for Derbyshire & Co. to despair.
You won’t find Henriette Cecile Beigh and Andrea Yoshiko Uehara on the new “Celebrations” page of The Oregonian, but someday you might find them in the history books. That’s because Rita and Andi are transgender trailblazers. Born 55 years ago as Henry Charles Beigh and Andrew Iwao Uehara, they are, perhaps, the only same-sex couple to become legally married in the state of Oregon, a feat accomplished during the brief time that Andrew had become Andi and Henry had not yet become Rita. They even have the certificate to prove it.
Of course, there’s also the dentist who has very good reasons for the state not to cut funding for dental care for the 400,000 poorest adult Oregonians, and the community activist (and black single mother!) who says, “That’s all great and wonderful, but the point I’m trying to make is, you work at a social-service program, but the only people of color are the janitors. You work with all black people, but yet you don’t have any people of color in your personal life. How serious are you about your fight to change things?” —So those National Review bigots pundits could take their pick, really.
A taste of things to come,
or, A cheap shot.
Nassau County, I think, provides a so-ghastly-it’s-funny microcosm of what happens when incompetent, crony capitalist Republicans leave fiscal prudence to tax-and-spend Democrats.
An American institution that deserves to be honored.
Thanks to Kevin, I’ve now got a quote that pretty much sums up my reaction to Charles Rangel’s (D-NY) proposition to bring back the draft:
Assume that all governments lie. Do not accept the idea that the violence of war can be justified by claiming to prevent a larger violence. Understand that all war is a war against children, and therefore can not be justified, whatever the reason.
—Howard Zinn, historian
In other words, I’m much closer to TalkLeft than Daily Kos. —Or, as Utah Phillips puts it (rather, as Utah tells us Tom Scribner put it):
Well they’d roust him out; he would hobble down the hall, pick up the receiver of the phone, swear at whoever was on the other end for being exhumed from his room, and I’d finally say, “Tom, Tom!”—this was on my nickel—“Tom, slow down a minute! It’s Utah, I got a question for ya.”
He spoke that workers’ shorthand, that sort of slices the fat off of any kind of argument. One time I said over the phone, “Tom, I’m in a debate over here at the Unitarian Church on bringing back the military draft; they’re going to try to bring back the military draft so I’m debating it. Now, you tell me what you think.”
Well, there was a long pause. Then the voice come back at me over the wires. “Nnuh. When I started in the forest, most of my workmates was Scandahoovians: Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Swedes. Most of ’em left the old country fleeing conscription to fight another dumb European war. Yeah, the wealth of the West was built on the backs of draft dodgers. It’s an American institution—deserves to be honored.”
And yet, the dog still hunts—
Had a weird experience over a year ago or so, watching television: one of those commercials came on. You know. A cross-section of America in natural light, looking with simple, quiet pride directly into the camera’s slow-mo pan, a subdued but stirring “America the Beautiful” jangling sweetly under an earnest voice-over. Thing of it was, I was arrested, sat up, jaw dropped, my shrivelled little heart growing three sizes all at once. Because what the voice-over was saying was this:
I believe there’s a reason we are born with free will.
And I have a strong will to decide what’s best for my body, my mind, and my life.
I believe in myself.
In my intelligence, my integrity, my judgement.
And I accept full responsibility for the decisions I make.
I believe in my right to choose—without interrogations, without indignities, without violence.
I believe that’s one of the founding principles of our country.
And I believe that right is being threatened.
The greatest of human freedoms is choice.
And I believe no one has the right to take that freedom away.
And I thought to myself, damn. Propaganda works. —Of course, the choir always likes to be preached to, but still. It felt good, you know?
I had another of those moments, just now. We’re lounging around, doing a note-taking, idea-sketching, Thai-take-out-snarfing, muscat-drinking, Pym’s-nibbling day, with videos, the Spouse and I. There’s a La Femme Nikita marathon on Oxygen!, and while neither of us ever got into the show, it’s a fine enough thing to have on in the background between flicks. Anyway. Commercial break, and here’s a simple little commercial from Familyplanet, telling us there’s a difference between hope and despair, and that there’s hope yet for a future where people around the world can have the tools and the knowledge they need in their own hands to plan for the families they want, to enable them to negotiate one of the contingencies of life, and not be at its mercy.
And I had another one of those weird, unsettling, moments where I agreed wholeheartedly with what a commercial was telling me.
I mean: if it really were as bad as some say, don’t you think the choir would be preached to just a little more often? —Or maybe we’re just playing it cagey. Trying not to tip our hand. Is that it?
Bookmark this.
The Progressive’s McCarthyism Watch, via Rittenhouse. Gonna be a long and interesting two years…
