Remember all the wonders of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, those amazing cradles of Western Civilization? Remember Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Newton, Copernicus and Einstein — fathers of modern science, culture and art? Do the names Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr ring a bell — men who gave birth to our modern ideals regarding justice?
And what about Western Civilization’s many miraculous offspring — such as life-saving medicine, outstanding universities, electricity, the telephone, moving pictures, human beings landing on the moon, the airplane and central heating?
While babysitting my three-year-old granddaughter Mena the other day, I was suddenly overwhelmed by her wonderfulness. “I’m thinking that what you have produced here is probably the height of Western Civilization!” I exclaimed to my son Joe when he came to pick her up later. “Mena is smart, kind, positive, curious and creative. She’s perfect.”
And then I looked over at my son, who is the prime example of a perfect loving and caring father. “Oh hell, Joe, you are the height of Western Civilization too!”
I’m so proud to be a member of a society that can produce such outstanding, high-quality youth as these ones.
Sadly, however, what Western Civilization is really going to be the most remembered for among future historians — if there will be any left, that is — is going to be climate disaster, planet-wide radioactivity, an economic crisis of epic proportion, greedy and grubby leadership, grand-scale human subjugation, pedophilia and pornography, waterboarding, voting-machine fraud and the bloody and anonymous disfigurement and death of hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children by monstrous drones, gristly cluster bombs and nightmare-quality uranium-enhanced weaponry that maim and kill indiscriminately. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/uk-backs-bid-to-overturn-ban-on-cluster-bombs-6259139.html
Is it too late to change?
PS: When my daughter Ashley was in first grade back in 1994, I wrote a book that her class could read in preparation for their big spring camping trip up to Tilden Park. The moral of its story was that people learn by doing — and that we are NOT stuck in our set ways forever but truly are able to change. (And also, perhaps, that if civilization as we know it is destroyed by our greedy and inept leaders, there’s still a slim chance that we might still be able to survive by living off the land?) Anyway, here’s my tale (illustrations are included below, free of charge):
Ms. Brown’s First Grade Class and the Great Outdoors
Let’s explore some of the facts we might know and the feelings we might have about city life. Let’s then compare them with the facts we might know and the feelings we might have about the Great Outdoors.
Here’s a fact: All the first graders in Ms. Brown’s class know pretty much everything they need to know regarding the rules of city life. You all know how to flush a toilet, buckle a seat belt, brush your teeth, turn on a television, get dressed, get on and off a school bus, bicycle to the corner and turn on and off the kitchen light.
You know how to make a bowl of cereal. You know how to answer the telephone, how to open the door and how to eat your vegetables. You know when bedtime is. You know when to get up. You know where to put your boots away. You know where to find the ice cream section when you go to the grocery store.
You know who to tell when you see a bad guy. You know who to ask for help with your homework. You know what to do when you are at school. You know what to do when you are at home.
You know a lot about city life.
But what about feelings? Most of you feel at home in the city. Most of you feel pretty familiar and comfortable with the rules and ways of city life. Right? Right.
Here’s a fact: There are no televisions, cars, lights, telephones, toilets, refrigerators, houses, bicycles, schools, streets or video games in the Great Outdoors. They don’t even have Barney!
Life in the Great Outdoors is very different from life in the city.
There are a lot of fun things to do in the Great Outdoors, but they are fun in a different way than the fun things you find in a city. There is dirt in the Great Outdoors. Lots and lots of dirt. There are trees. There are creeks and rivers. There are bushes, plants and grass. There is lots and lots of fresh air.
There are almost no people. There is lots of room to run around in. There is a lot of silence and a lot of interesting sounds. There are animals and birds in the Great Outdoors. And the Great Outdoors has a whole new set of rules that are completely different from the rules of city life.
But what about feelings? You might not feel familiar with this new set of rules. You might wonder how you are going to learn all the new rules of the Great Outdoors. You might feel doubtful. You might feel scared. You might feel curious. You might even feel EXCITED by the chance to learn about a new way to survive successfully in a whole new place, to go to and beat a whole new level in the game of life!
Here’s a fact: If you spend time learning about the Great Outdoors, you can learn a lot.
But what about feelings? Even if you only spend an hour or two a week learning about the Great Outdoors, sooner than you think you can learn enough to feel comfortable there — to feel as much at home in the Great Outdoors as you do in the city.
(This book is dedicated to the memory of Ms. Denise Brown, teacher extraordinaire, the best teacher ev-ah)
The Tattlesnake – Yankee Doodle Kydoodles and Other Yowling Yowfs of the Teabaggers Pox Americana Edition
“What then is freedom madness? God forbid. For freedom and madness exist not together.”
– Epictetus, “Golden Sayings,” No. XXIX
Non-corporate dissectors of the political scene, and Board Certified (in the Rand Paul sense) observers such as myself, have learned to read the stray tea leaves crushed beneath the corporately-financed circus wagon of this year’s New, Improved Tidal Wave GOP (“Democracy’s Detergent!”) and the occasional bits of actual useful information that drop off the Big Media buffet table of parboiled conventional-wisdom offal determined fit for the rustics by the over-paid ‘two legs good, two legs with money great’ crew that pounds a dismal beat between Beltway Washington and the glass canyons of New York.
A pattern has emerged as clear as the unblinking eyes of Karl Rove when he’s lying through his teeth; despite the noises made by national pollsters — whose questionable practices include antiquated techniques from the ‘one ringy-dingy’ age of rotary-dial Bakelite phones, and a habitual penchant for loading poll questions with such baloney as, “If you had to vote for a really fantastic Republican candidate or a Democrat who nightly dines on dogs and cats, which would you prefer?” or “Yes, I know it’s the headquarters of Koch Industries; I wondered how you planned to vote this election?”– it’s now plain internal polling done by the GOP has revealed that their bumble-brained Teabagger candidates are losing far and wide, and by more drastic margins than the MSM Silly Swillers of Echo Valley would have us believe. Hence, nearly a week before the actual election, we have Republican charges of ‘vote fraud’ and the vow that voter intimi – er – ‘integrity’ squads will be dispatched to those areas rife with denizens who made the poor choice to be born with skin darker than Sarah Palin’s and, unlike politely accommodating indigent whites in certain parts of the country, insist on voting against those who would gladly serve them up by the shovel to feudalistic Chinese-style capitalism.
Your Tattler could not avoid sketching out what these Teabagger ‘voter integrity squads’ might look like. Will they be in full 18th century drag from tricorn hat to knee-britches with silk stockings and ask questions of voters in the formal English of two centuries past? “Hark thee, fair citizen! Dost thou possess the required credentials to participate in this seemly exercise of democracy?” If so, I dost predicteth a spate of hilarity as laughing voters push by the costumed lunkheads, most probably thinking they are hawking the opening of a new Long John Silver’s rather than checking voter identification.
Of course, Ohio’s Republican House contender Rich Iott may dispatch his Nazi re-enactors to prevent any chicanery at the polls. Will they be dressed in complete SS regalia and posing their queries in a fake German accent, ala Col. Klink? “I must zee your papers now, schweinhundt!” This, too, affords too much room for risible ridiculousness, if not danger for the Nazi imposters – some unamused WWII vet might grab a rifle and take potshots at them from his wheelchair or walker.
But then, the Teabaggery may appear in yellow t-shirts with the affable “Don’t Tread on Me” embossed in acrylic on the front, accompanied by a gun strapped to their leg in one of those goofy Velcro thigh holsters. Sure, they seem to mean business, but the thigh-holster can be a knotty problem – if the straps are too loose, the pistol humiliatingly falls down on your foot and resembles nothing so much as a public depantsing; if the straps are too tight, it cuts off blood flow and the Teabagger tough guy is reduced to hopping around on one foot, trying to intimidate minority voters while restoring circulation to his numb leg. “Hey – Ow! Ow! – you got legal identification to vote – Ow! Ow! – here?” That path, too, leads to nothing other than comical YouTube videos and an excuse for some droll Jon Stewart barbs on The Daily Show.
But no matter what garb the Teabaggers don — whether it’s grim ‘Men in Black’ mufti like Joe Miller’s amateur-hour security guards in Alaska, or the simpler straw hat with hanging teabags stapled around the brim – the fact is that most Teabaggers hail from rural, caucasian areas of the country. While they are confident they intimately know the psyche of black people from long exposure to lawn ornamentation and Bill Cosby reruns, and no doubt believe they will be greeted in Inner City regions by courteous men and women emulating our gracious president, such may not be the case. I can think of several black folks of my acquaintance who would not take kindly to being confronted by some rude peckerwood demanding their papers. They would definitely not refrain from putting the ‘Mr. T’ in Tea Party, so to speak.
What’s more, if Hispanics are the vicious beheading drug gangsters the trembling Teabaggers have been told they are, how many of Beck’s Crusaders will want to hang around in front of polling places in Latino neighborhoods, waiting for the Machete of Death to fall? These Tea Partiers are, after all, gullible ante-bellum conservatives who are scared of almost everything, including any concept hatched after the Dark Ages, and unlikely to chance confronting the living representations of the actors Sharron Angle sticks in her Halloween Party TV ads.
There will be intimidation at the polls — the Teabaggers will be terrified into sitting in their vans with the doors locked, hunched down, trying not to wet themselves. This GOP ‘project’ will be as big a bust as Rove’s electoral math in 2006.
Add to that the number of voters who find criminally stomping on a passive woman’s head at a public event offensive, and you have an upset for the Democrats in the making, and the Teabaggers quickly jettisoned from the GOP ranks damned with the only epithet the cynical Republican elite consistently honors, ‘loser’.
Contrary to the news-cycle fantasies of Media Conventional Wisdom to which would-be president Rudy Giuliani succumbed, mostly a confection of giddy press releases, past performance, and inbred cocktail party jabber, the fanatical Teabagger GOP – a small minority never much more than empty rage, incoherent ideas, and shifting wind, financed by fools with more money than brains — peaked months ago and has been in decline ever since as Democratic candidates rose in even the archaic landline-phone polls that favor older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative voters – in other words, the core of the Tea Party movement. If the Punditocracy that has for the past year woven the fiction of massive GOP gains in 2010 were not so obstinate in supporting their own discredited imaginings, and getting a pat on the head from the large corporations that dispense their paychecks, they might look at this information from a different angle, and I don’t mean Sharron: Around the country, the Democrats have pulled even or ahead with the voters the desiccated, weakened GOP desperately needs to get elected.
Hang down your bulbous Chuck Schulz head, Charlie Cook.
Sure, it’s possible that Dems will stay home in droves to teach Obama some kind of obscure lesson, which is reminiscent of the story about the boy who chopped off half his foot with an axe for attention. He got the attention he craved – his family thought he was nuts and stuck him in a mental hospital, and he had to live out his life limping around with half his foot missing. And disgusted independent voters might decide to commit economic suicide by entrusting their futures to babbling goofballs like Angle and Rand Paul, and corporate vipers like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and complete the job of obliterating our Constitution, rewarding the rich at the expense of the rest of us, eliminating social programs, and shipping what’s left of our jobs overseas or forcing us to work for slave wages.
Then, I’ll hang down my head, but I won’t be alone – millions of Americans, in a few years, will feel the full impact of Reverse Robin Hood Republicanism and be doing the same, and what’s left of America will depend on the thin thread of ink flowing from the president’s veto pen.
If it comes to that point, you’d better hope Obama doesn’t hold a grudge and decide to teach the country a lesson.
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Kydoodle: To make loud, meaningless noise.
(From the book “Words” by Paul Dickson.)
Yowf: One whose importance exceeds [their] merit. Rich or influential fools.
(Coined by Gelet Burgess who also invented the words ‘blurb’ and ‘bromide.’)