The Two Chelseas

I'm unsure which Chelsea I like best, Chelsea Handler or Chelsea Clinton.

Chelsea Handler is a striking woman who was born in 1975 in New Jersey to poor parents, a Jew and a Mormon. If you never heard of her, she's an award winning stand-up comic with a long-running talk show on cable. She's quite funny if you don't mind cringe-worthy smutty jokes (okay by me). Her sidekick on the talk show is a dwarf.

Chelsea Clinton was born in 1980 and grew up in the White House where she learned good values from her wealthy Protestant parents, a President of the United States and a future Secretary of State. Today she is a hedge fund manager, and she is about to marry in a ceremony that will cost a rumored 3 million dollars. She did not invite the Obamas to her wedding. (Well, we are in a depression, and money is tight.)

This reminds me that in 1965 I invited Lyndon Johnson to my wedding at City Hall in Los Angeles. He didn't come, but someone in his office sent a nice note and signed his name.

I think in the end I have to go with the older Chelsea. The younger one is not all that amusing.

The Gong of Arnold Schwarzenegger

On Wednesday our acting governor vetoed a bill that would have given farm workers the same overtime pay earned by all other hourly workers in California. He did not want to upset agricorporations, who feast on cheap labor.

The social injustice is obvious.

Very hard stoop labor on farms is so badly paid that, in many places, the only people willing to do it are undocumented migrants. If you raised the pay, you might attract local citizens. But Schwarzenegger is too dim to think ahead. Steroids have solidified the gong he calls a head.

The Irrelevant Press Democrat

Last Sunday's Press Democrat ran its usual confused commentary on "warring tribes" in local and national politics. "The issues that motivate these warring tribes are no longer relevant," someone wrote. The issues he cited as irrelevant are mostly environmental, including resistance to big chain stores, and doubts raised about massive land development by multinational corporations. The PD, a decent paper in some ways, has never met a corporation whose backside it didn't fondle.

The newspaper's curiously ahistorical claim is that the warring political tribes are dying off, being replaced by young sane centrists. The evidence cited for major change is the Sonoma County elections of Supervisor Efron Carillo in 2008 and the election of Supervisor Mike McGuire in 2010.

In fact the struggle between greedyguts and compassion predates written history and shapes each new generation as it matures. Greedyguts doesn't become irrelevant in the same sense that newspapers become irrelevant.

I don't remember what position the Press Democrat took on Carillo when he ran in 2008. I do recall that the PD opposed McGuire, who won without its useless endorsement.

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From my perspective, what has been happening is not the rise of new neutral or conciliatory generation but the demise of the local Republican party. Sonoma County voters today are overwhelmingly Democratic. The local plutocracy has responded to this fact in three shrewd ways. (1) They have encouraged Republican politicians to switch parties and run as centrist Democrats. (2) In races that end up being contested by two progressive Democratic candidates, Republican voters are advised to vote as a block for the more polite Democrat. That can decide a close election and give the well-funded and well-organized Republican machine a little clout with the winner (they hope). (3) The plutocracy has orchestrated a campaign (see the claims above) to convince Carillo and McGuire that they are and should be political castrati.

Are Carillo and McGuire the sort of Democrats who believe in science (climate change), equal rights for gays, compassion (immigration reform), fiscal sense, no unnecessary wars, careful county planning, full employment, etc? I don't know Carillo, but he has forcefully resisted racial profiling (and been denounced for it). I've known Mike McGuire for ten years, and it's obvious that his core values are progressive. The Board of Supervisors has not shifted to some neutral pro-corporation center, as the Press Democrat hopes. The Board has moved Left.

Gary Goss

Dog Whistle Politics

You might wonder why the ancient Chinese built the Great Wall. It was to keep out Mexicans, Canadians and Mongols; it didn't work.

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William Rivers Pitt wrote in Truthout about "dog whistle" politics. "Dog whistle" is a new name for an older Republican practice. Wikipedia, Pitt notes, defines the term thusly: Dog-whistle politics, also known as the use of code words, is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. The term is an analogy to dog whistles built in such a way that humans cannot hear them due to their high frequency, but dogs can.

Pitt is concerned because of coded messages coming from places like Pat Robertson's "700 Club." Robertson has nothing but praise for attempted Adolf Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a trained theologian.

Pitt wrote: "The interview basically stated that it is the holy work of any good Christian to assassinate a fascist tyrant, and given the serial ways these right-wing media people have used those exact terms to describe the President, it is a pretty short leap to realize the "700 Club" was essentially sending the [coded] message that whoever puts a bullet in Obama will be considered a saint on the level of Bonhoeffer."

The invention of lying

A turning point in the history of American political dementia came when the Confederacy trudged home from the Civil War with a silver medal. The pathological thinking the South had needed to justify slavery lives on 150 years later in the current hate campaigns against people of color, against science and education and against the elected national government.

Some racists today threaten to adopt what they call "second amendment solutions." That's a call for a second Civil War. There will be--of course--no war. Even the badly warped Republican leadership, trained in hateful lying, will stop short of another open rebellion. What concerns me are attempts to reason with these addled prevaricators. It cannot be done successfully. They are not equipped to participate in rational discussion.

The Second Amendment

Recently our dismal Supreme Court--may five of them burn in Hell with broken backs--ruled that the Second Amendment to the Constitution granted individuals the right to bear arms. What interests me, though, is the fact that for many years leading liberal intellectuals argued that the founding fathers had passed the second amendment to make sure that militias, not individuals, could bear arms. (Not all of the left agreed. My closest Marxist friend, ready for the revolution, owned a submachinegun he used to fire off his back porch on the Fourth of July. When I attempted to fire my 1873 Winchester, he stopped me on the grounds that it might explode and endanger the children.)

The argument that Mason and Jefferson and Madison had written a Constitutional right for militias to bear arms but no parallel right for the cavalry to ride horses or for the navy to sail ships had long troubled me. In fact, all militias have the right to bear arms--it's part of the definition of a militia. The argument that the second amendment protects the rights of soldiers to carry guns makes no sense.

Here is what really happened. The founding fathers granted each of us the right to carry a sword or a one-shot musket. Looking ahead, they correctly envisioned the Sergeant Yorks and Audie Murphys of future wars, draftees who had learned to shoot accurately on their own time. It did not occur to Madison that some sociopath might invade a public school, hold hundreds of children prisoner and massacre many of them with a one-shot weapon. The times (and arms) have changed.

If we want to ban guns entirely, we will have to amend the Constitution. If we want to regulate guns (as we regulate cars), we might have to amend the Supreme Court.

--Gary Goss

The Future of Our Form of Life

Some American voters tend to vote thoughtlessly. If they are annoyed by the weather, they may vote someone out (and vote into office an idiot). That's a sad fact of life.

Consider the Republican agenda below. It's what we will get if the Republicans win in 2010.

• Privatize Social Security
• Cut taxes for the rich
• Log the national forests
• Expand offshore gas and oil drilling
• Privatize highways and waterways

Not to speak of more wars. Not to speak of climate change and its impact on the future of our species.

We need to make a maximum effort to turn back the Tea Party Republicans.

Gary Goss

Winter's Bone

About once in two years I see a striking movie, something original. Recent examples include MONSTER'S BALL, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and MICHAEL CLAYTON. Last night I saw WINTER'S BONE, and I'd like to recommend it.

This is a film impossible for me to compare to others, but after a night of troubled sleep I 'm going to try. I'd say it combined EMMA (or CLUELESS) with the Orson Welles thriller TOUCH OF EVIL. It's like a novel of manners set among violent hill people who are cooking crank. A teenage girl sets out to keep her family together. . . .

Reactions to the movie will differ, I believe, according to one's background. A major part of my family left Kentucky four generations back in order to escape from the Hatfield--McCoy feud. We came from people somewhat like those depicted in the film, and I felt the cultural kinship. I saw something upbeat in the movie. My wife, with nothing like that in her background, experienced the film differently, perhaps because she lacks a "been down so long it looks like up to me" mentality. She found the movie grim but memorable.

Survival

A message to Republicans from Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives. . . nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

--Gary Goss

Idiocracy

Recently Keith Olberman referred to Republican leaders as resembling "dogs chasing a car."

Dogs chasing cars, yapping, aren't dogs at their best. Dogs can't take on cars. They sometimes get caught under the wheels. Their tremendous effort is wildly brainless, and so dangerous you'd rather not watch.

The last forty years have witnessed a steady decline in intelligence among Republican leaders, and now the party is headed by people who seem genuinely clueless. That didn't happen by chance. Step by step, over the years, the Republican Party has been moved to the Right when centrist politicians lost in party primaries. Finally they fell off a cliff.

At this point, to win a Republican primary, you have to agree that the world is 10,000 years old, that climate science is a Marxist plot, that Hawaii is Kenya, that corporations are people, and that, although the government supplies you with social security and medicare, you stand alone, a proudly free individual who doesn't need government (except for food, clothing, shelter, water, safety, highway maintenance, and entertainment). You take for granted that progressives exist as a form of unmotivated absolute evil. You're willing to make the planet uninhabitable if you can get rich in the process.

To believe the above you must be mighty dumb, but American politics has long been shot through with absurdities, including the belief that slavery was a good thing for people with dark skin, and proof of this was to be found in the Christian Bible. Learning to accept that rubbish built a level of political lunacy into the South that might last until the end of time, which some expect in a month or two.

The running dogs of Transnational Corporations are seen most clearly in elected leaders who continue to defend BP in ways that even BP finds embarrassing. When it comes to electing stupid people to congress, we have finally reached bottom. And that's the way some of us like it. Some hope to live in an Idiocracy.

--Gary Goss