Eric The Blue

Eric the Blue writes to the editor

Mary Kiffmeyer is our former secretary of state, a current member of our state legislature, and a member in good standing of the moonbat wing of the Republican party.  The local daily recently published a column of editorial opinion by her.  All I could think of was what a dope she is until, finally, by writing a letter to the editor, I was able to exorcise the curse of having her rattling about in my otherwise chaste mind.

30 July 2010

To the editor:

I’ve read Mary Kiffmeyer’s July 28 Counterpoint and have come to the conclusion that all the huffing and puffing is a deliberate rhetorical strategy intended to disguise the fact that she has nothing sensible to say.  

She argues, for example, that “there is every reason to suspect that people who steal identities in other aspects of their lives would also do so at the polls.”   But identity thieves do not act out of mere perversity, exercising their powers at every turn in order to revel in deceit.  No, it is a way of getting another person’s money, and, since people are not paid to vote, there is no reason to do it at the polls.  

At least Kiffmeyer is occasionally entertaining--like when arguing that “academic studies” show that “about 85 per cent of felons are Democrats.”  For fun, I researched on the Internet the criminal pasts of a few of the voting felons she names in her article.  Her summaries of their offenses are sometimes incomplete, as in the case of Dustin James Norring, who, in addition to the priors Kiffmeyer mentions, was in 2004 cited in Washington County for operating an ATV in a road ditch.

Sounds like a Republican to me.

--Eric Jorgenson  

Writers read

The New Yorker is publishing this summer stories by twenty authors under age 40.  The anointed ones were asked, in interviews, a series of questions, including: "Who are your favorite authors over forty?"  As their answers indicate, the question is a little ambiguous.  Does Homer count or not?  Karen Russellseems to  have thought that maybe he doesn't, as her list ended with "whole cemeteries of the well-over-forty deceased ones."  Nevertheless, Homer was named by two others.  By my count, the twenty young writers named 112 different "older" writers as "favorites."  Here, for your perusal, with links to the Wikipedia articles, are the ones named more than once, with the number of "votes" in parenthesis.

Marilynne Robinson (6)
Mary Gaitskill (5)
Edward P. Jones (5)
Toni Morrison (4)
Lydia Davis (4)
Deborah Eisenberg (4)
Philip Roth (3)
J.M. Coetzee (3)
Lorrie Moore (3)
Denis Johnson (3)
Jonathan Franzen (3)
Padgett Powell (2)
Roberto Bolano (2)
Jeffrey Eugenides (2)
Joy Williams (2)
Stuart Dybek (2)
Alice Munro (2)
Don DeLillo (2)
Jim Shepard (2)
Homer (2)
Bruno Schulz (2)
Peter Carey (2)
Kazuo Ishiguro (2)
V.S. Naipaul (2)
Colm Toibin (2)
George Saunders (2)
Saul Bellow (2)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2).

Netflix: New in Town

Renee Zellweger, playing an ambitious corporate type, accepts a temporary assignment in small-town Minnesota, where she colors every polygon in a paint-by-number "romantic comedy."  This movie is woefully bad.  You long for the end of each scene, but when it arrives, the anticipated relief is soon drowned beneath a new stack of stale stupidities.

 

Wingnuts interpret song lyrics

Campaigning for re-election in 1984, President Reagan said Springsteen's "Born in the USA," like his own Administration, was bringing "a message of hope" to America.  A few days later Springsteen, introducing "Johnny 99" at a concert, speculated that the song, about an unemployed auto worker who commits a murder, was probably not one that the President had been listening to.  Actually, the President probably had not been listening to "Born in the USA," the hopeful message of which is captured in such lyrics as:

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

[Snip]

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "Son, don't you understand?"

[Snip]

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone

I remembered the "Born in the USA" dust-up yesterday morning when, temporarily in control of the home's electronic devices, I was listening to disc 2 of "The Essential Springsteen," which includes "American Skin (41 Shots)," about Amadou Diallo, the 23-year-old Guinean immigrant who on February 4, 1999, was shot and killed by New York City plainclothes police after he reached for what turned out to be his wallet.  The cops fired 41 shots and hit Diallo 19 times.  When the song was released, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association called for a boycott of Springsteen shows, and the right-wing commentariat denounced Springsteen--the Nihilist in Golf Pants, for example, cited the song in a listing of "Top 11 Lyrics that Prove Bruce Springsteen is a Leftist Scumbag."  Here is the song's lyric.  The last stanza is a refrain sung between and after the other two.

41 shots, and we'll take that ride
'Cross this bloody river to the other side
41 shots, cut through the night
You're kneeling over his body in the vestibule
Praying for his life

41 shots, Lena gets her son ready for school
She says "On these streets, Charles
You've got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you, promise me you'll always be polite
And that you'll never ever run away
Promise Mama you'll keep your hands in sight"

Well, is it a gun, is it a knife
Is it a wallet, this is your life
It ain't no secret (it ain't no secret)
It ain't no secret (it ain't no secret)
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living in your American skin

The song lyric does not really present the interpreter with difficult hermeneutical issues.  One stanza is from the perspective of the cops who, horrified by their mistake, kneel over the fallen Diallo and pray for his life.  Another imagines the mother of a boy such as Diallo:  understanding that her son could be killed in a similar incident, she counsels him on how he must behave around the police.  The other stanza, a chorus, is in a communal voice of woe and suffering.  The "American skin" of the title refers to Diallo, the cops, us all. 

Bruce Springsteen, leftist scumbag! 

John Hinderaker once weighed in on this topic in a post that I wish I could say exhibited an unusual degree of unhingedness.  Richard Hofstadter did not foresee the portentous choices we would face while filling our iPods. 

Readers write

A fan letter, by Nicholson Baker, to John Updike.  I have to say, it seems sort of churlish of The New York Review to block complete access, because I'm pretty sure the "teaser" you can see for nothing is more than half the whole.  For sure it includes the part I like best:

I thought what an amazing thing that Mr. Updike has been writing all the years that I have been growing up, and how I have come to depend on the idea that he is writing away as a soothing idea, and then I was reminded of Trollope, and how nice it must have been for writers back then to go about their lives knowing that Mr. Trollope was going to have a new book coming out soon, that it would be good; and they might not read all of the things he wrote, but they would read some, and they would know that what they didn’t read they were missing, but were comforted also that they knew what kind of man he was because they had already read a lot of what he wrote; and the idea they had of the man who gradually had written all these books was a powerful, happy thing in their lives.

I was trying to say something similar here. And when I wrote, here:

It's a comfort to think that, for those of us who did not know him personally, access to Updike is no less than before.  Being sustained by him, it's  a further comfort to contemplate how much his reading seems to have sustained him.  His love of books and learning is palpable on the written page.  Sometimes it breaks out with a little yell.  His introduction to Hugging the Shore concludes,

. . . I live again in a big white house with a view of saltwater.  I keep looking out the window.  The clean horizon beckons.  All sorts of silvery shadows streak the surface of the sea.  Sailboats dot it, some far out.  It looks like literature.  What a beautiful sight!

Gerson redux

I've just read over my post praising, sort of, Michael Gerson, who in a recent column flayed some of the more manifestly absurd specimens of Republican opinion.  I think now I gave him too much credit.  The notion that candidates such as Sharron Angle and Rand Paul are anomalies who should be rebuked by "responsible Republicans" is preposterous.  Gerson implies that these "responsible Republicans" are the ones who, unlike Paul, the party's candidate for US Senate in Kentucky, will not "retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, elderly and disadvantaged."  Ridiculous, but it would have been even more ridiculous had he named the Republican office-holders whose record is a rebuff to Rand Paul.

The Republican party is the one whose most ardent adherents sneer at such phrases as "commitments to the weak, elderly and disadvantaged."  Disadvantaged?  Fuck you.  I got mine, you try and get yours.  That's their whole philosophy, minus the fondness for war and guns.  Then there are the ones who claim Jesus as the source for these views!

Michael Gerson: giving credit where credit is due

Back in May, the conservative pundit Michael Gerson wrote a column that I thought was about 2.1 standard deviations dumber than his median dumbness quotient, and I exorcised my contempt here.  He has now written another one that is about 2.85 standard deviations less dumb than the median, and, being one to give credit where credit is due, I mean to link to it before quoting the best parts.  He wouldn't put it this way, but his topic, generally speaking, is the lunacy of the Republican "base," and the column doesn't really get going till he settles his gaze on Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for US Senate from Nevada.  He begins by allowing her to speak for herself, which, as her handlers have discovered, is REALLY A BAD IDEA:

"Our Founding Fathers," says Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle, "they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that's not where we're going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."

The Second Amendment is the one regarding a "well-regulated militia" and the right to bear arms.  Gerson:

A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt -- a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of "Second Amendment remedies" is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory.

Next up is Rand Paul, Republican candidate for US Senate from Kentucky, and his libertarian philosophy:

Since expressing a preference for property rights above civil-rights protections -- revisiting the segregated lunch counter -- Paul has minimized contact with the media. The fear is not that Paul will make gaffes or mistakes, but rather that he will further reveal his own political views. In America, the ideology of libertarianism is itself a scandal. It involves a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, elderly and disadvantaged, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments. Libertarianism has a rigorous ideological coldness at its core. Voters are alienated when that core is exposed. Paul is now neck and neck with his Democratic opponent in a race a Republican should easily win.

And, finally, on Arizona's new immigration law:

In addition, the Republican wave carries along a group more interested in stigmatizing immigrants than winning their support. Some conservatives have found Arizona's anti-immigration law a cause worth fighting for -- a law that is poorly written, ineffective, symbolically toxic and likely to be overturned.

Bravo!  Gerson nevertheless draws the wrong conclusion.  He's sure there will be a Republican wave in November, and that the party will be damaged by becoming identified with the likes of Angle, Paul, and the immigrant-bashers, all of whom will have their profiles raised by victory.  He seems genuinely puzzled by the evident reluctance of "responsible Republicans" to criticize the hooligans and crackpots.  But there is a good reason that these "responsible Republicans" go nameless in his column.  There hardly are any.  If they spoke up, they'd be purged, like Utah's Robert Bennett.  The Republicans can't even come close to winning elections without the votes of all The Crazies.  This identification that Gerson fears will occur upon the elections of such characters as Angle and Paul already has occurred.  It's imperative that Obama succeed, because the alternative is--take a look around. 

It's too late to worry about the Republican party.  Gerson should worry more about the country.

Bromwich on Rove

David Bromwich, writing in The New York Review, performs the work of a vivisectionist on Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.  Some of us just will not "get over"--the phrase is Antonin Scalia's--Bush v. Gore and we can't forget the case that was made for war in Iraq, either.  If not for the former we would have been spared the latter, too.  It appears that Rove, in his book, advances the familiar talking points regarding Iraq's nonexistent weapons: it wasn't just Bush, it was members of Congress and the international community, the intelligence agencies, everyone, who had arrived at the conclusion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  This conveniently elides some facts.

It is not true, for example, that no one doubted that Iraq had weapons and that it was necessary to go to war.  The reason our "coalition" was so small was that the international community did not, in fact, believe the case was strong.  Moreover, 23 senators voted against authorizing force in Iraq--21 Democrats plus Independent Jim Jeffords and Republican Lincoln Chafee.  (In the House, 133 representatives voted against the resolution authorizing war.) They were right to do so, and Bromwich is right to castigate Rove, who says now that these senators "were 'eager' for party reasons to do 'grave damage to their country's ability to win a war.'"  Having been proven right is no defense when the charge is that you are not a patriot.

Besides being false, the claim that "everyone agreed" is transparently lame.  Bush was president.  More than anyone, he was in a position to know.  The consensus, such as it was, arose because he said there was no doubt that Iraq had weapons.  When that proved false, it is not very impressive to plead that "everyone thought so"--they thought so because they didn't believe the president would start a war unless he knew it was necessary.

And it wasn't as if it was impossible to know.  Bromwich says that Rove's account "removes from view the international dimension of the reporting and inspection of WMDs in Iraq."  Yes!  I tried to make the same point here.  And it is not just Rove.  The justifications put forward now by the pro-war faction simply ignore that Iraq, in response to international pressure, had permitted United Nations weapons inpectors to conduct unfettered investigations at sites chosen by the inspectors.  These inspections, which began in November of 2002, turned up nothing.  By March of 2003, their work was coming toward an end, and Bromwich therefore aptly observes that what might have seemed a reasonable suspicion in September of 2002 appeared very doubtful by March of 2003.  That is why there was no vote in the UN Security Council authorizing war and no "coalition" worthy of the name.

I recommend Bromwich's entire article.  Do not delay as it may before long withdraw behind a wall requiring a subscription to scale.

Tom Emmer--there he goes again!

Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, has said something stupid again.  I know, dog bites man, but the details are fun!  He came out in favor of a lower minimum wage for waiters and waitresses, and claimed along the way that some of them earn more than $100,000 per year.  That raised a few brows among those capable of doing arithmetic.  The minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) is, for a full-time worker, less than $16,000 per year.  So to make $100,000 a waiter or waitress would have to make about $85,000 in tips.  That's more than $40 every hour, shift after shift, all year long. 

Among those with raised brows are workers at the Eagle Street Grille, in St. Paul, whose owner,  Emmer says, told him that some of the servers there earn into six figures.  The servers say they don't and are not pleased to hear their boss, arguing for a lower minimum wage, overstate their incomes by a factor of at least two.  So now the owner, an Emmer supporter, is doing a little tap dance between his employees and his candidate.  Emmer said nothing wrong, but no one at his place earns $100,000, he was misquoted, or "manipulated," or something.  Completely incoherent.  If no one at the Eagle Street Grille makes $100,000, then Emmer did say something wrong. 

One thing I love about Emmer is that his looniness, though consistent, conforms to the tenets of no coherent philosophy, unless screwing over wage-earners counts. He loves all guns, but his lunacy honors the shotgun, not the rifle.  In the Minnesota legislature, he co-sponsored a bill that would have prevented federal laws from taking effect in Minnesota unless approved by two-thirds of the members of both the State House and the State Senate--and even then the governor, which is what he wants to be, would have to sign on, too.  Why not just secede from the union?  Meanwhile, regarding tipped workers, he apparently wants to reduce the minimum wage to the $2.13 per hour that federal law permits.

We should adopt the federal standard for tipped workers.  We should nullify federal law.  An admirer might say Tom Emmer is "nimble." 

Netflix: "Food, Inc."

The forces of evil are arrayed unambiguously on one side, as in a Hollywood thriller, but now it's plausible, because the movie is a documentary and verisimilitude applies only to made-up stuff.  Moreoever, the villains are multinationals and anyone who goes to the grocery store is a victim.  The only sin is to bore and you aren't bored when contemplating depravity.

The food giants all turned down opportunities to make their case before filmmaker Robert Kenner's camera.  I have to admit, they're in a bad spot despite all the money.  When you take the Fifth, everyone naturally assumes you're guilty; but if you talk, Kenner might juxtapose your speech acts with footage from the killing floor at a big slaughterhouse, or the scene inside a corporate "chicken coop," and it's not exactly clear that you would not deserve it.

I eat meat and have always told myself that the animals do not have the kind of consciousness that permits knowledge of what's happening to them.  And is the food safety record of Goliath really as bad as the film suggests?  Nevertheless, many of the practices of the food giants are deplorable, it should not be against the law to criticize them, public policy should not help to make high fructose corn syrup more prevalent and affordable than fresh produce, and all of us need to be wiser consumers.  Shop around the periphery of the grocery store.  Read labels.  If the ingredients list is long and polysyllabic, don't buy the item.  Eat less but eat more fruits and vegetables.  Think about planting a vegetable garden or joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).  Overcome inertia by watching "Food, Inc."

On vacation

I'm in Wisconsin Dells with my family.  We left yesterday and are driving back to Minneapolis tomorrow.  Don't tell our kids that "family vacation" is an elevated expression for two 4-hour car rides separated by two nights in a mediocre motel, a trip to the water park, and a pig roast at a relative's new house.  At work, on Thursday, I mentioned to someone that this was my last day at work for a few days. 

"Mine too," she said, "where you going?" 

"Wisconsin Dells.  How about you?"

"Stockholm."

It was about 90 degrees here today, perfect for the water park, and I saw a lot of exposed surface area of middle-class, vacationing Americans.  Since we like to watch sea lions floating around at the zoo, perhaps some higher form of life would enjoy the sights at the water parks in the Dells.  I can't say I did, but there was one special little moment.  I was standing alone outside a women's dressing room waiting for my wife to come out with our daughters.  A few feet away a woman was standing with her daughter, who looked to be about four. When after a few minutes her husband appeared, she began speaking to him very loudly in a foreign language.  He listened to the end, then said something in an undertone.  He must have been defending himself, because her reply, in heavily accented English, though just as loud as before, was: "Well, you could have done that here, you fucking asshole."