WH ~~ Wake'N'Bake 101: Pants

A long time ago there was a sweet little book, the optimistically naive title of which was “All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten” (Fulghum, 1988), which many of you will recall fondly, I’m sure. It’s a whimsical, and slightly lyrical, and an altogether homogenized and sugar-coated vision.

Its charming conceit was that the rules of decorum and interaction which kindergarten–indeed, all “early childhood education”–is meant to inculcate and normalize are sufficient guidance, if applied, for successfully traversing the rest of life. Of course, it’s not true. It’s not “kindergarten” out there. We all know that.

It’s fucking middle school (or, Junior High, if you’re near my age): a cut-throat, mostly unregulated arena of vicious, pointless competition, hormonal chaos, social incompetence, and the raw struggle for power. THAT’S what you needed to learn from in school. That’s how “civilization” really works. One glance at Congress, or the bar of a well-heeled country club, or the corner pub, and you can see: Middle School NEVER ends!

Dr. Woody’s researches into cultural anthropology haven’t so far revealed whether or not there is a distaff equivalent of that most exquisitely humiliating of pre-adolescent, middle school/junior high, male domination rituals–”pantsing.” (If there is, I would like to hear more about it.) Having experienced it both as a pantser and a pantsie, I have clear memories of the experience. So it is with little hesitation that I declare the unfolding drama around St. Barry, the Pale, and the GOPhux/Teahadists to be akin to the big kids pantsing the weakling AND taking his lunch money.

Regard, if you will, ThePrez’ recent, apparently much admired fiscal planning speech. Thom Hartmann, the next day, was fuukin orgasmic with joy and admiration, and the Obamabots were delerious. FaceBook this morning was awash in congratulatory/laudatory ravings about how he’d reawakened the dream, revived hope, dispelled the baleful ghosts of Reaganomics, and on and on and on and…
I’ll grant you, from the standpoint of rhetoric (though his delivery really SUCKS!), composition, talking points, boosterism, ‘reality,’ all that, it was a pretty good address. But we forget, after the Bushevik years, that’s not really all that exceptional. He’s a pro. He “gives good speech.” You expect it, just as you expect a high-priced “escort” to “give good head.” And it was only a speech. He’s given them before, and been lauded by the peanut gallery (extra points: where was the original “peanut gallery?”), only to have the rhetoric and accoutrements amount to nothing in a stew of collapsed (non)promises. I think that must also be the case proceeding from here.

I mean: He’s been pantsed TWICE in six months by the GOPhux, once even before they had a majority in the House. In December, 2010, Shamwow renewed the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest for two additional years, after declaring six months earlier that they would be scrapped. (When the news taht the cuts were expiring was first going around, I tried to start a pool on FB: What percent will be renewed. But everybody in my cnical circle took “100%.” There’s no money that).

Then, they stuck it to him again on the interim budget agreement, forcing him to slather the lipstick of “VICTORAY” and the mascara of “Historic Compromise” on the snarling snout of the one UGLY pig, the BIGGEST DOMESTIC SPENDING CUTS IN HISTORY. About which he actually BRAGGED? On TV, to the nation. Chuy, jodido!

So you can imagine my surprise yesterday, when St. Barry, in his fiscal plan, declared among other things his firm intention NOT to extend the Bushevik cuts any further, and to instead levee stiffer taxes on the rich. This was what was giving the O’bots the vapors this morning. But hey! Really?

How does he propose to put tax INCREASES on the richest people through a Congress that is MORE hostile to his agenda (which is really, really strange, given how much his resembles theirs) when those folks were so easily able to mobilize their pet Congresscritters to beat back his efforts last time, for which he had the backing of MORE Members.

This is vexing to me. Who believes Prez. O’Bama can accomplish this miraculous occurrence should be able at least to explain how–short of divine intervention–he plans to do it.

Extra Points Answer: In vaudeville, the cheap seats, where patrons were in range to toss peanuts in displeasure; in TeeVee, the kiddee seats on the Howdy Doody Show.W

WWH ~~ Wake'N'Bake 101; Biology

Did Cell Phones Unleash Our Inner Rudeness? is the provocative question posed by the hed to this piece on the CNN blog today. Like the blessedly deceased Ronnie Raygun's last underpants, it dependz.

Dr. Woody is not a cell-fone communicant. He basically regards "Tweet" and "Twitter" to be the last, faint cries of our dying rhetorical canaries at the bottom of the technological coal-mine. Once, in the earliest swell of the boom, before all the "apps," and the i-pad, etc., I had a cell-fone. It made fone-calls. And answered them. So, I should best be regarded as a dedicated Luddite in the wonders thereof.

Nor am I a human ecologist*, but after rooting around for some decades in the periphery of the cellular communications revolution, I have a theory: it seems to me that the biggest reason for the success of the cell-fone is rooted in the biology of humans and our anthropoid and simian evolutionary and genetic progenitors.

Field Trip!

Remember the last time you visited a zoo? Did you go to the monkey house/enclosure? If so, you will have noticed that the din, of howl, and hoot, and shriek and cry, is ceaseless. Each and every monkey seems intent upon out-shouting it's neighbor, no matter they're of different species in different cages. The hullaballoo and hub-bub never stops.

I think that's because hollering-out to your species-mates is hard-wired into your hypocampus. For all simians, and their later evolutionary off-shoots, because of their brains and their social organization, there are two things that matter: one's membership in their troop, and one's status therein. Their cries and howls and displays are ways of demonstrating the truth of the former--affiliation--and of soliciting affirmation of the latter--status.

Pay attention to the folks who cannot, it seems, proceed 10 feet without initiating or answering a call. There is something of the hooting chimp about them, much of the time. Their conversations are never soft, but trumpeted through the ether. as if declaring all the immediate space their own personal domains? Humans of the dispensation that created cell-fones are almost uniformly of the opinion that, because it includes them, their species alone has any true significance. And that, of their species, as of here an now, they are the most important members of th species, and need to demonstrate that truth to the lesser mortals in their dominion.

Cell fones provide these poor simian-throwbacks the opportunity for constant reassurance that they are part of their group, and that they are important in that group.

See? Biology...

*Human ecology: See, e.g., Paul Shepard's work; he invented the field.

WWH: Wake"N'Bake ~~ "Capitulation"

You know that great, ol' Dr. John samba/shuffle, "(I was in) The Right Place"? I started hearing it when I was reading Robert Reich on Friday. As usual, Robert Reich is right, but it's about the wrong thing, and he's also therefore wrong about his central prescription:

"...But if the shutdowns contribute to the belief among Americans that government doesn't work, Republicans win over the long term. As with the rise of the Tea Partiers, the initiative shifts to those who essentially want to close it down for good.

That's why it's so important that the President have something more to say to the American people than "I want to cut spending, too, but the Republican cuts go too far." The "going too far" argument is no match for a worldview that says government is the central problem to begin with." (Once again, deepest thanks to the departed Ronald Reagan and the best damn propaganda department in the WORLD! for that delightful memory~~W)

What he's right about is that the entire agenda of the GOP since 1960 has been to privatize the State and to confer upon the CorpoRats that de facto lethal authority hitherto reserved to the elected Government responsible (at least nominally) to the People. Some of us have been saying for at LEAST that long what a bad idea it is to turn Government over to people who want to destroy it. I have yet to meet ANYONE whose instincts I would completely trust absent some controlling authority. "Government" is required for humans to live together in large (multi-hundred-million) numbers. The GOPhux want to turn it ALL over to their (and our) OWNERS, and do away with that messy, expensive, participatory shit, while maintaining the necessary appearances of the much-loved, but soooo-outdated 'democracy' crap.

What Reich's wrong about, in my always humble estimation, is that he appears to think that Pres. Shamwow regards the debate on any different terms than the GOPhux do. He uses their lexicon. He accepts their definitions. He cedes his most important gropund before the argument has even been joined. O'Bama is a CORPORAT! Born and bred, body and soul, top to bottom, and side to side, he's an Organization Man. Get that, and all the rest makes sense.

The furthest thing from Prez. Shamwow's mind is to say "HEY! Not only are the GOPhux WRONG about the AILMENT, they're also and necessarily WRONG about the treatment." O'Bama could no more announce tomorrow that he totally rejected the GOP plan than he could fart diamonds for tiaras for his daughters dancing costumes. He should not be compromising on how MUCH to cut, he should be proposing and introducing programs aimed at actually helping the PEOPLE, as much to regain and rebuild some trust as anything else. He could, if he were a "people's President."

But to think he would do so is ludicrous. HOW could ANY nominally reasonable, normally intelligent people imagine for a single instant that the Owners of the Country--oligarchs, plutocrats, aristos around the globe-- would ever turn management of THEIR "property" (us, btw) or the system of its incredibly profitable administration, over to somebody --to ANYBODY-- who posed even the tiniest, remotest, slightest, slimmest, faintest GLIMMER of a chance of challenging, much less undoing, the least jot or tittle of their immensely profitable, unimaginably powerful status quo? Really?

No. That's preposterous! Who could believe such a thing?

Thus, Pres. Shamwow, already by the time he had ASSUMED his offfice, had satisfactorily and faithfully demonstrated he neither would, nor even particularly wanted to, upset any hegemonic applecarts or otherwise in any way disturb the Owners in their well-earned ease. You don't get there any other way.

Sheer "Poe-etry": DESTROYING An Atheist

WWH: Wake'N'Bake 101 ~~ "Repairs"

Last week, Dr. Woody heard Vt. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thom Hartmann--both really sincere, admirable men--and was again struck by how totally, hopelessly, blindingly, wrenchingly IMPOTENT they seem. They pose exquisitely correct solutions to the most intractable problems whose ONLY flaw is that they must be approved by...

Yeah. Congress.

Hartmann's fix for the national economic difficulties is to return the top marginal tax rate to what it was pre-Reagan--about 70%. I'm not competent to say whether it would fix the problem or not, not being an economist. But I am almost 100% certain we won't find out, because it's not gonna happen. Why? Because any taxation measure to go through Congress must originate in the (now thoroughly Teahadist) House, which wouldn't pass such piece of legislatiuon if you were holding members' families hostage. There's the rub.

Any plausible repairs to the existing system have--MUST, unequivocally--go through both Houses of Congress, a Congress owned by and beholden to the same corpoRat interests which would 'suffer' from any democratizing changes, or which materially shifted the responsibility for funding the State back onto those who benefit most from it. Any member with the temerity to INTRODUCE a measure which, if passed, would lead to the diminishment of the nominal legitimacy of the thievery and bunkum the Owners now run on us poof hicks would find her or himself faced, in the next primary, a well-financed, bomb-throwing Fundie and another waiting in the General.

So those changes so beloved by Hartmann an his cadres--renewing tariff laws, a "national economic/industrial policy," the restoration of the USer industrial infrastructure-- cannot (and I daringly predict WILL NEVER) occur. This is as true for tax increases for the rich as it would be for constitutional amendments to roll back the vile, indefensible Citizen's United decision, as for the mischief the Opus Deists are gonna do with poor Ms. Dukes, et al. The ERA (remember the ERA?) has languished in Amendment limbo for almost 40 years. It still lacks ratification by one or two States. And it NEVER had the opposition that would confront ANY legislation attacking corporate personhood or raising marginal, individual tax rates would engender.

Folks wanna say, the people are waking up.

Mebbe. But if they are, it is only because they were awakened by the Ship of State slamming headlong into the CorpoRat "iceberg." ‎"We" re not going to "take back control" of the vessel or the voyage. That moment, if it ever existed, passed decades ago. The collision has already occurred. We're awakening to the cold realization that it's going down, slowly now, but... That's the sad truth.

The inertia of the existing power arrangements is such that, even if "we" were able to disrupt it, the shock would crash EVERYTHING.

Let me hastily assure you: I am NOT counseling defeatism. Fight Back! Indeed. Definitely. Send very harsh memoranda to your Representatives! Personally, I make stingingly sarcastic phone calls to the offices of both of my Sens and my Rep. I use low-power bulbs. I recycle. I conserve. I sign petitions. I blog like a futhermocker. I try to follow Aurelius: Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

And I do NOT delude myself that it actually accomplishes anything. And, yes, I shall return to the barricades, when the chance of my being shot for being there is closer to random than obvious, cuz I don't move as agilely as once I did...

(*Cartoon by Adam Zyglis / The Buffalo News / Daryl Cagle.)

WWH: Wake'N'Bake 101 ~~ "Zygote"

Dr. Woody'll be 65 in a coupla weeks and the utter undeniability, the intransigent incorrigibility, the chronographical indomitability of this fact--coupled with the arrival of his Medicare card--caused him to pause and consider. These are the fruits of that epiphany:

To the manner born: 4:20 AM, 4/20, '46: I'm an "early Boomer." Indeed, I believe I was conceived about 120 miles north of the Trinity site, on or about the fateful day in July '45 when they created 'trinitite' out of the hot New Mexico sand, thereby to have become one of the FIRST "nuclear zygotes."). I am, also, therefore, about as deeply integrated into the Baby Boomer generation as a person can be. And, since we are all the sum of all we know, it seemed to me that

"You Might Be A "Real Baby Boomer" (RBB) If..."

...You remember the name of the girl/boy you were sleeping with when you heard Neil Armstrong speaking from the Moon...or if you don't...but you remember hearing him...

Or noticed when Stevie Wonder had ceased to be "Little"...

If you remember the Tet Offensive, and LBJ complaining that he'd lost the war cuz he'd lost Cronkite...

Or you enlisted to avoid the draft, or you remember your draft number (hint: 1-365), or burned your draft card, or know what it means to have had a 'deferment...'

If you had sex with someone, in the shower, washing off the tear gas residue from being gassed by the pigs for demonstrating against the invasion of Cambodia, ...

Or you remember the the name of the judge who tried the Chicago Seven, and still know the name of Howdy Doody's cow...

If you cast your first presidential ballot for Nixon cuz you didn't trust Humphrey, and the first campaign you remember had Adlai Stevenson in it...

Or you watched the Watergate hearings and cheered for Sam Ervin and his Constitution...

If you saw LBJ's surgery scar on the nightly news, or saw him lift his beagle by the ears, (or remember his palpable despair...)

Or you remember the Huntley/Brinkley Report...or Tim Buckley...Connie Stevens & Troy Donahue...Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb!...the Edsel...Hoola-Hoops...Hopalong Cassidy...

If you remember civil defense sirens and hiding under your school desk with a book over your head awaiting the inevitable nuclear attack by the Soviet Union,...

Or when Ram Das was still Richard Alpert, and Herb Alpert was HOT,...

If you remember being scared shitless every time a car engine backfired during the Cuban Missile crisis...

Or went out with a date to the drive-in, bought snacks, watched (or not) a minimum of two movies, and got burgers afters, all for less than $5, including gas...

If you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing in school at the very moment you first heard the news that JFK had been assassinated...

Or you watched Ed Sullivan on the three consecutive weekends that the Beatles first appeared on American TV...

If you remember the day Sam Cooke was shot to death in LA (Dec. 11, '64)...

Or you were listening to the radio broadcast from Miami the night Sonny Liston refused to leave his corner for the 8th round of his first fight against "Cassius Clay,"

If you remember the assassination of Malcolm X, even if you weren't sure who he was at the time,...

Or you were or are still able to lie convincingly to anyone at all that you had attended either Woodstock or Altamont...

Feel free to append your own. I make no pretense that this is anything like an exhaustive list.

Wake'N'Bake 101: Conspiracy

Woody wonders: Why does what Rosie O'Donnell thinks about the WTC/9-11 events matter?

A clip of her espousing learned theories about the causes and agents implicated in the events of Sept. 11, 2001, was going around on the "F-Book" this (Saturday) morning. The hed proclaimed "Rosie O'Donnell saying the truth about 9/11."

Well, this got ol' Dr. Woody to speculatin'--that and the furious assault on his reasoning faculties, sanity, and parentage by passionate 'truthers,' which ensued when he raised the question of why Ms. O'Donnell's saying it mattered. Folks of almost any persuasion seem to go all orgasmic when Celebs take up their cause. But, I wondered, what's the point?

Is Rosie O'Donnell a physicist or a chemist or an engineer whose perspective is formed and informed by expert knowledge and rigorous analysis? I am a kinda sorta expert; I don't distrust experts, until they demonstrate they aren't. Is Rosie an expert? In anything?

No? She's just another "half-stellar celebrity?"

A celebrity, I would remind you, is someone whose sole achievement is to have become recognizable. Okay, then; now why should ANYONE care what the vacuous bint thinks?

I mean, really! Whisky Tango Foxtrot! Why does it MATTER?

Why should the 'amateur' contribution of someone who has no first-hand knowledge of, or expertise in, ANY in the relevant fields of study/knowledge be attended to with any more regard than would those of a groundskeeper, or a waiter, or any other menial who happens to have an opinion?

Rosie, sad to say, doesn't know shit, of her own discovery or expertise. She's just parroting what she's heard elsewhere. There is noting in her CV that would lead me to trust or value HER opinions, or the script she's reading, any more than those of a telephone operator.

So, I was asked, why did I posted the thing; and part from the fact that I mainly post things about which I have something to say that I think to be either interesting or entertaingng, I replied:

To illustrate the spuriousness of authority seated in/ceded to "celebrity?

Why does it matter what "Rosie O'Donnell" thinks about it?

Her opinion does not add a jot or a scintilla of illumination. There is ONLY one reason that "Rosie O'Donnell" is the face on this, and that is because she is known as "Rosie O'Donnell," and "Rosie O'Donnell"-qua-celebrity's opinion is as close to irrelevance as human utterance can be. Victoria Jackson thinks the sun orbits earth. Does that enlarge your understanding of the issue any further? I don't accord Elizabeth Hasslebeck's, or Chris Matthews', or Bryan Williams' opinions any more weight. They're just reading cue-cards.

It just doesn't MATTER what she thinks; anymore than, frankly, it matters what I think, without the experience and training necessary to scientifically analyze the competing claims. My degrees are in literature, journalism and education. I am not competent to say one opinion or one analysis is correct and another is flawed. There is NO reason to listen to me should I articulate, or even assemble and present a theory. I command no authority in that community which deals with those matters--tensile strength, nano-particles, thermite (An aside: I was trained to USE thermite, in the USAF, to ignite it and walk hastily away; not to understand it).

(I have an opinion, but it is wrought from available sources, nothing esoteric. I am sure I hold no unique insight, no special knowledge.) I can add nothing to that conversation. So I mainly abstain.

If ya wanna read it, the whole thread's HERE.