Ignorance and politics

Those of you that are frequent crisis visitors will probably have noted my penchant for bad alliteration.In today's post I am ripping off Strawberry Alarm clocks incense and peppermints. Thought this video here was cool and I spent a big chunk of the day in political junkie mode hence the politics. The ignorance I will explain later but first a little bike related news.
My workouts are going well did 140 miles this week and hit a milestone, 1000 miles on the odometer. Considering it is only a few months old I was impressed. I am planning to ride north again first part of next week. I had wanted to get out sooner but I have a doctor visit Monday and was supposed to be attending camp Obama this weekend but it was canceled. This time I am going all the way to the Oregon border if it takes a week each way.
Today was the Rules and Bylaws committee meeting for the democratic party. Generally a snore but because of the cluster frack of Florida and Michigan there was some actual drama promised and sort of delivered. As usual the Clinton camp acted like asses and Obama showed an amazing amount of class. In a for Democrats pretty organized event they argued and eventually compromised on the seating of delegates from the two rogue states with the only sour note the performance of Harold Ickes a douche of the highest magnitude trying to claim that Hilary Clinton was getting screwed because they did not let her have all the delegates from the illegal primary. He ended his whine reserving the right to take it to the credentials committee before being embarrassed by the speeches of the other members of the committee. This may be a little inside baseball for most of you but Obama had given Clinton what she wanted on Florida and the vote on Michigan was 19 to 8 against her by a group that was supposed to have at least 15 of her supporters on it. The Clinton supporters pretty much made asses of themselves shouting down speakers and yelling out non sequiturs. When all was said and done Obama was still in the lead by an insurmountable number and Hillbilly was vowing to fight on to the bitter end. Not a bad days entertainment all in all.
And now for the ignorance portion of today's program. I was pretty up beat having written the 2nd instalment of A New Obsession an adult story that I posted on my rude blog. Then my friend Mina was shooting some pictures with some of the props I had sent her and I was watching on the Spycams. Then the folks at CNN killed my buzz with more fallout from the latest crazy preacher scandal at Trinity United Church. You know home of the Reverend Wright that wacky spiritual advisor to the Obama family. Turns out that He and Michele were having to quit their church after a visiting preacher gave an insulting little moronic ridicule filled rant about Hilary. Father dipstick made the mistake of making it all about race and the idiots in the pews danced around like, well idiots and Fox news had another weeks programing. If Obama is not the next president we will have the good folks at a little south side church in Chicago to thank for it. I have spoken before about the Ignorance of faith but today I have a slightly different take on the theme. I watched the presser from South Dakota Barack had to explain why he had quit the church and felt genuinely sorry for the guy. He takes this shit seriously and so does his wife so it is really crappy that the news goons have hounded him out of his little social club. Especially when these same dickhead media morons can't seem to be bothered to investigate real stories like say lies about WMD or contractor fraud. Running for president is not supposed to have a religious test, look it up the Constitution prohibits it, look it up.

A propaganda lesson

The war in Iraq has been a study in propaganda in its most pernicious form. I was listening to the archivist and folk singer Utah Phillips the other day in an interview recorded before his death and he pointed out that before the Nazi party the word had a much more benign meaning. It was the conveying of information to support a position. In other words making an argument based on facts that supported your side. Goebbels corrupted that idea to mean making up the facts to support your side and the folks in the White House today have adopted this use of the word as their model. In making the case for the invasion it was not incumbent upon those that took the position that we had to invade to put forth the facts that did not favor their argument. In the market place of ideas that is the responsibility of the opposition. We can get to the failure of said opposition in another debate but the current administration new that the facts they were asserting were untrue. That is why they should be prosecuted as traitors and war criminals. When Dick Cheney went on television and said they knew the location of the WMD he knew that the fact he was asserting was a fabrication. The center for public integrity documented the 100’s of instances of this so I will move on to the present and the need for this little exercise in propaganda as it was originally defined.
The idea that John McCain is a teller of truths in the language of Bill Clinton is a fairytale. Let me provide a few examples. When the good Senator visited Iraq in 2007 in an effort to garner support for the ill-conceived war he visited an open air market. He then went on television to tell us that his visit proved that we winning the war because he could walk around and shop. One of his companions compared it to a farmers market in Indiana. Not having been to Indiana in a few years I can’t say that you do not need armed guards to shop there but here is the truth about Baghdad. For the Senator to walk around this safe secure marketplace he had to strap on a bullet proof vest, surround himself with 100 of our finest young soldiers and put 4 helicopters overhead to circle the area. A few weeks later this same market was closed by suicide bombings but as I stated before that is not his responsibility to bring out. Just don’t lie about your trip that’s all I ask. Did he forget that the cameras were running as Hilary Clinton did in Bosnia or was he counting on his pals in the mainstream media to go along with his lie as they had with the Bush folks.
McCain is pushing the, “the surge is working” meme so hard he make Sisyphus look like a piker. He quips in his speeches that General Petraeus drove around in an unarmored Humvee.The pentagon was denying this nonsense the moment they heard it and again McCain was forced to admit he, “misspoke” but in the same breath he uses the lie to support his bigger lie.
For those that try to advance the idea that we are winning in Iraq the phrase that our troops are doing everything we ask them to brilliantly tumbles from their mouths with ease. They deify the generals and when anyone dares to question their wisdom or competence that questioner is called un-American and traitor. I have one but one question for those folks. If they have done everything they have been asked and the surge strategy was so brilliantly designed to win why are they not on their way home to a well deserved victory parade?

Dual rant

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Battle Field Blues

I am not sure why history in America seems to be the story of war. Possibly it is just so simple since we seem to have so many of them. Could be that men that never fight them find them romantic. I do not share that opinion even though I was a peacetime soldier, airman actually. I suspect that is because I was a medic just post the Vietnam war and took care of a lot of guys with some pretty nasty problems from that conflict. Could just be I may have studied more of them than other people and I just have a perception problem. Whatever the case we have a great number of battle fields preserved in one form or another around this nation and I have visited many of them.
Visiting these places always stirs me but the reactions are never quite the same. The history of the war ,why it was fought has some impact combined with my sense of right and wrong. Walking in the fields and thinking about what happened there, the death and destruction as well as the desperation and bravery coat the pallet of my emotions. The day that I visited Wounded Knee and the Little Big Horn in the same afternoon created such an odd blend of sensations on that pallet I am still a little disturbed by it as I set the tale to paper.
The Little Big Horn in southeastern Montana and Wounded Knee South Dakota are close enough together that one can easily see both in the same day which I wanted to do. I was curious to experience both sides of the coin so to speak and compare the locations while they were fresh in my mind. The Black Hills Badlands area is a place that a man can go to feel insignificant. “Big Sky”, and vast tracts of emptiness with the lone surviving large herd animal left in North America lend a unique perspective to a day. Dances with Wolves was filmed there if you want to see it without braving the constant wind.
I wish I could remember the location I camped the night before but in those days I was all about escaping and failed to diary many details. It was in October, not long after Columbus day of that much I am sure ,arrived at Harts ranch on the 14th that is the closest I can pin it down not that it really matters but the timing was not lost on the natives I encountered later in the day but I am getting ahead of myself.
It is hard to know how much of the emotions one feels at any place are due to what you know going in and the vibe that the location retains. I am not talking about spirits just the energy that seems to linger at the site of terrible happenings, information in the physics sense so to speak. Growing up I watched lots of TV westerns and there was a show about Custer that painted him as some sort of heroic victim of the savages that was of course weapons grade bullshit but it was on my mind at the time.
Starting out at the interpretive center you get the “white mans” side of the story as told by the surviving cavalry officers in the newspaper accounts of the day. It is not my desire to relate them here as the greed and bigotry that were the “Indian Wars”doesn’t figure into my tale other than as backdrop. From there a walking tour lets you see the location as marked out by succeeding troops when they came and buried the dead, the white bodies anyway. Small white marble markers are spaced about the hills and gullies with the names and ranks of the men. The army was very good at identifying bodies even then. The wind is constantly howling making me think about the screams of the warriors and the cries of the wounded and dying. Little clusters of men in depressions in the earth waiting for the relief that was never going to come.
I cannot imagine what it would be like to be running out of water and ammunition as men that hated me and that I hated for no good reason crept up intent on my death. That to me is the horror of war and why I am a pacifist at heart. Listening to men groan in their death throes knowing that my time is probably next. I have been with lots of people at the end of their lives but not like that. Most of the folks I attended at their end were actually quite peaceful, the feelings this place imparts to me say that is not the case here.
I stop reading the names as unlike the civil and revolutionary war battle fields I don’t want to find any of my ancestors in the place. It just screams senseless waste, all this open desolate space all this empty land that men are fighting over for some oddly colored gold saddens me. I walk on in silence until the pain in my back and legs forces me to retreat to the RV.
Fortified by hot tea and a sandwich I drive east into a cloudless sky. The sun is at my back and the long prairie grass ripples waves in waves the color of tide flats at ebb. The Story of a young child, Black Elk runs through my mind as I pull into the dirt parking lot at the Wounded Knee monument. I am struck by the contrast of the after thought quality of this site when contrasted with the effort that went into preserving the Big Horn site. No rangers or interpretive center here. A wrought iron and brick gate with 3 Sioux at a card table and an old El Camino black and rusted. The men are dressed in wranglers and boots selling dream catchers.
I walk up the hill to the monument and see the names of the slaughtered, women men and children by the hundreds. This gray colored obelisk surrounded by empty fields of grass conveys the loss in much the same way the wall in Washington does. Death writ starkly on stone name after name until the power overwhelms one unhappy little man on the plain drowning in his own losses. I do not weep for the dead. I can find no tears, only shame at what happened here and the sense that it is only begrudgingly acknowledged.
It is late in the day when I walk back to the parking area my face red and wind chapped. I am tired deep in my joints and break out a chair to sit for a while before looking for a place to spend the night. The three men join me for a cool drink, rum and coke I think and I offer them each one of my cigarettes in an attempt to honor their customs. We sit and smoke and sip the cold liquid and Mike Brown Beaver tells me a little of the story of his people. Not the massacre, he can tell by the reverent way I have behaved that I already know that tale but of the struggle his father went through to get the monument built here. Of the AIM sit ins and the continuing struggles he and his friends have to stay on this land keep the old ways in some small way alive.
By the time I depart the sun is low in the west and I want to be away from these places. I do not want to think about the things men do to each other in the name of fear or god or greed. I want only to hope that next time it will be different that when we encounter the other we will embrace the differences and celebrate the common ground of all human experience. As I drive east into a darkening sky I am filled with despair knowing that my hope is still just a fantasy.

Kinetic roundup

The Kinetic sculptures are on their way to Ferndale and I am wimping out and heading for the couch., the recliner actually. Chasing the race kicked my butt and It shouldn’t have. The problem was all the walking on the sand. I have gotten to the point that I can peddle for 5 or 6 hours in a day with only mild swelling in the knees but walking even a mile or two kills my joints.
Yesterday was land today was water. I first rode to Arcata and watched the start of the race. The prerace takes a couple of hours when they safety test the sculptures making sure they can steer and stop. Then after clearing the wandering stoners from the street the noon whistle blows and they are off. Twice around and then out Samoa boulevard to the school at manila. Then things get tough as the contestants ride for a few miles in the sand before they head down dead mans drop. The folks from “glory hogs” even set up a BBQ at the bottom of the hill and passed out hot dogs to the spectators.
It is a great community event and almost everyone is in the mood to make it a great time for all. As usual though the local police presence does what it can to kill the buzz. Humboldt county sheriffs are just such huge dicks cruising around in their boat ragging on kayakers about life jackets when even if they went in the water there are hundreds of folks to pull them out. A bunch of little Cartmans with “authoritee” but what can you do.
Day two shifts to the water as the sculptures paddle, row, float and sometimes sink along the F street boardwalk in old town before heading to table bluff for the night. I again took the pussy way out and rather than camp I slept at home. The allure of a warm bed after being in the cold wet all day was just too strong. The sky was at least clear on Sunday but the wind was still a bit on the brisk side. I for some stupid reason forgot sunscreen on Saturday so on Sunday I was Radmul the red nosed rider.

Pictures from the race

A few shots from th 40th annual Great Kinetic Sculpture race on the Arcata plaza. The egrets were out along the highway between Eureka and Arcata. Today rode 24 miles on the roads and another 8 on the sand. My legs are on fire as I write this so I will be crashing early but will get more shots up tomorrow. The videos may take a little longer as I will be attending the second leg . This week will be more about bikes and less about political rants you have my word.

Radmul is an elitist ass

The photo is of the Ingomar club. It was built by one of the timber barons in the late 1800’s and is the most distinctive building in my little corner of the universe. It always reminds me of the Winchester Mystery House, the gun makers widow haunted by the spirits of dead Indians thought she would live as long as they never stopped building on the home. What does this have to do with elitists you might ask? Well the difference between being elite and elitist is in the details and a story I am working on for you guys from a trip to South Dakota put me in mind of dead natives.
I am not of the elite, it took me 18 years to finish a BA for Christ sake not exactly Rhodes Scholar material. That being said I am a liberal latte sipping pinko bleeding heart elitist and proud of it. Well I really don’t like lattes that much but the phrase is so evocative I couldn’t resist. Allow me to elaborate.
I live in America. I was born here and it is a pretty nice place to live. I have had the chance to visit a few other countries and some of them are pretty nice as well. In my time in the good ole USAF I also got to meet lots of folks from other lands, Asian dependent wives, middle eastern pilot trainees and central American refugees serving to become citizens to name a few. I point out these facts only to show that my position is not one of ignorance of other cultures but from my own sense of morality.
The term elitist is probably inaccurate to some extent, it might be better to say that the upcoming rant is more cultural imperialism but the world will be a better place when we adjust cultural diversity to exclude nonsense and barbarism.
I want the guy in charge to be smarter than me. If you are a legacy to a school that isn’t exactly noted for academic brilliance and finish at the bottom of your class you are not really qualified to run the worlds largest military. I think the last legacy guy proved that point. Oh I forgot evidence isn’t important only faith.
If your religion thinks that mutilating genitals of children is acceptable then your religion is not period no exceptions All religion is a problem in my opinion but that is just an opinion and we already established that as an ass I have one but your right in a free society to think whatever nonsense you like stops when you start cutting the fun bits off other people especially children that have no say.
If your culture treats ½ the worlds population like second class humans than screw your culture. It is inferior not the woman get over it and join the civilized world. No honor killings, rape is not a right that comes with a marriage license, nobody has to wear a sack over their head because you can’t keep it in your pants. You do not have the right to tell one person they must die rather than remove your DNA from their womb. These points are not negotiable either All humans are equal and endowed with inalienable rights or none of us are.
My anti theism does not negate Jefferson’s assertion that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator ….” the fact that the creator was a pool of primordial ooze and the creation took several billion years doesn’t alter the fact that human rights are given to us all by virtue of being human. I have mixed feelings about Thomas, a brilliant thinker as well as slave holding rapist. How did he reconcile these dichotomies in his own mind. Sort of the same way that so many in our culture believe that separate but equal is horrible for blacks but just fine for the gays and lesbians among us.
Many of the worlds great thinkers held some rather strange beliefs so I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised I should just be thankful that Newton didn’t let his religion interfere with his mechanics and that Darwin didn’t either.
My culture is full of its own viral memes, rampant commercialism, the elevation of private property over the environment and the most destructive of all Manifest Destiny. I freely admit that this glass house rock thrower is far from perfect and invite corrections from all quarters. After all as an over privileged white male I am way past due for a little comeuppance.