Recovery Redux

I realize I've been nagging about Obama's failings incessantly, but here's another, SERIOUS bone I have to pick: During campaign 2008, Barack made much of his "plan" to create 3 million+ "green manufacturing jobs." Was Barack Obama simply being the consumate, cynical politician, telling the electorate what he correctly figured they desperately wanted to hear? Or did he truly believe his own pipe dream?

Remaining cognizant that Mr. Obama was then a senator rather than a prophet, one nevertheless has to directly confront the lamentable fact: few if any such jobs were created, and the plan never came to fruition.
There is a highly dubious assertion being widely propagated on the Democratic side of the aisle, to the effect that Obama's "Economic Stimulus" has created or saved 2+ million positions nationally. While it's (officially) true that 700,000+ jobs aren't disappearing monthly as they were when the Obama administration assumed the presidency, job growth remains indisputably stagnant. The probable reality is more unfavorable than that - I'm guessing the US economy continues to actually shed more jobs every day than it adds. Nationally, official unemployment hovers stubbornly in the neighbourhood of 10%; most realists understand it is actually at least twice that level. The "Recovery," never much more than a fantasy, is over.
I know the President isn't a magician, but he could have at least fought passionately on behalf of the Amercan Worker. He didn't. Health Care? Taking into account "Single Payer"was politically impossible, Obie could have at least stood by his commitment to a "Public Option." He didn't, and what we got instead is basically a Byzantine maze of half-measures putatively destined to benefit the uninsured, but in truth destined to fatten the already bulging wallets of Big Insurance CEOs.

Who among you believes anything this guy says anymore? And why, in the face of all the evidence, would anybody believe positive Change of any kind has been accomplished, or will be accomplished before November 2012?

Did it begin with Watergate?

Did it start with WATERGATE? No, not the age-old political dirty tricks. Rather, the monumental, "fashionable" apathy. Were millions so shocked, so scandalized by Nixon's minor malfeasance - which nailed him - they simply dropped out of meaningful politics? I refer to Tricky Dick's minor crimes, as he was actually caught and forced to resign, in the immediate sense, on account of a second-rate break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters, not for the massive war crimes committed in SE Asia. But the real focus of my inquiry concerns the American Public. I'll always remember being ten years old and going to my best friend's house in the Summer of 1973. Nancy, Peter's mom, was glued to the telescreen, entralled with the Watergate Hearings. I was naturally bored on the one hand, being ten years old, and quite unable to fathom why Ms. ____ was so obsessed with such nonsense. On the other hand, I was fascinated, intrigued with the intrigue.
Of course, the United States had experienced political scandal before. Teapot Dome in the 1920's. Bobby Baker's misdeeds during the LBJ years. But never before, apparently, did so many people pay so much attention to cloak-and-dagger antics in the White House. So why the subsequent humungous level of apoliticization in the (long-term) wake of the "Plumbers'" shenanigans? Eisenhower had already been caught red-handed in a major international LIE in May 1960, when he falsely denied Gary Francis Powers had been involved in a U-2 spying mission over the USSR. Faith in the supposed truthfulness of Presidents certainly took a hit, but the population didn't seem to wallow, as a result, in complete indifference.

But following Watergate, it became "cool" to not give a shit. "Cool," when I was in Middle School in 1975, was showing off your Converse All Stars and running around the Gym to the tune of "Pickin' Up The Pieces" by the Average White Band. ...(Don't get me wrong - Great Song.)
It was evidently quite cool to make it known to everyone you'd seen the latest "Tony Orlando And Dawn" episode on ABC. Of course, I'm talking about kids here, but I'll wager many of those mental children who were absolutely THRILLED by "The Towering Inferno" were 18+.

CONVERSELY (heh heh) it became equally "uncool" to care about things that actually mattered, eyes were endlessly rolled to high heaven if you so much as mentioned any actual, grown-up ISSUE. By the time I entered High School in 1977, the fashionable boredom was so thick you could cut it with a switchblade. Example: We had Madison's Chief of Police visit the class one day. I expected someone to challenge him, to call him a goddamn fascist pig, SOMETHING. Instead, the entire class, girls and boys alike, sat there for 60 minutes like a bunch of granite statues. Myself as well - I wouldn't have been caught dead being so "uncool." OK, I lie, if my recollection is correct, I did ask a question, having already been discovered to be hopelessly UNCOOL. I haven't changed one bit, as you see.

I realize noone gives a shit, so I'll STFU and have a nice day. I'm kidding! Tell me, tell me, what did THEY do to YOU, to ME, to US??? Or rather, WTF did we do to ourselves?

Facebook, Trivial Pursuits, Lesbian Potato Chip Factories

New friends, thanks for joining, thanks for inviting, accepting. Facebook is just a notch in the stick of history. You oldies recall when PCs first made the scene Big Time, in 1981? How the Apple II was going to change and liberate the world? Bah, humbug. True, FB is THE Fad, but it's promise is similarly hollow! As long as the majority of users lack the barest notion of how, let alone WHY we should use this remarkable technology for the Global Good, it is likely to remain a kind of interactive Trivial Pursuits on a previously unimaginable scale. A Big Forking Deal that might have made a tangible difference when there was widespread political consciousness. You know, back in the day, before the Gay Marriage issue was inflated in stature to the sort of colossal proportions we've seen in recent weeks. Sorry, it just ain't all THAT important, folks. Not so important we need to hear about it every day, seventeen thousand times.

Don't get me wrong - I don't dislike Gays as a group. I have no "moral" objections to same-sex marriage. I just feel very strongly Gays and Lesbians want the WRONG things: namely, to join the fucking military and to get married!
Meanwhile, 14 million Pakistanis "displaced" by epic flooding. An uptick in car bombings in Iraq. The usual Afghan Quagmire. But please, don't stop, Main Stream Media, and all the rest of you as well. The clarion call remains: "Gay Marriage, Gay marriage, Same-sex marriage, Lesbian Potato Chip Factory, Transgendered Bicycle Repair, Bisexual Horticultural Association, Transvestite Gun Clubs, Same Sex Unions... Oh, did I remember to adequately emphasize GAY MARRIAGE!?!?!"
Please, don't stop! We haven't heard enough about GAY THIS AND GAY THAT, the most important issue on the PLANET! No make that the fucking Solar System, No the entire GALAXY!!!
Is it because you "cultural revolutionaries" have no substantial, real issues, independent of self-seeking IDENTITY POLITICS AT ITS WORST?

Those jobs aren't coming back.

If, despite the looming desperation that is presently being or about to be shared by millions, a critical mass of Americans cannot practice the organizational skills to effectively protest the bogus "Jobless Recovery," than they/we are doomed to suffer and starve alone. Being over-the-top, of course; I'm not starving, but what the hell? At some point, people who are affected need to put their foot down. I'm not one to talk, of course; being quite iconoclastic, ideosyncratic and individualistic by nature, I simply don't do meetings anymore.
But at least I know my behavior has got to change, and moreover, SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE!

For Hiroshima Day, 2010

If all a person had available to him/her was the commonplace, revisionist history, one would never even know that a number of influential American military figures were adamantly opposed to dropping Atomic weapons on civilian populations. Dwight Eisenhower, for example. But Harry Truman was teased incessantly as a child. He was small, and almost blind without his glasses. Little Harry was called a "sissy" on a daily basis (true story.) By nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman conveyed to a skeptical American populace, still reeling over the loss of the "magisterial" Roosevelt, that he truly was in command. It only cost several thousand lives to demonstrate Truman could be "tough as nails," and also make Stalin think twice about messing with Imperial America.
The US Air Force was quite prepared to drop a third nuke; only the Japanese surrender obviated that distinct possibility.

Election 2008 Nostalgia

In November 2008, I much prefered Chicago's foreign-born (HA HA!) "Centrist Intellectual" and his foot-in-mouth-disease suffering sidekick from Delaware. After all, the only real alternative would have been to select Arizona's PTSD-plagued former POW and Wasilla's vapid, moose-killing, Tantalizing Tart of a running mate. With such a meaningful choice at my disposal, the decision was easy.