Tag Archives: elephant

Gazette readers show their stuff

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Hurt feelingsThey’re still going at it at the Gazette, readers invective on the Feb 2 Saint Patrick’s Day parade article have kept it among the top commented stories, although you’d hardly recognize the subject.
 
It’s still plenty hurtful and doesn’t represent the public nor the sentiment of support I get almost daily.

In the golden days of the not long ago World Wide Web, going back to the computer Bulletin Board Services to which you could direct your modem, chat rooms used to be private. Or you could elect to take your chat private, to spare yourself the din of the newcomers, or spare everyone the subtext for which they might have no context. The blog comment format affords no similar filter.

Of course, those were also the days before spam, when computer literacy was buoyed by the fact that only well-intended people knew how to use them, or even had the curiosity to try.

I try to avoid waiting room comment areas because what’s said is so broad, and usually so bombastic as everyone tries to be the center of attention, that it’s easy to feel hurt if you lose sight that these are people in their bathrobes, in their Barca-loungers, covered in cat dander. Not your typical Gazette readers I should hope, but sufficiently uncouth to deter anyone else from even venturing to the keyboard. Hopefully someone in PR can figure out how not to represent our city by a show of our bottom-scratchers.

(If they’re Googling themselves: mercurialrust, davidb, pastor roy, turdman, coloradogirl, duncan, jeep4fun, pornstar, hmmmmm, jwstrue, back2colorado4go, pc12784, just1voice, justhefacts, skiracer, shazam3, erniezippreplat, moonshine, amazed2, rightswatcher, lexiii, 101abn, ruserious, elephant, sportz, welltondiplomat, some1stolemyname, etc)

Promoting education and ignorance

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Have I a verdict on Greg Mortenson now that I’ve had a chance to see him? He’s an incredibly likable guy, doing great good; to my values, doing fantastic work. But I’m a secular westerner, concerned about preserving the ideals of the enlightenment, and worried about the challenge posed by overpopulation. Are these the concerns of Islam? Do fundamentalist Muslims favor personal fulfillment of the individual and smaller families?

Greg Mortenson is advancing my agenda and I’d certainly like to think this will lead to prosperity and peace for everyone, but in the meantime I’m certain these actions are antagonistic to Muslims. I’d prefer we consult with Islamic leaders about prospects for peaceful coexistence, not peace engineered on curbing their numbers.

Perhaps Greg can champion the educating of Americans to tolerate other belief systems, some of which may not value literacy above family and religion.

Westerners subject themselves to schooling because it’s the cultural conditioning with which we equip ourselves for our complex post-agrarian world. Does everyone need it? Do Pakistani girls who are going to marry by age twelve need to be literate? Critical thinking and scientific understanding are values of ours. Getting married at a later age, and having fewer children, are values of ours.

If Islamic fundamentalists are rushing to indoctrinate adherents with the intention of recruiting Jihadists to attack western encroachment, you have to admit Mortenson’s conquest by education would be one of the causes. Mortenson’s methods are infinitely preferable to our military’s, but they are invasive all the same.

Central Institute AsiaThe disservice of Greg Mortenson’s lecture tour may be that he’s selling an over-simplified solution. Mortenson preached a message of hope not fear, hurrah, to an audience that really wants to hope. With Pennies for Peace, we can hope that kids’ pocket change will bring us closer to world peace. With the Central Asia Institute, we can hope to end-run our own government’s incurable ways. Is it true, do you think?

The white elephant in the room was so palpably invisible Dr. Greg may well have trained with David Copperfield. Not even lip service to it: Capitalism.

Mortenson’s idealism does not address globalization, the World Bank, debt, impoverishment by design, intentional destabilization, protracted war-making, etc. We the People may want world peace, we the people of the world could possibly come together through education, but will our industrial mechanisms allow it? Americans can’t even fraternize with Mexico!

The fantastic promise of Mortenson’s efforts would distract Americans from the more difficult challenge at hand, for which many of us perhaps are finding it harder to muster hope: arresting the destructiveness of our market forces, our government and its corporate oligarchy. Putting our hopes in schooling the children of Islam will be of little avail if our military-driven economies increase their plundering and exploitation all the while.

That’s who I think is behind the promotion of Three Cups of Tea. That’s why the Center of Homeland Security sponsored Mortenson’s visit. That’s why a self-defined hapless do-gooder is getting such traction. He’s selling a fix so easy it requires no introspection. Nothing to fix here, it’s the Muslim who needs learnin’.

Mincing Words with Nature’s Matriarch

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I learned about Sudden Wetland Dieback yesterday. What’s that? The salt marshlands of America’s east coast are turning inexplicably to muddy wastelands and scientists have developed a euphemism for the occasion.
Not nice to fool Mother NatureThe nomenclature reminds me of another unnatural phenomena that’s been given its own death form: Coral Bleaching. That describes coral reefs which have suddenly expired white as ghosts. As if we’d need to call the piles of bones in the elephant graveyard, Elephant Bleaching.

I understand that scientist want to name what they are seeking to study, but doesn’t a name confer the unfortunate suggestion of a natural occurrence?

It also adds a step, is seems to me at least psychologically, between the effect and the cause. The poor Indonesians in 2004 didn’t suffer a Rapid Oft-Fatal High Water Relocation. It was a Tsunami. Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance wasn’t due to Cement Negative Buoyancy Cankles. It was the mob. Do we need to study the criminal element’s access to poured concrete, or do we need to go after who done it?

The immediate agent of the dieback may be dust from Africa, just as an impassive Pacific may be blamed on an intensified gulf stream (belittled with the appellation El Nino), but wherefore comes this unprecedented toxicity of the elements? We all know. It’s not nice to fool mother nature.

I’d like to know what specifically is meant by dieback? Perhaps those subversive academics are allowing after all for the inclusion of the principle of equal and opposite reaction: blow-back.

We know what’s behind wetland dieback, coral dieback and El Nino blowback, it’s man’s unnatural pollution. It’s our excess carbon emissions and then some, which are heating and killing the globe. There’s already a neat term, sufficiently unnatural sounding: Global Warming. Corporate polluter think-tanks have already re-termed the problem Climate Change to introduce an ambiguity of inherent badness. Change can be good. Only Luddites fear change. The fittest survive change.

The corporate media very cleverly reframed the recent Enviro-palooza concert event as A Climate In Crisis. Sound the alarm there’s a crisis! But what to do, what to do?! The Global Warming warning was too simple. When bath water becomes too warm, for example, we know what to do: shut off the hot water.

Do we need to rename extinction as Pervasive Survival-Instinct Reversal? We could, if we are seeking to ameliorate the intermediate effectiveness of the death blow. Or we could find out who took out the contract on our murder and prevent it.

To belabor mixed metaphors, put an ambulance at the base of the cliff to address Near-Instant Altitude Deceleration Injury, or go to the mountain and curb Dead Man’s Curve.

Anger over Cheney’s privates montage

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The stampeding elephant keeps sailing on! Dick Cheney claims that he is above the law and can do anything, even pretending that the office of vice president is not part of the executive branch of the government. That in mind, the fact that the Democratic Party can’t find the energy to take this claim on in a concerted and serious manner, made me think of a computer enhanced American version of the following… except this time the photo would have Democratic Party leaders ‘suckling’ the vice president even further down below…. See Anger Over Polish Breast Montage

Visualize World Peace!

More Chavez, doing the hip-hop-reggaeton

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Slick did the sax, Dubya does Dumbo the Elephant, and many of America’s rich, famous and sleezy have appeared on David Letterman and Jay Leno doing the small talk. Still, I think that Hugo Chavez has them beat with the beat in this video. La Corte Negra

Where to host the war crimes trials

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War Crimes Trial in privateNotMyTribe is soliciting proposals for where to hold the impending War Crimes Trial. Brent Green replies:
 
In my van downtown.

This is kind of how I see it going: I’ll drive my van downtown- there’s a huge parking lot right on the bank of the river behind the UPS packing center. It’s unmarked, which I see as my biggest asset here, the secrecy of an unmarked van will keep these officials on familiar ground. I’ll hold out my dictionary (the only title the used bookstore wouldn’t purchase from me) and say “Place your right hand on this Science Bible, and promise that you’ll try hard not to fuck up.” W says “I swear.” I don’t believe him, he seems insincere, but I didn’t really give myself a backup option, so we move on.

I guess Bush will take the stand- a comfortable cloth spinning captain’s chair (one of Bush’s demands I’ll have to meet in order for him to submit to trial). I’ll grill him mercilessly.

“True or False: you are _______.” The correct answer is that tricky T/F hybrid that everyone mastered in elementary school quizzes, but that’s a very hard letter to say, so he’ll probably get this one wrong.

Whereupon I’ll make a powerful and moving objection “HEADS WILL ROLL!!!” I’ll shout, the wind shaking my ride.

We’ll turn on the radio for intermission. Some Mexican college rock station. Yo la tengo espanol.

And if you want experience and variety, this is your location. It’s seen it all. I got it from my Uncle Oscar who met Jack Kerouac once (not in the van)- it’s seen all there is: Illinois, DUI, DOA, FBI, Florida and a charging wild elk. Before Oscar raced dogs he used the van as an ambulance.

I pretended I was a lawyer once, to get my girlfriend a paycheck her boss was trying to keep for hisself.

Back when Great Uncle Oscar had the van it was always kept in tip-top shape. Uncle Oscar was rich. He was always saying “Get in the fucking van!!”

Uncle Oscar got more money than the government racing dogs between the cars on Wall Street.

Uncle Oscar lost his mind when his mistress died, and grew a cancerous hole the size some governments between his throat and his lungs. Wheezing like an elephant chasing dogs no one else could see up and down the cellar stairs. (Later, up, down and back up the street.)

Uncle Oscar’s legs went numb on Christmas Eve, a cart pulled by his dogs brought him to our front door (he was sitting on the hood, hollering whiskey fumes above the engine’s roar). With two strong hands and a trunk full of stuff he invited us “Come on In!” tramping snow through shoveled flowerbeds. He wasn’t yet, but he already looked dead.

After a long hard chase, Oscar liked to climb in his van and “help people.” He’d go ambulancing with a stethoscope and pliers and a bottle of Mescal. Mescal is terrible. Just everyone thinks so. Hitler didn’t like it ’cause it made him mean. But apparently it cures everything. Even road rash. Just say you’re halfway between the cab and the sidewalk and an ambulance turns you into a chalkline- Oscar’s there before you wake up. He cleans the blood off the hood with your shirt and puts you in the back. He opens the bottle, wraps your lips around the funnel, and moves the muscles in thee jaw (with his right hand- the left tipping back the bottle) ’till your teeth and your tongue eat the worm. Ambulancing was fun- even though I guess it directly led to my disbarrement (it was the only cause). I always told him it wasn’t his fault- but it was. Entirely.

Anyway, I guess Oscar should be the judge. He’s the oldest person I know, and he always says he’s done his share of courting.

Old Uncle Oscar, all hopped up on Viagara, screaming at Conde Rice “I hear my zipper shaking!”

I need these war crimes trials.

Toxic chimp

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Toxic ChimpI’ve been content to think of George Dubya as an ugly little monkey, as dangerous as he is rabid perhaps. But -and this is no joke- the comparison vastly undersells monkeys.

A recent study involving elephants recognizing themselves in mirrors made the distinction more clear. “Humans, great apes, dolphins and elephants, well known for their superior intelligence and complex social systems, are thought to possess the highest forms of empathy and altruism in the animal kingdom.” George it’s painfully obvious, and fatally obvious to too many, doesn’t score there.

A Freudian mixed metaphor for the GOP

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elephant gorillaI’ve read it several times now, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room. This would seem to confuse 1) the proverbial 600-900 lb primate (gorillas not named Kong seldom excede 400 lbs) who outclasses everyone else in size and power, for 2) the pachyderm in the room whose relative mass overwhelms our capacity to ignore it, though we try.
 
In this corporate age of Darwinian monopolies, maybe the de facto brutality of alpha-male corporate monopoly has become something the corporate media mouthpieces won’t let us talk about. There’s an elephant in the room, and the three hundred pound gorilla won’t let us talk about it.
 
The gorilla is the elephant is the new metaphor for the GOP.

Tookie and the myth of non-violent protest

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A police beatingTonight the state of California is scheduled to execute Stanley Tookie Williams, co founder of the Crypts, after Governor Schwarzenegger made the determination that Williams was not sufficiently redeemed to merit clemency.
 
All sorts of state and local organizations were abuzz about the possibility of riots should Williams be executed. The consensus was to urge every riot minded person to remember that the reformed Williams stood for non-violence.

Now isn’t that just like an authoritarian state to honor Stanley Williams with non-violence in word, while perpetrating institutional violence in deed against his defenseless body?

I’m not sure what could be accomplished by public violence in this case, but the threat of violence from the masses has always played a significant role in holding off the authoritarian ambitions of greedy bastards.

These days of protest against the war have raised profound anti-violence issues, extending from transcending human nature to the more applied martyrdom for the purpose of igniting support. But the immediate result and absolute result seems to be that the bullies get to keep all the marbles.

We are told to respect Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and now Tookie Williams for their seasoned non-violent teachings.

No one is prepared to point to Castro, Mao or Chavez as examples of rebels who resorted to violence and who brought their people to greater prosperity as a result.

I saw a documentary about Tibet recently, in which the Dalai Lama was praised for leading his people in non-violent opposition to the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

The Dalai Lama can be respected for governing his people in exile, for maintaining in them a sense of hope that their kingdom will be regained. That sense of hope is perhaps the most important motivation they have for keeping their language and cultural heritage alive. The other alternative is to face that they will be a displaced people forever. Each then might better embrace assimilation into their host cultures and prosper.

The reality is that even should Tibet be regained, the westernized and worldly Tibetans would probably not return to their feudal heritage. And the other reality is that Tibet will never be regained.

Holding firm to a policy of non-violence has certainly saved lives, but it has lost principles. The real wisdom of the Dalai Lama might have been the assessment that the Chinese forces would have proven insurmountable and that too many more Tibetans would have perished with the kingdom lost none the less.

Will non-violence prevail over the Chinese occupation? There is no precedence to offer that hope.

We like to credit Gandhi for having proven the efficacy of non-violence, but that is sorely inaccurate. Gandhi sat on the back of the dying elephant of British colonialism, until it collapsed. And it may have collapsed by his sitting on it, but it had been weakened and battered by a century of violent rebellions. British colonial rule in India ended because the elephant had been driven to its knees by many countless uprisings and massacres which the British public could no longer countenance. It took over one hundred years of struggle against oppressive rule to drive the British out, and Gandhi was fortunate enough to deal the death blow by sitting down.

Nelson Mandela too is credited with leading a non-violent takeover of South Africa. Anyone who has read Mandela’s auto-biography knows that this is a misrepresentation. Mandela’s struggle began with violence and then he was incarcerated. Involuntary non-violence.

Martin Luther King provides an example of non-violent martyrdom affecting the conscience of a democratic population. King would be the best model for non-violent protest were we to inhabit a similar circumstance. It is doubtful today that our media possesses a conscience to report about oppression and inhumanity. Likewise it is doubtful that we have retained any meaningful democracy. It remains our horror to discover that public opinion or outrage will affect our governance not one bit.

Isn’t it just like a bully to admonish the rest of the schoolyard to uphold principles of pacifism? The only thing that will bring down a bully is a collective agreement to take him down. Pacifism works against the bully because he knows that if he makes a martyr of somebody, the others will rise up like a mob. Behind non-violent protest lies a looming urgency of violence.

Jesus and the recalcitrant camel

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So some rich Christians are trying to work their way around Jesus’ admonition about Christian wealth. “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
 
Apparently some Christian scholars have been saying that the “eye of the needle” was the name of a gate in Jerusalem, a particularly thorny entrance through which it was not the easiest task to coax a recalcitrant camel. Interesting. So that is what Jesus was saying. Well.

Ask yourself how to define “impossible.” Imagine trying to explain to a child “it cannot be done.” To a child all things are possible. You find yourself having to use an illustration, very like Jesus did. Maybe you choose the elephant in a box concept. (Is there an elephant in this box? No. How do you know there’s not an elephant in this box? It would be too big. So would it be impossible for an elephant to be in this box?)

Now try to define a “difficult task,” and simple examples abound. “As hard as trying to stay awake when you’re sleepy. Or doing a handstand on one elbow. Or keeping a hacky-sack up in the air with only your tongue!” All would be pretty hard I guess. But not impossible.

Does it sound to you like that was what Jesus was trying to illustrate? I think his sarcastic tone gives it away. A sarcastic comparison only works with extremes. Else he would have said “it’s as DIFFICULT as directing your camel through etc, etc.”

Maybe in today’s parlance, Jesus would have liked to say, a rich man will get into heaven when the ambient temperature of the world’s nether regions reach a sufficient extreme to freeze over!

What a bunch of sniveling sneaks.