17th and Irving

Thursday, September 28, 2006

so, to what extent are CIA secret prisons concentration camps?

Not so secret now, but the Democrats once again proved their gutlessness, allowing without comment (i.e. a filibuster) a bill that basically makes democracy a system propped up at the mercy of the president and a few minions, rather than as an assertion of the people.

When people can be held as such a way that will soon be permissible, then any notion of democracy as being anything other than a convenience of the bastards will have faded as certainly as the old fashioned notion that a court of laws should determine innocence or guilt.

How abstracted from terrorism must something be before we acknowledge that there is no connection between these acts of government and terrorism? If somebody calls you an 98 pound weakling for something falsely, why be a 98 pound weakling for something else truly?

As evil as the Republicans are, in the end, what proves the sham of this democracy is more the inability of the Democrats to make any kind of meaningful argument or stand against the railroading of these horrible bills pushed through by an opportunistic set of bastards, why was there no filibuster? This is a bill that actually makes habeas corpus merely optional. This is the threat of the PATRIOT Act made manifest and complete.

At what point is our freedom at the pleasure of our God and at what point is that same freedom at the pleasure of another man? Does anybody ever sit around and think how odd it is that we are having a national debate about the nature and rightness of torture?

Fear is ugly. Opportunism even uglier. But despair is the ugliest worm of this democracy, it makes nary a sound crawling through the rot heaped upon it by the juvenile delinquents who pass for our law-givers. Like the worms beneath us, the Democrats among us on the Capital are little seen, and never more than something to be cast aside, once the plow has cut them.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

a few quick notes before bed...

School's going into its third week, already I feel sleep deprived and kind of cranky most of the time. It's like I've always just read an article about the bush administration now.

The L train is doing it's usual suck job and any time the weather's bad, it's even worse. All during the week it rained and dreared and I waited underground for the train. It was always too early.

And at the end of the week they gave me an extra prep and threw in some sophomores.

Anyway, whatever. During the week I spent a lot of time thinking about the Saw series of movies and the Final Destination series of movie and about how in a culture where we enjoy torture so much, of course the president, heading into election day electioneering, would scrap for a more legal standing for torture. Sadly, I think it will work just enough, and while he might not get the torture, he and his pals can point and preemptively say, "I told you so". They'll talk about how Iraq is on the upswing, after all, they've stopped counting all the bodies now, another nod in its obtuseness to Vietnam which this all faintly echoes politically, and just enough people in just enough states will leave America's Top Model and Lost to swing the vote safely far enough so that the Republicans will be able to enjoy the next couple years of power.

I've given up on Iraq, we're going to continue a slow bleed there until somebody sane comes around, not a John Kerry, not a Hillary Clinton, definately not a Rudy G. or John McCain, but somebody who actually has a sense of the world larger than his or her political ambitions. So for a long time.

But it saddens me that the powers of the Courts will continue to erode, that the rights of all will be sacrificed to the convenience of the few and that evil lobbyists will continue to act proxy in our sham of democracy.

Not that voting (d)emocrat would change that...it's just easy to be depressed after having made the mistake of reading a transcript of the bush speech that interrupted the bush group hug of a tv movie from 9/11(/06).

I would argue that the democrats should push that idea, that voting Republican is voting for all the naked classism, not just some, and that the bastards continue to make K Street the new Main Street...but it would probably actually help the Freedofascists, and as incompetent as they are at actually running anything, they know well enough how to deliver the vote come election day.

Who does all this hurt though? There's still bad television, several million dating sites on the internet, playstation and other et ceteras that even if it eventually comes knocking, you won't hear it.

Bush was talking about how we don't kill the innocent the way the terrorists do, I was reading this and thinking perhaps one of the wire services or newspapers reporting the speech might bring up civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, might bring up all kinds of things really, but none did.

The Cubs won again today, it's looking more and more likely they'll avoid 100 losses. And Rich Hill threw a complete game, the first one by a Cub all year. Ah, my team! Yesterday, with the Dodgers only a half game up, Maddux threw seven innings of one hit ball up against the Padres, the team right behind them. 331 wins.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

a few quick comments...

The rain is steady to drenching tonight, and will be for the next couple days at least. Another hurricane down the East Coast so it must be almost autumn.

Today I started getting ready for school again, threw out a lot of stuff, looked out the window and thought about how little has changed over the summer. Room 648 gleamed, wide open spaces and bright but grayed light. My desk is clean and the rows are arranged in a neat semi-circle, the duel rows even. Summer is over.

There was a war in the middle, pointless, destroying thousands of lives, killing at least a thousand people, meanwhile in Iraq thousands and thousands continued to die and no real answer emerged as to why this suffering was necessary.

We could get existential or Dostoevskian and wonder aloud if the reason for suffering needs an answer save what is God's or what is our own understanding of it, but the fact is, there were no weapons of mass destruction and there is no democracy in a society where violence, murder and terror punctuate every call to prayer. But the same things continue in the same way. In Lebanon the question of who is a terrorist, really has become a meaningless one, just as in Iraq. Credibility, lost with imperialism so long ago, is not even an illusion that the West can create for itself anymore, much less these others.

This is why the horserace of politics receives such press I don't wonder, because we are so hungry for something different to happen that we cover the nuances and vagueries of the powerful and wealthy as they scrap to see who will have the most power to dole out the most wealth to who. It's easier than questioning actual policy or the lack of it, easier than looking into the consequences of things and easier than studying alternatives to the way of things now. The press has let us down, and our failure of the imagination and our demands to keep entertained have allowed the atrocities of ignorant fools, so what else is there to say? I've been thinking about that.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is about how predictable ideologies are, and therefore movements and, in a way, policies (which are like ideologies in a way) and countries as well. There are fewer subtleties to make the actions of large things confusing, as there are with individuals. The large unweildy responses of ideology and policy to individual lives are so abstract from the experience of life as to make all this truly absurd. But we all desire the oracle's touch to tell us how we are connected to these things which have no real meaning for us.

My thinking is becoming muddled because I'm so tired. But I wanted to write something as it has been too long. Perhaps in here, there is the reason for my writing to have been infrequent as of late.