Category Rants

War, Peace, And Whatever The Fuck This Is

Of all the meaningless gestures from the Obama Administration regarding our illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none is more meaningless than the declaration that “the last combat troops have left Iraq”.

Fifty thousand troops remain in Iraq and the number of mercenaries used in lieu of U.S. military personnel will nearly triple from 2,700 to 7,000. An American military presence in Iraq is unlikely to disappear for decades to come. Just ask the Germans, who still have 68,000 American soldiers in their country even though their war ended 65 years ago. Or the Japanese, who have 47,000 U.S. troops. Or the Koreans, with 37,000. “They need us to maintain order”, “they need us to defend them”, “the strategic value of forward placement is critical to our national security”, “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”, and so on. The lies evolve as the situation changes, but there is always some rationalization for permanent occupation.

John McCain had the temerity to say this on Twitter: “I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.”

Somebody should kick John McCain in the teeth. While it’s not the first time the United States trumped up some bullshit reason to invade another country, the outright lies from Bush and his allies used to gin up a case for a completely unnecessary war are nothing short of war crimes themselves. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Tony Blair, every last one of them should be hauled in front of the same sort of kangaroo court that Saddam Hussein was tried in, summarily found guilty, and hanged for their crimes against humanity. Crowing triumph after seven years of unadulterated misuse of power should be seen as the craven act of a coward and a bully, and the bootlicker McCain deserves to have some sense smacked into him.

During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama received a great deal of criticism for using the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig”, but the news spin on this troop reduction is exactly that. Meanwhile, Obama himself deserves a pretty good smack for continuing and expanding the war in Afghanistan, now nearly ten years old and with even less legitimacy than the invasion of Iraq.

There will, of course, never be any proper accounting for all of this. The trillions of dollars squandered, the lives lost or ruined, the incalculable damage done to not just the people of Iraq and Afghanistan but also the people of this country. But neither should there ever be a banner raised in triumph, a head held high in honor, or a page written in history that portrays these last seven years and however many more to come as anything less than a disgrace and a shame.

Drape The Flag No More

In the course of its history, this nation has sent a little more than 1.2 million men and women to their deaths in military service. Over 234 years, they have fought and died for causes noble and just and causes shameful and wrong; they have died for the birth of the republic and the continuation of the union, they have died to help William Randolph Hearst sell more newspapers, they have died to liberate the people of Europe, they have died to prop up or knock down petty dictators, and they have died to secure cheap oil for our insatiable gluttony. In all that time, not a one of them has died for your freedom, though many of them died to bring freedom to others.

How many acts of selfless heroism, of duty, of honor, of ultimate sacrifice must we continue to squander when they could be so better used? Each headstone on the hills of Arlington National Cemetery, or the fields of Normandy, or the graveyards that dot every city and town across America is a life that could have been so much better lived if left untouched by the hubris and greed of politicians and businessmen. Our remembrance does so little to fill the void left by so many losses, yet it is the one small act every person in this country should feel obligated to. Not out of thankfulness or pride, but out of atonement and out of the realization that so much was given for so little in return.

Bow your head and beg forgiveness from these crosses and stars and flags and flowers. Raise your voice, raise your fist, and vow that their deaths will not simply be a million precursors to a million more. Not until every soldier marches home, until there are no more flag-draped coffins to lower forever into the earth will the lives of the fallen have been given their due.

Maybe We Don’t Need Them After All

Earlier in the week, there was a blog post by a guy who calls himself American Dad posting at Talking Points Memo called “An Open Letter To Conservatives”. In it, he offers a vast laundry list of all the appalling behavior, thuggish tactics, and outright terrorist acts that have been committed by elected Republican officials, right-wing “political action” groups, straight-up right-wing wackos, and that gaggle of morons known as “The Tea Party”. It’s a pretty damning list of lies, hypocrisies, petulant behavior, and serious acts of violence, and yet he says “we need you” to them, arguing that somewhere, somehow there is something beneficial about trying to reason with these people and bring them back into the fold of normal, civil, rational political debate.

And that sounds all nice and fuzzy and conciliatory and such, but I am here to tell you that it’s totally wrong-headed. We don’t need any of that bullshit, and to pretend that just sitting down over a cup of coffee with these people will turn them back into rational, thoughtful people who just differ a little bit in opinion is not only foolish, it is quite likely dangerous.

Since the passage of the health care legislation Sunday night, right-wing groups have begun shattering windows, tried to blow up the house of a Democratic member of Congress (except they got the wrong house and almost killed the guy’s brother and his family), and have instigated so many death threats against members of Congress that no fewer than 10 of them have had to be given round-the-clock police protection. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the looming threat of widespread right-wing violence and it’s beginning to look like the passage of the health care bill was exactly the match needed to set off their tinder.

So what can anyone expect to gain from trying to reason with people who have concluded that the best course of action is to threaten, intimidate, and kill? That’s not “meaningful political dialogue”, it’s terrorism plain and simple. “Conservatism” is a meaningless term in the present context, because there’s nothing conservative about the actions and agendas of these groups. Mollycoddling them with the notion that they might have something positive to offer is like hand-feeding steak to a starving grizzly bear.

The time has come to take a tougher stance in response to these people and instead of offering them a seat at the table, pushing them back under the rock they crawled out from.

The Pyrrhic Victory

Regardless of the rhetoric and spin from both sides of the debate, the bottom line on the passage of the health care bill was that the political necessity of passing the bill outweighed every other consideration for the Democrats, and the necessity of defeating the bill outweighed every other consideration for the Republicans, and once that reality sank in on the holdout Dems, it was an irresistable force. The Democrats may never again hold as large a majority in either house as they have at the moment, so this was truly a once-in-a-lifetime chance to take this to a final floor vote and win, and there isn’t a soul in Washington DC who doesn’t know that. For the 34 Democrats who did vote no, at the end of the day their personal political survival was more in doubt that the political survival of Barack Obama, and Pelosi’s leadership group had the numbers, so those who needed the out were given it.

Do not kid yourself, precious little was accomplished in terms of real health care reform by passing this legislation. And for all the talk of “it’s just a beginning, we’ll do more later”, nothing of substance in this matter will be brought before Congress for decades to come. This is it. This is what we got, and it’s too fucking little to make any difference in the grand scheme of things. But the Republicans made sure it was a 100% all-out war, and in the end there was no choice but to return fire. And now there can be no quarter given by either side; every legislative battle of consequence from this time forward will have to be fought to the death, and every outcome will be zero-sum. Though I think the Republicans are kidding themselves to believe that they will flip Congress in the mid-term elections, they will probably come out ahead in the short-term calculus and thus the parity of the warring factions will level off again, to the detriment of every person who lives in the United States.

To the Democrats, I say do not rejoice even a single moment of this victory. Your win comes at the sacrifice of any genuine reform. Millions will continue to be unable to afford even basic health care, and will be permanently welded to the sides of the rapacious insurance companies by a mandate that failed to include a public option. Your cowardice and cupidity throughout the year that this legislation has ground through Congress means far more than your acquiescence to the President now. You did win the battle, but you have certainly lost the war.

To the Republicans, all that can be said is that you do not deserve to serve your country in any way shape or form. “Deplorable” does not begin to describe the conduct of your leadership or your rank and file. Nothing you say or do should ever be taken seriously by anyone ever again, and if you had the slightest bit of human decency you would resign your offices, beg for absolution, and remove yourselves from the company of decent human beings forever. There is not a brush big enough to tar each and every one of you with the shame you richly deserve. You have managed not only to doom millions of people’s lives, you have also brought the wrecking ball through the house of democratic government so completely that it might not be possible to ever govern this nation through the legislative process again. As Bob Dylan sang, is your money that good?

Unbelievable

BELIEVE

I was busy yesterday and completely offline all afternoon, so by the time I caught first wind about the story with the balloon and the kid, they had just found the kid on the ground, hiding. But this ridiculous story led the local 6:00 newscast AND the network newscast, and the frothing twats at our local NBC station were ready to go wall-to-wall with it all night long if the kid hadn’t turned up about two minutes into their newscast. They had reporters live at various locations to cover this IMPORTANT STORY…even though this was happening in Colorado and NOT Boston. They had “Experts” lining up to explain about how balloons work. They had animated SCARE-O-VISION graphics and that “Voice of Doom” voice-over guy they use all cued up and ready to use over and over and over. And I will wager you any amount of money that at least one station in every single major media market in the country did the exact same thing. And all you had to do was look at that balloon to know that there was no way in hell it was going to support the weight of a small child. Is there a television news director left anywhere in the country who isn’t a complete moron?

Even if it turns out that this was a complete stunt on the part of the family involved (and I can’t make up my mind if it is or not), every working television journalist in America needs to take a long, deep look inside themselves and honestly question what the hell they are doing if this sort of inanity receives that much of their time and attention. Seems to me that maybe we would be better served if the newspapers stayed in business and the television news networks were the ones shutting down; newspapers are guilty of a lot of sensationalism, too, but this story would have had time to play itself out before a single inch of print could be wasted on it.

UPDATE: Since some people coming here via the CNN link can’t play nice, I have turned comments off

Bring Lawyers, Guns and Money

revolutionary

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — The Declaration of Independence

If it isn’t clear to people by now that when Barack Obama said “Change you can believe in”, he really meant nothing of the kind. He meant “we’ll just keep on doing it the way we always have”, and most Democrats have been okay with this because the ones in power benefit from having it be their turn and the ones who aren’t powerful seem to be satisfied that he’s not George Bush and that’s all they really cared about in the first place. Which is really, really, really disgusting, when you think about it.

So what can you do? Well, the deck is so stacked against any attempt to bring change to the rotten two-party system that the consensus seems to be that the only way to effect any change is to “nut up” (as that ad for the new Woody Harrelson movie says), and settle in for the long haul of trying to bring genuine change to the Democrats, who are the lesser of the two evils. The Republican Party was transformed through the slow process of seeding people at the bottom 25-30 years ago and now those wackjobs and wingnuts have successfully turned that party into a very scary political entity indeed. This long, but well-written, post at The Seminal (which has been folded into the political site Fire Dog Lake) by Bill Egnor outlines exactly wht a long and arduous task it will be. If you don’t have a quarter-century to devote to it, it’s going to seem insurmountable.

And maybe it is insurmountable. Maybe our political system is so ossified and thoroughly corrupt that it can’t be changed through even the most diligent of grass roots activism. Maybe it’s time to “nut up” and shoot it out. It’s my distinct impression that there are quite a few people on the right preparing for this very solution. It’s becoming my opinion that the left should begin thinking the same way. If you want me to believe in “change”, then you’d better be intended to actually change something.

Another $0.02 Opinion About “Star Trek” From A Middle-Aged Geek

oldtrek-newtrek

It did not suck.

All three of us went to see it Saturday afternoon at the nearby IMAX theater, since I had been smart enough to pre-buy the tickets online. By that time, there had been enough positive word-of-mouth from trusted friends as well as the glowing professional reviews that I felt reasonably confident we would not be seeing a stinkbomb, but I was still delighted and surprised at how much fun the film was. Charlotte, who has never seen a single episode of any version of Star Trek in her entire life, was totally taken with it, and Bridget, who has had to put up with me being a fanboy all these years but isn’t much of a Trekker herself, still keeps saying two days later how much she liked the movie. I think the three of us represent the exact target audience J.J. Abrams needed to hit: the hardcore Trekker, the newbie, and the average moviegoer. How you could expect to please all three seems to be an impossible task, and yet he managed it.

Now that I’ve had a couple of days to percolate about it a bit, I realize that as much fun as it was to watch, it doesn’t hold up to much careful scrutiny at all. To it’s credit, you can sit through the entire movie and just be a part of the experience without once being distracted by the weaknesses of the film, but be warned that if you are one of those people who likes to pick apart a film as you’re watching it you will see the problems and it will spoil the watching for you. Just let yourself be swept up for the 120 minutes and enjoy it as an ephemeral pleasure and save the analysis for later. That’s working for me.

At this point I’ll pause for any of you who choose to take that advice and stop reading, then I’ll share some of my critical observations with you. Noo ni noo noo…….

Okay, so on with the criticism. We’ll start with the problems from the perspective of its place in the Star Trek Canon and then move on to the problems from the perspective of the filmmaking. From the moment this film was announced as being in development, we all knew the problem would be recasting the characters and re-introducing the series without totally demolishing 40 years’ worth of carefully crafted backstory and utter worship of the original cast. Hollywood has done an utterly TERRIBLE job with every movie they’ve made based on some beloved TV show of the 1960s and 1970s, and the fear early on was that this would be no exception. What ultimately saves the bacon of this movie is that the casting of the primary roles is slam-dunk flawless. All seven of the main cast roles are so fucking awesome that it almost doesn’t matter how stupid the rest of the movie is. Chris Pine channels just enough of Bill Shatner’s swagger and charm but never seems like a caricature or a parody. There are one or two moments when Zack Quinto’s Spock is a little too much like Sylar (the character he plays on “Heroes”), but his intensity seems just right for a young Spock who has not yet mastered his unflappable demeanor. The rest of the cast get a little more leeway to bring new interpretations to their characters, especially Uhura (Zoe Saldana), although poor Scotty (Simon Pegg) gets stuck with the comic relief a wee bit too heavily, and every single one succeeds. Even Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike is great.

But my first and most serious criticism as a Star Trek fan is that they actually had TOO MUCH from established canon in the film. Every character got to utter at least one of their best-known catchphrases, and though each line got a bit laugh from the audience, after the first one or two I found myself just waiting for somebody to say the next one. Trekkers usually love lots of inside jokes or subtle references to bits and pieces of other episodes, but especially considering that the idea was to “reboot” the series, by the last couple of scenes it was just too much for my taste.

And that dovetails with my other biggest criticism from a fan standpoint: they went too far in establishing the story as an “alternate reality” that ties the new cast firmly to the entire canon of Star Trek. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Seems to me they did it to buy some legitimacy from the existing fanbase: “See, you nerds, it’s not THAT different!” It also made the inclusion of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock a viability. But that viability also represents a liability for future movies to have to continue to justify the existence of their diagetic universe by explaining it in the context of the original series. Along that same line of reasoning, I don’t see how they could have worked in a similar role for Shatner as Kirk within the narrative they ended up using, so I’m glad that didn’t come to happen no matter how pissy Shatner has been about it.

So here are my carps about it as a film on its own merits:

The whole film is simply an extended action sequence. One chase scene after another, with barely any time to catch one’s breath. It’s fun, but it’s extremely superficial. Abrams doesn’t make the slightest effort to do any character development or storytelling, he simply relies on the fact that 80% of the audience know these characters inside and out already and that he hasn’t changed anything significant about any of them. So, fire forward phasers, Mr. Sulu and get us out of here, warp factor seven! The villian is utterly generic — angry bad guy with a powerful spaceship who wants to destroy Earth — yeah, right, we all saw Star Trek IV already. He’s as much of a throwaway as the guy in the red uniform who buys it on the away team mission. All he does is enable the conceit of the “alternate timeline” element. A really good Star Trek bad guy has to imply some serious peril to the Federation that maybe the Enterprise can’t stop. That’s why the Borg were such a good nemesis and why Q could keep coming back again and again. In other words, if this wasn’t a Star Trek movie, it would be an utterly forgettable generic summer action movie. A fun bit of entertainment and nothing more.

But you KNOW how these things work. Without question, all the primary cast members had to sign a multi-picture contract, and the writing team is well into a late-stage draft of the next movie so they can go into pre-production this year and have a finished film ready for release late next year. My guess is that there will be at least three movies with this cast, if not four, to pretty much fill up the release calendar clear through the next decade. So they have the opportunity to cover some ground in that time in terms of working out some more substantial storytelling and original character development. OR they could go down the path that most movie series take these days and simply cash in on all the catchphrases and shtick that worked in the first movie and repeat them endlessly until the last film goes straight to DVD.

Personally, I am at a point in my life as a fanboy to appreciate the film from a very superficial level of enjoyment. In fact, I liked it enough that I plan to go see it again, probably without the wimmins. I think it is worth recommending to anyone, be they a trufan or not. Just try not to think about it too much.

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