I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: The California state Republican Party has been declared dead and gone. Why? According to a Democratic political consultant, the state GOP is too white, to write, and too uptight. What if the party were to take the advice and straighten up in order to appeal to more voters In an increasingly liberal state?
Years back, George Carlin had a singularly perfect bit about “shell shock” becoming “battle fatigue” becoming “operational exhaustion” becoming “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Carlin was arguing a point that has been made multiple times: how you think affects what you think. That war is terrible and destroys the people it touches is morphed gradually into the standard operating procedure being that a wellness specialist provides positive incremental feedback to help you self-actualize a post-incident readjustment. (Translation: a handful of prescriptions and a psychologist will, somehow, magically make you okay with how you now have to learn to wipe your ass with the metal hooks that replaced your hands when they got blown off while you were fighting the war to make Dubya’s father’s friends even richer. And if you complain? You will be humored and taught/conditioned to not complain out loud. Why? Because complaining is what losers do. Complaining is what quitters do. And complaining is how every single revolution ever got started.)
Bill Hick, a comedian who died much too young, made a similar observation about how Debbie Gibson writes all her songs: “Yeah, she writes all her own songs about her own real life experiences. [W]hat’s the next one called? ‘Mom, why am I bleeding?’ When did we start listening to pre-pubescent white girls? […] We have at our fingertips the greatest minds of all time, the knowledge and history of the greatest thinkers of all fucking time, but no, what’s that little white girl saying? Let’s go put Debbie Gibson’s thoughts on compact disc so they’ll never be destroyed.”
I saw the Carlin-Hicks offspring last night (or the night before) in an ABC News item about the effect of the Sequester.
First, see how it’s called “the Sequester”? (Ted may have covered this already.) It’s a frickin’ budget cut. So why call it “the Sequester”? Because that sounds better. When someone says “sequester” you think of one of two things — a jury being put in a room to decide a legal case or carbon dioxide being pumped into the bottom of the ocean. Sequester carries a flavor of gravitas, of a rational, prudent step being taken to resolve something. Budget cut carries a flavor of failure. And this time, there’s enough blame to go around for everyone on all three sides (Rep., Dem., and Journ.). So everyone’s calling it Sequester.
Second, the ABC News piece shows the culmination of the Carlin-Hicks hypothesis. The piece had the cutesy widdle part about how pwecious middle schoolers weren’t able to go on tours of the White House because those tours were cancelled as part of the Sequester. And there were clips of the semi-articulate children reciting what they’d memorized ahead of time (see Debbie Gibson). They’d even made some adowable signs about how the “White House is our house.” (I guess the cards that read, “Mom, why am I bleeding?” and “Why am I getting hair in my armpits” weren’t ready.)
At one point, the reporter (Jonathan Karl, IIRC) mentioned that the film crew had just happened to run into John Boehner while they were filming a segment of the report, so they went to a film clip of Boehner mouthing some inanities. They “just happened” to run into him. So, were they originally going to air this report without ANY senior officials? Just gonna run with the kids, huh? That’s Carlin-Hicks for you.
Even though the ABC News piece actually criticized the president — they pointed out that he was going to a restaurant six blocks from the White House, which meant a full Secret Service contingent, which meant a big price tag — they sandwiched the criticism in cutesy, so it lost its impact. But that’s what the news does now. Lots of simpering and a slight trace of mirth in the voice at all times. (Sidebar: I propose a new drinking game: Every time Diane Sawyer seems mildly amused, take a drink. Every time she leans forward as if the teleprompter font is too small to make out, take a drink. You’ll want to switch arms every few seconds or one bicep will become noticeably larger than the other.)
But that’s how you do it: soften everything, make it all look rose-colored and moist-eyed and cute, and everything goes down nice and smooth. All that’s missing is a basket of puppies on the news desk while they read the 30 second report on drone attacks.
About this, anyway.
An op-ed in the New York Times tries to gin up hysteria: terrorists can buy guns!
The logic is, um, not flawless:
Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, has reintroduced a worthy measure to close this “terror gap”— eight years after his initial attempt failed. It would give the Attorney General authority to stop a firearm or explosive sale when a background check reveals the buyer is a known or suspected terrorist who the Attorney General reasonably believes may be planning mayhem. The National Rifle Association opposed the measure in the past because the terrorist watch list has been shown to contain errors. That’s hardly a justification for extending carte blanche to terrorist suspects.
Actually, it is.
I don’t give two shits who the AG thinks might be planning terror shenanigans.
Gun ownership is a constitutional right, and constitutional rights don’t vanish – or shouldn’t, anyway – on the say-so of some political hack like Eric Holder. There shouldn’t even be a terrorist watch list in a country where we are considered not guilty until proven otherwise by a court of law.
The New York Times: the gift that keeps on giving.
Yesterday I reminded you of the paper’s nauseating role in the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez. Naturally they whitewashed this from their coverage of his death.
Today they editorialized this hilarious nugget:
“The Bush administration badly damaged Washington’s reputation throughout Latin America when it unwisely blessed a failed 2002 military coup attempt against Mr. Chávez. The United States should now make clear its support for democratic and civilian transition.”
Um, what?!? The Paper of Record pretends there is no record. So which Times do we believe: the fascist pro-coup rag, or the lofty pro-democracy journal?
In a Two-Party System, the Loser is Us
Stalin called bourgeois parties “the dancing bears of social democracy.” Toothless and undignified distractions, these non-movements personify the function of electoral politics—to channel the energies of the oppressed into bullshit discussions about trivia and inanities.
Uncle Joe’s hilariously inelegant phrase comes to mind these days as the corporate pundit class prattles on and on about the supposed current crise de coeur of the GOP. How, everybody is asking (if, by everybody, you mean a coupla dozen writers), can the Republican Party maintain its relevance?
Like that grammatical atrocity The Sequester (it’s a budget cut), the Republicans-could-go-extinct meme is a crisis so manufactured it hardly exists. The Party of Hoover still controls the House of Representatives. They hold us 27 state legislatures and 30 governors mansions.
You could even argue that they have the Democratic Party. The Dems of yore, after all, were big-spending liberals standing up for the little guy. FDR and LBJ wouldn’t recognize guys like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, more worried about deficits, sucking up more to bankers and ignoring the plight of the poor and oppressed than so-called conservatives, as members of their party.
All this handwringing over the alleged danger that the GOP could fade into irrelevance—that’s mediaspeak for losing more elections—ignores the fact that Barack Obama only defeated Mitt Romney, a bizarre human being and an awful candidate—by a few percentage points. Republicans lost a few seats in the House and a pair in the Senate, but things basically remained unchanged. Not bad for a party that failed to present any new ideas beyond the usual gays suck, government should be small when the other party is in charge, and one of these days, just you wait and see, the rich really will spend some of those tax cuts here in the States.
The argument that Republicans need to reinvent themselves boils down to two factors, the first shoulder-shruggingly silly: given what a terrible job Obama did with the economy during his first term, the Republicans should have done better. No one was closer to summing this up than The New York Times the morning after Electorapocalypse 2012: “After four years in which the jobless rate never dipped below 7.8 percent, with millions of Americans still unemployed or underemployed and median household income falling, Republicans still failed to unseat President Obama and, for the second election in a row, fell short in their efforts to win control of a Senate that seemed within reach.”
A lack of crushing victory does not a defeat make.
The Paper of Record, Wednesday-morning quarterbacking elections a decade or two earlier, was evidently astonished by voters’ refusal to maintain its previous practice of punishing the incumbent party for a bad economy by rewarding an opposition that offers nothing better.
The worry that Republicans really should focus on is demographics: an influx of immigration, especially by Latinos alienated by decades GOP race-baiting on illegal immigration, coupled with a seemingly long term trend among young adults toward increased liberalism on social issues like gay marriage—young adults who will of course become the older adults of the future.
“The question now facing Republicans,” Brian Montopoli of CBS News wrote in November, “is whether they shift toward the middle or instead try to appeal to growing demographic groups while staying planted firmly on the right side of the political spectrum.”
George Skelton of The Los Angeles Times quotes a “veteran political consultant” who explains why California’s GOP is pretty much doomed: “Too white, too right and too uptight,” says the consultant, a Democrat. “That’s why the Republican Party can’t come back in California.”
A cogent and witty summary. And many conservatives seem to agree. The problem for them, as it was with Romney’s failure to make the case that he couldn’t fix the economy, is that all the proposed solutions are so lame that they’re hardly worth trying.
Karl Rove, “Bush’s architect” whose crazy right-wing politics now seem positively liberal compared to the even crazier, further-right Tea Party-dominated GOP, addressed delegates to the California state Republican convention last week, making the case for tokenism: “We need to be asking for votes in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we’re asking for the vote from.” In other words, Marco Rubio. Which is Spanglish for Condoleezza Rice/Colin Powell. Sorry, but minorities have become too sophisticated for that. They want candidates who stand up for them, not just those whose skin tone matches theirs on the RGB chart.
In his pamphlet “Go For the Heart: How Republicans Can Win,” David Horowitz, whose politics blend classic 1930s fascism with Reagan at his welfare-queen filthiest, argues that the Republican victories of the future rely on a combination of hope and fear, making voters feel that Republicans care about them and that liberals want to enslave them in some imaginary nanny state. The trouble is that neither argument stands a chance of getting off the ground given decades of GOP propaganda. If Republican leaders have been successful at anything, it’s that convincing Americans that, not only do they not care about them, Americans don’t deserve to be cared about, and indeed anyone who does care is evil. As the tacit support for Obama’s flawed healthcare reform plan demonstrates, however, people really do want the government to care about them, at least to some extent. If anything, they’d like a little more nannying (in the form of a public option).
Many conservatives suggest downplaying the GOP’s stands on social issues because they aren’t popular. Some say they should be changed entirely. Others imagine a mishmash of social liberalism or at least libertarianism and fiscal conservatism.
The real reason that all of this is interesting is that it reveals the muddleheaded mess that characterizes political thought at this, a crucial juncture in the late final crisis of late stage capitalism in America. A successful political party, whether a genuine movement or a dancing bear of bourgeois electoral democracy, requires a consistent and coherent ideology. It isn’t enough to cobble together a laundry list of poll-tested positions on issues past and present. You have to put forth a way of thinking about the world that allows anyone to predict with a high degree of accuracy how your party would respond to the problems, challenges and controversies of the future, to events that are completely impossible to imagine today.
The Republicans aren’t anywhere close to achieving a coherent—much less popularly appealing—ideology.
On the other hand, neither are the Democrats.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
When news of Hugo Chávez’s death broke yesterday, I wondered whether the Paper of Record would ignore its own disgusting record on Venezuela in its coverage. Alas, I was not disappointed.
In April 2002, when coup plotters briefly overthrew the democratically-elected president and kidnapped him to a remote island in the Caribbean – with the consent and backing of the White House – the Times jumped aboard the coup wagon. Not only was there an official editorial endorsing the coup, there was even a breathless profile of Pedro Carmona, a “Man in the News” in Times parlance, the coup leader/figurehead/who knows, full of details the Times could only have gotten in advance from one source: their chums in Langley, with whom they have a well-established and very cozy relationship.
Today the Times had nothing to say about its own role in the 2002 coup.
Um..Mr. Public Editor?
Time for another cartoon auction! This week: another cartoon about Mohammed, drone pilot hero of Pakistan, this time the winner of the exciting new Pentagon medal that outranks the bronze Star that goes to people who die in battle, a tongue-in-cheek solution to unemployed people looking for jobs in a market that discriminates against the unemployed, and a throwback to slavery, the preferred employment status of perfect capitalism.
If you’re new to the cartoon auction, if you win, you receive the original artwork of one of the three cartoons of your choice, as well as high-resolution color artwork emailed to you. And most of all, you receive the satisfaction of directly supporting a living artist. Well, living for now, anyway.
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Thousands of paroled sex offenders are removing or disarming their court-ordered GPS tracking devices.
Cannibals, Thoughtcrime and a Rising Police State
“I was going to be tied up by my feet and my throat slit and they would have fun watching the blood gush out of me because I was young,” the wife of 28-year-old NYPD “cannibal cop” Gilberto Valle testified at his trial.
After she installed keyboard-tracking software on his laptop, Kathleen Mangan-Valle went on, she found that her husband planned to stuff one of her friends in a suitcase and murder her. Two other women were “going to be raped in front of each other to heighten their fears,” while another would be roasted alive over an open fire.
Planned? Or fantasized?
There’s no evidence that Officer Valle, on trial for conspiracy to kidnap, torture, kill and eat women, ever acted on his voreaphilia, a cannibalism fetish. If convicted, however, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
George Orwell called it “thoughtcrime”: punishing people for their thoughts rather than their actions. The case of the cannibal cop – or, more accurately, the wannabe cannibal cop – is a perfect illustration of why a society can be tempted to try to monitor what goes on in people’s brains, and to sanction citizens whose opinions and fantasies fail to conform to “normalcy.” Suppose the federal jury lets Officer Valle off the hook. The idea of this guy roaming the streets of Manhattan picturing the women he sees roasting on a spit – one of the staged (ßlink not safe for work) and Photoshopped images he perused online – is, well, the word creepy hardly does it justice.
Voreaphiliacs are rare, but one of the great things about the Internet is that it allows pervs and other weirdoes to find one another. “If you were someone mildly interested in cannibalism 30 years ago, it was really hard to find someone in real space to find common cause with,” Joseph V. DeMarco, ex-chief of the cybercrime unit of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, told The New York Times. “Whereas online, it’s much easier to find those people, and I think when you have these communities forming, validating each other, encouraging each other, it’s not far-fetched to think that some people in that community who otherwise might not be pushed beyond certain lines might be.”
That’s what happened in Germany in 2001, when a man who responded to an online post seeking a victim willing to be killed, slaughtered and eaten got his wish. No one disputes that the 43-year-old Berlin engineer died voluntarily; the cannibal videotaped his chatty – and perfectly happy – prey before finishing him off.
As bizarre and – yes, I’ll say it – disgusting and terrifying as the so-called cannibal cop’s online chats were, I am disturbed by convicting people for actions that they not only never committed, but might never have committed. And yeah, things – bad things, as in Germany, do really happen sometimes. But as Sartre said, we are all responsible for our actions. Should we go to prison for our fantasy lives? Should we give up our right to cranial privacy to protect ourselves from the exceedingly rare chance that some nut will eat someone?
Take another look at the quote above by Joseph DeMarco. It’s so full of conjecture and speculation: “not far-fetched”…”might”…”might.” Well, anyone might do anything, right?
What if Saddam had WMDs? What if they had them and what if they gave them to terrorists? And then, what if those terrorists used them against us? If if if.
We know what happens when we act based on ifs.
Thoughtcrime prosecutions often revolve around sex. A 50-year-old man in South Florida currently faces more than 3000 years in prison for possession of child pornography. (Prosecutors filed separate 15-year counts for each of 200 videos found on his hard drive.) Even if you buy the demand-side argument that no one would make kiddie porn if no one bought it – a dubious claim, given the zillions of people who happily “sext” nude photographs of themselves for free – aren’t we forgetting something? Looking at child pornography isn’t the same as producing and disseminating it. In America, convicted rapists serve an average of about eight years. Wouldn’t it make more sense to send the actual rapists away for three millennia?
As America continues to degenerate into unapologetic authoritarianism, prosecutions for thoughtcrime are increasingly common. In 2008 a Pennsylvania woman, Karen Fletcher, was sentenced under a plea bargain for writing fictional erotic stories about sex with children. The victimized children didn’t exist; her criminal record does. In 2001 an Ohio man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “textual child porn” – writing stories in his private journal that depicted kids being raped and tortured. Again, no actual kids were hurt. The diary was for personal consumption and never shown to anyone else.
In 2010 an Iowa man was forced to plead guilty and went to prison for six months for possession of porn manga – Japanese-style comics – that depicted children having sex. The same thing happened in October 2012 to another consumer of kiddie porn manga, this one in Missouri.
In the Missouri case a press release by Project Safe Childhood asserted that “the depictions clearly lack any literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” Of that, I have little doubt. The same could be said of the contents of most TV shows.
Hysteria leads to irrationality. Dwight Whorley of Richmond, Virginia is serving 20 years in federal prison for looking at Japanese anime images of cartoon children being raped. Upholding the decision, Judge Paul Niemeyer of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted that “it is not a required element of any offense under this section [of the law] that the minor depicted actually exists.”
WTF?
Has it ever occurred to anyone that cartoon porn might be beneficial to society, a way for people whose fetishes are illegal to get themselves off without hurting anyone?
The main reason that so many of these cases, including that of the so-called cannibal cop, are prosecuted in federal court is that most state and local jurisdictions set a higher bar for conspiracy convictions, requiring that at least one member of the conspiracy be proven to have taken at least one decisive action toward carrying it out. The young Somali-American charged with plotting to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in downtown Portland in 2010, for example, was handed a fake detonator by an undercover agent and told it would set off a bomb. He pushed it. I agree with the jurors. He meant to do it.
The cannibal cop, kiddie porn and other thoughtcrime cases, on the other hand, involving sending people to prison for things that they thought, not that they did. I don’t see how any society that does that can call itself free.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
Why Can’t the U.S. Move Forward?
“Your dearest wish is for our state structure and ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds away to develop or else collapses.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that in 1974, in his famous “Letter to the Soviet Leaders.” But it could just as easily be addressed to President Obama, Congress, members of the media, corporate chiefs, and others who lead and maintain the power structure in the United States.
The United States is as ossified as the USSR was before its collapse.
Shortly after the start of the financial meltdown which began in 2009, polls found American citizens disgusted with the capitalist system. Tens of millions said they would prefer socialism. When the Occupy Wall Street movement took off in 2011, mainstream pundits began using the “R” word, revolution – but only to ask a question with a predetermined answer. Regime change, they said, was neither desirable nor possible.
Too bad.
We used to be a growing country. Not any more. We used to welcome new states into the Union. It’s been 53 years since we added a star to Old Glory; Puerto Rican statehood isn’t a subject of serious consideration. We used to amend the Constitution to suit changing mores. The last major amendment, granting the vote to 18-year-olds, was ratified in 1971. Apparently equal rights for women is too much to ask.
We don’t build anymore. Think about infrastructure. The last major public works project in U.S. history was the Interstate Highway System, built in the 1950s – not coincidentally when the economy was booming.
Our political system is ossified too. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut prompted calls for tighter gun control. But nobody – not even liberals, the traditional enemies of gun rights – argued for getting rid of the Second Amendment which, depending on your interpretation of the prefatory comma, allows us to join a militia or carry guns in our waistbands. “I have no intention of taking away folks’ guns,” President Obama has said.
Well, why not? Personally, I’m against gun control and I’m glad that very little is going to change. Yet I find it disturbing that the Second Amendment is considered sacrosanct, even by the 24% of Americans who want to ban handguns. Pointing out that the country is very different now than it was in 1789 seems reasonable. Maybe we don’t need guns any more. A smart country, one willing to weigh the alternatives when trying to solve a problem, should be able to discuss the possibility of repealing the Second Amendment.
Look at our national political dialogue, which ranges from center-right (Democrat) to right (Republican). Whole strains of ideology – communist, socialist, nationalist, libertarian – are off the table. We pretend most of the ideological spectrum doesn’t exist. Not smart.
Our national unwillingness and/or inability to have a wide-ranging debate reminds me of New York City, where I have lived for many years. There are no public restrooms. Restaurants and other businesses post “Restrooms for Customers Only” signs on their doors. Yet peeing outside is against the law; in fact, it’s public exposure, a sex offense that can land you on a Megan’s Law-style pervert registry. So where are you supposed to go?
A child could tell you this is insane. You know what’s even more insane? That we New Yorkers don’t even talk about it. Like Germans on their way to work in the early 1940s, wondering what that funny smell coming from the camp down the road might be coming from, we pretend that this is all perfectly normal.
As a recent New York Times article by Louis Seidman pointed out, we have foolishly elevated the Constitution to the status of a sacred text, fetishizing a supposedly “living document” that in truth has been dead for years. (Congress, for example, has the sole right to start wars. President Bush ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions concerning POWs at Guantánamo. And so on.) The result, Seidman argues, is endless petty bickering about what the meaning of “is” is – and what that stupid comma was supposed to be for.
The question for any society is not how to figure out how to conform ourselves to rules and assumptions laid down by our forebears, but to come up with the smartest solutions to our problems and the best systems to make things run smoothly now and in the future. If we were revolutionaries, if we were inventing the United States from scratch, would we create the Electoral College? Doubtful.
The people of the United States are changing all the time, but the United States government and power structure are stuck. The political “culture wars” date to the 1960s and 1980s. Our military thinks the Cold War is still going on.
Our economy reflects our national congealing.
Once a “land of opportunity,” the U.S. is now anything but. If you’re born into a poor family, your chances of elevating yourself into the middle or upper class are lower in America than in other industrialized countries. “It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries,” says economist Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.” Aside from the unfairness and the instability caused by inequality and lack of social mobility, we’re losing the talents of tens of millions of Americans who will never be able to live up to their potential, share their ideas and contribute to the making of a more perfect union.
We haven’t had a major social or political revolution since the 1960s. It’s been too long. Like the Soviet Union, we must develop – scrapping long-held assumptions and reconsidering everything from scratch – or collapse.
I think we’re headed toward collapse.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
