Blind loyalty
There's a proposal at the Iowa Statehouse to
rid our ballots of the straight-ticket voting option. The Des Moines Register has declared the issue a balanced one for Democrats and Republicans, even though Democrats, with a large advantage in the number of statewide registrations, largely support the straight-ticket option while Republicans oppose it and sponsored this legislation. This is another recent example of Republicans being in the right (along with their opposition to traffic cameras). The straight-ticket option is a backwards concept that reeks of tribalism and encourages the disengagement of voters, as Republicans are arguing.
The option has also not been employed democratically in this state. Thanks to a successful lawsuit brought by the Green and Libertarian parties, Iowans can declare themselves members of these two voting groups in their registration, yet there is not now, nor has there ever been, an option on any ballot anywhere in the state to vote a straight "Green" ticket or a straight "Libertarian" one. Do candidates appear in every race for these smaller parties? No they don't, but few, if any, ballots will have both a Republican and a Democrat in every race also. So there is a political advantage at play here-- the one enjoyed by the two dominant parties. In 2008, I appeared on the local ballot as a candidate for the state legislature. I did so as a member of the Green Party in a two-person race against a Democrat. My opponent doubled my vote total on election day. He also had the advantage of having two ballot lines bestowed on him by the state to my one.
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In case you didn’t realize that this was the official week for having no sense of humor, here's more evidence:
Morrissey is sad that Jimmy Kimmel teased him last night on TV.
Well done, Seth: My thoughts on the Oscars
When you hire Seth MacFarlane, you kind of need to expect a certain level of smarminess, right? Either you like
Family Guy/American Dad/The Cleveland Show/Ted, or you don't.
I read a number of articles online today describing how misogynist MacFarlane was as host. The critics' essays were all similar in form-- beginning with the author's claim that he or she can take a joke, and then accusing the voice behind Stewie Griffin of being everything that's wrong with chauvinist Hollywood. Reading each review, I couldn't help but think to myself: wow, this person is dead on-- they
can't take a joke. It's as if they're all miffed that the beautiful people, men and women, all dolled themselves up for the night to pay tribute to our National Celebrity State, and then TV Guy had to go pee on the whole thing.
Troy Patterson at Slate liked it. Here's
his review. How could you not enjoy a telecast that featured a gay men's chorus backing the host on a fresh new ditty entitled "We Saw Your Boobs," an Oscar-winning actress taking a nose dive on stage during the biggest moment of her career, two great wins for the CM Blog Movie of the Year (
Django Unchained), and Barbra Streisand enlivening the Dead Actor Montage with a salute to Marvin Hamlisch. The highlight of the latter was Streisand singing
The Way We Were with the line "If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we?" then answering her own question in a whisper, "Of course we would." It was my favorite moment associated with that song since this scene in
"Naked Gun".
MacFarlane, however, was about the only scripted part of the show I liked. No other presenters were remotely funny. The supposed theme, something along the lines of "saluting the modern movie musical" had a block in the middle that was a 20-minute waste of time. The telecast felt more like the Tonys in parts, and that's not a compliment. For almost 10 minutes, we watched a salute to
Chicago, a movie incorrectly introduced as enjoying its 10th anniversary this year (it's actually 11), and that nobody in Hollywood has mentioned in a studio meeting, or even a cocktail party, since 2006. What'll it be next year? A salute to inspirational films starring Seabiscuit. The horse could come out right there on stage. (This is a good idea actually.) The least that Queen Latifah could have done to spice up the
Chicago segment would be to have come out as a lesbian right there on stage, like Jodie Foster did last month. This was the last chance for this year. Awards season is over.
I'm glad that
Les Miserables didn't win Best Picture. I shutter to think we would have had to watch their cast reunite on stage 11 years from now. I must tell you I have no plans to ever see that movie. Watching Anne Hathaway emote in a 20-second musical clip is long enough, and if his Oscar night performance tells us anything, Russell Crowe did for that picture what Lee Marvin once did for
Paint Your Wagon.
Speaking of both MacFarlane and Hathaway, here is my list of the top Oscar hosts in the modern era:
1) Chris Rock, 2) Seth MacFarlane, 3) David Letterman, 4) Steve Martin, 5) Young Billy Crystal, 6) Jon Stewart, 7) Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, 8) Ellen DeGeneres, 9) Whoopi Goldberg, 10) Old Billy Crystal, 11) Hugh Jackman, and 12) Anne Hathaway and James Franco.
Final upside: the increased visibility of MacFarlane should mean even more episodes of
Family Guy on TBS and Adult Swim. Fifty a week is not quite enough.
The sanest man in professional basketball
I've referenced Royce White here before. He played basketball at my alma mater, Iowa State, a fact I'm proud to promote. He's famous now for refusing to play professional ball with the team that drafted him last summer, the Houston Rockets, until the team accommodates his request for a "mental health protocol," which essentially means employing for him a full-time personal psychiatrist.
I'm a layperson when it comes to understanding matters of mental health, but I am an observer of the modern American scene, and an almost-20-year dweller amidst the low rungs of the corporate world, and I recognize lucidity in a young man when I hear it.
In
this Chuck Klosterman interview, Royce-- I'm going to call him Royce to further humanize him-- spits out several unmistakable truths about our life and times that even our academic class, as a collective group, doesn't seem to grasp.
For one, that hypercompetitiveness is a mental illness. Nobody questions Michael Jordan's mental health because the man knew how to "suck it up" better than almost anybody during the big game, but this is also a man who has become estranged over time from dozens of one-time friends, so much so that it prompted
a recent satire on the Onion's website. On at least one occasion, Jordan has reportedly staked more than a million dollars on the outcome of a round of golf, or a hole of golf, whatever it was, and according to a recent profile in the ESPN magazine, he does not claim to see his competitiveness as anything other than a healthy commodity. Jordan has a deep psychic need
to be perceived as great, and as Royce explains, the only reason this isn't viewed as a problem is that most people perceive him to be great. How are you keeping score?
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that the problem with America was that it was led by what he called PP's, psychopathic personalities. They are smart and personable, and therefore drawn to and successful in political and corporate life, but they are also without conscience. Violating society's ethical codes of behavior causes them no stress. The rest of us use this healthy form of anxiety to moderate our more greedy impulses, but lacking it, they have the advantage of running roughshod over the landscape. (Their employment picture is excellent.) It's not a psychosis, like schizophrenia, so they appear outwardly normal. As Royce suggests, identifying a possible-majority of Americans as mentally ill raises frightening questions about our nation's future. Accepting that this group is a majority would make it more difficult to keep the more traditional cases among us resigned to the margins.
Royce is also correct about the reason the ranks of the mentally ill have become legion-- the diametrically-opposed agendas of business and health care advocacy. Says the former Cyclone point forward, "It's no secret that 2 percent of the human population controls all the wealth and the resources, and the other 98 percent struggle their whole life to try and attain it. Right? And what ends up happening is that the 2 percent leave the 98 percent to struggle and struggle and struggle, and they eventually build up these stresses and conditions."
Holy shit, this is revolutionary stuff. Even our "liberals" have ultimately chosen to bow down before the belief that free-market capitalism will save us. Morality has been replaced by what's perceived as politically-practical. Royce recognizes that the system is rigged, and he's not willing to sign over his mental and emotional health just for a big payday.
So that means he's going to give up the dream of sporting stardom that millions of boys and girls would give their right arm to make a reality? He very well might. It's no wonder that the average sports fan, a failed jock in some fashion, thinks
he's the crazy one. And with the Rockets, Royce wouldn't be joining a roster that resembles the Beat Poets in their rejection of materialism. In the world of sports, you're considered an iconoclast if you grow unusual facial hair.
Royce White is concerned with toxic air, with toxic stress, with toxic surroundings. Klosterman's right that Royce is basically advocating that the power dynamic in sports between employers and employees be completely capsized. The author sees this as a confusing and contradictory stance by Royce because it puts the power of performance and the pocketbook in the hands of the athlete. And he might just be right that that's the goal. Royce's leverage as "the product" is just the most glaring reveal yet of the biggest lie in professional sports-- that is, that the team owner serves a purpose. Sure, they "sell" the sport in the sense that they prepare the branding and the advertising, but that's a little like taking credit for marketing sex-aid pharmaceuticals. The shit sells itself. It's semantics to argue who's selling the games, but it's undeniably the athletes that the fans are buying.
Royce hits my favorite notes when he talks about how sports owners see their business as something other than a business. This is an age-old maxim that it's a "sport" and not a financial enterprise, and now a multi-billion dollar one at that. Like any other employer, his bosses are going to try to get away with providing only the employee and consumer protections they're required by law to provide. His contention makes sense that it's a conflict of interest to have the Rockets assign a team doctor to his case. This would be like having
your employer provide your health insurance. Oh shit, bad example.
Royce isn't getting special treatment when he asks for the mental health care of his choosing.
My employer has a mental health policy. Why doesn't the NBA have one? Instead, he is that rare individual in modern America willing to stand up for his natural rights. I know we hear contradictory claims of this: the loud and frequent hooting of well-armed ninnies, but these are simply the recouping bellows of the happily-caged. They're afraid for their guns, but the guns have little left to protect. Undeniably, the vast majority of Americans prefer living in the zoo to living in their natural habitat.
We should all be more inspired by Royce White, and less perplexed. His win on this matter would be our win. His job is higher in profile than yours or mine, and he has unique leverage in that he has a rare and highly-marketable skill. The outcome of this standoff will have reverberations either way. Fortunately for the rest of us, Royce is, in addition to being a courageous man, a "big picture" thinker. He sees the full scope of what he's fighting for-- and what he's up against. As the man says, you're "always going to run into problems with people who think that business is more important than human welfare."
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Roger Ebert writes about
his favorite bar.
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South African “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, and has been charged by police with her premeditated murder. But that’s not the worst of it. It seems police have also found a testosterone supplement in his house. That son of a bitch.
The Senator from Wal-Mart
There are few figures in our entire political system that I find more personally distasteful than Hillary Clinton. She’s a crass opportunist in the category of her marriage partner. She's actually worse than an opportunist-- she's literally been
on the take.
It is shocking what racist behavior she got away with during her 2008 primary battle with Barack Obama. In New Hampshire, her campaign co-chair, Billy Shaheen, called their African-American opponent a drug dealer. In rural Pennsylvania, to an audience of white working-class voters, she said he couldn't win because he was black. (This particular pandering was also an insult to the white working-class voters.) Then of course, there was the photo of Obama wearing a native Somalian garment that the Clinton campaign leaked to the press. As usual, our elitist press corps allowed her to get away with it, and then the president-elect let her off the hook too by giving her a plum job she was unqualified for, and at which, she proceeded to blow chunks for four years (see: the exposed secrets in the WikiLeaks cables, the Arab Spring, Palestine, Benghazi).
Even as she walks away from the State Department, she's lucky that she lives in the country where you don't go to jail or even lose your job when it's discovered that you have been employing diplomats as spies. As she collects buckets of cash on the back end for her long-time corporate service in government, our news media
fawns over what they perceive as her good fortune and resourcefulness. She's earned it, you see.
You mean after all she's done for us, she has to give Congressional testimony on Benghazi? They actually applaud her skill at public deceit because god help 'em, it's just so inspiring to see an ambitious woman on the national stage!
There's old Hillary Clinton again, spinning gold. Just like she did in 1998 when she rode her husband's untamed penis all the way to the corner of Capitol and Wall. She Tammy Wynette'd him in 1992, then he returned the favor two terms later by agreeing to move with her to New York City so she could run for the Senate, and he was very obviously fibbing on
her behalf even two terms after that when he told a crowd of Iowans in 2008 that she had opposed the Iraq War from the very beginning.
Not an inch of Hillary Clinton projects authenticity to me, including her public contention that the one-time president of the College Republicans at Wellesley College is
not now and always been a Republican. More lies: On a trip to Nepal a decade ago, she made the claim that she was named for Edmund Hillary, even though she was born in 1947, and the explorer didn't climb Mount Everest until 1953. That story lasted long enough to make it into her husband's autobiography. I don’t believe that public service has ever been her motivation in working in government. It's been about making money. Bill and Hill rented out the White House bedrooms to their corporate benefactors (to say nothing of what Bill rented out in the Oval Office). Hillary sat on the Board of Directors for Wal-Mart for years, and then as Secretary of State, used her position to clear the company's path into India. She voted to bail out Wall Street. She voted to murder innocent Iraqis so that that country might be opened up for investment, or rather I should say, profiteering. Even though she lied about this one also in '08: she adamantly backed her husband's key legislative accomplishment, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has proven to be a boon for Corporate America-- and also the most damaging piece of legislation to working people on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Thanks again, Democrats.
Hillary becoming the public face of the women’s empowerment movement might be the single worst thing to happen to feminism since the word came into existence. Most famously, she covered for her high-profile husband, who by all uncompromised accounts of his deeds and misdeeds, has a deep-seated hatred for women. But she's also done virtually nothing to help poor women get ahead, here or abroad, except to champion abortion rights, which is certainly an important issue, but sadly, the only women's issue that the Democratic Party uses as a litmus test for its candidates. Heaven knows she never saw the battle against poverty to be a women's issue, but statistically it most certainly is.
Hillary Clinton believes that projecting a positive female archetype means saying that you want to drop more bombs than the boys do. And of course at that moment that her long public career reached its zenith-- its most desperate stage-- on the ground in New Hampshire in 2008, when it was win or go home, she was faced with the challenge of all challenges. How did she respond? She tried to "George Wallace" her opponent as described above and then she cried in front of the cameras. Disgusting.
Is it too much to hope for in this dark world that Hillary might decide to skip the 2016 presidential race altogether. I won't even begrudge her the private speakers' fees she worked so hard to earn for years as one of our most insatiable elected prostitutes-- just as long as she goes away.
My vow
You know when I'll get married? I'll get married when a 10,000-ton fireball hits the Earth.
That's when I'll get married... Come again... It did. You're kidding...Where?...10,000 tons? That seems like that would do a lot more damage than that. Units of measurement have always stumped me... Crap.
Well, I'm getting married. After much consultation, my girl has agreed to tie the knot with me this coming fall. Of course, I'm actually quite thrilled about this. We've all but settled on a date of September 1st, the day Hitler invaded Poland. The oppressive Iowa heat should have lifted sufficiently by the start of September, and the drought will have moved into lucky month number 18. All I know is that the next seven months are just going to be incredibly busy. I spent this whole weekend on the phone, and we didn't get any of our shows watched.
More details to come between the unhinged political rants.
And the Oscar goes to...
Did y'all read
what Frank Rich wrote about
Django Unchained earlier this month? Take a minute. I'll wait.
Unlike its fellow Best Picture contenders
Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and
Lincoln-- films purported to be ultra-relevant to today's political scene in America--
Django doesn't preach the false doctrine of nobility. We left the nobles behind in England. It doesn't congratulate the Great Nation on its ideals. It kicks the Great Nation in the balls. In
Django, American imperialism is the enemy, not the hero. Though it features much more energy and pluck, Quentin Tarantino's fantasy story about a Civil War-era slavery revenge is really no more outrageous than Steven Spielberg's fantasy about a government of, by, and for the people. Tarantino often gets accused of talking too much about his movies, but unlike Spielberg, he has never made a public claim that one of his movies (or three) should be compulsory viewing in American schools. Now
that's most audacious of all.
If
Lincoln had been written by Tarantino
, rather than by a pretentious, lifeless liberal like Tony Kushner, you could be damned sure that the emblematic scene of the picture wouldn't have observed the real-life radical and abolitionist hero Thaddeus Stevens (portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones) publicly renouncing his most strongly-held belief in life-- the innate equality of the races-- for the benefit of an inexact cinematic statement about political deal-making. Instead of a manufactured drama about congressional vote-counting, Tarantino might have conceived a climax in which Stevens throws a lit torch through a window of the Capitol. The narrative would have been labeled absurd, but then again, Doris Kearns Goodwin thinks that the similarities between
Lincoln and President Obama's congressional battles today are "eerie," and if
that's accurate, who the hell is the Thaddeus Stevens of the 113th Congress? I've searched high and low.
Beasts of the Southern Wild had some high voltage also. It dripped with emotion, and the graphic images at its conclusion caused the hair to rise on the scruff of my neck (and I had the handicap of watching it on the small screen). But the movie of the year, and for the last-- and next-- several years is
Django. It's mercilessly entertaining. It's the only movie I've seen since the premiere of
The Sopranos in 1999 to be bigger and badder than what I see on television on a semi-nightly basis. Spike Lee won't go to see it, but that's simple to explain: He's jealous.
Django is a delirious riot of a film. Tarantino's masterpiece is
Pulp Fiction, but his jeweled epic is
Django Unchained. It kicked
me in the balls too.
And the Oscar goes to
... Django!
Django! Django! Django!
And the 'D' is silent.
A couple lines about several different things
You already knew that North Korean madboy Kim Jung-un was malignantly uncool. But seriously, guy, a 5.1 magnitude nuclear test on Fat Tuesday? There were no revelry parades tonight in Pyongyang. Again.
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A viewing gallery full of gun victims
and Ted Nugent?! I don't know how anybody could not want to watch the State of the Union address tonight.
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I know you Midwestern ladies were all thinking of running out and searching for skunks this week, what with Valentine's Day approaching, but Pepe LePew aside, the one you find would
most likely be rapid.
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Speaking of skunks, I was in a car in Texas with a group of Kenyans back in December. We were on a rural stretch of interstate at night when the pungent smell of the stink badger came wafting into the cab. I quickly guessed that my immigrant companions had heard tell of the most-acrid-smelling North American mammal, but wouldn't recognize it to breath it. I was right. And I felt like Marlon Perkins. People travel the world over to explore Kenyan's spectacular wildlife. For a shining moment, I got to be the safari guide.
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It's a shame. Stan Musial had been the obvious choice to be the next Pope. Unless he was too young.
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Dropping the sport of wrestling from the Olympic games is an appalling decision. You might know that I never cared for the sport myself. I bowed out of participation in high school due to my inflexible policy: no sports where they have to disinfect the playing surface. Sadly though, the next generation of Olympic viewers will never know what the phrase "Greco-Roman" means. Of course, the previous generation never knew either. Now all we'll have are the SmackDowns.
Benedict resigns
Today is a glorious day for the Roman Catholic Church. The seven-year elective monarch of Vatican City, Benedict XVI, 85, has resigned his position because of what aides call his “advanced age.” He must not have taken to Twitter.
Before and after Benedict's papacy, he has been the legal shield of protection for scores of pederast priests and
their parochial protectors, whether they be infamous Americans, like Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, or the kidnapper and rapist of 11-year-old Wilfried F. under Benedict's own direct jurisdiction when he served as the Archbishop of Munich in the late ‘70s. He was among those that mastered the art of shuffling the rapists from parish to parish to hide their villainy. He slips into retirement, having failed to protect the weakest and most innocent members of his flock, and having never excommunicated a single cleric for any offense other than whistle blowing the sexual crimes against children.
And here you've been told that the unbelievers were the moral relativists.
Benedict, formerly Josef Ratzinger, was nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler” by his peers, but his purported tenacity was always of the conservative theological sort, never in pursuing justice for children who were forced to suck the penises of their church confessors or be anally-raped by them. When it came time to protect these children-- to borrow a phrase from a Reuters reporter, not only did Ratzinger not bite, he didn’t even bark. Word came out last month that Cardinal John Mahony, the former Archbishop of Los Angeles, was covering up the crimes of the pedophiles in his jurisdiction. At the time he was doing so, then-Cardinal Ratzinger was leading the church's global body for investigating such matters, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, still better-known today by its previous name, the Inquisition. There’s a lot of speculation that the details about to emerge in the Los Angeles case might better illuminate the timing of Benedict’s exit.
The odds-on favorite to lead the church now is Francis Arinze of Nigeria, who served on the jury that named Ratzinger to the church's top post, has labeled homosexuality a sin on par with infanticide, and who has been possibly the Vatican's most outspoken critic of birth control, hailing as he does from the continent that has been most ravaged by AIDS, and not coincidentally, is also the one in which Catholicism is most rapidly spreading.
It will be interesting to see how Ratzinger treats his retirement. There’s very little precedent for a Roman Catholic Pope living after his spiritual reign. When the third distinct person of the Holy Trinity assigns a task, a man only walks away from it every six centuries or so. The last one to do it did so the year (1415) Henry V's army won at the Battle of Agincourt. This would be a unique retirement in any case. You very likely won't see Ratzinger travel outside of Rome or Vatican City. It sounds as if justice may still very well await him in several legal jurisdictions upon the Earthly plane.
Pontificating in the U.S. Senate
The posturing of party politics in America is so arduously predictable. It’s not a secret to even the most casual news observer that the two demonic sides of the oligarchy simply reverse roles whenever the Oval Office changes hands. Both sides have a pretty phrase for this alternative positioning too. They call it "public messaging," and the traditional news media just takes it all at face value. Because what else are they going to do, investigate something?
The Democrats now argue that the president should be given a wide berth when appointing the members of his own cabinet, but they whistled a very different tune during George Bush Jr.’s eight-year term of executive leadership and public mortification.
Remember that there is, theoretically at least, a system of democratic checks and balances built into our political system. Cabinet officials are not elected by-- and therefore not directly accountable to-- the citizenry, so our only say in the appointment process is having our elected representatives interrogate them in a most public setting and then approve or deny their hire. The tragic reality of our past is not that so many of our presidents’ cabinet choices have been prematurely discharged by the legislative branch, but that so many degenerates and miscreants have sailed through without opposition.
John McCain is Shakespearean in his wretched fall from prisoner of war to merchant of war, but it is his job to ask tough questions, however
self-serving and delusional they may be. Personally, I think that Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel is President Obama’s most-inspired Cabinet choice ever, but that his nominee for CIA director, John Brennan, should be turned over to an international criminal court for his crimes against humanity.
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The improv players at Saturday Night Live
rehearsed a sketch this week (all the way through dress rehearsal) in which Republican Senators attempted to one-up each other during the Hagel hearing over which one loved Israel the most. The sketch never made it to air. Conspiracy theorists, one minute to air.
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Chris Kyle was an action-hungry former Navy SEAL who “liked war,” and described killing in that arena as “fun.” He was a proud, confirmed killer of more than 160 “bad guys” in Iraq, possibly more than 250 souls in total, a man who wrote in his autobiography that he “couldn’t give a flying fuck about Iraqis,” and that he “hated the damned savages” there. He was a man with a “crusader cross” tattooed on his arm, who by his own account, once told a military investigator that he didn’t kill people carrying a Koran, but admitted all the same, “I’d like to, but I don’t.”
Now he’s dead, killed at a firing range in Texas a week ago, fittingly by a fellow ex-army soldier who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. There is no tragedy to see here. Kyle was a proud and contented, government-engineered killing machine. And we were done with him.
Goin' Postal
The 221-year-old United States Postal System is a marvel. We’re conditioned not to view it that way because of the orchestrated and well-funded public relations effort dating back to the first inauguration of Ronald Reagan designed to destroy our faith in government. (The ultimate goal of the saboteurs is to destroy government service itself.)
The USPS is one of the most visible and human faces of our government. A mail carrier has basically been coming to my home six days a week my whole life. I still pay my bills through the mail, which means that roughly six envelopes get sent to me each month, and then I send six of them back. In the almost-20 years since my 18th birthday, I have changed my address approximately 14 times. That’s a lot of sorting and a lot of mailing to be executed by the Postal Service's dedicated team, yet I have never failed to receive even one of these bills in all that time, and in a timely fashion, nor has the recipient of my returned payment ever failed to receive it. It costs me 46 fucking cents-- roughly a third of the national average price for a cup of coffee-- to mail an envelope anywhere in the country, and when I put it in the mail, I know it will arrive there the day after tomorrow. That is insane. Yes, we live in the age of faxing and the internet, but those machines are only capable of reproducing copies of many of these items, not the real thing.
When the era of big government began-- under George Washington in 1792-- the United States Postal Service took flight-- or technically, I guess, took hoof. In the 20th century, it served to prop up the fledgling aviation industry. As it still does today, it tied the nation together physically and intellectually, by distributing information and helping us all save money by sharing in the cost of transporting documents and products. But also today, as Grover Norquist and the National Army of the Smash and Grab School of Economics have directed of all our government services, the baby in the bathtub has been condemned to drowning. By the end of 2013, roughly half of the USPS processing centers will have been shuttered, 3,000 local branches closed, and more than a third of the Service’s livable wage jobs terminated. Saturday delivery will go away, probably forever, and mail will take roughly twice as long to reach its destination.
The Postal Service has been under attack for decades. It’s already been bastardized into a quasi-private corporation. A decade ago, a government audit revealed it had overfunded its pension plan by $70 billion, but the agency has not been allowed to tap into those funds to pay down debt, expand services, or invest in improvements. It’s now the victim of an internal government accounting scheme in which it increases the federal debt if it draws upon its own surplus. A 2006 law passed by our bought-off legislators prohibits the USPS from offering products that would create “an unfair or otherwise inappropriate advantage” over its competitors in private industry. It is forbidden by law for the Postal Service to lower prices that would allow it to compete for the growing home delivery business spurred by online shopping. It's a rigged game.
The federal government will probably wind up selling off the Service for parts-- the trucks, the buildings. Their private competitors, with their vastly-inferior distribution network, will be happy to place bids, I’m sure. Funny that you don’t see the USPS' equally cost-conscious competitors threatening to end
their Saturday deliveries.
You also won’t see the private companies make any effort to provide a meeting place for residents of small, rural communities. When the USPS is gone for good, you’ll be entrusting your absentee electoral ballot to a private delivery service, not to mention many of your medical and pharmaceutical needs. If you rely on a public assistance payout, you’ll be dependent on them for that too.
There’s going to be a devastating, wide-ranging social impact when we lose our post offices. Even if you never ship with USPS now, I encourage you to check your shipping receipts a decade from now for evidence. Our government appears ready to turn over the shipping business entirely to private industry, in that same way that worked such wonders for the airline industry.
Electric moments
Why did the dome go dark? Was it sabotage? Was the outage linked to the power-intensive halftime show by Beyonce? Was she just too fly? If Americans demanded the same level of accountability of their political leaders that they're demanding of the operational staff at the Louisiana Superdome, we'd have ourselves a government.
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There was more than a little schadenfreude involved here-- the Superdome got a heavy and immediate influx of cash for rebuilding in the aftermath of Katrina, and results were extraordinary. But getting corporate cash back into the city through the Superdome was seen as the lynchpin of the region's rebuilding effort, and meanwhile, entire neighborhoods, the city block after city block of homes and small businesses that actually give the city its unique culture, went neglected. Even today, seven years later, many of these neighborhoods remain threatened as city leaders decide which New Orleanians they want to welcome back.
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I didn't bother to watch most of the game, but evidently the 49ers lip-synched the first half, then were able to quickly battle back in the third quarter thanks to the power outage conspiracy. Baltimore finally won out at "The Wire." CBS analyst Dan Marino made out okay too. He fathered another love child during the 34-minute delay.
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Here's
a great article explaining why "30 Rock" dealt with race better than almost every other show on television. It never congratulated us for having come so far, but instead recognized that we've come nowhere close to where we need to be. It recognized the cultural and socioeconomic limitations of an African-American presidency, but also knew that it couldn't exist in its distinct form without it. The conventional wisdom is that TV shows that deal with very topical references, like "30 Rock," wind up aging very badly (see "Murphy Brown"), but I'll be curious to find out in this case. What a funny, funny show. The last episode, which aired Thursday, ranks right up there with the all-time finales. As with "Newhart," the model program for delivering transcendent final episodes, I was busting a gut right up to the closing seconds. Thanks again for everything, Tina Fey. Now quick, do something else.
