Art for art's sake: Leonardo, Constable, Turner

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well... back to blogging.

I got back from England on Thursday, late in the evening, and it's been a fairly busy couple of days since. And it doesn't help that I'm a bit jet lagged, certainly by this time of the night.

I'll get back to political blogging tomorrow, as I just don't have much to say tonight (and am too tired to think all that much), but I did want to post something, and I remembered recently that I haven't posted any art in a good long time. As some of you may remember, I used to break up the political posting with posts not just on music, mostly YouTube clips, but on art, a long-time passion of mine going back to childhood, not as an artist, as I seem to have little artistic talent of my own, but rather as a critic and historian. At Tufts way back when, I thought about double majoring in history and art history, but while I generally enjoyed the art history courses I took -- notably on expressionism and medieval illuminated manuscripts (both of which remain of great interest to me) -- I ended up shifting to political theory and becoming a Straussian (long story, some of which I've told here already).

Anyway, while in London last Friday, I went to the National Gallery, one of the world's greatest art museums. I'd been there many times before, but it had been several years since my last visit, and I wanted especially to see the Leonardo cartoon and the Turners and Constables, some of the most magnificent pieces in what is a truly magnificent collection. I usually comment on the art I post -- and you can find most of my past art posts here -- but for now I'll just let these stand as they are.

(Except to note that, to me, the Constable and Turner pieces, and the two artists generally, are deeply connected in terms of their relation to English social, political, and economic development in the 19th century. In a matter of just a couple of decades, the pastoral serenity of Constable's English countryside was overtaken by the technological dynamism of Turner's industrial modernity. Turner's train is literally speeding past, or through, Constable's hay wain, destroying it for good (or for evil). If you look closely at the Turner, you'll even notice a hare running for its life as the train bears down on it. The message is pretty clear. Now, Constable's England still exists, in a way. I was there, in the middle of it, out in the country between London and Oxford, but it is hardly what it once was, for better and for worse. In this particular work, Turner points the way to England's future, with Constable receding into the past, and it is that future that is the England of today, only much more so. It is a development that is common to much of the world, to all that has been touched by modern technology, with its high-speed transportation and high-speed everything, and so in these two works we see not just what is specifically English but what is increasingly universal in terms of the human condition.)

-- Leonardo da Vinci: The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist;

-- John Constable: The Hay Wain (1821); and

-- J.M.W. Turner: Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844).

For more information, click on the links. I wrote about The Hay Wain, one of my favourite paintings, in July 2007. You can find that post here.

Needless to say, viewing these masterworks on a computer screen hardly does them justice.

Their religion is politics

By Mustang Bobby.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) spoke up at at town meeting in Utah on the state of the GOP:

He said the Republicans need to organize and pull together just as unions, environmentalists, personal injury lawyers and gay rights activists do for Democrat candidates.

“Gays and lesbians don’t pay tithing, their religion is politics,” said Hatch.

Aside from the cultural stereotyping that gays and lesbians are not religious -- a statement not borne out by the facts -- he also assumes that all gays and lesbians are political; again, a statement not borne out by the facts. Not only that, Mr. Hatch is making this statement as a senator from the state of Utah, which is overwhelmingly dominated by a faith -- the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka the Mormons -- that is not only very powerful by its sheer numbers, it is deeply steeped in politics and the use thereof to get its way. The Mormons played a significant role in the passage of Prop 8 in California, rescinding the rights of same-sex couples to marry. So when Mr. Hatch speaks about tithing, he doesn't seem to have any objection to the money going to a political cause that he supports.

It's not just the Mormons. Religious leaders such as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell have been the biggest mouths in leading the charge against gay rights and marriage equality, speaking out not on the basis of civil rights but on the imposition of their religious beliefs on the secular society. For these and a lot of members of the Religious Right, politics is their means of getting their religion into the laws and foundation of this country.

Mr. Hatch's sweeping generalization about gays, lesbians, and faith and practice is just as odious as the prejudices that percolate about the Mormon faith. His assumption that gay people can't be religious is on the same level that all Mormons practice polygamy, all Catholic priests are pedophiles, and all Muslims are terrorists. He's also equating an innate trait -- being gay -- with a conscious choice of belonging to a religious denomination. Perhaps he believes that being gay is just as much a choice as being Mormon or Catholic, but even if he does, it shows a stunning ignorance that he would make the sweeping assumption that all gays are atheists and are out to win over the country by forcing their Radical Homosexual Agenda onto the nation. And even if they were, they have as much of a right to do it as the Mormons or any other group that wishes to make their voices heard.

Perhaps Mr. Hatch is envious of the organizations that the Democrats have aligned with them that support them and he wishes that the GOP wasn't so self-destructive, i.e. the teabaggers that brought down Bob Bennett, his fellow Senator from Utah. Or perhaps he's just a sniveling bigot who can't pass up the chance to do a little gay-bashing.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Jobs

By Creature

The report is not good. Get ready for another dip into the recession pool.

Want some gay fries with that?

By Capt. Fogg


It's never been clear to me why people like Bill O'Reilly think about gay people so often. Perhaps he really doesn't care but he knows that those grunting knuckle dragging Budweiser drinkers and super-size fries addicts who keep him in the money do care, but be that as it may or may not be, Bill's at it again, focusing his dull perceptions and limp wit on a French McDonald's commercial. With a passionate pose he hopes will remind you of Churchill's famous "we will fight them on the beaches" speech, he assures us that such a thing will never run here. Yes, the ad features a lad whose father doesn't know he's gay. It's a bit wittier than you'll see in the US market, so perhaps he right. I just wonder why he cares so much.

"We wanted to show society the way it is today, without judging. There’s obviously no problem with homosexuality in France today”

said the brand director for McDonald's France, but there sure as hell is in the Fox Nation.

"Do they have an Al Qaeda ad?"

asked O'Reilly. Do you think he dreams about bearded gay men with AK-47's?

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Disservice

By Mustang Bobby.

There's some kind of karma going on when the Republicans raise a hue and cry over a Democrat being caught in a lie or a misstatement... and it turns out there are several examples of Republicans having done the same thing. The examination of Richard Blumenthal's history while running for the Senate in Connecticut led us to Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who is trying to win the Senate seat once occupied by President Obama; it turns out he made some "misstatements" about his military record. And now Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) is doing a little creative writing on her own.

Gov. Jan Brewer said in a recent interview that her father died fighting Nazis in Germany. In fact, the death of Wilford Drinkwine came 10 years after World War II had ended.

During the war, Drinkwine worked as a civilian supervisor for a naval munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nev. He died of lung disease in 1955 in California.

Ms. Brewer's umbrage was triggered by people comparing the new Arizona immigration law to Germany in the Third Reich. While invoking the Nazis for everything is both gauche and trivialized the unbelievable horror of that regime, it's not an excuse to project your late father into the cast of Band of Brothers. That's like me saying my father made the ultimate sacrifice at Pearl Harbor. Aside from the fact that he was in the Navy during World War II, he wasn't at Pearl Harbor (he was fifteen at the time), he never saw combat, and he's still alive. Other than that, though....

The real offense here isn't that candidates are trying to mislead voters about their war record for the purpose of winning an election or shield themselves from criticism. Exaggeration and embellishment is a human flaw, more often than not harmless; "I caught a fish THIS big," and if all the people who claimed they were at Woodstock had actually showed up, there would have been a million of them on Yasger's farm in upstate New York in August 1969. What it does do, in this case, is diminish the service of those who actually did serve in Vietnam or helped liberate Europe on the ground in 1944. The embellishers can't speak for the real service done by those who were really there, and trying to horn in on it after the fact is a disservice to those who really served.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Quote of the Day

By Creature

"So these calls for Obama to behave like a Big Daddy to rage and weep are worse than stupid and embarrassing. They're ignorant and dangerous. As I see it, it is to Obama's great credit that he has made a point, since he was president, not to play the populist rabble rouser." -- tristero.

Personally, I think the president should wear an emoticon lapel pin. That would solve the problem, but who am I.

Premeditated violence

By Capt. Fogg

So whether you agree with me or not that Israel's attempt to enforce the blockade of Gaza by boarding a ship which refused normal inspection procedures and the attempt at self defense of the IDF Navy when attacked, was not the outrage it was meant to look like, do you agree that it's all Obama's fault? Sure it was says John Bomb-Bomb McCain. If Obama hadn't insisted that Israel freeze it's West Bank settlement construction, this wouldn't have happened. (insert WTF here!)

Michael Savage tells us that Obama "pressured" Israel into it without offering any of the evidence one would desire to back it up.

"As far as I know, it was Obama's administration that told them how to do this attack. It was probably one of America's peace-loving generals, who knows which one of them did it."

The use of probably by a Fox News member of course is as good as proof to the willfully Foxed, as is "as far as I know." Probably means 'definitively' to the Savage audience. Only a Liberal would question it. Only a Liberal would wonder why "peace loving" should be the equivalent of stupid, duplicitous and incompetent -- if not treasonous.

Of course knees are jerking in the Liberal camp as well, as Dennis Kucinich has written to President Obama suggesting that the country needs to "redefine its relationship with Israel" in the wake of the Gaza flotilla "raid." I'd ask him his opinion on redefining the US Coast Guard's daily practice of stopping and boarding ships with armed gunboats and armed inspectors as "raids." I'd ask him if an attack on the Coast Guard by a vessel refusing to stop and be inspected in wartime or peacetime, would be supported by him or excused by him because we're certainly doing it now in the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Caribbean. I'd ask him whether our entire drug interdiction and human smuggling interdiction policies are " reckless, pre-meditated violence waged against innocent people." I'd try to do it without calling him an idiot and a hypocrite, but I doubt I could manage.

So if you still feel this was "premeditated violence" even when the violence occurred only after the "peaceful passengers" tried to kill the inspectors and threw one overboard, ask yourself what the US should do if a flotilla from Iran attempted to enter Iraq with an unspecified, un-inspected cargo, refused to heave to and be inspected and then brutally attacked our Navy when our Navy attempted to examine that cargo and passenger list.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Explaining the Oil Disaster to Kids

by Distributorcap

Shielding kids from the disaster in the gulf is not in their best interest. Some kids books are out to help wind your way through the mess

When the Steele man gets rusted (maybe we should also explain to kids that tin does not rust, only iron products do) - Sarathy and Scare911 hear the cries "drill baby drill."

Pro healthcare candidate wins primary vote

By Creature

While I realize this may not hold in a face-to-face battle with a Republican, I do think think it's very good news that an unabashed healthcare (and public option) supporter beat a denier. There's a lesson in here somewhere and I hope other Dems are paying attention.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-BP) on oil spill: ‘Acts of God are acts of God.’

By Creature

Sure, if god cut corners and lobbied for lax regulations, then maybe.

The outrage machine

By Capt. Fogg

As a boater, I'm aware that the Coast Guard has the right to board and inspect my vessel at any time and that I'm required to comply. Upon probable cause and perhaps just suspicion, they have a right to impound and literally disassemble my boat looking for drugs or contraband. Sometimes, as I'm given to understand, they've been known to be rather demanding in their searches, and other completely innocent, law abiding yacht captains I know have complained of dirty footprints on the ivory carpeting or greasy hand prints on the cherry paneling and have suggested that too much protest or grouchiness can earn one an extra careful inspection of safety equipment that might entail a ticket.

Of course we have a real problem in our coastal waters and particularly on the Atlantic coast with illegal immigrants arriving rather often, and then there's always the drug smugglers, so when the Coasties hail you it's best to heave to and not make waves, so to speak. In fact the US has a policy of stopping and boarding vessels anywhere on the high seas and at any time they suspect contraband. For an honest captain or crew, the idea of going after the Coast Guard with a boat hook or marlinespike is pretty much as unthinkable as it is counterproductive.

Yesterday however, when I read about the Israeli raid on the blockade runners attempting to bring supplies to Gaza, I was truly angered at what seemed like a pointless and brutal attack on unarmed civilians, and the video then available seemed to confirm that first impression. The media were making charges of piracy and it seemed less than hyperbolic at the time. Then I saw the rest of the video.

Aside from the question of the embargo itself, it has to be mentioned that the "relief" expedition was required to pass inspection before landing in Gaza, there being good reason for Israel to make sure no weapons or explosives or ammunition were being carried, or fugitives, or any persons wanted for questioning. The word of some Turkish political group that it's a peaceful enterprise is scarcely enough, although reports so far seem to gloss over the obvious with a coat of shiny outrage. Of course the flotilla had no intention of complying or of allowing themselves to be boarded peacefully and inspected, which carries the implication that they had indeed something to hide. The Israeli Navy did what any country would have done and boarded them.

The video that was not shown, of course, was the brutal attack by the passengers, who mobbed the inspectors, threw them to the deck and began beating them with clubs and metal rods. One Israeli was thrown overboard. They were vastly outnumbered. They began to defend themselves. There were casualties. It started to look less and less like piracy or even aggression. It began to look like deliberate provocation. It began to look like assault. It began to look like a mission of strategic martyrdom designed to turn Israel's ally Turkey against them. It looks like a success so far.

As usual, those who have their reasons for hating Israel will not compare the incident to trying to run through passport control at the airport and complaining about being tackled and detained. Those who are quite sure Hamas is justified in any act whatsoever that brings about the total annihilation of all Israelis wouldn't care and might rejoice if the ships had been blown out of the water without warning.

There's not much middle ground, there's not much changing of minds and a fortune is being spent on further polarization. This, in my opinion, is just part of that enterprise. The drums of manufactured outrage will continue to boom about mistreatment of "peaceful" passengers so long as doubt remains as to whether their mission had anything do do with anything but creating provocation against "Zionist Aggression." To some, the passengers will continue to be "tourists" and the haters of Israel will use any opportunity to appear as martyrs, but try this, if you dare: load up a flotilla of ships and announce your destination as Turkey and your cargo as aid for Islamist patriots resisting secularist aggression and when it comes time for customs inspection -- refuse to stop and be boarded. Set your "tourists" on the Turkish coast guard and customs inspectors with fence posts and bits of deck railing and furniture and claim that the secular Turkish government is attacking Islam and peaceful Islamists. Go on -- I dare you.




(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Stagnation

By Mustang Bobby.

David Brooks is at it again, trying to convince us that it is fate that has brought us to this point where the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a symbol of the "nasty stasis" where trying to balance the free market and government regulation is beyond the control of any one president or corporation. He offers a lot of historical comparisons to the Iranian hostage crisis and tries to use the moderate tone that while everyone means well, sometimes things are just too much for us to handle and we must learn our humbling lesson.

Oh, crap. This passive-voice pablum about "the country’s core confusion about the role of government" is his way of backing away from the obvious conclusion that a generation's worth of hearing that "Big Guv'ment" is the problem and the free market is the Holy Grail of freedom and roses and rainbows for the whole world is bunk. If it hadn't been for a concerted effort on the part of the Republicans and their corporate allies to dismantle and defang any form of regulation of business since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, not to mention the complicity of Democrats who knew a good source of campaign funding when they saw it, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with, and if we were, there would be real-world consequences for those that caused them. It isn't "stagnation" when doing everything possible to do nothing -- vide the current GOP minority in Congress -- is your idea of how to run a government.

The supreme irony of all of this is that when the shit really hits the fan in Detroit and Wall Street or when the oil hits the shore in Louisiana, who do you think are the loudest complainers about the inefficiency of government and who are the ones standing there with their hands out demanding instant relief in the form of cash from the Feds to fix it? Yeah, the same people who were screaming about the Tenth Amendment, states' rights, secession, and complaining that oil-rig regulation stifles the free market and makes it tough for the "small business owners." Yeah, I think dead birds, stinky beaches, and no tourists makes it tough, too.

What is also the most maddening thing is that once this oil spill is contained -- whenever that is -- we will all firmly resolve to fix the problems that caused it and make sure that it never happens again. We will learn from our mistakes and go on, confident in the knowledge that we have covered every contingency, taken every precaution, sued everybody for the damages, and we can resume our lives again. Except whatever we learn from this and whatever regulations and laws we put in place will be so watered-down and loop-holed that those with the right kind of grease can slip through it until the next time. And there's always a next time.

We were supposed to learn from the Exxon Valdez and Hurricane Katrina and the Iranian hostage crisis and Vietnam and Watergate and Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the Depression and Munich and any of the other hundreds of life-lessons of the past two centuries, and we rarely do. Or if we do, it's not the right lesson.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Research this!

By Capt. Fogg

Sometimes it feels like trying to explain calculus to a deaf canary. The idea that permitting anything some religious group doesn't like is infringing on their self-given right to tell other people what to do or to punish them for doing or not doing it, seems impossible to counter no matter how obvious or how long you try. I've tried for a long time, but it's like the Shroud of Turin, even if you could show it's made from polyester and has a made in Taiwan tag its authenticity returns again and again.

In the interest of perpetuating the kind of de facto but illegal kind of control they have exerted over private and public affairs for so long, they have invented a mythology wherein our government really owes so much to 21st century esoteric Christianist philosophy, that it's best simply to let delusional perverts and enemies of freedom dictate to us regardless of contrary laws and public sentiment.

Take the Family Research Council whose President Tony Perkins, a man whose face seems to belie any assertions of straightness, insists that allowing such people in the military as offend his flock is -- wait for this -- infringing on the rights of those pretend Christians who also serve: the right to be a bigot that is. It would "undermine religious liberty."

Now I don't recall that the Constitution confers or protects or affirms any such rights. It only tells the government not to establish an official religion. It says nothing about protecting the prejudices of religious bullies with neurotic phobias about sex. It says nothing about creating an army that President Tony Perkins feels comfortable with at whatever the cost may be to the religious and personal freedom of others.

President Tony Perkins isn't likely to remember that when President Truman integrated the armed forces, it offended the "rights" of racists in the very same way. Anyone who simply couldn't bear the thought of being in the same barracks with one of those lesser races God wanted to keep separate from his own light skinned people, just had to leave and of course the same sort of people will be offended by sharing a foxhole with someone with different sexual preferences. You know -- that's just too damned bad, President Tony Perkins and I'm quite sure our military will cope quite nicely and for God's sake, give it up and call Rentboy.com -- you know you want to.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

A watered-down UN Security Counsel response

By Creature

So, now that Obama has clearly backed Israel's escalating stupidity, will the delusional chants coming from the right that "Obama has abandoned Israel" stop?

Rhetorical question, of course.

Where the blame belongs

By Creature

Dennis G:

The oil spill in the gulf is is just another result of snorting deregulation fairy dust with a Markets-Are-God hi-ball chaser night after night for decades. When you let industry capture regulators and dismantle effective governance, you guarantee a catastrophic failure. The spill is evidence of this, so was that mining disaster in West Virginia, same thing when it comes to that financial meltdown and the same thing will be true when the next system fails.

And when it does, like idiots, we will not blame the failed philosophy of the modern Conservative movement. Nope, we will blame President Obama, liberals and Democrats—because that is what we are used to doing. More than that, we will ignore facts and worry whether or not the optics of the response are right.

Finger pointing in the wrong direction is what the Beltway does best.

Memorial Day

By Mustang Bobby.

This post originally appeared at Bark Bark Woof Woof on May 25, 2009.

I grew up in Perrysburg, Ohio. It's a small town, a suburb of Toledo, and when I was a kid in the 1950's and '60's, it fit all of the images that small towns in the Midwest have: tree-shaded streets, neat homes, lots of churches, and a main street -- Louisiana Avenue -- with little shops like the drug store with the fountain, the dime store, the barber shop, the hardware store, the bakery with the smell of bread baking and the sweet scent of icing, and the bank with the solid stone exterior. They're all still there, just under different names now, and my parents, who still live there, still call the drug store by its old name, even though it's changed owners and become a jewelry shop. In the winter the Christmas decorations line the street, and each Memorial Day there is a parade that starts at the Schaller Memorial, the veterans hall, and proceeds up Louisiana Avenue, taking a turn when it reaches the Oliver Hazard Perry Memorial ("We have met the enemy and they are ours...") and marches down West Front Street past the old Victorian homes that overlook the Maumee River.

When I was a kid the parade was made up of the veterans groups like the American Legion and the VFW, and platoons of soldiers and veterans, including, through the 1970's, the last remaining veterans of World War I. They wore their uniforms and their medals, and those that couldn't march sat in the back seat of convertibles, waving slowly to the crowds that lined the sidewalks. They were followed by the marching band from the high school, the color guard, the Cub Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the drum and bugle corps, floats from church groups, all of the city fire equipment, antique cars, and the service groups like the Shriners, the Elks, and the Kiwanis Club. After the last float came all the kids on their bicycles decorated with streamers, bunting, flags, and all the patriotic paperwork we could muster. My friends and I would try to outdo each other, and it had less to do with patriotism than it did with seeing how many rolls of red, white, and blue crepe paper we could thread in between the spokes of our wheels.

I was about ten or so on one Memorial Day when I spent a lot of time getting my Schwinn Racer ready for the big parade. It was a perfect day; the sky was a sparkling spring blue and all the floats, cars, and fire trucks were gleaming in the sun as the parade organized on Indiana Avenue in front of the Memorial Hall. The high school band in their yellow and black uniforms marched in precision as the major led off with a Sousa tune, and as the parade slowly made its way down the avenue we could see the crowds along the sidewalks waiting and waving. As we waited our turn we wheeled our bikes in circles, just like the Shriners in their little go-karts, and finally we got the signal that it was time for the kids to roll. There was an organized rush to lead off, and then we were slowly pedaling down the street, waving to everybody outside the library, the Chevy dealership, even the people lined up on the roof of the pizza parlor. I looked for my dad shooting movies with the 8mm camera, but didn't see him. Oh, well, it didn't matter; we were supposed to meet at the home of friends who were hosting a post-parade picnic in their backyard. Their house was at the end of the parade route, so that was the perfect place to pull out of the parade and have the first of many Faygo Redpops that summer.

But for some reason I stayed with the parade, on down West Front, and then up West Boundary and past the gates of Fort Meigs Cemetery. The floats and the fire trucks were gone, but what was left of the parade -- the color guard and the veterans -- went through the gates and along the path. There was no music now, just a solemn drumbeat keeping a steady muffled tapping. The color guard turned at a small stone memorial, and then past it to a gravesite where a family was gathered; a mother in a black dress, a father in a grey suit, and a teenage son and daughter, looking somber and out of place. The grave was still fresh, the dirt mounded over, the headstone a simple marker with a flag. A minister spoke some words, and then the color guard snapped to attention. A volley of rifle fire, then Taps, and then a tall young soldier in dress blues handed a folded flag to the mother, who murmured her thanks and tried to smile.

I suddenly realized that I felt out of place there with my gaudily-patriotic bike and my red-white-and-blue striped shirt. No one noticed me, though, and when the people started to slowly move away from the gravesite and back to the entrance, I followed along until I was able to ride slowly back to our friends' house, park my bike with all the others, and find my parents, who probably hadn't even noticed that I was not there with all the other kids running around and playing on the lawn.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images via Andrew Sullivan.

Quote of the Day

By Creature

"Here's an idea for assignment editors: publish a piece with specific steps federal officials should take but haven't. Because at this point, unless we can fix the leak with useless media palaver, there's not much point to the breathless speculation, nebulous criticism, and finger-pointing." -- Steve Benen on the unrelenting media stupid.

You and whose army?

By Capt. Fogg

It's Memorial Day weekend again in the New South. It's nice to know they've finally accepted a holiday they once loathed. Of course it was Decoration Day until 1968 and after I was grown and had a family. It was as you know, about decorating the graves of Union Soldiers and after the next horror of the Great War, the graves of the 117,465 American dead: a day of solemn reflection.

But by the time they changed it to Memorial Day to make it more compatible with our imperialism at the height of the senseless horror in Vietnam, it was about Dad's cremated Hamburgers and Indy; parades and patriotic hoo-ha, but perhaps it's because I now live in the South, it's taken on a new tone. Perhaps too, it's because I live in an area flooded with retired military folks filled with their own importance and those employed by the notorious Military- Industrial Complex -- but my in-box is once again flooded with glorious stories about our glorious military and the glorious things they do. A good part of them are hoaxes and of course there are no mentions of our heroes of My Ly 4 or Abu Ghraib or of the recent glorious heroes who accidentally slaughtered 30 or so civilians using robot planes in air conditioned comfort from halfway around the world.

No, what I get are bogus stories about Marines rescuing babies on 9/11/01 and how it is the Veterans" we owe our freedom of religion, press, speech and the rest of the rights we've had abridged because of the martial spirit of the times -- not the constitution, the courts or the Government of the United States.

Have we forgotten that the biggest enemy of freedom on this continent was the American South? Was anything we can call our own freedom at risk in most of our wars? Andrew Jackson's slaughter and deportation of the Seminoles? the use of Federal troops in slave raids into Florida? The Mexican War? The Spanish American War? The war against Philippine independence? What kind of threat to our freedom of speech necessitated suppressing free elections in Vietnam or the killing of two million civilians? What threat to our freedom of Religion was posed by Iraq? What threat were flower carrying kids in Ohio that they needed to be shot in the back by American troops? Were the troops driving armored vehicles down Chicago's State Street in 1968 there to support our right to assembly or to shut us up?

It' s not that I have any disrespect for veterans, living or dead, but our Constitution wasn't written by the Generals, no foreign power is any threat to it and that we still pay any attention to the Bill of Rights owes as much to the "activist" courts and the ACLU as to anything else. It owes nothing whatever to the Tea Bag flag wavers who hate government power unless it's carrying guns. It owes nothing to Macho flag wavers from John Wayne to Bomb-bomb McCain.

Memorial day has become an encomium not to dead soldiers; an expression not of profound grief. It's not a day when we mourn our losses or of any remembrance of the horror of war and militarism, but to celebrate living veterans, sing praise to the Armed forces and to the glory of war itself. It's a day we now use to decorate ourselves, congratulate ourselves on our military prowess and this in a country that's been fighting all my life but hasn't been on the winning side of a war since 1945. It's a day too often used to obscure the real threats to freedom with red white and blue bunting and it's good to remember that the same folks crowing about military defense of freedom are quite happy to require anyone with tan skin to carry proof of citizenship at all times, quite happy to give the local police the power of Federal Marshals and to forget all about warrants and probable cause. What army is going to protect us against our own smug racism, bigotry and expansionism?

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Truth in Comics

By Creature


If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.