At last, a nation of intellectuals

This morning's Hartford Courant used the word intellectual in a truly disturbing manner. Apparently the WWE (which I believe stands for Watching Women Exploited) has been scrubbing websites that continue to include the more raw and "dated" footage of women being abused FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES. I guess that means that eventually this abuse FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES will have never happened. (I somehow think it was easier to erase memories when they didn't exist on video, but what the hell, it's only politics.)

But I object to the use of intellectual.

When I was a child in the 50's I watched professional wrestling. To me it was boxing with fun. I admit to becoming emotionally involved in the spectacle, and despite what people told me about its being fake, looking forward to revenge matches where the good guys would dispatch the bad guys by ramming their heads into the turnbuckle and throwing them out of the ring, only to have the bad guys rally their demonic forces and storm back to victory—the only method to insure my return to the screen the following Thursday night. It was violent and it was fun, but I never considered it intellectual. Now I know that intellectual property covers a wide spectrum of creative endeavors, and I know it's supposed to protect the creator. But if the WWE wants to sanitize its current business model (i.e., morph Ms. McMahon from a rapacious entrepreneur to a nice old lady), it's going to have to stop calling attention to itself by making farcical references to intellectual property. Seriously, we don't have to be intellectuals to know what those two words mean.

Clinton after hours

Tonight Bill Clinton will speak at the DNC and I'll watch; in fact, I'm more likely to watch his speech than I am anyone else's including the President's. And I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. There's something about an ex-Democratic President that inspires us, or maybe an ex-Southern Democratic President. Ah hell, I mean Carter and Clinton.

Now the same think tank that crowned Reagan king crowned Jimmy Carter a dunce some thirty years ago—it turns out to have been wrong on both counts. If you take Jimmy Carter's humanitarian achievements and match them up against the combined achievements of all 20th century Republican presidents, Carter wins. If you add Bill Clinton's work (some of it with George H.W. Bush—a notable exception) it's a landslide. Yet they both left office under a cloud—Carter's malaise and Clinton's incredible lack of judgment—but now they're revered.

It's because their politics, their philosophy is a bit romantic, one that speaks to an inherent belief in the basic goodness of man, the integrity of the individual, and the allegiance we owe—not necessarily to the country as an entity—but to the country as a disparate group of individuals. Maybe that attitude doesn't play well in the White House—maybe the majority of Americans don't want to hear about our duties to our fellow mortals especially in times of economic hardship, but that's just the time that we should.

The Republicans have portrayed social programs as a detriment to hard-working Americans, but if Clinton can show the voters that it isn't true, that tending to our fellow man outweighs the need for a bottom line, then this whole Republican schtick crumbles. And Clinton is the one to do it because he has walked the walk. And so to, on a less international stage, has Carter. Either one of them can appeal to the "better angels of our nature" and show us what we can be.

I hope the first tea party meant something

I'm old enough to remember when the protest movement wanted to stick it to "the man" because "the man" had everything and the rest of us didn't. The man ran the big companies, and promoted the wars, and kept people of color suppressed, and wouldn't let women advance, and fought to criminalize homosexuality, and, well they just wanted everything to go back to some imagined good old days that may have been old but weren't necessarily good. And youthful Americans who didn't want to respect this mythical man raised their voices in protest.

Now it's all changed. The Occupy movement has lost its vigor (unless they pull a surprise occupation in Tampa this week) and the only remaining protest group is the Tea Party, and they're protesting against what any right-thinking human being should be protesting for. They don't trust big government, so they've thrown their support behind big business. (If they thought big government was a problem wait until they see how the corporate philosophy in government.) They oppose health care even though they're the ones who need it, the ones who will continue to swell the coffers of the insurance companies who don't give a damn about their policy holders. They're convinced that government intrusion must be stopped, but then they're convinced that government intrusion like Medicare and Social Security must be saved. In short, they don't have a clue, but they're being led around by a Republican party that itself has sold out its principles for the opportunity to win an election. They divorce themselves from Todd Akin when, in fact, Akin should sue his party for nonsupport: they espouse the same principals he enunciated last week.

 Protests are coming, though. They'll begin a year or two into the Romney presidency (and yes, I think he can win) and the right-wing loonies—and there won't be many left anyway—will once again retire to their fringes so that maybe the country can begin the recovery these well meaning but misinformed people have hindered.

A dot.com whose time has dot.come

I'm wondering if there's a website called Ihaterepublicans.com. There must be, and I'm going to check as soon as I stop feeling too lazy to check. Actually it's not republicans per se that I find so odious—I always considered them a bit stuffy and old-fashioned and clinging doggedly to outdated ideas in the hopes that the good old days would somehow return. Did they ever read The Great Gatsby? So it's not the traditional republicans: it's the Grover Norquist-Paul Ryan branch of the party that wants to bring everything to a full stop. What they don't understand is that the world will move forward even without them and spit in their faces as it goes by. This antediluvian attitude of theirs in so many areas appeals to the basest instincts of people, mainly fear: more taxes will kill us; gay marriage will end childbirth; illegal immigrants will usurp the American worker; climate change is a myth. The list is endless. But the Ihaterepublicans.com website could become a clearinghouse for these ideas, where people could read them and laugh at them and wait for all these right-wing bozos to eliminate themselves from significance. But we can't ignore them, any more than we can ignore a lunatic with a weapon. You can call him crazy, even prove him crazy, but the damage he does before he's disarmed can't be undone. And the way things are going, these lunatics are going to be heard from in all their troglodyte splendor unless those of us who haven't boarded the reverse time-machine begin to speak out as loudly and stridently as they do.

The Gun Lobby—Let's Build One and Fill It

So a guy brings a gun to a movie theater and everyone freaks. I don't blame people for being on edge after the Aurora shootings, and I am baffled by his decision to bring this weapon to, of all movies, The Dark Knight Rises. Sung-Ho Hwang, the alleged guilty party, probably deserves a good talking to, and maybe some indication that he understands others' sensitivities (blaming the dangers of New Haven for his action was just dumb, as was his lack of cooperation), but I can't say he did anything worthy of this firestorm. Maybe we don't like the idea of the guy next to us in the theater—or behind us in line at Whole Foods—or waiting next to us at the stoplight packing a weapon, but it's the world we've allowed to develop. Allowed? No, encouraged. Not long ago, within the last two years, tea-partiers were encouraged to bring guns to anti-Obama rallies. These "attendees'" defense seems to be they weren't as dirty as the Occupy movement and they were nicer to the police...so they've got that going for them. But despite all the denials after the fact, they showed up with guns. I'm pretty sure not all those pictures were Photoshopped. Angry weapaons-toting gun nuts waving assault rifles in the air scare me a lot more than a New Haven attorney with a licensed handgun in his shoulder holster. Did I say gun nuts—of course I meant aficionados of the 2nd amendment—I must have been abusing my 1st amendment rights again.

A sport for all seasons

Yesterday I took delivery of a recumbent exercise bike, but that's not what this post is about. It's about what I did while I was straining up hills and coasting down. I watched television, You see, when I'm on the treadmill I can enjoy Hawaii Five-0 or Mission Impossible or Millennium or any number of a a host of mildly diverting DVD's from the past. But I didn't know if I'd last 50 minutes on this new apparatus, so I aimed lower: ESPN's SportsCenter.

Now I don't mean "lower" in any pejorative sense. I guess I could have said shorter: I figured I'd watch some baseball highlights; after all, it's July.

And so I did watch some highlights; unfortunately, it took 20 minutes to get to the first one, for SportsCenter had transmogrified into the LeBron James Show. Let me say this: to me NBA athletes are unbelievably good and beautifully conditioned, but NBA basketball as a sport lies somewhere between professional wrestling and full-contact checkers. It's filled with silly touch fouls, body slams that pass for good defense, and four-step dribbles that involve something called continuation which, apparently, refers to any event that happened in the past decade. But because Mr. James has promised to make his upcoming betrothal known on ESPN first, the network has sold out to the young man, lock, stock, and promo.

So yes, I have little use for NBA basketball, as much as I like LeBron and Kobe and Wilt—isn't he still playing by the continuation rule? That bias aside, it's July, people! The NBA season has ended—not even the continuation rule applies—and yet ESPN devoted 30 of the first 40 minutes of SportsCenter to the signing of someone named Chris Bosh (I guess he's really good) and his future pairing with Dwyane Wade (I guess he's really good too, even though my spellchecker balks at the spelling of his name—his first name. His surname fools the spellchecker nicely.)

Years ago I watched SportsCenter every night, often eschewing the local news to see the day's highlights. Even then there were superstars like LeBron James, but I don’t think they owned the network in quite the same way. And the worst part of all this is that all these signings and machinations result in no more than conjecture. We can all remember pairings that were supposed to guarantee championships and never did, and while I don’t care enough to wish harm on Messeurs Bosh, James, and Wade, there will be something reassuringly delicious about watching next year’s finals slugged out between Boston and L.A., or whatever team Elgin Baylor plays for.

Oh for the wingnuts of yesteryear

More than a decade ago a Simpsons episode featuring John Waters centered on Homer’s fear that Bart was gay, or becoming gay, or catching gayness, or whatever mishmosh of ideas reverberate in that yellow head. In the story Waters voiced the owner of a little collectible shop, a man whom Marge (who knows from the outset that he is gay) takes an immediate liking to. Bart could hardly care less, but he thinks the guy is okay. When Homer eventually catches on to the fact that John "prefers the company of men"—a statement that Homer initially misinterprets—he forbids his family from having any further contact with this menace. Near the end of the episode, Homer has a conversation with the Waters character who refers to himself as queer. “And that’s another thing,” Homer says, filled with resentment. “That's our word for making fun of you!”

Which leads me, in roundabout way, to “wingnut.” Thirty years ago I taught high school with a man who used that word to describe any student who didn’t quite get it. It had nothing to do with behavior or intelligence; it simply meant there was something slightly askew that prevented the young man or woman from grasping the day-to-day workings of the universe. My friend wasn’t shy—he’d say it to their faces, and it became after a while a term of near-endearment. Out of respect I shunned the word. I figured, he thought it up; he owns it.

But now everything has changed. Somehow right wing has transmogrified into wingnut and the word is tossed around continuously. Worse, no longer does it refer to people who are slightly off the wall: now it clearly points to people who don’t even know where the wall is!

As epithets go, it’s no “tree-hugger” or “bleeding heart,” but I guess in the name-calling society in which we find ourselves situated, it serves the purpose. Still I want those former wingnuts to know that, though your academic work may not always have been up to par, you weren’t embarrassing yourselves every time you spoke. Only the new wingnuts do that.