Little Boys With Real Machine Guns

I still remember the Christmas when the local Walgreen's had a window display of toys including a realistic wooden model of the machine guns John Wayne  toted in his U.S. Marines movies.

My friend Ron Ellis and I really coveted those things. We had outgrown Santa Clause and one of us remembered his Mom saying those "awful guns" were overpriced,  so neither of us was particularly optimistic.  But we'd walk past that window display every day thinking how great it would be to run through the woods with such a real-looking weapon.  The imaginary "Japs" lurking in the weeds wouldn't stand a chance.

The store cut prices by half on its unsold toys on the day before Christmas, and our parents relented and we got our guns.  Couldn't wait to go out to the woods and hide behind trees and shoot "Japs."  Did so for a day or two, swaggering like the Duke,  feeling like big shots, tough guys, but ere long the simple noisemaker on the wooden guns broke, and we had to shout "blam blam  blam" or something when we shot "Japs," and pretty soon it wan't such great fun having wooden machine guns, and our killing sprees ended.

That was my last infatuation with guns. Same for most of my friends.  The war to end all wars ended, Johnny came marching home, there were blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover and real-life sports heroes replaced John Wayne.  And then, one day, the little boys of Harrison Street were young men, striving wherever young men strove those days to be ready to deal with the Real World.

In the Real World you learned to respect the rights of others, including those of different colors or creeds. You learned to respect the law, and obey it, and you learned how to work to change the law if it was unjust or unfair.  You learned about things like perspective and priorities and equality.  You learned about prejudice and hate and bullying.

And you learned there were those who never did grow up, who never did outgrow the coveting of guns, whose insecurity required phallic trappings and bullying comrades.  They tended to gather together, these little boys of middle age, and bring their sons and nephews with them, in places like the National Rifle Association, and ad hoc militias, at shooting ranges and in the great outdoors, toting their heat. Sometimes they called themselves "hunters" and"outdoorsmen" but in reality they were would-be murderers who mostly did their killing in fantasies.  A few  -- far, far too many -- fulfilled their fantasies against real people, in shopping malls, parking lots, churches, government buildings, army posts and schools.

Fort Hood.  Columbine.  Sandy Hook.  Blacksburg. 

From their intellectual puberty, these monsters of arrested development shouted their tortured Second Amendment logic, their posturing of patriotism, their utter nonsense about their "rights" to have and to use firearms, until even right wing propaganda sheets like Rupert Murdoch's New York Post called them "nuts." On the front page!

"Nuts" they are, but dangerous ones.

Ron Ellis, wherever you are, I'm grateful that we grew up.  Merry Christmas.

Less Than Two Weeks

After Sandy Hook

WEBSTER, N.Y. — An ex-con set a car and a house ablaze in his lakeside neighborhood to lure firefighters, then opened fire on them, killing two, engaging in a shootout with police and committing suicide while several homes burned. Authorities used an armored vehicle to evacuate the area.

The gunman fired at the four firefighters when they arrived shortly after 5:30 a.m. at the blaze in Webster, a suburb of Rochester on Lake Ontario, town Police Chief Gerald Pickering said. The first police officer who arrived chased the suspect and exchanged gunfire, authorities said.

Police say he lay in wait outdoors for the firefighters' arrival, then opened fire probably with a rifle and from atop an earthen berm, Pickering said.

"It does appear it was a trap," he said.

Peace on Earth

Good Will to Men

What Really Happened at Benghazi?

Even when the Reublicans get it right they get it wrong.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was unfit to become Secretary of State, but not because of Benghazi, as is clear in the newly released report by an independent panel investigating the terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including the ambassador, in Libya.

The report won't stop crackpots like Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a science-denying creationist, from continuing to blather the party line.

In fact, Rice's disqualification for the office was her huge stockholdings in Canadian corporations that stand to profit greatly if the Keystone XL pipeline is built.  The Secretary of State has the power of final determination of the fate of the pipeline.

That, of course, doesn't bother the Republicans, for whom conflict of interest is a way of life.  With hands always open for corporate cash, eagerly embracing legislation crafted by corporate lobbyists, kissing the boots of the biggest bankers, the GOP is oblivious to that silly thing called ethics.

The investigators' report on Benghazi came down hard on senior State Department officials.  "Systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place," the panel said.

However, the board ruled that no individual officials ignored or violated their duties and recommended no disciplinary action. It recommended that poor performance by senior managers should be grounds for disciplinary actions in the future.

Buried in most media accounts of the panel's report was the fact that Congress' own parsimony was a major factor in the security lapses in Benghazi. The panel found that budget constraints in the past had led some management officials to emphasize savings over security, including rejecting numerous requests from the Benghazi mission and the embassy in Tripoli for enhanced protection.

House and Senate negotiators on a pending defense bill on Tuesday agreed to fund another 1,000 Marines at embassy security worldwide, locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.

What the report does not disclose is the source of the so-called "talking points" that Rice and others in the administration used when addressing the media in the immediate aftermath of he Benghazi killings.  Those points said the violence at the consulate began with protests over an anti-Muslim movie made in the U.S. The investigators determined that this was not true, that the attack was a terrorist plot from the outset.

Did the falsehood originate with the CIA? With its director, David Petraeus?  Two of the four slain Americans were independent CIA contractors.  A mysterious CIA compound -- a black hole for torture? -- stands near the consulate where the men were slain.

What was the CIA's role in all of this?

Our Worst President Strikes Again

Barack Hussein Obama, you have sealed your fate in history.  As long as a single sane, humanitarian voice remains to speak truth in this benighted land, you will go down as the very worst president the nation has ever had.

I don't know what motivated your latest capitulation to the handmaidens of corporate America, but it certainly was not your vaunted intellect.  Only an utter fool would think that our sick economy can be turned around by taking from the poor and the needy and giving to the rich.  But that is exactly what you have done in your concessions to House Speaker Boehner regarding the scarecrow perniciously called the "fiscal cliff."

My private opinion is that you are driven by cowardice and a desperate, sick need to prove yourself worthy of your high office to the elite, the oligarchs, the warmakers and the oppressors of the common people -- the relative handful who really run the country.

If I live to be a hundred, I cannot wash away the filth from the hand that cast my ballot for your second term.  I bought the canard that a vote for one of the worthy third-party candidates would in effect be a vote for Mitt Romney, and that somehow a Romney presidency would be even worse than a second Obama term.  You are peas in the same pod.  Liars both, although you disguise your lies more skillfully than the man who challanged you. Warmakers both, but you make a vile mockery of the Nobel Prize that was undeservedly conferred upon you.  Killer of women and children with your drones.  Torturer.  Repealer of the Bill of Rights.  Spyer upon your people.  Hider of ugly and terrible secrets.

Now you and your fellow connivers will market your latest sell-out of the common people as an "adjustment" in "entitlements" rather than what it is: viciously slashing  the safety net that millions upon millions of Americans need in order to eat, breathe, have modest shelter over their heads, get treatment for their most pressing illnesses. You would let the modest tax relief for middle-class wage-erarners lapse, while coddling the millionaires and billionaires -- many of whom themselves vainly challenged you to raise their taxes!

How can you stoop so low?  How can you allow yourself to grovel at the feet of right wing extremists who have no interest other than the obscene profits of their corporate masters?  How can you callously urinate on not just the dreams and aspirations, but the quotidian needs of the very people who elected you?

Never has a man so besmirched the highest office in the land.  The crimes of your predecessor pale in comparison to your betrayals of the masses, of basic human ethics, of human rights, of civil liberties, of truth and decency.

You, sir, are a disgrace to your race.  The human race.

Oh, We Can't Move That Mountain!

Even more pernicious than having banks that are too big to fail is the American propensity to perpetuate problems that are too big to solve.

Once such problem, brought to the fore by yet another mass killing spree, is our guns.  More than 300 million of them.  Even as citizens and politicians renewed the clamor for gun control legislation, skeptics pointed out why it can't be done. Nearly half of us -- 47 per cent -- own at least one firearm. We have  more registered gun dealers (130,000) than we have grocery stores. Yet 40 per cent of gun sales are unregulated transactions made by private, unlicensed vendors, mostly at gun shows and conventions. In 2008, the Supreme Court Gang of Five wrongly ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment provided for an individual right to bear firearms. This destroyed the more logical argument that the amendment applied only to militias.  Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer, once pointed out that the law is what the lawmaker intended, and it's clear to anyone not in the thrall of the National Rifle Association what the writers of the Second Amendment intended.  And so we're stuck with a problem that's too big to solve and mass killings of innocent men, women and children -- eight this year alone -- will continue. What can we do?  Get used to it.

Some say the climate that tolerates mass killings exists in this country because of our own government's policy of endless war, of covert killing of innocents, of death by drone. This is another problem that's too big to solve.  The greatest single engine driving our otherwise sick economy is the massive war machine and all of its accoutrements.  Shut it down and the economy collapses.  The most powerful corporations, outfits like Exxon Mobile and Chevron, owe their obescene profits to the U.S. military, the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the history of the planet.  Even if public opinion were absolutely unanimous for peace, it wouldn't change one mind in the corporate suites of those who derive their money and influence from warmaking.

Our government is corrupt.  Office holders become corrupted because corporations legally are people, with a First Amendment right to throw unlimited cash at candidates until they own their very minds and souls.  Even if every single taxpayer in the United States demanded legislation to change this, nothing would come of it, because the votes would be cast by the corrupted.  Another problem that has become too big to solve.

Our corrupt government is militarizing local and state police forces, the better to suppress any possible insurrection against a dysfunctional and oppressive system.  And so our society plummets crazily down the sinkhole to enslavement.  And there's nothing We, the People, can do about it.

The problem is way too big to solve.

Take Away the Guns! Now!

Since we were shocked, shocked, by Columbine, and our hearts went out to and we prayed for the victims and their families, and some of us called for new gun laws and others said guns don't kill, people kill, and politicians prattled platitudes on one hand while the other hand pocketed millions in bribes from the NRA and gun and ammunition makers, and Michael Moore plunged headlong into making a shocking, shocking movie called Bowling for Columbine and the NRA spent more millions bribing more politicians who blathered refutations of the movie and after a while we forgot about the kids killed in the Colorado high school and went back to watching Fox and stewing about which celebrity was being unfaithful to which other celebrity . . .

. . . .since that time there have been 25 mass slayings in public places in the United States.  Schools, workplaces, hospitals, religious places, government places, business places.  At least 237 Americans have died in these shootings.  Another 220 or more were wounded.  The dead include at least 52 children.  Since 1982, this country has experienced more than 60 mass murders by firearms.  More than three quarters of the weapons used in these assassinations were legally obtained.

"The Columbine Massacre changed the way society looked at children and at schools," a contemporary historian wrote.  "Violence was no longer just an after-school, inner-city activity. It could happen anywhere."

Today, anywhere was an upscale New York exurb called Newtown, Conn., and the school was Sandy Hook Elementary and 20 little kids are dead.

It was the seventh mass slaying by gunfire in the United States in the calendar year of 2012.

What is wrong with you, America?  Why in the name of whatever god you invoke to decry each tragedy, and then forget about it, do you not rise up and demand that your governments do something to stop this carnage?

The Second Amendment "argument" is sheer bovine excrement.  We must round up and destroy the guns in private citizens' hands and pass iron-clad laws  that prohibit unauthorized persons from possessing them.  All kinds of guns, not just so-called "assault weapons." 

This isn't the time to bring up gun control, a White House spokesman said.

More bovine excrement!  If this isn't the time, when the hell is the right time?  After 500 more are dead in mass killings? A thousand more?  After an unarmed citizen is no longer able to go safely into a shopping mall, send his kids to school, go to worship, browse in a library or sip a mocha in Starbucks without their being in danger of death by gunshot?

Act like a  President, Barack Obama.  Go before the Congress tomorrow and demand sweeping gun control legislation.

Act like responsible leaders, members of Congress.  Start today to frame such legislation.

Seize the day, governors of the states, mayors of cities, legislatures, town councils.  Draft your own gun control measures.

Stop the carnage now.

Musings on Republicans and Hatred

I'm convinced more than ever that the underlying and unifying force driving today's Republican party is hatred.

It oozes from every pore of the public demonstrations I've seen by the Tea Party wing. In Congress, only hatred can account for some of the GOP actions against women, immigrants, people of color, the poor, the sick, the elderly and all the children of all of the above.

Just last Tuesday, for example, Republicans in the Senate blocked ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which more than 150 other (obviously more compassionate) countries  have already ratified. To the GOP, all those cripples are takers, a burden on society, not "makers" like good, conservative Republicans. Or maybe they think the metal in those wheelchairs should be diverted to the weapons industry to help keep us safe from Muslims.

Symptoms of Republican hatred turn up all over the place.  Women? In Arizona, a drunken cop flashed his badge to enter a bar, walked up to a woman, put his hand under her skirt and groped her genitals.  When he finally turned up in court, the Rpublican judge gave him probabtion and chided the victim! "If you wouldn't have been there that night," the judge said, "none of this would have happened to you." The judge told her to "take a positive lesson" from the assault.



A journalist friend thinks that such hatred stems from fear, fear of all those "Others." As Freud wrote, "if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.”

The Republican position on immigration is, at bottom, racist and hateful.  Arizona Republicans seem determined to fight to the death for their Xenophobic Gestapo law ("Ve vant to see your papers, now!)  Even though net immigration from Mexico has dwindled to nearly zero, the Republicans still want to put up steel fences, fly armed drones over the border and station legions of armed outriders along a no-man's-land between us and Them.

Right wing hatred ended the community service group, ACORN, when rigged videos by a truant brat scared Congress into cutting off its funding.  Even though it no longer exists, a recent poll showed that 47% of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the recent election for Obama.

More than half of every tax dollar goes to illegal wars on people of color, and spying not just on suspected enemies abroad but on us, the people. Our local Republican Congressman supported these wars and that spying,  yet today in the local paper he argued in an op ed that we're spending too much on "entitlements" like Social Security, health care and education. It happens that in his district, most of the people who need those "entitlements" just to survive have skin of a different color than his.

I suppose one might say that it's not hatred of people so much as love of money that drives the Republican machine. Coming from Arkansas and becoming richer than Croesus, Sam Walton surely must have been a Republican. Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a  director of ethical sourcing for Sam's worldwide Walmart empire, imay not be a member of the GOP, but he played the lead role in blocking an effort to have global retailers pay more for apparel to help Bangladesh factories improve their electrical and fire safety. The New York Times, citing the minutes of a 2011 meeting of a worlwide association of apparel retailers, said the Walmart man noted that the proposed improvements in electrical and fire safety would involve as many as 4,500 factories and would be “in most cases” a “very extensive and costly modification."

"It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments," the minutes said.

Two weeks ago, in one of those factories in Bangladesh, 112 workers, people of color, died in a horrible electrical fire.

Robert E. Lee is said to have remarked to an aide, just before a major civil war battle began, "It is good that war is so terrible lest men grow to love it too much."

I have never heard of a CEO saying. "it's good that money is so terrible lest men grow to love it too much."  But then, most CEOs are Republicans, aren't they?