Music of the Day: The Youngbloods, Get Together

RATING: SSW (Somewhat Serious With Occasional Flashes of Wit)

Post-Inauguration Beverage of the Day: A Cold Adult Beverage of Any Kind

It seems that our new president, Mr. Obama, will soon close the facility at Guantanamo Bay that currently houses the flotsam and jetsam of the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Many fellow righties are lathered up over where to send these individuals because foreign governments do not want to have anything to do with them; let me make a modest proposal. . .for their disposal. . .oops, I mean for their disposition.

Various and sundry Democrats seem to think we owe these “detainees” some kind of more humane treatment than they have allegedly been receiving at the American Gulag known as Gitmo (our military being the inhumane, despicable, and oppressive organization that it is—according to the lefties amongst us) so the Change that Mr. Obama wants to institute is. . .well, it’s not clear exactly what is to be done with combatants captured on the field of battle, but something has got to Change, so Gitomo will close and the captured practitioners of the religion of peace will be sent to. . .well, that’s the tough part, isn’t it?

We already know, for instance, that some of the previously captured men, once released, have returned to their former employer, al Qaeda, and are back at work plying their old trade (which means, I guess, that whatever vocational rehabilitation and occupational therapy they received at Gitmo was ineffective); on the one hand, this means there may be some opportunity in the near future to provide them with the kind of final military justice they obviously deserve, but on the other hand this also means they may well have the opportunity to kill quite a few innocents before such military justice can be rendered.

And we already know that these men would not be welcome anywhere else on the planet, except for the caves of Afghanistan, which brings me to my modest proposal: Since various Democrats, so-called civil libertarians, and other ostensibly good-hearted, but clearly misguided people of the lefty persuasion, seem to think these men deserve freedom and rights and the usual sorts of legal gyrations and machinations permitted in civilian courts of law (rules of evidence, and so forth), I say let’s close Gitmo and place these individuals in the homes, spare bedrooms, dens, wine cellars and such, of those who think this way. Kitchen privileges might be optional, but why not give ‘em the run of a few Georgetown brownstones, keys to the family BMW, and the like. I’m sure the Kennedy family would be willing to donate some rooms at Hyannis Port for the housing of the accused while their trials proceed apace. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Kerry would be willing to put some up in their various residences and Mr. Edwards, the fine gentleman from North Carolina, has a huge home that could easily house, in great splendor, many of the previously incarcerated, even with their supply of Korans and prayer rugs and the other accoutrements of the religion of peace. Thus, the former combatants and terrorists would be housed amongst the righteous, the oh-so-good progressives who belabor conservatives with much moral snuffling about this, that, and the other—and perhaps the former combatants would come to appreciate the moral sensibilities of their hosts and foreswear jihad, suicide bombings, the murder of innocents, engaging in acts of war whilst wearing civilian clothes, and all of the other activities which landed them at Gitmo in the first place. This would be the best outcome—but I fear that another outcome might result from placing dangerous men amongst civilians who have no appreciation for their tendencies for violence.

Which is, come to think of it, the point of having these people at Guantanamo Bay. . . .

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: James Brown, There Was A Time

RATING: S (Serious)

Post-Inauguration Beverage of the Day: Prosecco Brut

I know there’s a lot of post-inauguration euphoria ‘mongst the Dems, but I have to wonder if anybody over there is paying attention to the “change” president and his recent appointees for various gubment jobs, agencies, etc.

While drivin’ around in the family Hummer the other day I heard Mr. Obama ballyhoo his selection of George Mitchell to head up some kind of commission or some such thing to work wholeheartedly on. . .you guessed it. . .the so-called Palestinian-Israeli “problem.” I swerved off the road again (as I often do when hearing about the latest Change/Obama-administration move back to the future/Clinton administration), laughing into my silk scarf, the tears running down my cheeks—and I spilled my beer (Modelo Especial), too, damnit! George Freakin’ Mitchell?!?!

If memory serves me correctly, this same cat, George Mitchell, had the same “job” at the end of the Clinton administration. And if memory serves me correctly, this same cat, George Mitchell was tasked by the commissioner of Major League Baseball to produce some kind of report on steroids and performance-enhancing drugs in Our Nation’s Pastime, which he did—he produced a report, which sank like a stone into the dismal swamps of sports-commission-reports-oblivion. He accomplished absolutely zero with respect to steroids in baseball and that was actually a better result than what he “accomplished” working on the so-called Palestinian-Israeli “problem.” It was okay for Mitchell to fail in the baseball-steroids-drug job because that whole thing was a put up deal to begin with—it was purely a public relations move on the part of Major League Baseball and Mitchell’s fulminations and public pronouncements, and the report itself, were all rightly ignored.

But this new/recycled gig in the Change/Obama administration is really the same old gig as before, but the consequences are a little more serious than a proliferation of over-sized home run hitters and pitchers who can throw a baseball 110 miles an hour—it’s a life and death deal for Israelis and Palestinians. If he does a repeat performance of his first gig “working” on this “problem” the results are liable to be as bad, or worse, than before—lots of people will pay with their lives for another muddled attempt to assign equal blame to Palestinian terrorists and the state of Israel. And that was the end result of Mitchell’s first attempt at “solving” the Palestinian-Israel conflict—not less conflict, but more Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, more dead Israelis, and eventually more dead Palestinians after the Israelis responded to the attacks.

And I’ll put in print again here: Those of you who voted for Change ought to recognize by now that the Change/Obama administration, so far, is recycled Clinton-era people, recycled Clinton-era policies, and worse, recycled Carter-policies. Anybody paying attention to the last 30 years of American history has seen all this Change before; normally reruns on TeeVee happen in the summer, but January 2009 has already been full of reruns of some of the worst shows—ever, and this latest one stars George Mitchell.

AJ

TO LIFE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Diana Krall, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

RATING: SSW (Somewhat Serious With Occasional Flashes of Wit)

Post-Inauguration Beverage of the Day: Whatever works for ya’. . . .

We now know that one of Mr. Obama’s proposed appointees failed to pay the above amount, $172,000, in back taxes to the federal gubment. This cat will likely be the next Treasury Secretary. Apparently he failed to pay $43,000 in taxes in each of four consecutive years, which his defenders are saying was merely an “honest mistake.” And he’s going to be the next Treasury Secretary.

I think the Treasury Secretary works with. . .money. . .lots of money, lots of taxpayer/gubment money. . .but I could be wrong—maybe because it’s a secretarial job he just has to take notes at important meetings and stuff, you know, write down the crucial stuff he sees on the PowerPoint slides during Treasury briefings, and stuff like that kind of stuff.

I hope he’ll be more scrupulous with gubment money than with the money he owed the gubment—wait, does that even make sense? I’m confused. . . .

I once couldn’t pay my taxes to the state where I live; I didn’t have the money to pay the taxes for one particular year (I was a graduate student and that year I made all of $4500, total, which didn’t give me a whole lot of economic wiggle room), but I’ll tell you what—I lived in absolute monetary dread until I was able to start paying my owed amount back to the state, and my owed amount was nowhere near $172,000, or even $43,000—it was more like a few thousand bucks.

Question: How does a cat who owes $172,000 in taxes to the gubment sleep at night?

Question: How does a cat who owes $172,000 in taxes to the gubment get a cool sounding job like Treasury Secretary?

Question: Shouldn’t they change his title from Treasury Secretary to Debt Secretary?

One other thing about my puny little tax debt: I was, and remain, ashamed of my tax debt; it just felt flat wrong not to be able to pay what I owed. I have not been able to detect any overt shame in our next Treasury Secretary, which is in itself a shame. But I guess it was just an “honest mistake.”

Finally, I wouldn’t suggest that you attempt the “honest mistake” excuse if you decide not to pay your taxes in April (or if you can’t pay your taxes in April); the nice people at the IRS, a division of gubment overseen by the Treasury Secretary (now that’s some kinda’ irony, aint’ it?), will send you straight to tax hell, never mind how “honest” your “mistake” might be. . . .

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Norman Brown, That’s the Way Love Goes

RATING: SSW (Somewhat Serious With Occasional Flashes of Wit)

Tryin’ to get from the great room into the library these days is about half hazardous; Maylie, who has gone from 19.5 pounds to over 30 pounds in six weeks, has toys (aka, binkies) all over the place—let’s see now, in the library, within easy view, I can see (1) the belt from MLB’s robe (that she sacrificed right away so that sweet little doggie would have something soft to chew on), (2) a pair of my old woolen socks that are tied together with a regulation Boy Scout square not, and (3) a two-foot long nylon rope with some kind of weird rubber-ball-with-soft-teeth thing in the middle of the rope. In the other room there is a round squeeze toy with four squeakers in it (the Mother of All Tough Toys, or something like that), a Kong toy (that holds doggie treats in the middle and is perfectly camouflaged to match the rug in there, which means I trip over the damned thing about four times a week), two Nyla bones (one huge chocolate thing that she’ll be able to chew on until the year 2012), a soft bear with a squeaker inside, a squishy-sounding bone-looking thing (a Beanie Bone) with a squeaker inside (she loves this one a lot), a Nyla fish (that's supposed to taste like bacon—I personally cannot vouch for the flavor of the fish, but that’s what it said on the package), two tennis balls (Dunlop high altitude balls, used, dirty, semi-flat), a giant bone-looking-thing that is made from two over-sized tennis balls with a huge, and ear-piercing, squeaker inside (by Airdog) and a couple of other generic bone-lookin’ thingies, some of which are gnawed on now and then, others of which have been systematically ignored.

I think there are three other binkies in her crate—her first favorite from Debbie and Dr. Phil (she killed the squeaker in that one in about a week), another unrecognizable (Monkey with huge nose? Toucan with four legs?) squeaker that she has chewed the nose off of completely, and finally the remnants of her Dad’s favorite binkie that we brought along with us the day we picked her up from the nice people with a litter of nine Labradoodles (and four kids).

I wonder if we’re spoiling her?

I’ve read one book since we got Maylie; my brain is turning to mush—I’ve started listening to NPR, I get all my news on CNN, and I’m thinking about changing my voter registration to Democrat. If you can’t beat ‘em, join’ em, right? Maybe I can get an Obama-government job. . .building “infrastructure.”

On the up-side, I’ve started reading Patrick O’Brian and in the next week or so I may actually finish the Hornfischer book, if I can cobble together a few consecutive hours of reading over the weekend. Oh yeah, there’s the new Clint Eastwood film that we’ve gotta’ see, and then there’s the NFL playoffs, and maybe on Sunday Steve and I will get to bash some tennis balls (if the weather stays nice). Oh hell, I’m giving up reading and thinking—maybe now that I’m a Democrat I’ll run for Congress. . . .

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Joyce Cooling, Expression

RATING: (S) Serious

Our friend CB sent us an after-Christmas gift; she’s been dealing with unpleasant things since her Mother passed away last month and her note indicated that she wouldn’t be coming to the ranch for a while due to will- and trust-related matters (complicated by an unpleasant and apparently nefarious sibling). We were grateful for the gift and hope that the unpleasantness soon goes away; the gift she sent was a copy of Since the Layoffs, by Iain Levison, someone I had not heard of before yesterday. I won’t be buying any of Mr. Levison’s books in the future, not if this latest (2004) screed is representative of his thinking. Still, public thanks to CB for the gift; it was nice to read a book start to finish in one day, but the book itself was profoundly disappointing and wholly predictable.

The book was touted on Amazon.com in the following way: "[A] dark, satirical comedy. Written with the same kind of deadpan humor Levison used so well in his first book."-USA Today. "A gleeful satire. . . . It's an amusingly bleak little (im)moral fable."-Detroit Free Press. "Exciting, funny, poignant and sociologically important."-The Chicago Tribune. "Levison's irony is acute as he caricatures the working world's groundlings."-The New York Times Book Review. The back cover of the book has this to say about the book: “Exciting, funny, poignant.”-Chicago Tribune. “Sharp satire with real suspense.”-Kirkus Reviews.

Ah, let me go back to those blurbs: “Comedy.” “Deadpan humor.” “Gleeful.” “Funny.” I read the entire book, one sitting—no laughter from me, not even a chuckle. I only read the book because CB sent it and because the blurbs promised comedy and humor and gleeful funny stuff inside. I wanted to laugh; I was ready for a laugh or two. Alas, the blurb-writers lied (or they didn’t really read the book, or what constitutes humor for blurb-writers these days is pretty skewed).

And that’s just the beginning of my problem with Since the Layoffs. Had it just been a humorless book with a “sociologically important” message, I would have been disappointed but grateful (maybe) for the sociological stuff; after all, some of my best friends are sociologists (and that’s no joke).

Jake Skowran lost his loading-dock-supervisor job when the tractor factory closed; almost everyone else in town lost their jobs, too and the entire unnamed town is depressed—psychologically, economically, and spiritually. Jake’s girlfriend left him after he lost his job; more importantly, it seems, is the fact that Jake can no longer pay his cable bill and, even worse, he has had to pawn his television. I guess for Mr. Levison, this is as bad as it gets—no cable, no TeeVee. But Jake’s real problem, the one that gets glossed over in the novel, is that he has a big ol’ gambling debt to Ken Gardocki, the local bookie who also dabbles in other criminal enterprises such as drug dealing. Gardocki uses Jake’s gambling debt against him when he offers Jake the opportunity to wipe the slate clean, and make a few bucks in the bargain, if Jake will kill Gardocki’s wife, a former stripper who has been having an affair with an airline pilot. Almost without a thought, and certainly without a moral qualm of any kind, Jake takes the offer, kills Gardocki’s wife (and the family dog) and finds that he likes killing people—it liberates him from the constraints of “normal” life and, he figures, if he doesn’t do Gardocki’s killing for him, someone else will and he’ll still be broke and in debt.

Interestingly, Jake turns to wagering on football games in order to try to “make” money instead of finding another job, or picking up and going somewhere else to find another job, or going back to school to learn some new more marketable skill other than “loading dock supervisor”—he can only see the quick fix to his problem in the form of winning some bets on NFL games.


His next victim is a freebie—it’s just someone he doesn’t like, a “corporate” man who comes to town to the Gas ‘N Go where Jake and his longtime buddy Tommy are working for barely-more-than-minimum-wage; Brecht comes to evaluate the employees and to rate the store in order to maximize sales and profits. He’s a by-the-book type, apparently clean-cut (although after Jake kills him and goes through his stuff, he finds cheap porn in the man’s briefcase—the author’s way of showing us that the apparently clean-cut corporate guy is really a sleaze), and officious and snide and unlikable—and that’s enough for the new Jake, the unconstrained-by-“normal”-life-and-rules-Jake, who goes to Brecht’s motel and kills him, not for money this time, but just because he has taken an immediate dislike to the man.

This encapsulates the big theme of the book—that corporate men are unfeeling, sub-human types who don’t really care what happens to the “little guy,” the guy who has to subsist on a lousy salary and be bossed around by corporate dweebs who really don’t know what they’re doing, who don’t care what happens to their employees, and who will close down businesses and take away people’s jobs just for the hell of it. It’s okay to kill people like that.

The next couple of killings Jake performs are for pay (again, for Gardocki), in New York and then Miami, where Jake kills the airline pilot who had an affair with his first victim, the aforementioned Mrs. Gardocki. Jake can’t get the crappy rifle he’s been provided with to fire accurately, so he kills his man along the beach with a bayonet, then he goes back to his hotel and takes his new girlfriend out for an afternoon of parasailing. Later, Gardocki (the bookie/criminal) fronts Jake and his buddy Tommy the money to buy the convenience store they’ve been working in and Jake stops killing people for money now that he has a new job and a new career and a new girlfriend.

The villain in the story, in case you haven’t yet figured this out, isn’t Gardocki (the bookie/criminal-guy who hires Jake to kill people), it isn’t Jake (who actually kills people for money or less tangible reasons), or Tommy (who steals from the convenience store corporation to help his friend Jake)—the real villain is, of course, Corporations and Capitalism and The System (even though, as you may have noted, Jake and Tommy want nothing more than to be Capitalists and part of The System even as they rant and rave and rail and rebel against these things). And now you see the larger problem of the book—it’s a mish-mash of half-baked notions, adolescent fantasies, and standard Leftist Rubbish. And some genius at The New York Times Book Review called this book “[a] black comedy of morals cracking in a lousy economy.” There is no evidence that Jake’s morals “cracked” in the story, only some vague references to the fact that everyone always considered Jake a straight arrow before the layoffs, a notion that is completely and instantaneously undermined when Jake takes his first “hit” job on Mrs. Gardocki without a moment’s hesitation and without, as noted above, any struggles with morality, right or wrong, good or bad, or anything of the kind.

Is there some consolation to all this? Yes. Amazon.com says that this book is ranked somewhere around 796,955 on its list of sellers, which means there are 796,954 other better books out there for people to read—and my recommendation would be to read all those other books first and then find (if you can) Since the Layoffs, by Iain Levison.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.