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.

Music of the Day: Shawn Phillips, No Question

RATING: S (Serious)

In my previous post I erred when citing the number of rockets fired into Israel and the time period in question; according to Dore Gold, “Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. The majority of those attacks were launched after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Indeed, rocket attacks increased by 500 percent (from 179 to 946) from 2005 to 2006.” [Note: The source for these statistics is: Dore Gold, "Israel's War to Halt Palestinian Rocket Attacks," JerusalemIssue Brief , Vol. 7, No. 34, March 3, 2008, Institute of Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. See also December 2008 publications on www.intelligence.org.il.] The number I incorrectly quoted was based upon my own confusion about dates and I apologize for including incorrect and misleading information here.

The larger point, of course, is that the terrorists of Hamas continue to hide in civilian enclaves while firing their rockets into Israel hoping that any Israeli response, no matter how precise, will result in the deaths of women and children and other non-combatants (including the “pious”).

As Mark Steyn pointed out in a 2006 piece that appeared in the Chicago Sun Times (and that was reprinted Friday, January 2, 2009, “But, when an army goes to war against a terrorist organization, it's like watching the Red Sox play Andre Agassi: Each side is being held to its own set of rules. When Hezbollah launches rockets into Israeli residential neighborhoods with the intention of killing random civilians, that's fine because, after all, they're terrorists and that's what terrorists do. But when, in the course of trying to resist the terrorists, Israel unintentionally kills civilians, that's an appalling act of savagery.”

More significantly, as Steyn points out, is the notion that “In Hezbollahstan, the deaths of its citizens works to its strategic advantage: Dead Israelis are good news but dead Lebanese are even better, at least on the important battlefield of world opinion.” Obviously Steyn was writing about rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah, but the same logic applies to rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas—any Israeli response, no matter how justified or measured or careful, will likely result in the death of the civilians that the terrorists surround themselves with, a circumstance which is by no means accidental or random.

AJ

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

Music of the Day: Ron Carter, The Golden Striker

RATING: S (Serious)

Beverage of the Day: Bailey’s Original Irish Cream

If you have been reading, or watching, the news you know that Israel has decided not to take the daily rocket attacks from Hamas any longer without retaliation. These attacks from the cowards of Hamas followed the end of the most recent brief cease-fire in Gaza and the Israeli government has wisely chosen to strike back in a serious way. In the twelve months prior to the most recent cease-fire, the peace-loving Palestinians [sic] fired more than 4000 rockets into Israeli territory, a practice they resumed immediately after the end of the cease-fire. Now, of course, the actions of Israel are condemned; the current president of Iran has called the Israeli attacks a “holocaust,” which is an Orwellian twist of language that even Orwell might have found staggering. Here’s a quote from the Islamic Republic News Agency: “In the message, the Iranian president underlined that the real Holocaust is now taking place in Gaza Strip and Palestine, calling on world nations not to hesitate even for a moment to back the oppressed Palestinians in Gaza. The president lauded the heroic resistance of the noble Palestinian people in Gaza who are being massacred by the savage Zionist occupiers. ‘Innocent women, children, youths and pious people in Gaza have fallen victims to the Zionist criminals just because of their attempts to vindicate their legitimate rights’, he said.” Notice, please, that there is no mention of the cowards who fire rockets into Israel, gunmen, murderers, terrorists, suicide-bombers-in-training, only the innocent, women, children, youths, and of course the pious.

And that last bit brings me the title of today’s piece, the cowards of Hamas. Innocent women, children, youths, and pious people in Gaza have fallen victim to something—that is likely a true statement, but they are the victims of the “soldiers” of Hamas who hide among the innocent, hoping that by doing so they will be shielded from harm. I cannot think of a more cowardly act, but it serves a political purpose—the Palestinians can claim that the Israelis are “savages” (see above) because the cowards of Hamas hide among the innocent while lobbing rockets into Israel—and the gullible, the confused, the ignorant, and the bigoted believe and repeat these canards. Not long ago in this space I noted that the bad boys of Islam care nothing for what we call “collateral damage” to the innocent—and we’re seeing it again in Gaza.

AJ

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