Hattie's Web

Going to stop quarreling with my friends on Facebook for a while and take the  cat to board. We are on our way again tomorrow. It is brutally humid here, but I am all packed!

More: Below I mentioned a Palestinian I knew who came to the U.S. to study and stayed here instead of going back. Talking over things at lunch with Terry, I asked him if he remembered one of his high school classmates, an Israeli who was in a high school study abroad program. He had lost touch with him. He was quite the guy--fun, adventurous, had a great motorcycle--wondering what might have happened to him, I looked up his name, an unusual one, and to my surprise found that he now lived in Berkeley. I remember him saying he did not want to go back to Israel and did not want to be in the military.

Here is what I wrote at the time of the last big assault on Gaza. 

They did not use white phosphorus this time, but they are using some kind of horrific bomb that spews shrapnel that cuts people to pieces.

What is so infuriating to me  is that you could turn the clock back to the 80's and realize that, belying all the feel-good rhetoric,  we have regressed everywhere when it comes to social justice. A lot of us had great hopes with Clinton. Then we had great hopes with Obama. But the trend is so clearly downward that I don't see how the greatest optimist in the world could imagine ever seeing the kind of improvements that would make a difference to ordinary people. We've run out of money. It's disappeared. We threw it away and not just the rich, either, but all of us. There is no longer the capital to repair our infrastructure, educate everyone and provide good health services. 

And now another round of the Cold War! Just what we need!

As a couple of old people who will be pretty well shot in a few years, we have decided to at least get a look at the things we want to see before it's too late. It would be egomania to think we can make much of a difference in this sorry world.

Monday

The latest "authorized version" of Israel-Palestine is being put into place. Luckily, we have Democracy Now, "the exception to the rulers," to provide the kind of in-depth on the ground reporting and excellent analysis that is rare in journalism.

 Here is Max Blumenthal, who clarifies the issue.

 

He points out that the current Israeli invasion of Gaza was the result of a "green light" given by our State Department, to go and "clean out" the tunnels in Gaza. Kerry's sarcastic aside, caught on Fox News, that this was "some pinpoint operation," Blumenthal considers to be a deliberate and not at all accidental way for him to refuse to take responsibility for his blunder in expecting Netanyahu to act in a measured way. Netanyahu is a fascist, and Israel is becoming a fascist state. Leftists are being bullied and attacked on the street and encouraged to leave the country.  Arabs are targets of racist attacks. This is not a country that should be given the kind of loyalty and money that the U.S. lavishes on it.

The whole program is here.

 

And if you have the time, read Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

BTW: If you don't have the time or inclination to look at the vids, DN provides transcripts.

 

Hanan Ashwari and other Palestinians I have known

"You obliterate ... whole families, and then you come and say this is self-defense?" - http://t.co/ynHh99ZsVd pic.twitter.com/JYl03XoSLl

— ABC News (@ABC) July 20, 2014

I heard Hanan Ashwari speak years ago in Portland, sometime in the mid-late 80's. She is the kind of person you don't forget. She described what the Palestinians were going through then, which was living in an outdoor prison, as she put it.Would she have believed that the torture was still going on in 2014? Her belief was that knowing the injustice would mobilize opinion against the occupation and bring freedom to Palestine. I guess we were all naive in those days.

Around that time, too, I got to know a Palestinian man pretty well from taking the bus with him from school. We were both  in the Portland State University ESL teaching certificate program, and later we taught at the same campus for a term. He was a very serious and "correct"person and did not joke around, in classes or elsewhere.  He told me that he had asked his father whether to stay permanently in the U.S. or to come home. His father said, "Stay where you are. There is nothing for you here." His father knew what would happen, that there was no hope.

Here in Hilo I know a woman who left sometime in the 60's and has returned to Lebanon from time to time to visit family there. She is very anti-Semitic and says the Holocaust was a hoax. I have tried to argue the point with her but without success.  Her family was driven from their ancestral home, and that has made her very angry and anguished and half mad.

One thought occurs to me pretty often. Why are the Palestinians being bombed when it was the Germans, not the Palestinians, who destroyed the European Jews? Why are the Palestinians the chosen enemy? What is the advantage of having a population of people who have been persecuted to the point where they are driven to hate the Jews, or at least the occupying Israelis? And why do so many Israelis  say that everyone hates the Jews and wants to wipe the Jews out, which is not true at all, probably not even among Palestinians? I think almost anyone can tell the difference between a rabid Israeli nationalist and a normal Jewish person.  I'm at a loss to figure out what good the current awful situation does for anyone. It's pure evil.  

More: In the current climate, this qualifies as light entertainment.

Best news coverage today

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2014/7/18

 

I do send them money. They get better and better.

Stuff

Well, I watched Pootie Tang and it was not sufficiently entertaining to excuse how awful it was. So I'm off BET for a while. Wanda Sykes was great, as usual, but for the rest of it, it was just junk food for the eyes. I sure miss the 70's, where movie making is concerned. But I guess, too, I'd have to be the different person I was in the 70's to get that thrill again. Today I think I'm more sophisticated but also cruder. Could be lots of people are like that, these days. The mass media are to blame!

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The mynahs have been terrorizing Fred the cat, divebombing him from the deck. The deck is on the flightpath between the nest they have made in the palm tree and the breadfruit tree where they hang out.  So he lies in the doorway, keeping an eye out for those raucous birds.

Yesterday I held a guinea pig while over at the neighbor's. These guinea pigs are on vacation from a school class. I realized that Fred is a genius compared to a guinea pig. If they did not eat and poop it would be hard to distinguish them from stuffed toys. 

Our neighbor has created a farmlet next door. Her kids love it.  I think it's fun, too.  I try to visit over there once a day.

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We are going to be gone during the Democratic Primary, and the early voting starts too late for us, so we have to pick up absentee ballots. Having just remembered after watching Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue's documentary, Body of War (available on Netflix) that Abercrombie voted against the authorization of force in Iraq, I am going to vote for him.  The unlikely hero who emerges from this film was Robert Byrd.

Byrd led a filibuster against the resolution granting President George W. Bush broad power to wage a "preemptive" war against Iraq, but he could not get even a majority of his own party to vote against cloture.^[68]

(From Wikepedia)

Clearly his major concern was preventing an unbalancing of the three branches of government. He said that Congress had the power to declare war, not the President. So he was thinking in institutional terms, but he did the right thing in this case. But he was also incensed about the Vietnam War where 50,000 Americans died and untold numbers of Vietnamese.  And thinking it over, I don't want to vote for anyone who authorized that war.  What a disgrace.

I was working up at the prison, and except for Mary and me, everyone, staff and inmates, was just go go and pumped up about the war,which looked like an easy kill and patriotic shot in the arm for America. The media were pumping out the propaganda by the bilgeload and almost everyone fell for it. The fact that some of us had figured out the truth proves that there were ways of knowing what was happening.

And now with social media and other kinds of online publishing, it is possible to get a fair idea of the current assaults and their motives for anyone who really wants to know.

At the same time, theory is important. Why are the Israelis bashing the Palestinians again? Why is the Ukrainian government destroying cities in the east of the country causing thousands to flee into Russia?  Why are Honduran children being sent back to a country where they will be killed or turned into soldiers or prostitutes for the drug lords? What are the commonalities of fascism now on display in Israel, Ukraine, Honduras and the U.S?

This is hardly one thing happening after another but something systematic going on. The goal is not to exterminate; it is to subordinate and humiliate or drive away whole peoples through terror. I don't even think it's about money and resources at this point. All these assaults on civilians are only destructive of property and lives. What kind of activism is effective against such a juggernaut of evil?

Somehow I guess I'm supposed to feel lucky because nobody is persecuting me personally, but we all pay for living in the times we live in.

On this light note, I wish you a happy weekend.

I needed to read this. It really has helped me to calm down.

Discipline and Punish

If you pray, please pray now for those folks who almost no one values; our poor, our prisoners, our immigrants, and the people of #Gaza.

— Sarah Slamen (@VictorianPrude) July 17, 2014

Applying Foucault here, I'd say that these groups do perform a valuable service. We value them as the lesser beings against whom we measure our relative good fortune.  They are the ones whose bodies may be starved, confined, banished, even murdered, all in good conscience and with every legal means.

Business cards

I had a card for a while.  Being at one time a part of the disciplinarian industry, or prison industrial complex, it is enlightening for me to be reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison.  He understands the theory behind the penal system and explains things in  a lucid way. The translation is very good. The link has a lot of excellent reviews of the book. I read it four or five pages at a time and just sit and think about what he's saying. It's like little lightbulbs of enlightenment going off in my brain. Terry says watch out for the big ones, or I could get a stroke.

 

I collect cards. Here are a few I like: You can enlarge the image for a better look.

Generation meh

That's my generation, born in the 20s and 30s.  Say from post WW I to the end of WW II. We were just people who did not represent much of anything but ourselves.  Some of my Meh friends are conformist to the point of ridiculousness,  and a lot of us, like Terry and me, are recluses at heart, no matter how much we have had to be in the world. My childhood was quiet and mostly uneventful and not something I worried about, one way or the other. Nobody saw anything special about me or tried to burnish my talents. My parents, in common with many others of their generation, had a very tough time of it and parenting was stressful for them. 

So mostly I got left alone with my own thoughts, which has given me a lot of freedom in old age.  This is also true of Terry.  Only now do we appreciate what a gift from our parents that was to let us have our own thoughts.  So  we don't have to keep with the program as it's laid out for elders but can just go our own way, as we did when we were  children.

Sometimes we were called the "silent generation," but I think that was because we had to be called something, I guess. Strangely enough, many of the Boomer idols are actually pre-Boomers, though mostly on the younger side of the demographic. The same is true of important civil rights activists. By the 70's, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll had taken over, and horrified adults fled into enclaves everywhere unless they decided to join the party (I'll never forget my father in law throwing a tantrum at the sight of a long-haired kid walking down the street. And his attitude toward blacks was shameful, too.) 

By contrast to us (as a group, only, you understand), Boomers are poor and unsystematic thinkers, due to the drugs, I guess, and all that running around they do. Their great strength, though, is that they will try just about anything! That attribute of theirs really did free things up in so many ways! The stolid conventionality that some elders still cling to was the norm until the 70's. I am kind of conventional in that style sometimes, but I can be very free, too. What I won't do is cross the line into risky behavior, because that always has consequences I'm not willing to suffer.

Well I meant to do this and that,  catching up on the many things that did not get taken care of while I was sick , but instead I wrote this piece of self indulgence. Back to work!

Tonight I will reward myself by watching Pootie Tang. If you watch sports, don't criticize my taste!

Men's studies

Louis C.K hates the human race, but that is OK, because he hates himself too. He makes good money with his particular brand of white man humor. He does not take money for granted, though, probably because he is partly Mexican. He knows that money can buy a man out of many a tight situation.

There are two things no white man will ever joke around about: money and success. Louis C.K. does not joke about money and success.

Black men joke around about money and success a lot, for example in Real Husbands of Hollywood.

For many men, their existential  problem is to function well while dull and depressed. Money is a big help here. Larry McMurtry's hero in Duane's Depressed is of this type. He farms his feelings out to women. Some men, such as Duane,  are like gods, but they are gods who do not understand themselves, more like Greek gods than Jehovah. There is no one above them, but their powers are limited. The basis of their godlike power is money.

I have yet to meet a white man who is not very concerned about money.

We have certainly been getting a lot of rain. This a.m. we woke up at dawn and everything was a lurid orange. The rooster, Johnny Cash,  is crowing away now. The weather is keeping things pretty lively around here. And I'm all well and ready for the next adventures we have coming up!

These are doves. As you can see, they are not lonesome.

Inventing the University

Now available on the prestigious Internet! This is my favorite piece ever on writing.

Convalescing

It certainly is pleasant to feel well, if weak. Time to fool around on the Internet!

My bad self loved this:

 

Cate Blanchett Upgrades Her Cable Service: http://t.co/5ZUmrOWIEN pic.twitter.com/eNY5cf4GBy

— Timothy McSweeney (@mcsweeneys) July 15, 2014

Making fun of Cate Blanchett never gets old! 

(deleted)

Alain de Botton is doing something interesting as a philosopher, which is to clarify the ideas of these great thinkers and make their insights useful to people who have not studied their work. It takes a lot of persistence to hack your way through the prose of, for example, Hegel, and yet it is important to grasp his insights, which influenced Marx and others. It is good to understand his basic idea, which is that progress is slow. He also admonishes us to listen to the other side in dialectical arguments. That would really help a lot of marriages!  Sure people are disappointed, with civil society and personal lives, etc. but that is the nature of existence.  Do you think I like being 75? But it sure beats being dead.

Recent travels and travels to come are causing me to think a lot about my home, which I consider to be the Far West, incorporating California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska. I am at home anywhere in this huge area. In spite of having spent so much of my life elsewhere--Wisconsin, New Jersey, Germany, Switzerland-- these are not places I understand at any deep level. This is not the same as saying I love all aspects of the Far West but I guess you could say I have an instinct for it, some personal historic knowledge from my family, an early attachment to its landscapes, the history of old California, the political polarization, right there from the beginning,  the lived experience of WW II and its aftermath, the influx of new people from everywhere, the unions,  the lavish amounts of public money available for many years, and so on.

From day one the agenda throughout the west has been appropriation and exploitation. Roman Polanski, a complete outsider, caught the mood well in his film, Chinatown. That bastard understood!  Appropriate resources, exploit the weak and discard them when they are used up,  regard everything as property!  "It's Chinatown, Jake!"

By comparison, Woody Allen the New Yorker is nothing but a small time twerp who diddled anyone handy but never could get very far out of his own shell. Polanski transgressed on a huge scale, as befits the landscape and the opportunities (still!)  available to the ruthless out here. Great crimes made this place what it is today!

Speaking of water, John Talton, The Rogue Columnist, is gifting us his expertise on the Arizona water situation. Rare to find writing and analysis of this caliber anywhere in these days of fading journalism. I think I might buy the book he mentions, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City,  which quotes him extensively.  Guess what city that might be!

Manchild and thieving Mexicans

Go look for yourself. No link. I don't want any Manchilds over here.

Manchild allows you to be an overcomer of the plot through the world system to destroy the male seed which many have become increasingly emasculated by tragedies, traumas and abuse. The group, helps restores marriages, healed confidences and establishes the boldness intended for men. Manchild is for every man who ever needed to bear his heart and had no one to hear it. It is for every man who has ever had an issue he could not discuss. It also provides women a deeper understanding into the caves and crevices of the masculine heart. The Manchild represents overcomers, men throughout history have attained to a state of full maturity, or completion for their era through this movement. The movement develops men into maturity as a corporate body not just as individuals

It almost seems wrong to make fun of this attempt at making a few bucks out of male resentment, but if Alicublog can sneer at Manchild, so can I.  It's really kind of sad. But basically, hahahahahaha!

Oh, and Edroso is on fire in his latest Voice column. He monitors rightbloggers for a living.  Here he is taking on the anti-immigration crowd.

...we knew the contribution of Victor Davis Hanson would be a dilly.

In his National Review column, at first Hanson used the immigrants' plight to tease the America-hating liberals who live in his head, pointing out that the immigrants did not run to their local "communist utopias or to socialist spin-offs" for socorro, but to the good ol' U.S.A., even though "they have often been taught back home [that America] is the source of their misery," probably by soreheads over-reacting to death squads, CIA coups, and stuff like that.

But soon Hanson got down to cases: Obama was flouting the law, because that's what all Obama ever does ("Who in the pen-and-phone era of Obama gets to decide which law to follow and which to ignore?"); also, if you think the people blocking the buses in Murrieta were bigots, what about racist, chainsaw-stealing Mexicans? "For that matter," thundered Hanson, "how does the racialist term 'La Raza' survive as an acceptable title of a national lobby group in this politically correct age of anger at the Washington Redskins football brand?" There's really no end to the persecution of white people in this country.

In closing, Hanson told us that liberals are rich and live in Manhattan or San Francisco, whereas real Americans are simple sons of the sod who need protection from immigrants who seek to steal their chainsaws.

And good lord. I almost forgot this. It could be Edroso's masterpiece.

 

Bad head cold this weekend and major massive tropical storm with thunder and tons of rain.  Doing lots of reading and will get caught up by tomorrow.

Saturday a.m. special

We love our neighbors! They have little kids and the dad is a great barbeque chef. Also, their chickens come into our backyard and eat up insects.. Their  "indoor" cat, Said (pronounced Sigh-eed), who gets out a lot,  came over, too.  He doesn't bother the chickens,  and so far he and Freddy have been avoiding each other, so no fights.

This is the rooster, Johnny Cash. Unlike many, I find the crowing of roosters to be a pleasant rural sound.

The flock

Said looks more like a wild animal than a domestic cat.

Looking forward to a fun weekend. And Happy 40th birthday to my son in law, Paul! Wish we could be there for the party!