MacDaffy's 650 Blog

2012-01-23T14:32:00.000-10:00

Don't Think Twice (song parody)

2011-11-11T04:55:00.000-10:00

Don't Think Twice (song parody)

Bush Screwed The USA (song parody)

2011-10-02T03:42:00.000-10:00

Bush Screwed The USA

(to the tune of God Bless The USA)

I have had it! All the things are gone

I've worked for all my life,

And I have to start again

Without my children and my wife,

Goodbye, dear middle class

There is no room for me today,

'Cause the banks all have their freedom

And they've taken mine away.

And I'm proud to be an American

Though I'm in insolvency,

And I won't forget the man who lied

To take my rights from me,

'Cause the man who messed up everything

Still defends himself today,

'Cause there ain't no doubt, he shamed this land

Bush screwed the U.S.A.

It's a bridge in Minnesota

Or a flood in Tennessee,

When our country needed leading most

He preferred to "let it be"

From Detroit to New Orleans

and New York to L.A.,

This country's damned near torn apart

And it's time we stand and say:

That I'm proud to be an American

Though I'm filing bankruptcy,

And I won't forget the folks who've died

For oil royalties

And I'm going to stand up and challenge you

To prove me wrong today

'Cause there ain't no doubt he wronged our land

Bush screwed the U.S.A.

And I'm proud to be an American

I'm as proud as I can be

But I won't forget the man who lied

To loot our Treasury

And I'd gladly stand up in any court

Indicting him today,

'Cause there ain't no doubt he failed this land!

Bush screwed the U.S.A.

Raising [Herman] Cain...

2011-09-30T08:10:00.001-10:00

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain caused a firestorm of controversy by revealing in a CNN interview this week that Black Americans have been "brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view." This has been such a closely-guarded secret among us that it occasioned an emergency meeting--the third one in the last three years (the others were called when we realized that Obama actually did stand a chance of winning the presidential nomination, and when rumors arose that a sequel to Soul Plane was in the works). Black people gathered at clandestine meeting houses all over the nation last night in an attempt to hash out a response.

My location--an abandoned Popeye's Chicken franchise--was in an uproar when I arrived. Paramedics were attending to several women who had become so irate that their necks locked. Arguments raged from one end of the room to the other. Things got so out-of-hand that the Head Negro In Charge (HNIC) for our district--a formidable woman in a Chanel suit--had to put Aretha on the loudspeakers (Aretha's version of Respect has been the real Negro National Anthem since its release; people still who think the anthem is Lift Every Voice didn't get The Memo).

"Quiet down now! Everybody find a seat! We got to get this over with before anybody realizes we're here," roared the HNIC.

The restless crowd came to some semblance of order.

"What do we do now?" wailed Sam The Barber. "It was all anyone could talk about at the shop yesterday!"

"They're onto us!" shouted Willy The Pimp.

"What should we do?!"

Disorder threatened to overtake us again until the HNIC fired a round into the ceiling with her Glock.

"Y'all shut the hell up! We got this! Now, let's hear a few words from Brother Jones! Go 'head and talk, Daddy!"

Brother Jones, the elder of our group, stood up. The kindly old gentleman--shaking a bit from palsy, and still in his pajamas and robe--faced the group.

"Thank you, Brenda. Gather the little ones around," he said. "They need to hear this and remember it."

Baby-mommas and baby-grannies and baby-great-grannies guided their little charges to the front of the room where they sat at Brother Jones's feet. Each held a sippy-cup filled with red Kool-Aid laced with a spoonful of Ny-Quil.

I detected the glint of a tear in the brother's eye as he regarded the little angels.

"We done had quite a run, children. Quite a run... but it's over now... It's time for the next step. We got to move on."

"Praise the Lord," said Miz Wells, the principal of the local elementary school. High Pockets was so affected that he set down his forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor, took off his watch cap, and sat forward in his chair.

"We done heeded the siren song of them Roosevelts long enough," shouted Brother Jones.

"All this marchin' and complainin' and carryin' on... All this civil rights and votin' rights mess... All that talk about 'Eyes On The Prize'... We been wrong, people! We done let Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and them convince us to trade one set of shackles for another! We been hoodwinked! We been misled! We been bamboozled!"

Several attendees shouted "Amen."

"What did we brave them dogs and them hoses for? What was the point? The conservatives were trying to show us the error of our ways, but did we listen?"

"No!"

Brother Jones seemed to stand a little taller as he warmed to his subject.

"After all that, what are we?! Where are we? What do we have?! What have we become?"

Brother Jones thrust his cane at the assembly.

"Liberals! That's what! Nothin' but dirty, stinkin', low-down, no-good, bleedin' heart, welfare-takin', crack-smokin', sex-crazed, Obama-votin', food stamp dependent, mutton-headed liberals!"

Hearing that many of us that quiet at that moment was an almost religious experience. We knew in our hearts that the brother spoke the truth.

"It's time we got with the program, y'all! A people that doesn't adapt perishes! The hardest shackles to throw off are the ones you put on yourself!"

The congregation erupted in cheers and assent.

"Preach it, brother!"

"Tell us what we need to do!"

"Lead us!"

Brenda, the HNIC, gestured to the sergeant-at-arms. The doors opened and a team of white people in lab coats began bringing in equipment. A widescreen television set was wheeled to the front of the disused chicken shack. Every mouth gaped--including mine--as proctors passed 3-D glasses out to everyone. I put mine on.

A professorial, silver-haired white man took the podium.

"Please put your glasses on and watch the screen," he instructed. We obeyed as one. In a scene repeated throughout the country, the lights dimmed, the television set flickered on, and Herman Cain's toothy grin filled the screen.

"Be not afraid... I am Herman Cain, and I am here to free your minds."

"Our asses will follow," we said as one.

"Repeat after me... Government can not create jobs!"

"Government can not create jobs!"

"Taxes and regulation are evil!"

"I've got mine! Get your own!"

"Nobody's going to help you but you!"

"Government is not the solution; it's the problem!"

"Government is not the solution..."

I was back home and in my warm bed before I knew it. I woke up refreshed and energized and I felt a power I had never experienced before that moment. I'm no longer a liberal. My mind is open because Herman Cain has opened my heart. There was a quote from Mr. Cain ringing--not just in my ears--but in my soul, as well. I had not heard it before, but it resonates even as I write this.

Mr Cain said: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!

Obama? That Kenyan Socialist Muslim doesn't stand a chance.

The Newest Zodiacal Sign

2011-01-14T08:27:00.004-10:00

OPHIUCHUS -- Nov. 29 - Dec. 17 (may be pronounced as "officious" or as rhyming with the Yiddish tuchus or as "oh-f**k-us"): Members of the newest sign of the zodiac, Ophiuchum will intensify the well-known Sagittarian trait for insistence on being the most clueless, tactless dicks in the room. Given to delusions of grandeur, Ophiuchum are downers at parties, consistently spook horses and small children, and have the hygienic elán usually associated with hyenas.

Avoid engaging them in debate at all costs. They are thick, obtuse, and quick to anger when faced with a conversation above the fourth-grade level. Any word with more than three syllables is automatically translated to a grunt most often heard from ESPN announcers or the bathroom stalls at an Indian restaurant.

Utterly hopeless at matters of the heart, Ophiuchum are indifferent lovers, at best. They have only a nodding acquaintance with the concept of passion, think of any hot meal before a sexual act as "foreplay", and consider fidelity a quality desirable only in high-end audio equipment. They are incessant "re-gifters" when they remember to give a gift at all.

Any famous persons born under this sign don't deserve mention; they have been of little use to society at-large except for liquor store owners, bail bondsmen, pet thieves, or Albanians.

Ophiuchum are not only incompatible with any other zodiacal sign; scientists consider them outliers vis-a-vis the human genome and place them somewhere on the evolutionary scale just below Pukwudgies and golf pros.

Judicial Activism

2010-01-23T23:58:00.002-10:00

This is a link to the dissent to January 21st's Supreme Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission written by Justice John Paul Stevens. The dissent lays out just how activist this decision was.

The court decided questions it begged to be asked.

From the dissent: "Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law."

Stevens doesn't sugar-coat the situation; he calls it the way he sees it. His fellow justices ignored centuries of protocol to rule on this case. The act Stevens accuses his colleagues of committing is highly irregular and almost without precedent--predecent is an important word here--in the annals of Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission are bookends and of one piece. Both decisions fly in the face of precedent. They dismantle years of settled law. They benefit narrow interests to the detriment of the common good.

FAIL!

The First Quarter...

2010-01-23T19:07:00.006-10:00

There's a lot of hand-wringing, gloom, and doom after the first year of Barack Obama's presidency. Health care's a cock-up. We've doubled down in Afghanistan. The Senate is a millstone around The First Brother's legislative neck...

Joe Conason says "NOT SO FAST!

Having taken the oath of office just one year ago, Barack Obama is a flashing meteor that sputtered out too soon -- or so the national media narrative tells us. According to this story line, the young president is a presumptuous liberal who disappointed his own idealistic followers while irritating everyone else. Media tipsters spoke of a "final judgment" in Massachusetts before the stunning returns came in -- so we may soon hear declarations of a "failed presidency" from Washington's pundit herd.

Yes, after a run of extraordinary luck that helped get him into the White House, Obama today is confronting his share of electoral trouble. He may well encounter more and worse as November's midterm approaches. But he and his critics should remember the last time a Democratic president had to listen to the drafting of his own political obituary.

The premature farewells came early in Bill Clinton's first term.

The joker in the deck is the Supreme Court Decision of January 21st. That's a game-changer. The damage it causes can't be addressed until Congress can take definitive action (snerk) or someone is actually injured in November's elections. That's the way things work when the Supreme Court screws up.

Anyway, today's media have a stake in making Obama's situation seem more dire than it is.

Finally, I've been a football fan all my life. If I've learned anything, I've learned not to assume the outcome of the game in the first quarter even if "the better team" is ahead by twenty-eight points. There are three quarters left in this game. Root the way you want to, but don't assume that it's a blowout yet.

Oh... and watch the referees.

Heroes And Zeros...

2010-01-22T22:03:00.007-10:00

Chris Matthews Reminds Us That He's A Political Weather (Vain)... Tweety lays into Representative Alan Grayson for "pandering to the netroots"--something about which Matthews obviously knows bupkes. Remember Matthews's reaction to George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing? Remember the "thrill up the leg" that Matthews got on hearing Obama speak? Chris Matthews is a political windsurfer. He's a functioning idiot.

Elizabeth Warren is one of the bona fide heroes of the age. She deserves our thanks and our undivided attention. From the Huffington Post article

If the financial reform bill doesn't establish an effective and independent consumer protection agency, Congress would be better off passing nothing at all, Elizabeth Warren warned on Friday.

Warren, one of the country's foremost consumer-right's advocates and the congressionally-appointed watchdog for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, said her chief concern is that financial regulatory reform legislation will suffer the same fate as health care reform -- starting out with noble principles but scaled down and negotiated away ultimately to ineffectualness. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency, she said, is not optional.

Here is a good article on the implications of the Supreme Court's ruling on campaign finance. This video from "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" features Representative James Cliburn, who sounds aggressive and hopeful notes on what can be done to address the bookend legal travesty to Bush v. Gore. Take heed and take heart. Some corporate leaders are already beseeching Congress to redress the high (as in "they must have been...") court's ruling. Yes, folks: It's that bad.

Listen To The Wind...

2010-01-22T00:54:00.003-10:00

My late father-in-law, Edward R. Becks, told me that Republicans are like junkies; they don't know the meaning of the word "enough." The desires of a tiny cabal of super-rich reactionaries born in the wake of Teddy Roosevelt's ascent to the presidency in 1901 and energized by the implementation of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1932, have been realized at last. They've finally gotten what they always wanted and you can be sure that it still won't be enough: On January 21st, 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled that corporations have unfettered free speech rights in regard to political campaigns.

[The cabal maintained that any expansion of government beyond what it was at the end of President William McKinley's tenure was a perversion of the founder's conception of federal power].

The decision is a catastrophe that has been compared to Dred Scott--the decision that officially deprived black Americans of their constitutional rights. In that case, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that blacks were constitutional ciphers and "had no rights that the white man was bound to respect." The Supreme Court today declared that this country's voters now have no rights that the corporations are bound to respect. America's politicians can now be bought and sold on an open market legitimized by the highest court in this land, The legacy of George W. Bush--The Worst President In United States History--is the gift that keeps on giving.

Corporate money rather than our tax dollars controls governance from now until this nefarious decision is either overturned or we descend into an alarmingly imminent approximation of Mike Judge's prophetical film Idiocracy, wherein corporate America reigns supreme over a riotous clutch of ignoramuses. As Keith Olbermann said last night, it is "government of the people by the corporations for the corporations...it is our Dred Scott!"

Bingo!

We've got to see that it perishes from the earth. Quickly. Otherwise, the United States of America will devolve into a rigged mud-wrestling match with the corporations serving their own interests and the people wondering why everything that they want or need--health care or social security or climate change initiatives or the well-being of the middle class--is "economically infeasible" and why they're covered with mud.

Newt Gingrich said on National Public Radio yesterday that "this is a victory for middle-class political candidates."

Imagine being a Regular Joe presented with the opportunity to secure a coach seat on the Gravy Train by running for virtual sure-fire election to Congress... (you ride in coach because the people in First Class can't stand your stench). You vote the way the people who got you where you are want you to vote. You do and say what you're told. Then--even more nakedly than now--you dance with the ones that brung you.

Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission was about a corporation's right to air a hit piece against presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton during the period just before an election. Election laws precluded airing of corporate or party propaganda in the immediate period leading up to a vote. Citizens United sued and took it to the Supreme Court where it blossomed from a narrow dispute about an acerbic anti-Hillary Clinton movie into the replacement of individual Americans in the political process by American Corporations.

The Supreme Court held that speech--corporate money, in their lexicon--can not be constrained.

Funny...

I can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater without expecting consequences.

I can't joke about a bomb or a weapon at any point during an airline flight with impunity.

I can't threaten the life of a member of the federal government.

I can't make terrorist threats.

I can't libel anyone without fear of penalty via due process.

In other words, my speech as a free, responsible citizen of this country is subject to constraint... for excellent reasons.

But--by the very nature of corporate America--those constraints don't apply under the ruling handed down by the Roberts Court on January 21st.

Libel an opposition candidate in an election?

Tough titty. It's a corporation versus an individual. It's a Great Dane versus a chihuahua. The litigation would be over long after the "right" candidate took office. The corporation could fight the case as long as it desired (i.e. when the losing candidate ran out of money).

A corporation buys all the available air time in a market for its preferred candidate?

Not a problem, according to Justice Roberts. It's free speech. The corporation can't be expected to look out for a rube that didn't hook up with a Sugar Daddy.

Corporations can now shout "Fire!" and do so with impunity. They're writing the checks now. Politicians don't prosecute or hold accountable the hand that feeds them.

Corporations can now characterize candidates as dangers to national security or the national well-being. The offended candidate can sue, but their adversary has the deepest pockets on earth,

Hell, the corporations can do pretty much what they want because they've got the money to deal with the negative consequences of any action they might take on behalf of a candidate.

That kind of power buys an awful lot of indulgence. It buys an awful lot of influence. It buys results.

There's a passage in Citizen Kane that comes to mind. Kane's affair with Susan Alexander has been found out by Boss Jim Gettys. Gettys has told Kane's wife and--in a confrontation in Susan's apartment--Kane's wife challenges him to pick between fling and family. Susan--silent for most of the time--wails "What about me?!"

The silence from Kane, his wife, and Gettys speaks more eloquently than any words could have.

Go ahead...

Try it...

Whisper it or shout it...

"What about me?!"

Listen to the wind.

George W. Bush: The Worst President In United States History

2009-11-23T22:46:00.007-10:00

The mainstream media is trying to stuff the administration of George W. Bush--The Worst President In United States History--down the memory hole. That eight years didn't happen, according to The Villagers, and less than one year of Barack Obama has brought us to the brink of economic ruin.

Don't let it happen! Challenge anyone who tries to blame the deficit on Obama. Remind them of the tax cuts for the rich, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Medicare Drug "Benefit", and the TARP bailout. The war in Iraq accounts for $1.2 billion per month. That's BILLION. What is $1.2 billion times seventy-eight? The Medicare Scam cost us seven trillion, more-or-less. Now, they're telling us that every extra soldier we send into Afghanistan will cost us another million dollars. Since we've been there for eight years, extrapolate that million bucks per soldier up until today, And--don't forget--that the wars were "paid for" "off-the books."

Let's leave aside the exorbitant contracts awarded to Halliburton, Blackwater/Xe, KBR, etc. The above paragraph adds up to quite a bit of money.

The ONLY reason we're not in a declared depression right now is that the Obama stimulus package was sufficient to interpose a quarter or two of growth into what is an economic crash-dive. That's why The Villagers refer to our current plight as "The Great Recession." It's a dodge. Rest assured: This is the Second Great Depression. People don't have money. They don't have jobs. They don't have the security that most of us grew up taking for granted.

Put the blame where it lies... on George W. Bush: The Worst President In United States History.

A Cause For Concern...

2009-11-23T02:30:00.002-10:00

Barack Obama hasn't been president for a year yet. The mess he inherited from the Bush Administration is rivaled only by the one existing during the transition between the presidencies of James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln.

BTW, every time I mention George W. Bush, I am going to emphasize his richly-earned title: The Worst President In The History Of The United States.

A number of issues that the Bush Administration has left for President Obama require a definitive departure from the status quo. This Time Magazine article is a troubling peek inside the Obama White House. It chronicles the firing of White House Counsel Greg Craig and why it happened. It doesn't give me a good feeling about the Obama White House. It doesn't give me a good feeling about the president's command of the situation.

So many issues facing our nation now require unambiguous leadership from the president. And President Obama has virtually disappeared from the field.

He should begin with his decision on Afghanistan and begin throwing his considerable weight behind some progressive initiatives like ending the two wars in the Middle East while capturing or killing the Al Qaeda operatives who authored 9/11; rendering quick, effective, and direct aid to the millions of Americans suffering under this undeclared depression; making definitive progress toward addressing energy policy and its relationship to climate change; and re-building the bond between the American government and its people. There are other issues--he need only read his campaign speeches--that demand his follow-through.

We've seen the conservative's work. It's a wonder they still get the lion's share of the appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows. It's a wonder they've remained out of jail. But they're still setting the agenda.

President Obama should give the Teabaggers something to scream about and do what the people who elected him sent him there to do: Effect change we can believe in.

A Message From Jacques...

2009-11-08T17:25:00.003-10:00

Hello. My name is Jacques. I live with the idiot responsible for this sorry POS excuse for a blog. If he didn't slip me the occasional morsel of steak now and then, I don't know that I'd give him a second thought. I mean... SEVEN MONTHS worth of cobwebs?! He's been sitting at his other light box punching stuff in with his fingers, but he sure as hell hasn't been doing this.

Anyway, he seems to be taking an interest in the stuff he was doing all those months ago.

Fair warning: He may start blogging again. Just remember I'm the one who warned you when it's time to pass out the treats.

Woof...

Fox News Viewers Watch Specter Announce His Defection From Republican Party...

2009-04-29T04:37:00.006-10:00

Requiem For A Heavyweight...

2009-04-23T01:59:00.002-10:00

This is one of the first paragraphs of William F. Buckley's Wikipedia entry:

Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century", according to George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement. "For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure."
Buckley's primary intellectual achievement was to fuse traditional American political conservatism with laissez-faire and anti-communism, laying the groundwork for the modern American conservatism of U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan.

Bill Buckley died in February of 2008 at the age of 82 on the cusp of Barack Obama's ascendancy to the presidency of the United States. I would like to think that he died with his vision of America intact. I say that as someone who was not exactly included in that vision. He was adamantly against the civil rights movement. Buckley wrote the following in 1957 when I was not quite five years old:

”…The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

True to his intellectual rigor, his sense of fairness, and his essential decency, he repudiated this view.

Yet, he still held that view at a time when its effect was most crucial. Barry Goldwater came to repudiate it in later life as well. Conversely, Ronald Reagan put the shining happy face of neoconservatism on it. Reagan’s invocation of “The Welfare Queen” and George H. W. Bush’s demonizing of presidential rival Michael Dukakis via the dark-skinned boogey man of Willie Horton are of a piece. They diminished the nation’s political debate and laid the groundwork for the cynical, self-interested, pseudo-conservatism of Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, and Grover Norquist.

Again, I like to think that Bill Buckley saw through this hucksterism.

Now, the progeny of William F. Buckley’s movement are arguing for the acceptance of torture as a useful and indispensable tool in the fight against America’s enemies. I can’t pretend to think what Buckley might have thought about the present spectacle of American officials equating war crimes with mere trifles.

But I like to think that Mr. Buckley—his prodigious vocabulary shining at the fore—would have warned us against this abomination. I like to think that he would have been a voice of reason sounding the alarm against discarding the rule of law for the sake of political expediency. That is what Richard Cheney and those who assist him are doing now. They are trying to convince us that we have to break international law in order to save it.

Cheney. Rumsfeld, Rice, and the other Bush administration officials responsible for this country’s descent into torture as national policy should be held to account. It’s a view I hold partially because William F. Buckley laid forth an example that I follow. Our country is worth cherishing. Our country is worth consideration in national affairs. And the price we pay for that is that our country’s ideals are worth upholding.

Bill Buckley and I may have disagreed on the best way to do so, but we agreed.

On Sesame Street With Ricky Gervais and Elmo!

2009-03-13T23:09:00.002-10:00

Things might seem dire in these trying economic times, but there's nothing like a good laugh to keep us sane. All the best to Ricky but especially to Elmo, who performed a work of genius under adverse conditions.

Headphones recommended.

Pietri Nella Mia Scarpa

2009-03-10T00:21:00.004-10:00

President Barack Obama has done some great things in the first two months of his presidency. He has promised to end the commitment of combat troops in Iraq by a date certain. He has set in motion the process to close our shameful detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama has rendered George W. Bush's signing statements inoperative, rescinded the ban on federal funding for stem cell research, signed into law important legislation barring discrimination against women in the workplace, submitted an honest and forthright--though earmark-laden--budget, and passed a stimulus bill that will translate into real jobs and real progress for the American people.

But--alas--my unstinting support of him has come to an end. To paraphrase Don Altobello in The Godfather Part III, "I have some stones in my shoe."

The biggest one has been placed there by Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. His latest column--Behind The Curve--suggests very strongly and very convincingly that the current stimulus bill is inadequate. President Obama is surrounded by advisors who have been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and other key economic players in the administration had front-row seats for the making of the debacle that is our current economy.

They are still protecting their own interests.

The so-called "zombie banks" and financial institutions should be treated no differently than the seventeen regional banks that have been seized and liquidated this year. No more bailout money. No more bonuses gleaned from taxpayers. No more hemming and hawing about the value of "toxic" loans on the books of financial institutions.

Why?

The longer it goes on and the more bailout money allocated to the malefactors who got us into this mess in the first place, the less incentive average Americans have to honor their own commitments. Rick Santelli notwithstanding, what debtor should be counted as an idiot for walking away from an obligation when our own government is paying The Big Players to do that very thing? With bonuses! Why not?

"Why not stiff the banks for some tens of thousands of dollars when the government is pumping billions into those institutions for the same purpose? If they can default without penalty, why can't we?"

This is the psychology that adds to the toxicity of the current economic environment.

The second stone in my shoe? The Obama administration isn't even back on its heels as far as framing the issues: It's comatose. He's getting his ass kicked. Inaction is allowing incoherence to hold sway. The Mainstream Media are always going to give the right-wing a voice. That voice will always have influence as long as it is allowed to ring unchallenged. Witness the canard that--two months into his administration--Obama "owns" the economic mess we're in. The most intellectually benighted yokels in the furthest reaches of our nation's Dogpatches can be talked down from that lofty perch if only someone would undertake to do it.

No one in the Obama administration seems up to the task.

The final stone in my shoe? It can only be written down to timidity. Barack Obama is the premiere politician of this age and could be the premiere politician of any other if he would just take hold of the reins and drive this country into the proper direction. He needs to start "throwing elbows." He needs to stop lamenting his long-lost status as a private person and begin to take on this greatest of mantles.

Maybe Michelle can strap him into a chair in the White House theater and replay the pivotal moment from the movie The American President until The Clue Train pulls in.

It don't get no better than this, President Obama. You'll never have a better chance to crush these bastards than you have right now. Our future as a nation depends on you doing just that. Their leader is Rush Limbaugh and they're too afraid--too timid--to say any different. Offer those Republicans an alternative, Mr. Obama. Invite Paul Krugman and Howard Dean and Nouriel Roubini and FDIC chair Sheila Bair in for a meeting without Hillary's DLC flunkies around. Fashion a kick-ass policy that will lift this nation out of the crisis it's in, do so in a way that ensures that it won't happen again, and marginalize the Republican Party as an effective political entity in this nation.

Come on! They've proved that they deserve it! Pull the trigger and put us all out of their misery.

The Mad Bull Of The Pompous

2009-02-28T20:19:00.010-10:00

Aloha! It's been a while...

I've finished my screenplay. Spring is almost here. The deafening peep of hungry chicks tended by their mother hens awakens me most mornings.

We have a president again. The mess left to Mr. Obama by the Bush administration is the most horrific since Herbert Hoover passed the torch to Franklin Roosevelt. The movement that began with the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and came to fruition during the presidency of Ronald Reagan has proved itself again.

Conservatism...

It's a word that still commands respect if it means what the late Bill Buckley meant. It's a word that means something good if it means what Theodore Roosevelt meant: Patriotism. Prudence with the taxpayer's money. Respect for the land, the law, and the legacy of American Democracy.

But that's not what we have now. The so-called "conservative" movement has done more damage to this country than any terrorist could have hoped to do. The Bush foreign policy has cost more lives--needlessly--than did the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11th, 2001. The conservative mantra against "tax and spend liberals" can't hold a candle to the damage done by "spend and don't tax" conservatism. Capitalists who have known that the cops weren't watching have stolen oceans of money, kept wages so low that working people now think little of using a credit card to buy a hamburger, and have the nerve to command the right to continue steering the ship that they've let run onto the rocks.

What do we have now? The Great Depression's Sequel.

What do we have now? Cries of "class warfare" from the right-wing bastards who made this bed in which we lie (""class warfare" being the outraged cry of an abusive husband finally shot by his wife).

What do we have now? Fear and uncertainty bordering on panic.

Our new president is taking steps to fix the situation. He has tried to enlist the assistance of every patriotic American in the task.

But what does Rush say? That "Obama should fail."

An American president should FAIL! Why?!

Rush Limbaugh is appealing to the dried-up promises of three decades. He's appealing to the intellectual bankruptcy of a movement that considers Alaska governor Sarah Palin a serious candidate for president. He's appealing to those who believe in the ravings of über-anti-tax activist Grover Norquist who identifies our government as "the problem" and prescribes no government at all for us--a government we can reduce to the size that can be "drowned in the bathtub." He is appealing to those too ignorant and too arrogant to face the cold, hard realitlies the rest of us face.

The government IS us! For good or ill, it is the expression of how much we care for ourselves and for others. The right-wing cries out against "socialism" after wrecking their country through sheer greed for the second time in the span of a century. Reality is literally forcing us toward a more equitable arrangement of our national affairs.

Good conservatives like Bill Buckley and Teddy Roosevelt might have questioned the path we travel toward restoration of American prosperity, but they would never have railed against setting out for the destination. The Republican Party--sixteen years removed from its effort to "destroy the Democrat Party as a viable political entity in this country"--stands at the brink of having done themselves in instead.

Payback's a bitch...

Weekend Update...

2008-09-28T20:45:00.002-10:00

Where the hell have I been?

I'm working on my latest screenplay, I have unretired from live musical performance and am in an excellent band, and life goes on. The picture is from the beach at the Four Seasons resort north of Kona where we had breakfast this morning.

Aloha, all. I'll let you know how things are going.

Simple Question...

2008-08-20T21:55:00.002-10:00

I'm going to ask a simple question: Who is the head of the Democratic Party?

It's not Howard Dean. Howard Dean is the head of the Democratic National Committee--an essential arm of the Democratic Party--but not the force that steers the ship. It contends with the Democratic Congressional election committees, the Democratic Leadership Council and the big Democratic donors.

It's not Barack Obama. Not yet.

It's not Al Gore or John Kerry. They ran for the presidency and lost. They were granted primacy and did not retain it.

The head of the Democratic Party is still its erstwhile president: William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton has refused to give up that mantle for the last eight years. Al Gore won the presidency in 2000 but was denied it by the United States Supreme Court. As they say, "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Gore chose not to associate himself with Clinton during his campaign for the presidency. It would have been a wise decision had the Supreme Court chosen to follow the law.

John Kerry's own flaws as a candidate simply amplified Bill Clinton's non-involvement in the 2004 campaign. Make no mistake: The Clintons looked at 2008 as Hillary's Year. They short-armed support for Kerry and began amassing a campaign chest that would eventually amount to a quarter-of-a-billion dollars.

The Clintons were more than confident during the 2008 primaries; they approached the nomination as a foregone conclusion. But Barack Obama came along as an object lesson against failing to hustle... against taking things for granted... against hubris. He ran a more focused, more disciplined, more prepared campaign. The Clinton effort to do away with primaries that determine their nominee by caucus is proof that the Clintons haven't given up on 2012. They didn't develop the ground game necessary to compete effectively in caucus states (I live in Hawaii--a caucus state--and Clinton had ZERO presence and effectiveness here).

Barack Obama will not be the leader of the Democratic Party until the floor vote is over and he completes his acceptance speech. It is right and fitting that Gore, Kerry, and Clinton will speak before him. But Clinton is the one passing on the mantle. His speech has to be letter-perfect or he can kiss his stature in the Democratic Party goodbye.

Aloha...

2008-08-06T06:05:00.002-10:00

I was extremely fortunate to grow up when I did with the parents I had. My father was an amazing man. He taught me two important things: You belong wherever you are and you regard each person you encounter as an individual. I can't begin to convey how rich those two simple tenets have made my life. They are what have made living in Hawaii such a joy for me: I'm in a culture where those two values are essential. And that culture has shaped Barack Obama. I think that may be part of the reason that some accuse his supporters of a "cult-like" devotion to him. The values he learned during his formative years here shine through. He is the genuine article. He is not pretending.

We face the most crucial election of our lives (I hope). Barack Obama only needs to accomplish a few things to be a great president: End the war in Iraq, start the fights against global warming and against our dependency on oil, ensure that every American who needs health care has it, and work to make the world a more just and safe place. That's about it.

John McCain is viscerally opposed to that agenda, as is the constituency supporting him. We can't afford a McCain presidency. We don't have a lot of time left. The rest of the world is ready to break out the torches and pitchforks and there's not a whole lot we Americans would be able to say in our own defense. The oceans are rising. Tides are turning.

Aloha means a lot of things, but it's most famously known as meaning "hello" and "goodbye." America will pick one or the other in November.

The Obama Prayer

2008-07-26T02:03:00.008-10:00

Barack Obama left a prayer in Jerusalem's Western Wall during his recent week-long foreign tour. The prayer--written on a piece of stationery from the King David Hotel--was supposed to remain in the wall until its custodians removed it for burial on the Mount of Olives.

That didn't happen...

An orthodox seminary student is alleged to have plucked Barack Obama's prayer from the wall and taken it to the newspaper Maariv which published it. I am prepared to accept the possibility that this story is apocryphal or manufactured. But if it is not, the student and the newspaper deserve Biblical tsouris (grief).

What upsets me so much about this--apart from the egregious violation of Senator Obama's most intimate territory--is the utter humility and sincerity of the prayer:
Lord, protect my family and me.
Forgive me my sins
And help me guard against pride and despair.
Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just.
And make me an instrument of your will.
I'm not a religious man but this prayer resonates with me. I intend to put it on a t-shirt with the Obama logo and wear it. If this is a campaign ploy, then it's a good one. Otherwise, I wish the worst for those who authored this sacrilege.

"It's A Class War, Stupid!"

2008-07-24T17:10:00.001-10:00

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi says it all: We're being robbed blind.

Al Gore For UN Ambassador...

2008-07-20T20:08:00.003-10:00

Al Gore would be the perfect choice for ambassador to the United Nations if Barack Obama attains the presidency in 2008. The post is a perfect compromise for Gore who views the vice-presidency as a step down and who views the presidency--so far--as a province for others to pursue.

The post would provide a bully pulpit for the causes in which he believes. An appointment of Gore to the UN ambassadorship would signal to the nation and the world that we take the organization itself seriously, that we take our responsibility on the world stage seriously, that we acknowledge the importance of climate change on the global landscape, and that we want to rejoin the community of nations dedicated to the rule of law.

A transcript of today's Meet The Press interview can be found at the link.

Coffee!

2008-07-20T00:56:00.003-10:00

I live on a coffee and macadamia nut farm.

Yes, my main directives in life are screenwriting, fixing Macintosh computers, and commenting on politics.Yes, macadamia nuts are essentially worthless on the world market. Yes, farmed coffee is a lot more difficult crop than most other pursuits I could mention.

But look at that coffee!

The raw coffee you see in the picture will ripen between September and November. Green coffee “cherry” will turn red as it ripens. The cherry will be picked and delivered to a processor. Seven pounds of cherry translate to one pound of processed coffee. So. you may be drinking this stuff next year if you ask for Kona coffee.

Enjoy!

Welcome To The Great Depression of 2008

2008-07-14T04:08:00.004-10:00

The second largest bank failure in history occurred on Friday.

IndyMac Bank of California was taken over by federal authorities because nervous depositors created a multi-billion dollar run on the institution. There are real questions about whether or not large depositors can or will get their money out. They face losing at least half of assets above the FDIC insurance limit of $100,000.

Treasury secretary Henry Paulson made a rare Sunday statement yesterday assuring that two semi-private entities created by the United States government to promote housing and mortgage markets—Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae—will be rescued with government funds at a time when the government is running deficits.

Seven large banks are on a failure watch list according to reports at this writing from MSNBC.

Foreclosures are running at highs unseen in seventy years.

Questions are rising about the country’s AAA credit rating because so much money has been borrowed to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Energy and food prices are sucking disposable income out of the economy.

America is hurting despite the characterization by Phil Gramm—one of Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign co-chairs and surrogates—of America as a “nation of whiners” when it comes to the economy. Almost half a million jobs have been lost just this year.

An administration that refuses to acknowledge the judgement of its own scientists regarding global warming can’t be trusted to give us a true pictuire of our economy. An administration that can’t bother to keep track of the very real effects of doubled gas prices on low- and middle-class citizens can’t be expected to reflect that pain in its reporting.

The legions of the homeless rise in silence.

More Americans live on the cusp of poverty than at any other time in our history.

Rising prices are butting up against a ceiling created by stagnant or falling wages.

The falling value of the dollar erodes the buying power of all but the most affluent Americans.

Some people beliieve that the bad news is driven by bad press. The fundamentals of the economy and the realities of everyday life for the American people point to another, more pragmatic explanation: The economy is in trouble.

Welcome to the Great Depression of 2008.

Bink! Bink! Bink-bink! Bink-bink! Bink!

2008-07-09T21:46:00.006-10:00

If you’re watching John McCain speak in public, he has a “tell”: He blinks more than a quasar when he’s lying. Try it out for yourself. Say “bink” every time he blinks. If you’re saying “bink” so much that you can’t hear what John is saying, stop keeping track of his blinks and pay attention to his words. Do that because whatever he’s speaking about, he’s lying about. Pretty soon, you’ll stop keeping track of his blinks because he’s lying too much to keep this little exercise viable. Just be thankful it isn’t a drinking game.

McCain has had a bad couple of days. His “joke” about American cigarettes being a good way to kill innocent Iranian civilians has all but overshadowed the news that the Iranians have test-fired missiles capable of reaching Israel and beyond. Even McCain’s wife Cindy knew that her husband was forging a fresh gaffe because she actually poked him in the back when he made his “joke”. His jaw-grinding laugh and his manure-munching disclaimer that it was “just a joke” didn’t do anything to clear the stench in the room. That joke makes it hard to imagine McCain standing at the podium of a presidential briefing. It joins “Bomb-bomb-bomb! Bomb-Bomb Iran!” and calling his wife a cunt as evidence of his unfitness to represent this nation as its chief executive.

The Iraqi government has also made it crystal-clear that it wants American troops out of its country and that it wants a timetable outlining that goal as soon as possible. John McCain is immortalized on videotape promising that if the Iraqis asked us to leave, we’d honor their wishes. Now? Not so much. McCain needs to be called on his flip-flops--past and present. We call flip-flops "slippahs" here in Hawaii and right now, John McCain is manufacturing a mountain of them.

Mainstream media has a chance to redeem itself in this election. It has a chance to return to its rightful place as the wellspring from which the electorate gains enough information to make informed choices about the people for whom it will vote. Only MSNBC seems to be discharging that duty at present.

As for another loose cannon on the political stage, Jesse Jackson may have rendered his own political coup-de-grace with the release of his remarks about Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s Father’s Day speech about the personal responsibility of fathers. Jackson—out of the side of his mouth—accused Obama of “talking down” to the black community about fatherhood and said “I’d like to cut his nuts off.”

Even Jackson’s own son—Representative Jesse L. Jackson III—stomped on the tawdry ignominy of his father’s remarks. The elder Jackson is a contributing commentator to Fox News and may have become so steeped in the atmosphere there (“steeped”, in this case, meaning “accustomed to benefitting from Fox News chief Roger Ailes’s largesse) that he forgot that Barack Obama—his “homey” and his son’s bread-and-butter—stands an excellent chance of becoming the next president of the United States. Jesse Jackson, Jr. had a chance to stand as an embodiment of the triumph of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream in an Obama administration. Now? He’ll be lucky to play the role of a groundling. His son—knowing how to keep his bread from landing butter-side down—will occupy the position that Jackson pere so coveted.

Though the heavens may fall, let justice be done.

Tonight's Forecast: Dark...

2008-06-23T19:13:00.003-10:00

I'm a member of the Ed Sullivan Generation. Everybody was at home on Sunday night at eight o'clock to see a show that began four years before I was born and broadcast its last installment when I was almost twenty years old.

Ed Sullivan's show was the last gasp of vaudeville and the birth-gasp of television elongated into one big, beautiful breath. We met The Beatles, Elvis, Topo Gigio, Allen & Rossi, Stiller & Meara, plate spinners, jugglers, mimes, impressionists, Myron Cohen, Jackie "The Finger" Mason, Totie Fields, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, and a multitude of others.

The Sullivan Show was a high-class, weekly version of American Idol with people who'd been beating their brains out in show business for years--not tyros barely out of their Underoos. Sullivan had Phil Silvers, The Doors, and The Stones.

It was a major event when African-American acts would come on in our house. The Supremes. The Temptations. The Four Tops. The Fifth Dimension. Dionne Warwick.

But for all those years, I was a fan of the comedians. One team--Burns and Schreiber--were particular favorites of the show. Square-jawed, straight-from-Texas, Jack Burns. Pudgy, mustachioed, "I Went On To A Featured Role In "My Mother The Car"" Avery Schreiber. They were hilarious.

I say all that to say this: Jack Burns's first comedy partner died. George Dennis Patrick Carlin lived to know how high he flew. That's a blessing. Only Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce were his peers. Richard was funnier and Lenny was braver (Lenny did "ultra-blue" first and paid with his life and his liberty) but George Carlin moved out of their footsteps into his own.

Carlin did for "The Seven Dirty Words" what John McCain has done for the c-word (I'm not as brave as those other guys). George Carlin didn't pretend. When his beloved wife died Brenda died, his grief spilled from him. There was no decorum. There was no restraint. He loved her and he showed it. That created some bizarre moments on television, but so be it. So he was on the Carson Show in a blond wig. George Carlin was hurt and he couldn't pretend otherwise.

George Carlin's humor was sunny and infectious in the beginning. For those who aren't familiar with it, Google +"Al Sleet"--you're in for a treat. His "Seven Words You Can't Say On Television" was the rock through the window. Four out of the seven words have nodding, conditional acquaintance among broadcast audiences: Shit, piss, c**t (thanks, John), and tits. If you've got cable, you've got the entire smorgasbord on top of what he served us.

His HBO specials were major events. Carlin never got stale. He never gave in. He never got cute.

I made a commitment to honesty a little ways back in this blog. Here's to an example of what I've failed to live up to.

Aloha oe, Cardinal Glick.

Black Man Refuses Public Assistance; Conservatives Livid!

2008-06-19T22:53:00.003-10:00

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama refused to participate in the public funding of his campaign for the presidency today. The above headline might help as an argument to right-wingers who try to make a big deal out of it.

The story can be found here.

My First Five...

2008-06-18T03:27:00.003-10:00

Almost exactly ten years ago, I had occasion to visit the Santa Clara County Superior Court building in San Jose, California on personal business. This building houses the family court--divorces, separations, child custody, and related cases.

It was the most secure location I had ever visited in my life. No joking. No messing around. Airports don't even approach the level of security I saw in family court even in this post 9-11 environment. My eyes were opened to a reality that resulted in the screenplay that I've just finished: the emotions involved in interpersonal relationships are among the most volatile forces in American life.

Police almost unanimously rate domestic violence calls as their most difficult, dangerous jobs. Some of my personal experience with assisting survivors of domestic violence has been incorporated into the script. My own experiences with domestic violence inform it as well.

I wove these issues into an action/thriller script about a bank robbery and a hero struggling with the loss of his family because of an incident of domestic violence.

The linked script contains a bit more than the first five pages, but the extra pages were necessary to include a coherent excerpt.

Why just the "first five?" Most movie scripts have an "enthrall me" count of ten pages. If someone doesn't want to read past the first five-to-ten pages of your script, you're sunk. You'd be surprised how many scripts don't entice you to read that far. So, the "first five" is the tease. If people are interested in reading further, you've cleared your first hurdle.

If you're offended by violence or strong language, this excerpt isn't for you. Otherwise, you can find the first five of a ten-year labor of love--"After Today"--here.

Your comments are eagerly welcome. Mahalo nui loa

Father's Day...

2008-06-15T01:39:00.005-10:00

I have no choice but to imagine what life would have been like for a black boy born in Mississippi in 1923. Born with a name intended to be a description, but which would become an obstacle to be overcome: Purtie Lee Drake was born February 23rd, 1923—the youngest child of Solomon Drake and Beulah Grimm. This boy would have weathered the teeth of the Depression—an event that began when he was six years old. The 1930 census only lists his mother and his two siblings—a brother and a sister—as an Arkansas household then. His mother was fortunate enough to be a restaurant cook. And at the very moment I write this, I realize the source of one of his strongest character traits: food as an expression of love. He lived in a time where food and clothing and everything else were hard to get. He loved food and he loved restaurants. My father ate everything. He gloried in food. And one of his bitterest disappointments was his oldest son’s finicky appetite.

He refused to believe that I was allergic to shellfish. It took my mother’s intercession and a doctor’s opinion to get him to believe it. But he abided the evidence once he was convinced.

I write about my father with some difficulty. It is only now that I have lived to be older than he was when he died that I’m beginning to get a handle on him.

Let me start over…

I love my father.

My father’s most prominent trait was his sense of humor. My father and a boyhood friend named Bobby Woodard are the two funniest people I’ve ever known. Richard Pryor is the funniest person I’ve ever heard. The three of them had this in common: they saw clearly and spoke clearly. The truth didn’t scare them. Unexpected truth is the wellspring of laughter. My dad would tell the truth and his friends would laugh. Our house was filled with laughter at times. His Army buddies would come and reminisce. They’d play cards and dominoes and drink and forget their troubles for a while. My father would harangue them about the state of their cars or how badly they practiced the Sacred Art of the Bones. He'd recall embarrassing stories about them. And they would laugh about stories that were told about him. My father was the funniest person I ever met. But he was also a fathomless repository of pain and rage.

Let me start over…

I didn’t just respect my father; I feared him. The pressures of raising two black sons to manhood is something I couldn’t understand until I became a father myself. Don’t doubt for a second the truth of the old saying that the sins of the father are visited on the sons. I had rage visited on me. My anger at him was something I could only fathom after my mother had died and I had wandered in the valley of the shadow for a while. Sallie’s death brought me face-to-face with Purtie and his death and with the appointment that I have coming some day. I began that encounter in rage—just as I had left it. Just as we had left it. Except…

Let me start over…

I visited my father in the hospital on October 12th, 1975. We talked for a while. Can’t remember for the life of me what we talked about. I had seen him in a hospital bed before. He’d gone to work on a construction site and walked off the edge of a three-story apartment building. The doctors at Stanford put him back together and nursed him back to health and sent him home to us. My father had a disease that I—an aspiring doctor—knew nothing about. I thought leukemia was something that cats got and got over. I fully expected him to pull through and come back to us despite all the doctor visits and the medicines and the hospitals stays and the pain and the rage. I wish to God I could remember what we talked about that day. What I remember about leaving him that day was that he had the sweetest smile on his face as he waved goodbye to me

“See you tomorrow!”

It’s my last memory of him alive.

He died the next day and I didn’t expect him to die and I didn’t want to believe that he was dead and I didn’t want him to be dead but dead he was. And the funeral came. As the oldest son, I was dutifully somber. They carried him in in his coffin and words were said and praises given and the chapel full of friends and family began to file by to pay their last respects. Something strange, though. I noticed my mother sitting next to me convulsed with laughter. In the limousine on the way to the internment, everybody was in on the joke but me.

“You didn’t see it?!”

“See what?”

“The elastic on Mrs. W’s panties gave out just as she got to the coffin! She was crying like nobody’s business, but she just pulled them up and kept on going!”

You can’t convince anyone who was there that my father’s spirit wasn’t responsible for that.

We buried Purtie Lee Drake in a plot overlooking the Pacific Ocean in one of the veteran’s sections of the cemetery. His Sallie C. joined him near there almost fifteen years later. They met at Hamilton Field Army Air Force Base around 1949. I have a friend from Kentucky who’s older than me—old enough to know post-World War II military conditions in the Air Corps. I told him my father was stationed at Hamilton.

“Hamilton Field?! How the hell did your dad pull a duty like that?!” he drawled.

“By hook or by crook,” I said.

Knowing my dad, it was probably both. Purtie Lee Drake admired “hustle” above all else. That meant taking advantage. That meant getting there early. That meant winning. My father was an excellent coach. He taught my brother and me to play baseball. He taught us everything we needed to know. But he couldn’t make us love the Dodgers. We were San Francisco boys and the Giants could do no wrong. I realize now that he was an excellent athlete—a swimmer, a baseball player, and an excellent tactician. But he couldn’t aspire to the major leagues. He couldn’t even aspire to bus driver when we were born.

My father was a very intelligent man, even though he barely cleared elementary school. I’ve always thought that that deprivation might have been a blessing in his case. He liked lawyers. He liked slick, conniving, hustling lawyers. My dad would either have become a judge or an inmate if he’d been allowed to go to law school.

I realize now that I’ve been rambling. It’s Father’s Day and I wish my father could be here now. I wish my mother could be here with him. One day, after she had died, I was brought by the kindness of a counselor to the realization that I contained a repository of rage against my father. That smart, funny, sweet man. That occasional monster. That man who clothed and fed and taught and loved us. That man who cried inconsolably as they poured him off the plane from burying his sister. That man who couldn't save a brother executed by the state of Mississippi for a crime that would get him a well-deserved life sentence now. That man who fought through sickness. The man to whose grave I drove as fast as I could when I had a few choice words for the things he did that I didn't understand. I was going to tell him off. I was going to set things straight. And all I could do when I got there was tell him that I knew he was doing his best. That he did what he thought was right. I began to understand him better then.

We started over...

Barack Obama’s candidacy would be so fulfilling to my parents. The forces arrayed against Obama are attacking him on his status as a family man. They’re relying on the stereotype of black men as indifferent fathers. They’re relying on a lie. My father lived for my brother and me as his sons. He lived for our mother as his wife. He did so until he could do it no longer. Don’t ever let anyone convince you that any color, race, or creed has the corner on fidelity. Don’t ever let anyone convince you that love and tenderness and caring and nurturing are the province of some self-identified group.

I’m living proof that that’s wrong. Here’s to Purtie Lee Drake! Aloha, Papa!

Obama Ohana...

2008-06-12T22:48:00.008-10:00

Aloha is the most universally recognized word in the Hawaiian language. Most people think of it as the word that stands for "hello" and "goodbye" but its meaning is much deeper than that, as I discussed in an earlier entry.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama should introduce the electorate to another Hawaiian word--the word for family: ohana. He should introduce the American people to it and do everything he can to make it as well-known as aloha. That effort would accomplish the "task" set out for him by the mainstream media: Acquaint the electorate with his story and with his values.

Here's the best way I can describe ohana: Imagine that Barack Obama is elected president of the United States. Imagine that he comes to his boyhood home in Hawaii and is in the bosom of his ohana. One of the most powerful men on the planet would not be the most powerful person in that room. That honor would belong to Obama's tutu--his grandmother Madelyn Dunham. Obama's wife and children and everyone there--whether related by blood, by marriage or by acquaintance--would honor her status as the matriarch of the family. Gatherings of ohana in Hawaii are highlighted by the joining of hands in a family circle at some point--usually for the blessing of the meal--and everyone participates, regardless of spiritual belief, under the leadership of the head of the ohana. Ohana is more than religion. It is the reason for being.

Visitors here get the impression of Hawaii as paradise. It can be. But if you are alone here, there is no more lonely feeling in the world. If you are without a home here, it is one of the most difficult, inhospitable natural environments you can imagine. Blistering heat, torrential rain, numbing cold at higher elevations, volcanic rock, mosquitoes...

Life is tough without ohana.

If you find a way to deal with nature, the socio-economic realities of the last seven years lurk to test the mettle of those wishing to make a life here. This place isn't like the mainland United States. You can't move away from your mistakes. Your reputation is universal on certain islands. Ohana is the cushion that allows people here to get along and to get by. And ohana means anyone who is accepted into the family circle. If you are ohana, your race or religion or sexual orientation or economic status don't matter. You belong. You contribute. You matter.

As a screenwriter, one of the most important things I have to determine about a screenplay of mine is its logline: What slogan best expresses its overarching theme?

I think this should be the "logline" of the Obama campaign: You belong. You contribute. You matter.

You are ohana.

That is the American Ideal. That is the logic bomb entwined in the DNA woven by the slave-holders who initiated this experiment in democracy: We are ohana. One of the vilest crimes of the conservative movement has been the concerted effort to destroy that aspect of our national identity for its own selfish reasons. For money. President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in 1961 of the very situation we face today. The United States Supreme Court was compelled to hand down a decision yesterday that affirmed Eisenhower's wish that "security and liberty may prosper together."

Mainstream political discourse of the past twenty-eight years has been designed to divide, control, and cower the American People. What we need now are policies that reverse this trend. We need to restore the concept of the Fellow American. We need to pull together as a nation to address the lengthy and dire list of problems that face us. But we can do it. We must do it. Nothing can stop us from doing it but us: We are ohana.

Top Ten List

2008-06-11T02:47:00.003-10:00

I've been pretty busy lately but I had occasion to hear about a story in the New York Times concerning Barack Obama's candidacy that set my teeth on edge. Its title? How black is too black — and where do white voters draw the line?" I won't link to it and I couldn't get through the first two paragraphs of it.

When I encounter something that stupid, I have a couple of coping strategies. One of them is humor. I made up a Top Ten List based on the article's premise. Some friends of mine were kind enough to blog it here.

What's kept me away from the blog is the finishing touches on my screenplay. I'll post the first ten pages here when I'm done along with some background on it.

Working...

Forty Years...

2008-06-05T03:06:00.005-10:00

I was fifteen years old forty years ago. I'd gotten my California learner's permit on the Friday before June 4th--the first day I was eligible. My father bought me a scabrous red and black 1963 Chevrolet Corvair standard shift so that I would learn to shift for myself...

My research tells me that Petulia Clark and Harry Belafonte had generated controversy a month earlier because a white woman touched a black man on television. We were still mourning Martin Luther King's death. Andy Warhol had been shot on the third of June, although I have no recollection of giving a damn.

Menlo Park, California was a typical California suburb and it was my home. In the expanded bungalow of my parents in East Menlo Park, I was a happy, thriving nerdlet. My father was working at a warehouse in the city of Brisbane. Location scouts picked a site near his job for the climax of the car chase in an action film starring one of my dad's heroes: Steve McQueen. My dad would point out to us the disparity between the explosion and the careening villain's car in the chase's climax. Bullitt may not have made sense but it was a hit.

Dicky Dietz was the catcher for the San Francisco Giants. We kids loved saying his name. Mays and McCovey and Marichal and McCormick and Perry were our heroes. We had a new distraction on the east side of the bay: The Oakland Athletics. Jerks named Jackson and Rudi and Bando and Campaneris were foreign entities to us.

Mom and dad bought me a crystal radio set. I had won first prize in a science fair two months before and they wanted me to have everything my inquiring mind wanted. It was the height of The Space Age and every rocket launch was an event.

I was still sorting out the vagaries of my first love. It is a love that abides all these years later. It is the tragedy that became my triumph. It is the dilemma that helped me become a man.

Tuning that cheap crystal radio was my only priority that night all those years ago. I heard the haunted, shattered voices. Ambassador Hotel. "On To Chicago!" Sirhan Sirhan? "Will he live?" Daybreak in front of the TV. I don't remember going to school that day. There was a chance. There's always a chance. Dum spiro, spero. And then, Robert Francis Kennedy was dead.

And today, I sit typing this in Hawaii, the proud proprietor of my own business. Loved and in love. A man fifty-five years old. Celebrating the nomination of an African-American man for my party's candidacy for president.

Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!

Hillary As VP? NO!

2008-05-27T00:12:00.004-10:00

I submitted the following comment to Paul Krugman's New York Times blog entry. It was refused. I highly respect Paul Krugman as an economist. That will not change. I am less enamored of his political instincts. Here is my response to his call for a Hillary Clinton vice presidency:

There's no way Hillary Clinton should be offered the vice-presidency.

1) Bill's finances are too big a liability to take a chance on. We don't know who's donated to his foundation, we don't know how much, and we don't know what interests they represent. Saddling an Obama candidacy with that potent a black box makes no sense whatsoever.

2) The Democratic Party would be rewarding and lending credence to an insurgency that has fought the current officialdom tooth-and-nail since it was elected in 2004. All the work that has brought the party to this point would be subsumed by infighting no matter the outcome in November. Inviting the DLC into the tent when they've stayed out voluntarily for so long makes no sense.

3) Hillary Clinton has proven herself a horrible campaigner on the national level. The Democrats need a running mate they can set-and-forget. That ain't Hillary. That ain't Bill. Also, she's been running against fellow Democrats. She's been granted an extraordinary amount of deference--despite what her supporters say--and the Republicans are not going to grant her that deference. Saddling Obama with those negatives would be unfair.

4) The assertion that Obama "needs" Hillary on the ticket to unite the party is a specious one. Eighty per-cent of the electorate already thinks the country is going the wrong way. McCain is having trouble keeping his own party happy. The Republican Party can't raise any money. The economy is in free-fall, Iraq is a debacle, and our basic freedoms are under siege. And the rising fuel prices? That's the oil companies betting on the outcome of the election: They're squeezing every ounce of cash they can from the market in anticipation of more stringent regulation.

Giving her the vice-presidential nomination would be of more benefit to Hillary Clinton than it would be to the party or to Barack Obama. Bad idea. Period.

Gee-Oh-Pee...

2008-05-22T01:54:00.003-10:00

How blithely do they pretend not to know
The horrific extent of all their crimes
A pat of butter frozen in their mouths
Canary yellow and singing as sweet
We, like the wife who trembles in her bed,
Dreading the rasp of the key in the lock
Ears open to the drunken tread of rage
Boozy breath'd and rampant out of pure spite
Ascending the stairs to make pleasured pain
To land the blows of selfish spite again

"I am master of this house, as always!
No other task you have than a bent will
No other mien you take than of fealty
No other charge you have than to yield
No other breath you draw than to serve me!"
The beast take one and the beast doth take all
And all to harass and eat their substance
And quarter oppression in their stout hearts
To cheapen the lives of those that they've slain
'Til clotted blood fall like hell's own cursed rain

But another wind blows through the curtains
Bringing the scent of freedom to the room
The paltry pace of the penny's pursuit
Stopped dead by the love of the rose's smell
Accounting will come! Accounting will tell!
The height of a hope! The toll of a bell!
The stopping of steps where misery fell
The end of conspiracy with our hell
And knowing the name of our pain so well!
And knowing the name of our pain so well!

Full Disclosure...

2008-05-14T20:17:00.003-10:00

I'm often asked "Ron, where do you get your ideas?" "Who inspires your writing?" and the ever-popular "Do you make this stuff up yourself?" I thought I'd include a picture of our latest editor's meeting. Jacques is reading me the riot act for the item about him a few days ago. He was offended by the "Prince Scratchabelli" remark.

He penalized me all the chicken in my daily garden salad and made me "sit."

He's strict!

Happy Mother's Day

2008-05-11T00:05:00.011-10:00

Sallie Colister Drake was an outspoken woman. She was born in Donalsonville, GA in 1927--not the most conducive place for opinionated, intelligent, no-nonsense women to grow up. But there she grew, the daughter of Carl Sherman, a tall, black, big-boned farmer in overalls and Suzie Sherman--the most exotic person I had ever seen in my life when my brother and I visited her with our mother in 1958. She had almost translucent, alabaster skin, high cheekbones, and frizzy hair done up in braids. Some families try to claim Native American heritage when they wouldn't know a Native American if one kissed them on the jaw. Grandma Suzie kissed me. They say she was part Seminole and I have no reason to doubt it. Five year-olds are highly impressionable. The echo of Grandma Suzie's appearance is loudest in my brother. I'll have to ask if he remembers her. I'll never forget her.

Anyway, my mother grew restive in the South. From what I've seen of it, I don't blame her. There are those who love it as home. There are those who have adopted it as home. There are those who go there to re-connect with their roots. Having grown up in California, I've never been comfortable below the Mason-Dixon Line. I am a child of the Fifties and Sixties and East Menlo Park, California. I've been to the South once as an adult and it felt like what I imagine visiting Auschwitz or Buchenwald would feel like for Jews. Everything I saw was there thanks to an enormous, heinous, hideous crime. But it was mom's home and so much of it is a part of me.

As I remember her telling it, my mother had a token of what she wanted her life to be when she was young: A postcard of a cable car from San Francisco. It was where she wanted to go. That's understandable when your life is subject to someone else's whim. It makes sense when you could die any day over a misunderstanding or a someone's bad mood or unbridled lust. One lesson I learned literally at my mother's knee is that freedom is relative. She was free, even if everything else wasn't.

She finally got her wish to move to the San Francisco area after the war. She worked as a maid at Hamilton Army Air Base in Marin County. There, Sallie met a smart, funny, mercurial soldier with secrets and sorrows that melted away when his saw his sturdy Georgia girl. He also had a funny name: Purtie. Understandably, his friends--and even us kids--addressed him by his last name: Drake. So, when Purtie met Sallie, two black kids from the South decided that they had found the right partner to start a family. And they started that family as an expression of their faith that things could and would be better in this country.

He went to work and she bore me through a tough delivery. Some of my first memories are of her reading to me. She read to me so much that I could read the newspapers by the time I was two. My father would wrestle a newspaper from his buddies, challenge them to point to any place on the page, and he'd bid me to read. I remember pronouncing the abbreviation for pounds as "libs," but I pulled it off otherwise.

Another early memory: Sitting on her lap in the Empire Theater on Market Street in San Francisco and watching the premiere of Disney's Lady And The Tramp. Even well into my adulthood, she beamed with pride about the man who had sat next to us in the theater who apologized for thinking that I was going to be nothing but trouble.

"He likes the movies as much as we do," she said.

We grew, like any other family. We had our joys and our troubles. We laughed at Richard Pryor's newest albums until we gasped for air. We went to Disneyland. We endured 1968. We played baseball and football. Our parents fought. They danced. They built a home. And when dad, who had faced death in the military and through his own carelessness and through just being a little black boy in Depression-era Mississippi got sicker and sicker and saw more and more of hospital beds and the houses of others and less of his home, it was our mother who kept things together. It was my mother who transmitted to me his pride that I had an article published in the local daily paper where I worked. It was she who told me that he bragged about me being the editor of my junior college newspaper. It was she who told me of his disappointment that I had never directly challenged his authority, but chose instead to move out on my own.

His death in 1975 confused more than saddened me, but I'd found someone to start a family of my own with by then. Sallie C. Drake was with me every step of the way, even if I wasn't with her. One trait I neglected to mention before occurs to me now: My mother could grow anything. The first banana plant I ever saw, I saw in our back yard. There were collard greens and castor beans--enough ricin to kill the neighborhood if she'd been so inclined. There were tomatoes and ducks and avocados and figs and peaches. All this in a lower middle-class suburb south of San Francisco not five miles from some of the richest homes in the world.

Unfortunately, she also had a talent for growing cancer cells. She took me with her the day the doctor delivered the news. It wasn't his prognosis she cared about; it was mine. I told her that she'd be fine once the mastectomy was over. She beat the five year survival norm by a good margin. Over those years, her kidneys gave out and I'd take her to dialysis on weekends--my stalwart brother taking the rest of the duty. She still ran the house. She still rendered her opinions on whatever topic suited her fancy. And she loved her grandson so much that it almost made me jealous sometimes. Imagine! Him getting the run of the refrigerator when I couldn't go near it without permission when I was his age!

And so, when the news came that the cancer had come back and that it was easier to catalogue where it wasn't growing rather than where it was, my life lost focus. I sleepwalked through that time. I drank through it. Another smart, beautiful, strong-willed woman and the people at Apple helped to see me through it. And, at last, I came to a night when there was no one in that little house but my mother and me. She was sitting up in bed sleeping. Snoring. That snore. BIG. That snore. I had to get used to sleeping without it when I moved out. We talked. She began to cough. She couldn't stop. I got her a basin and thumped her back. The thump wasn't hollow, but full like that of a ripe melon. That's what lung cancer sounds like. She coughed out some fluid and I gave her some morphine and I told her it wasn't time to go yet.

"You did a good job," I said.

"I know."

She knew how I felt about Christian religion and the church and she argued for my and my son's souls. I told her that I couldn't stand the subservience and the language of submission. But neither could she. She could have taught Barack Obama a thing or two about the care and feeding of pastors whose pronouncements from the pulpit might displease. No reverend was ever unsure about what she thought about what was said. Not even her own aunt--a reverend of her own right. And--when the church had finally displeased her and disappointed her enough--she stopped going. Just as I had.

But...

"You've got to submit to something," she said.

She began to nod off.

"Praise Jesus... praise Jesus." Then, that snore again.

The next day, my mother submitted to the only thing to which she ever really submitted. I still have to look that date up. I can't remember it for the life of me. I don't know that I'll ever be able to do so. But on this Mother's Day, I'm doing my best to emulate her. One of her strictest injunctions--one born of hard experience throughout her life--was "never put your business in the streets." She wasn't much for self-revelation or navel-gazing. The words tug at me even as I look at them. But I am my mother's son. I will speak up in the time I have left. I will tell the truth as best I can. I will take care of those who love me and whom I love. And I'll submit to the same thing she did.

Here's to Sallie Colister Drake. 1927-1990. Artist. Gardener extraordinaire. Wife. Mother. Friend. My soul.

(The image above is the Place of Refuge in Honaunau. She would have loved it here.)

Prince Scratchabelli...

2008-05-08T01:04:00.003-10:00

This is Jacques. He is a miniature poodle with very definite ideas on how the world should work.

--All dishes containing meat, butter, salad dressing, or anything else yummy (except lettuce--he can't seem to chew it) belong to him unless he grants dispensation.

--My workday isn't done until he jumps into my lap, takes his leash into his mouth, and presents it to me. This is supposed to happen at 4:30. There is hell to pay if it doesn't.

--He is The Boss.

I haven't come up with any effective rebuttals to any of his assertions other than to scratch his belly and hope that he is too distracted to remember what directive we're under.

The picture was taken Monday during a trip to the northern end of the island. The air there was clear, the weather was excellent, and the coffee cake at Starbucks was first-rate. Jacques gave it two paws up. You can check out the little tyrant's lineage here.

I've done a major rewrite of the screenplay I started over seven years ago. I've renamed it A Man Alone and am putting the finishing touches on it. It's a character-driven story about a man who is hired to protect a battered wife. Drop a line to the blog email address if you'd like to read and critique it.

Obama Aloha...

2008-05-04T23:26:00.006-10:00

Senator Barack Obama appeared on NBC's Meet The Press With Tim Russert on Sunday--two days before important primary votes in the states of Indiana and North Carolina. The first quarter of the interview dwelled on the pseudo-issue of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his remarks, and Obama's reaction to them. The rest of the hour was wide-ranging, substantive, and did credit to interviewer and interviewee.

One of Obama's major objectives leading up to the primaries is to acquaint voters with his story, with his values, and with the attitudes and qualities that might serve the American people if he were to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Obama has emphasized his upbringing by a single mother and her parents. Barack Obama has made his basic, Middle American values the centerpiece of this particular leg of his run for the White House.

But I think he has ignored a powerful and vital aspect of his upbringing that would provide greater insight into him for American voters and that would ease their translation into tangible, emotional ties for so-called "values voters." I'm referring to his Hawaiian heritage.

Hawaii is viewed as an exotic, sultry, magical "destination." This is an occurrence born of nature, design, and a hefty chunk of good old American over-simplification. The islands of Hawaii are among the wonders of nature. The heritage of its people is as rich and as diverse as are the islands themselves. Living in Hawaii shapes people. Growing up in Hawaii shaped Barack Obama. He should find a way to communicate what that means to him, how it has shaped what he thinks, and how it informs where he wants to take us as a country.

I write this from the perspective of a black man who has come to the islands late in life. Living here for almost seven years now has shaped me in positive ways. Those positive qualities are imbued more deeply into someone whose childhood was spent here. I'll try to outline some of that here.

The state of Hawaii has the concept of aloha written into its constitution. What does that mean? It means the following:

Kindness expressed with tenderness;
Unity expressed through the conscious pursuit of harmony;
Agreeability expressed with pleasantness;
Humility joined with modesty;
Patience expressed with and through perseverance.

An island culture places emphasized value on these qualities because islands are closed systems; foul the nest and you foul it for everyone. A fouled nest can only be cleaned with the assistance of others through long, hard, concerted work. If you have a grievance against someone here, you have to think long and hard about how much you want to protest because islands are closed systems; the enemy you make today may be sitting at your dinner table tomorrow. They may even become family. Foul the nest often enough and you may find yourself alone. All you have here is your word and your reputation. Damage to or loss of either of these can have dire consequences.

What you do here is who you are.

Hawaii is the home of all the world's races. Love has conquered here. All combinations co-exist. Hearts of all kinds meet and marry here. That isn't to say that there's not racism here; it's to say that if you've got time to worry about race, you've got too much time on your hands. If you ask each person you meet "what's your heritage?" or "what's your background?" you don't have time to hear the answers. White, black, Micronesian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, Latino... Hawaii is the melange that one finds in very few places on the American mainland.

Barack Obama may have heard racial epithets or slurs growing up here, but it was more likely that he caught more grief for his ears. His talents and abilities were his tickets to acceptance here. There are subcultures that are tough to crack, but that's always been so. Those subcultures have been set up as protection against the vagaries of living in a racist society.

But this is a place where you are the member of every family you encounter until you prove otherwise. You are "uncle" or "auntie." You are "brother" or "sister." You share the responsibility for taking care of the children under the family's wing and you must take part in enculturating them. If you are the cornerstone of a family, you become "Papa" or "Tutu." If you are without family and are deemed to need family, you can become hanai or adopted. This doesn't happen overnight. It happens as you reveal your character to those whom you contact. Although it is by no means perfect, it is closer than anything I've encountered to the social order that Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned.

There is much more to be said about life in Hawaii and its effects on someone, but this is neither the time nor the place to go further. I just think that Barack Obama is missing a very valuable trick by not communicating the importance of his time here to the electorate.

Your Red Scarf Matches Your Eyes...

2008-04-30T19:02:00.004-10:00

1968 was quite a year. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Jr. were assassinated. The North Vietnamese army launched an offensive that caused then-president Lyndon B. Johnson todecide not to seek re-election. The Democratic National convention in Chicago was a debacle marked by police riots, discord at the convention, and an eventual win for Richard Nixon. France was riven by riots.

On the lighter side, these were the top fifty hits for the year:

# 1. Hey Jude, The Beatles
# 2. Honey, Bobby Goldsboro
# 3. Love Is Blue, Paul Mauriat
# 4. (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay, Otis Redding
# 5. People Got To Be Free, Rascals
# 6. Sunshine Of Your Love, Cream
# 7. This Guy's In Love With You, Herb Alpert
# 8. Stoned Soul Picnic, Fifth Dimension
# 9. Mrs. Robinson, Simon and Garfunkel
# 10. Tighten Up, Archie Bell and The Drells
# 11. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Hugo Montenegro 
# 12. Little Green Apples, O.C. Smith
# 13. Mony, Mony, Tommy James and The Shondells
# 14. Hello, I Love You, The Doors
# 15. Young Girl, Gary Puckett and The Union Gap
# 16. Cry Like A Baby, Box Tops
# 17. Harper Valley P.T.A., Jeannie C. Riley
# 18. Grazing In The Grass, Hugh Masekela
# 19. Midnight Confessions, The Grass Roots
# 20. Dance To The Music, Sly and The Family Stone
# 21. The Horse, Cliff Nobles and Co
# 22. I Wish It Would Rain, Temptations
# 23. La-La Means I Love You, Delfonics
# 24. Turn Around, Look At Me, Vogues
# 25. Judy In Disguise (With Glasses), John Fred and His Playboy Band
# 26. Spooky, Classics IV
# 27. Love Child, Diana Ross and The Supremes
# 28. Angel Of The Morning, Merrilee Rush
# 29. The Ballad Of Bonnie And Clyde, Georgie Fame
# 30. Those Were The Days, Mary Hopkin
# 31. Born To Be Wild, Steppenwolf
# 32. Cowboys To Girls, Intruders
# 33. Simon Says, 1910 Fruitgum Company
# 34. Lady Willpower, Gary Puckett and The Union Gap
# 35. A Beautiful Morning, Rascals
# 36. The Look Of Love, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66
# 37. Hold Me Tight, Johnny Nash
# 38. Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, Ohio Express
# 39. Fire , Crazy World Of Arthur Brown
# 40. Love Is All Around, Troggs
# 41. Playboy, Gene and Debbe
# 42. (Theme From) Valley Of The Dolls, Dionne Warwick
# 43. Classical Gas, Mason Williams
# 44. Slip Away, Clarence Carter
# 45. Girl Watcher, O'Kaysions
# 46. (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone, Aretha Franklin
# 47. Green Tambourine, Lemon Pipers
# 48. 1, 2, 3, Red Light, 1910 Fruitgum Company
# 49. Reach Out Of The Darkness, Friend and Lover
# 50. Jumpin' Jack Flash, The Rolling Stones

One tune that doesn't appear on anywhere near this list is one of my favorite novelty songs and the source of this entry's title, Loving You Has Made Me Bananas by comedian Guy Marks. This month (May) marks the fortieth anniversary of the song that begins:

Your red scarf matches your eyes
You close your cover before striking!
Mother has the ship-fitter blues
And loving you has made me bananas!

Does it make any sense? As much sense as me living on a coffee farm where I'm up to my tuches in bananas when I can't stand the things! The picture above is of a banana flower. The purple part is the flower. The green things are baby bananas.

Another fortieth anniversary I'll mark this month is my life as a driver. I got a license as soon as I could possibly get it (May 30th in California--I was fifteen and a half). I got my license six months later.

Madame Pele's Place...

2008-04-10T19:26:00.005-10:00

Here's a picture of my brother Stan in front of Kilauea's Halemaumau Crater on his visit to the island in August of 2004. The two of us saw as many of the sights as possible in one day and the volcano was the last stop. We didn't have time to go down to see the lava flow, but it was a beautiful day and we had a great time.

Legend says that Halemaumau is the home of Madame Pele, the goddess of fire. Unless she is plied with steady offerings of flowers, food, and liquor (she seems to like gin), Pele can pitch quite a fit.

Well... Madame Pele is a "What Have You Done For Me Lately?" kiind of lady. And I am in no way criticizing her. Don't want to make her any more angry than she is already. Stan and I wouldn't be able to visit now... this picture from the Hawaii Volcano Observatory website was taken a few yards back from where I took my brother's picture.

There's Good And There's Bad...

2008-03-18T03:10:00.002-10:00

This is a view of Keauhou Bay that most people won't get. The picture was taken on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago at the home of people we've come to consider friends. The sun was setting, there was a gourmet dinner on the way, and leisurely talk about movies and computers. The best part of my job is the wonderful people I get to meet.

That's the good.

The bad? Kilauea volcano's main crater has decided to let off some steam. Actually, steam wouldn't be bad. The Halemaumau Crater is now spewing sulfur dioxide at the rate of 1,500 tonnes per day. Depending on the way the wind is blowing, it looks like Los Angeles around here sometimes. You can keep up with the latest here. I've been coughing a bit but no adverse consequences yet. You can bet I'm watching it, though.

So Long To Fidel Castro And To The Oldest Topical Joke In Film!

2008-02-19T23:06:00.006-10:00

That lovely couple above is Margie McDougall and C.C. (Bud) Baxter having a drink in a New York bar. They're both out and alone--Bud because he's allowing his bosses from the insurance company where he works to use his apartment for their illicit affairs and Margie because... well... her husband Mickey The Jockey is in a Cuban jail. Why?

MARGIE: Castro caught him dopin' a horse.

And thus began one of the longest-standing topical jokes in movie history.

The Apartment took Hollywood by storm in 1960. It's a neat little morality play written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond and directed by Wilder. The cast is letter perfect. Shirley MacClaine, Fred MacMurray, Edie Adams, Ray Walston, and the lovely, brassy lady at the bar above with star Jack Lemmon: Hope Holiday. The movie won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Editing--a feat that wouldn't be matched until 1980's Manhattan by Woody Allen. As Wilder was returning to his seat after another award, someone is reported to have yelled out "Quit now! It'll never be any better than this!" I'm personally glad Billy didn't listen because we'd never have had Walter Matthau's performance as "Whiplash Willie Gingrich" in The Fortune Cookie or the sophisticated comedy of Irma La Douce.

The Apartment is one of my favorite movies.

Fidel Castro announced today that he is stepping down as the leader of Cuba--a post he acquired shortly before Wilder and Diamond made what I'm sure they thought was a throwaway line. It's been funny for almost forty-eight years. Most movies and television shows have trouble serving up forty-eight seconds worth of funny. If you haven't seen it, please do.

La lucha continua! Cut!

Not So Much...

2008-02-18T01:55:00.004-10:00

Where have I been? What have I been doing? Wie gehts?

Well...

I've retired from live performance as a member of a band after over thirty-five years of doing gigs. I've lost twenty pounds, I've given up alcohol completely, bought an iPhone, gotten my blood pressure down to normal,and am having a wonderful time.

BluRock played its first and last gig February 1st. We did very well. Things just didn't work out afterward and I decided that I'd had enough of being in bands. My first band was called Oso (Spanish for "bear") back in 1972. I've played for Don Estes's Silver Bullet Band (country & western), the New Pyramid Jazz Quintet, Bole Bantu, Sparkle, and the Kona Gold Blues Band. I bought a new keyboard in anticipation of gigging with BluRock, but I'm playing at home. I used to love the camaraderie of the men and women I performed with. There's nothing like the thrill of pleasing a crowd of people. The buzz you have when you return home from a successful performance is indescribable. But times have changed--or I've changed. I used to love it. Now? Not so much...

The blood pressure, weight loss, and no more drinkie-winkies are related. I'm pre-diabetic and I don't want it to get any further than that. Also, Billy Preston died of malignant hypertension in 2006. Anyone who knows me knows that he's the reason I play the way I play. He's the reason I became a musician. I had the pleasure of meeting him several times and sharing the stage with him once in San Francisco. He was only fifty-nine. Billy--with all his imperfections--was a hero of mine. I emulated his style of playing, singing, and (I pray to God there are no pictures) his early-Seventies appearance. Now? Will I follow in his footsteps at the age of fifty-five? Not so much...

I wanted a different Valentine's Day present for Trisha. I'd gotten her a pair of earrings and a jacket on my visit to the Bay Area. The jacket was too small and the earrings were just wrong. My next present would have to be good. I got her an iPhone. She was frustrated and dissatisfied with it in the beginning. Then, the little sound glitch was solved with the help of a friend. Reception improved. All the wonderful features it has became more and more manageable. I can count on one hand the number of times I've touched the thing since we got it a week ago. Trisha hated our iPhone at first. Now? Not so much...

Aloha.

Yes We Can!

2008-02-05T01:08:00.000-10:00

My sense of things going into today is that the Clinton-Obama race is a showdown between the old, established, "New Deal", fat cat wing of the Democratic Party--the ossified wing that the so-called "Reagan Revolution" finally beat in 1980 and that was nearly buried by Newt Gingrich et.al. in 1994--and The Insurgency embodied by Howard Dean and Barack Obama.

When I say "New Deal" Democrats, I'm talking about the Democratic Party pre-1980. There were hiccups (Dems lost control of Congress for a bit in the Fifties) but Democrats basically ran this country from 1932 until 1980. The last of that generation was so entrenched that it stopped moving forward. Scandals picked off the people's confidence in their leadership. The Vietnam War, the draft, and Movement Politics created the Vocal Minority that was re-dubbed The Silent Majority. The Republicans--emboldened by sheer opportunism, greed, and venomous hatred for paying taxes for anything--cooked up the modern conservative movement, the Southern Strategy, and the seeds of what would become the Neocons--and beat the fat, drunk, stupid, squabbling Democratic Party nearly to death.

Look at the roster of Hillary supporters vs. the ones who are for Obama or were for Edwards; the latter are the ones challenging the status quo that congealed into the Democratic Leadership Council. They're challenging the "super delegate" crowd--the ones who think that they'll be able to go back to "business-as-usual" because they'll be in the engine room of the Gravy Train.

Well, America isn't a Gravy Train any more. The Clinton Gang will find that out when they get into power and find that the vandals have stolen all the handles. Our problems will worsen because a coalition between The Military-Industrial Complex and Democratic Government means we continue down the path Reagan and his antecedents chose. There isn't any money in the coffers for new mandates. We don't have the resources to create block grants and jobs programs and a single-payer national healthcare system; the Republicans have stolen it all. Corporate America is going to continue to press for its interests and the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party will do its best to accommodate them.

Hillary is getting the backing of the old-style party stalwarts--Democrats who got re-elected by greasing the right wheels and getting along with the Big Money interests when times were good. That Democratic Party built the American Middle Class and sustained it until it became too fat and stodgy and bought-off to elude the conservative steam roller that finally squished it. The Contract With America--broken though it was--spoke to a yearning in the American People for leaner, more efficient, less intrusive government. Never mind that this yearning was built on the myths of the Welfare Queen and her Cadillac and government as larcenous nanny to labor, minority, women, gay, and other "special interests." The myth resonated, was used, and has brought us twenty-eight years of decline, death, and disaster.

Bill Clinton's unwillingness to decree an end to discrimination against gays in the military and stick to it was simply the first in a series of compromises--political, social, and moral (personally and otherwise) that gave Republicans Congress and the White House in 2002 and left the Democratic Party a quivering, spineless wreck. Apres Clinton, le deluge. I have no reason to believe that Hillary will be any less efficient in her willingness or her ability to compromise at the expense of the poor and middle class.

Barack Obama represents the wing of the party that wants to speak to everyone in the country, just as Franklin Roosevelt did in the depths of the Depression, and as John F. Kennedy did on the verge of the New Frontier. This April will mark the passage of forty years since the day a teenager sat in a classroom listening to the horrified account of an assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. The next months would find that teenager hearing of another assassination in California on the crystal radio kit he'd just built. A president abdicated another run for office because of a war gone wrong--a war that he knew couldn't be won. The Democratic Party was torn from without and from within and lay belly up and bleeding in the streets of Chicago. Our world had grown macabre and chaotic. Our nation was fractured and frustrated.

That's why we need new coalitions, new ways of thinking, new ways of approaching problems, and a new attitude. We need to sober up and realize that thumping our chests and declaring ourselves the "greatest country on earth" has become a pathetic and rather dangerous conceit. We have been neither good nor right for a very long time. My hope is that Barack Obama will begin the very hard work of prying the hands of the past from the levers that move this country and replace them with ones that realize we live in a world that needs us on its side now.

The relief and the hope some of us feel when we regard Obama's candidacy is that this may be the coda for a nascent symphony gone so horribly wrong all those years ago. Maybe it's the realization that the ember of hope for a better America and a better world hasn't been extinguished. Maybe we'll finally heed Ike Eisenhower's earnest warning about the dangers of letting certain elements in our society hold sway. Maybe our prophets will finally find honor in their own land, even if not in their own time. Maybe that's why the echoes of Yes We Can reverberate; they've been in us all along.

Sweet Baby, I Need You!

2007-12-28T07:30:00.002-10:00

As you can tell, things have been busy for me--no time for Le Blog. A recent electrical storm created a welter of problems for all computer users here on the island, but it created a huge pile of work for me. Combine that with my four-day sojourn to the mainland and you get a backlog of work that stares me in the face even as I write this.

One diversion I have is the band I'm. Its tentative name is BluRock. It's named after a notoriously hard volcanic rock that differs from the more common, black basaltic forms in that it is blue-grey in color and devilishly rough to move, remove or otherwise change. What kind of music do we play? I hope the answer is "good." We all agree that we don't want to be restricted to a genre. We play funk, blues, Beatles, rock, jazz or anything that strikes our fancy. That's what I love about us.

(The video that accompanied this post was one of the reasons for BluRock breaking up and for me retiring from performance as member of a band. Thanks to all of you who were so encouraging. No one's sorrier that it didn't work out than I am).

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today...

2007-12-17T01:24:00.000-10:00

I walked through the doors of Apple's De Anza 3 building on December 13th, 1987. I'd had a variety of jobs and I will admit that I hadn't been a model employee in almost any job I'd had before. The concept of showing up to work "on time" wasn't one of my strong suits. I have problems with authority. I'd work hard and smart, but I wouldn't put myself out to make someone else look good. There are few things in this world more difficult than a prima donna with an inferiority complex. The truth of that about me comes as a surprise because I've just realized it.

Apologies to everyone who put up with that.

The main influences in my life beside the usual ones everyone mentions--parents, school, church, etc.--had been the Boy Scouts and music. I encountered my third great influence on that day in December.

I was under contract to test products for Apple because my late best friend had identified me as someone who knew programming on the IBM PC and Apple needed PC people to test some of its new products. I was placed at a desk with a Mac Plus and a twenty megabyte hard drive, and my supervisor said, "see you next year." She then went on vacation for the rest of the year.

That was the first test Apple presented. Left to your own devices, what do you do with your time? I learned to program for the Macintosh (Pascal was its primary language then and I had been trained to write it).

That was the beginning of my education. The most important aspect of my time at Apple was the people I worked with. Jerry (good to see you again), Robert, Derek, Michelle, Anna, Ginny, Carol, Matt, John, Chris, Robin, Sharon, Leland, Paul, Andreas, Steffond, Vladi, and so many others have taught me so many things. Some of them were so patient with me. Some of them were examples of commitment to thoroughness, quality, and excellence. Some of them nagged me into quitting smoking--something that couldn't have happened if they didn't genuinely care about me. I was encouraged to use my talents. I was allowed to figure out the best path toward a goal and follow it. Apple supported me through my most dire health crisis without a blink or a hitch. They bore me up through my mother's passing. The company offered me the opportunity to be the first person in the world to do things. I was taught the difference between reasons and excuses; if I couldn't accomplish a task, there'd better be a reason. An excuse wouldn't do.

I was hired on as a full employee in 1989. The plaque I received in celebration of the fifth anniversary of that event hangs on the wall of my bedroom. I was just reunited with the gold Apple pin with five gems in it that the company used to offer along with that plaque (thanks to Elena).

Some of the products I worked on? System software from 6.0 through Mac OS X 10.1, the Scriptable Finder (test lead), AppleShare 2.0. AppleShare IP 6.0, most of the machines released between 1988 and January 2002 (I was laid off in 1997 and returned later that year), the Apple II emulator card, cross-platform floppy reading, the first attempt at transforming the operating system to a more modern model, and, finally--thank you, John--wireless networking.

Apple's current success was being built when I left. Steve Jobs had returned. Say what you will about him, he has two qualities that have infused the company since he and Steve Wozniak founded it--qualities that are in the company's DNA and will always be with it: Passion and taste. Passion makes you unstoppable and incorruptible. Taste is the vision you want to realize.
The combination makes you unwilling to settle for less than your best. The people working on every Apple product CARE.

A co-worker provided me with Apple's unofficial motto: We do good work. I'm now an Apple Authorized Service Provider. My business couldn't run without the standards and practices I learned at Apple.

I went back on December 13th to say "so long, and thanks for all the fish." It was an event I will remember the rest of my life.

Thank you, Apple.

Responsibility...

2007-12-09T22:43:00.000-10:00

The CIA is under investigation for destroying tapes of its enhanced interrogation techniques. "Fine!" you say? If either of the cases of the men interrogated reaches a court of law, the government will have jeopardized the legal proceedings against the alleged terrorists. The government has destroyed evidence, they've admitted it, and they've admitted that the tapes were depictions of the government obtaining "testimony" under duress--in violation of national and international law. "So what?" you say? Imagine that one of our soldiers is captured and submitted to "enhanced interrogation techniques." What moral authority--pray tell--do we appeal to?

This scandal is just the latest in a seven-year miasma of malfeasance, corruption, cronyism, criminality, graft, and murder. The United States Government is a criminal enterprise. Look at it this way: Let's say a kid knocked over a fast-food restaurant, then found out that he was videotaped doing it. Let's say that he got access to the tapes and erased them. That kid is guilty of at least one additional crime: obstruction of justice. That kid would be sentenced to a lifetime under the jail for doing that.

Officers of the CIA have done this and worse. Those tapes were government property. Your taxes and mine paid for their creation. Your taxes and mine have paid for all of it--the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Blackwater and on and on. It is illegal to destroy work product generated with the taxpayer's money. Everything the Bush Administration does is owned BY US because they've gotten the money to do what they've done FROM US!

A short digression...

My parents were sticklers for responsibility. My brother and I were held responsible--strictly--for everything we said and did. If we erred, we expected to pay the consequences if we were discovered. My brother and I got our "constitutional rights" at the sufferance of our parents. If we committed a crime, we'd be supported, but we'd also be expected to atone. Our parents were born black in the South before The Depression. The lessons they learned were implanted in us with the utmost emphasis. They taught us to obey the law--society's AND theirs. And--until recently--our government reinforced our parents.

The pardon of Richard Nixon began the erosion of this nation's moral proprioception. "Mr. Law And Order" got a free pass on his naked, unabashed assault on our constitutional rights and on our freedoms. But the system worked after a fashion; Congress did its duty and made sure that the rule of law prevailed to the extent possible. After Nixon, the Reagan Administration got itself embroiled in Iran-Contra--a brazen violation of the spirit and letter of American law. Congress gave Reagan a pass because they were aware of his diminished capacity and feared the demoralizing influence of another presidential impeachment. George H.W. Bush closed the circle by pardoning important figures involved in that scandal. Meanwhile, poor and minority kids were going to jail in droves for the sake of "law and order." The right has pushed merciless punishment of the aforementioned groups while letting the rich and powerful slide. OJ Simpson should have been their wake-up call but extremism knows no bounds. They pressed their increasing advantage.

George W. Bush became president because of the most astonishing, sanctioned instance of lawlessness in American history--except the War in Iraq. The Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore in 2000 is as political as it gets. The judges who denied the people of Florida the right to have their votes counted were so ashamed of their decision that they stipulated that it not be taken as precedent--meaning they admitted that this was a "one-off" special case for one of their own. The right says "get over it!" Well, I WON'T "get over it." Bush v. Gore was the signal that America had dropped the pretense of being a "nation of laws and not men." For those of you who believed that it was ever true, Native Americans and black people have a huge bone to pick with you.

Anyway, Dick Cheney--up-close and personal with the results when a Congress holds a president accountable during the Nixon administration--decides that the George W. Bush administration is going to reclaim and enhance the Imperial Presidency that Nixon was building. A long-dead French king gave us the aphorism l'etat c'est mois ("I am the state"). George W. Bush and his minions have tried--and succeeded in hideous ways--of invoking that conceit. I don't have the time or space to recount the lawlessness, venality, criminality, corruption, and callousness of the current administration. Bush avers that history will be his judge and this is one of the few things on which we agree: George W. Bush is America's Suicide Note unless our next few presidents are of Lincolnian and Rooseveltian caliber.

Illegal aliens? What law are we talking about? The law that Bush and Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo and the CIA find so inconvenient? "America doesn't torture?" Where'd that picture accompanying this post come from? Law and order? Scooter Libby sleeps at home in his own warm bed while poor bastards caught with a dime bag of weed languish in jail or in prison. U.S. attorneys are fired for carrying out their oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States instead of the Republican Thousand Year Reich. Thousands die and are wounded in Iraq for an elaborate lie and all Bush has to say is "watch this drive." Osama Bin Laden--a relative of a Bush family business partner--slaughters more people than were lost in the attack on Pearl Harbor and he lives and threatens us and serves the Bush Terror Machine to this day. Financial scams have wreaked damage on our economy, the dimensions of which we can only imagine. The United States government has been reduced to a hollow shell. No environmental protection. No consumer product safety. No assurance that the food we eat or the drugs we need are safe. An official unwillingness to regulate industries vital to our health and well-being as a nation.

And the Democrats? They continue to lay down, just as they did beginning with the Clinton Administration. Bill Clinton compromised his way out of greatness. NAFTA. Welfare reform. Same-sex relations. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council's strategy of getting Democrats elected by emulating Republicans bears some of the blame for the pass in which this nation finds itself.

But the destruction of evidence by the CIA should convince everyone of the naked truth: We are through the looking glass with the Bush administration. Even Richard Nixon--the president who averred to David Frost that "if the president does it, it's not illegal"--didn't destroy evidence (you have eighteen minutes to tell me how wrong that last passage can be).

No one is holding George W. Bush responsible. Evidence suggests that no one ever has. The concept of justice is a relic at this point. Even people in jail for serial murder have to wonder what the rules are now. They've been held responsible. George W. Bush hasn't and--if present trends hold true--won't be held responsible or accountable for the profound wrong he has done.

My dead parents are more of a moral force than the living president of the United States. That is profoundly tragic.

A Pirate Looks At 55...

2007-12-02T21:56:00.000-10:00

My new band, BluRock, debuted at a party for our bass player's birthday last night. We went on after two hula hulaus and a fire dancer. We got underway after a few sound and power problems. The audience was very kind to us. Lots of dancing. We did the late Vince Guaraldi's Linus and Lucy and I was so proud--it's the first time I've ever done that song with a band. And we did well. We also did one of my originals, a few tunes by Billy Preston and some blues. For those of you who knew me when? It's the best band I've ever been in. Randy "Malfalfa" Shelor, Keith "Sparks" Brown, Tim "The Coolman" Taylor, and me--Ron "Dr. Fake" Drake. Wow!

I reached the tender age of fifty-five on Friday. Trisha and I ended up working so hard that day that we had to postpone the celebration to tonight. There's a restaurant in downtown Kailua-Kona called Lava Java. Your mind immediately conjures up coffee. Well, I say "nay-nay!" We had a gourmet-quality dinner by the sea and returned home. Feyabe sent me a wonderful book that I plan to devour--This Is Your Brain On Music. It explores the physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of music on the human psyche. Thanks, Pook!

We had a 3.9 magnitude earthquake on Thursday. That's always exciting. It was the capper for Wednesday's excitement.

We'd taken two of our dogs--Sophie and Jacques--to the groomer's to get them cleaned up that day. Sophie's a wire-haired dachshund (which we found out only recently) and needs only occasional clippings. Jacques is a miniature poodle who needs monthly care. So, after their spa day ended around noon, we had two dogs in the office. I thought "let's take them home." But Trisha reminded me that I had plenty of work to do... which I did until about 1:30 when lightning went off right over our metal building where I'm repairing computers.

The decision to get out of Dodge became unanimous. We left immediately and drove through a rainstorm that defies description. It got worse the longer we drove. But we were lucky--homes were flooded. Mudslides blocked roads. Thunder and lightning were constant for seven hours. Some people were stuck in place until the next day. The road was closed all night soon after we passed. A lightning strike knocked out our power for a few minutes but it came on again soon. Trisha, the dogs, and I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark on DVD until the storm blew over. Our best wishes to our neighbors who weren't as fortunate as we've been.

Anyway, the volume of computers we've had to fix and the extra-curricular activities dictated by fate have left cobwebs on the beloved blog. I'm atoning by enclosing a picture I took on my MacBook before starting this entry. If the Good Lord's williing and the creek don't rise, I'll be in California from the eleventh to the fourteenth.

If you like comedy, pick up Werewolves And Lollipops by Patton Oswalt and Making Light of Myself by Jon Pinette.

Aloha!

Nostalgia

2007-11-18T23:27:00.000-10:00

Here's my favorite picture of my son Jawara and me. It was taken in the early Eighties when he was three or four and I was about 160 or 170 lbs. Children are my favorite people. They're honest, uncomplicated, and--ideally--have no pretensions. I was recovering from the onset of sarcoidosis. so I was quite the svelte fellow. This pic was snapped at a park in Palo Alto, Ca. A shout out to Terri Jacobs, who made it possible, and to her remaining family wherever they may be.

Jawara (he was referred to as "Fred" or "Beelzebub" before his planetary debut) was living in Los Angeles the last I heard from him. He was born in 1980 which would make him twenty-seven at this writing.

Ask me for a comment about him and I'll refer you to that nugget of genius from Bye, Bye, Birdie!: KIDS!

California, Here I Come!

2007-11-13T22:44:00.000-10:00

I'm going to arrive in San Jose, California at nine o'clock Tuesday evening, December 11th. If things go well, I arrive at the Brittania Arms pub in time to find out whether my old trivia teams still rules or not.

The next day will be taken up with some pretty emotional stuff. The house I grew up in was torn down and rebuilt. I have no idea what's there now. Our family moved there fifty years ago and it'll be interesting to see what grew from that two bedroom-one bath bungalow we moved into all those years ago.

December 13th will mark the twentieth anniversary of me working for Apple Inc. I began on that day as a contractor. Got hired as in employee in June of 1989. I was laid off in 1997, returned later that year, and left as an employee in December of 2001 to move to Hawaii. If I don't do anything but play the Boesendoerfer piano in the cafeteria's piano bar, I'm hoping to make the visit.

I'll leave for home the next morning. Yes, I said home. Hawaii has become my home. As I type this, I haven't even gone and I miss it already. Can't determine the moment I became a Hawaiian. Maybe it happened during a Forty-Niner game. Maybe it happened during a sunrise. Maybe it's because of some of the wonderful people I've met fixing computers here.

Whatever the cause, I've gone from "later, dude!" to "Aloha!"

A Reason To Go Mac And A Reason To Take Care

2007-11-07T18:16:00.000-10:00

One of the great things about surfing the Internet with a Mac was that you didn't have to worry about catching malware, spyware, and/or viruses from visiting sketchy web pages. Note that I said didn't: Things have changed. Go to the wrong porn site on a Mac and you can have your Mac infected. Historic!

Now, don't panic, all you pr0n m0nkeys out there; all is not lost.

The infection is caused by what's called a trojan (and you guys probably aren't wearing one, seeing as you're surfing porn rather than spooning with a real-live SO) is avoidable. A trojan is a malicious program disguised as sweetness, light, and all-things-beautiful. Here's all you've gotta do to acquire the trojan:

1. Surf to the porn site.
2. Pick the smut you'd like to see (OOPS! There's a message saying that your computer doesn't have the software necessary to show you "Sheep Hobbling For Randy Men" and offers to download and install said software for you).
3. At this point, you have a choice: If you must see "Sheep Hobbling For Randy Men" you can answer "HIT ME" and invite the delicious misery you've got coming or you can say "NO", go, and sin no more (at least 'til tomorrow).
4. If you've decided to download the codec that will allow you to consume all that sheepy goodness, you have to agree to the dialog that asks if you want to install the codec (there's a setting that skips this step if you're using the Safari web browser--you don't have to bother setting it, though. Live on the edge!)
5. Finally, supply the trojan with your administrative password. Really. Go ahead. Let me hear you go BAAA!, Mr. Sheep!

Congratulations. Your Mac is infected. The road to salvation can be found here.

Also, Salon Magazine's technology writer, Farhad Manjoo, has an excellent column on the advantages of buying a Mac.

2007-11-02T11:57:00.000-10:00

Things have been hectic the last few days. The blog is like an angry pet reminding me always that I haven't fed it lately.

Yesterday was a very good day. We drove out to the northern part of the island to meet an excellent dog trainer. I set up her computers while she worked with Jacques, our two year-old miniature poodle. Then, we drove to the coast to set up a wireless network for two of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. Jacques got his introduction to the ocean (two years old and he'd never seen it). That area of the island has been plagued by a series of stubborn brush fires. Helicopters were ferrying water in to douse the flames yesterday. All-in-all, a long and singular day. I used to travel the island fixing computers before the volume of business made that impractical. Now, I journey out only when it's absolutely necessary. My job would take me to parts of the island I'd have never seen otherwise, and introduced me to wonderful people. It was nice to feel that again.

The day before that, the yard was graced by the monarch of the Hawaiian skies: a Hawaiian hawk. The noble bird had captured one of the noble chickens I feed every morning and made short work of it. Not even the cats dared approach until the hawk was done. As you can see from the picture, the hawk didn't give much of a damn about my presence, either. The picture isn't very good, but there it is. Your rare sight for the day: A noble, endangered `io.

Long And Short

2007-11-02T00:12:00.000-10:00

There's a lot of debate now about whether waterboarding is torture or not. This is especially important in light of the state of Attorney General-designate Micheal Mukasey's assertion that he doesn't know enough about the subject to render an informed decision.

Here's the procedure. Let me know if you think this is torture or not.

Obama And Gays

2007-10-26T01:03:00.000-10:00

My parents raised my brother and me to take people one at a time--don't judge without experience.

Our father had a buddy from the military; a gay man. We all lived in the same neighborhood in Menlo Park, California--a neighborhood where black people were allowed to evoke the American Dream in relative peace. This gay man would visit us and he'd get along better with our mother than he did with dad and his mannerisms were a little disorienting to my brother and me, but our house was a house of inclusion, refuge, and welcome. "Mother C" always had a seat at our table.

In his later years, my brother looked after him when his health declined. The only thing that mattered was that he was a member of that blessed circle of friends our mom and dad cultivated. When "Mother C" passed away, my brother looked after his interests. It's what our parents would have wanted.

There's a controversy now about Senator Barack Obama's campaign's embrace of an anti-gay minister, Reverend Donnie McClurkin. AmericaBlog has extensive coverage of the issue.

It seems to me that Reverend McClurkin's issues aren't with gay people: They're with opportunistic pedophiles. Anyone with a clue knows that the two tendencies--gayness and pedophilia--have nothing in common. Pedophiles are cowards. They don't have the wherewithal to deal with an adult relationship. They don't have the self-confidence it takes to risk rejection and heartbreak and embarassment. Pedophiles are all about power... just like rapists. The violation isn't a sexual act; it's an assertion of power and dominance.

Reverend McClurkin's animus against "gay people" is misplaced. Barack Obama's embrace of Reverend McClurkin--someone who maintains that gay people can be "cured"--is misplaced as well.

If Obama's inclusion of Reverend McClurkin is his "statement" courting the African-American Religious Right, it is a fatally flawed move and should be disavowed. The Right isn't garnering votes these days. It isn't worthy of support, consideration, or respect if we are to judge by its most revered, most credible spokespersons. Rush Limbaugh? Sean Hannity? Ann Coulter? Dick Cheney? Hugh Hewitt? Fox Noise? Michelle Malkin? No. Just, no!

Barack Obama should embrace inclusiveness. He should embrace tolerance and understanding. These are the brave, forward-leaning concepts that resonate with voters. His embrace of Reverend McClurkin's very real and understandable pathologies is a distraction from what is and should be a historic campaign.

Enough Already!

2007-10-24T13:34:00.000-10:00

OK... So far we've lost: The World Trade Center, a piece of the Pentagon, five or six trillion dollars, almost four-thousand dead American soldiers and almost thirty-thousand wounded (not to mention equipment crashed, blown up or stolen), untold numbers of Iraqis, Afghanis, and a few Pakistanis dead and woulded, millions of Iraqis made refugees, the sympathy and the cooperation of almost every nation on the planet, most of New Orleans, the housing market, Enron, habeus corpus, the Fourth Amendment, a valuable spy specializing in counterproliferation, the Executive Branch, the Supreme Court, the entire Department of Justice, a recent NASA study revealing how unsafe airline travel really is, a space shuttle and seven astronauts, years of government research on global warming, fair elections, President Al Gore, the educational system... and now?

Countless acres of burned forest and homes in Southern California. As the article points out, the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Agriculture planned to fail by failing to plan.

Are we ready for a black or female president? Hell, yeah! No one could do any worse than what we've got!

WW III

2007-10-19T04:26:00.000-10:00

One of the unalloyed joys in my life is the comedy of Lewis Black. Black, a New York-based comedian who appears on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, looks like a high school social studies teacher. The resemblance falls away as soon as he opens his mouth.

Black stalks the stage delivering himself of profanity-laced tirades against the rich stew of topics offered by this American life, his fingers probing the air like the antennae of some pissed-off caterpillar. He growls. He shouts. A sentence that begins as a quiet statement on the facts of a subject ends in a volcanic eruption of outrage. And--the hallmark of a good comedian--he tells us the truth--truths we believe ourselves, but that we might not broach in this time when American walls have ears and you don't know who's listening.

One of those truths reared its ugly head in President Bush's last press conference. Huffington Post blogger Bob Cesca's current offering is World War III Is Going To Be Hilarious. Cesca's piece is accompanied by a clip of Bush's expression as he pronounces his prescription for avoiding the next war-to-end-all-wars.

As always, Dubya looks positively giddy when he's talking about pain, suffering, and punishment.

Lewis Black noticed this earlier on his Carnegie Hall Performance album.

"Bush would talk about Iraq with a smile on his face," Black says. "Part of the job of being president--and I know it's hard, is to say "Oh! I'm going to be talking about war, so I have to have a frowny face."

(After he fluffs the next line--hilariously--he continues)

"...Here's something you have to realize: When the expression on your face doesn't match the words... that's fucked up!"

Bush's expression is increasingly at odds with the seriousness of our situation nationally and globally. I'm reading Robert Draper's biography of Bush, Dead Certain. It's an inside look at the Bush operation beginning with the New Hampshire primary of 2000. Reading it is like reading the narrative of events leading up to a horrific car crash that you know is coming. The book is bringing into focus for me the man who is now--without doubt--the worst president in this country's history. Once Bush was awarded the presidency by the Supreme Court, he didn't want it--except that to relinquish it would mean losing it to someone else, and Bush hates being seen as a loser. Fratboy bonhommie only goes so far when we're talking about the future of the planet. Draper paints a picture of an engaging, cunning, cheerleader with an Olympic-sized mean streak who won the job for the sake of winning it and promptly left everything up to his vice president.

Bush enjoys his daily bike ride and not much else. He can't wait to get out of D.C. so he can lounge at Camp David or Rancho Relaxo down in Texas. He can't wait to get back to Texas for good.

Meanwhile, we're left to clean up the mess he's left. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it in The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

That's fucked up.

A Vision...

2007-10-15T19:04:00.000-10:00

If you haven't checked out Crooks & Liars, John Amato's compendium of quotes and clips of must-see video, do yourself a favor and give it a shot. Some smart people read that blog and I found a gem of a comment regarding the case of Graeme Frost--the 12 year-old boy who is being slimed mercilessly by those-who-shall remain-nameless for daring to open his mouth about the importance of health insurance for children.

Usually, people come for the articles and videos and don't stay for the comments, but they'd have missed this, if they did. Thanks, Bonkers:

I’ll tell you one thing, I sometimes hope that these crazy fucks have it right; that there is only a one, true christian God, exactly as they describe him, etc etc. Because they are in for one big, bloody surprise when they go to meet their maker and while the rest of us heathen Muslims, Buddhists, druids, agnostics, Hindus, Great Flying Spaghetti Monster worshippers, etc are filing through the Pearly Gates and saying to each other, “Well, how about that! A beard and everthing, just like they said! Hey, dibsies on that cloud over there! Wheee!”, directly to our left God will be stomping their wretched asses one at a time, straight through the clouds and telling them, “You really didn’t get it, did you? All...you had to do was be NICE. Good-bye.” STOMP!

Ahh, the idea just warms my heart…..

UPDATE: Oh! My! Effin'! God! They thought this was funny the way I think my little ditties and satires are funny. The difference? I know I don't suck this bad! (Drop me a line if this link drops out of sight. I'll gladly put a bullet in it).

Al Gore Has Won The Nobel Prize...

2007-10-12T14:32:00.000-10:00

Al Gore won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize today. Congratulations to him and I hope he runs for president--the job he won seven years ago.

Some Days...

2007-10-11T20:19:00.000-10:00

The Jokes Just Write Themselves...

There Is Nothing Like A Brain!

2007-10-10T23:47:00.000-10:00

One of my heroes is satirist and song parodist Tom Lehrer. The blog will allow me to indulge my passion for those genres from time to time. So, to the tune of There Is Nothing Like A Dame from Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific, I humbly present: There Is Nothing Like A Brain (this one's for you, George)...

We've got soldiers in Iraq
We've got taps on every phone
We've got guys in secret prisons! We don't make them moan or groan
We've got answers for each wiseass who would cavil or complain!
What don't we got? We don't got brains!

We've got IED's in Baghdad
We get intel! We get dope!
We get secrets from our allies and to Fox News we will lope!
We don't care whose source gets burned! Our allies can go to hell!
What don't we get? We just can't tell!

We've done things that we get into lawsuits for!
What we lack, there just is no substitutes for!

There is nothing like a brain! Nothing in the world!
There's no boner you can name that can't flourish without a brain!

We got soldiers dead and wounded!
No remorse or time for grief!
Every life is bent to serving our deep neocon belief!
When we march into a country, folks ain't grateful like they should!
They bitch and moan! And that ain't good!

Whoever says that we're trading blood for oil
Is in for the ultimate sliming and beatdown for making our blood boil!

There is nothing like a brain! Nothing in the world!
There's no boner you can name that can't flourish without a brain!

Nothing else is quite the same! Nothing in the world!
That could help us to explain. There is nothing quite like a brain!

I said there's nothing (there is nothing)
No, there's nothing (there ain't nothing)
We've found absolutely nothing (there ain't nothing)
No, there's nothing!
That is anything like a brain!

We suppose a brain don't torture, lie to people, break the laws
Or give every other country on the planet pause
It's a waste of time to worry over things that we are not!
We're rich! So who cares what we ain't got?!

There is nothing that you can name that is anything like a brain
Things we do might look insane, but who says we need a brain?
We reach brinks without a brain and no one blinks without a brain
There ain't a thing that's wrong with any land here
That can't be cured by putting it near
A far-seeing, thinking, rational human brain!

Great Summation Of The Current Mess...

2007-10-09T11:42:00.000-10:00

I'm a regular reader and poster on Salon.com's Table Talk. I find something new and interesting there every day.

Someone pointed me to a post on one of the blogs that I read daily, The Huffington Post. One of their bloggers, Jane Smiley, has summed up the motives of the various players responsible for the War In Iraq.

Worth reading. You'll find it here.

"The Startle Reflex..."

2007-10-05T22:21:00.000-10:00

A liberal woman who saw combat in Iraq? That describes Ginmar. Her story of dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder is compelling.

The Coup

2007-10-05T00:31:00.000-10:00

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

When did The Coup happen?

Did it happen when the United States Supreme Court declared that the interests of one George W. Bush superceded the right of the citizens of Florida to have their votes counted?

Did it happen when the murder of thousands of Americans by nineteen religious lunatics at the behest of their leader was transformed from a criminal case into an act of war with Saddam Hussein as the featured villain instead of the son of Bush’s father’s business partner?

Did it happen when Dick Cheney—late of Halliburton—sat down with a group of energy moguls and laid out an energy future for this country that we’re not allowed to see to this day?

Or was it when the Project For A New American Century published its manifesto urging that Iraq be taken by military force to serve as the key element in a scheme to secure the entire region for the interests of Big Oil?

Whenever it happened, it has happened: The United States government has been overthrown by the very military-industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned us in his final speech as president in 1961.

The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence are no longer the contracts by which this republic is constituted. Corporations--clad in the armor of the rights formerly accorded individual Americans and insulated by the profits they’ve amassed--have seized the levers of power and are working them for their own interests.

How else to explain the fecklessness of the current Congress? If the people’s word mattered, George W. Bush would be facing impeachment and our precious men and women fighting in Iraq would be coming home or being redeployed to actual battle lines in the war against the criminal enterprise that attacked America on 9/11. Democratic leaders would be offering bill after bill popular with their constituents and daring the Bush administration to veto them.

The majority of the people elected to Congress are beneficiaries of The Coup.

Money is the key to everything now. Corporate officers, hedge fund managers, insurance company executives and captains of industry wield more influence in our society than elected officials, the courts, the press, or—so far—the people. The military-industrial complex stands astride our erstwhile democracy unchained and unchallenged.

Globalization has made the American Middle Class expendable. American workers want health care and safety and a living wage and a clean environment and enough money to fuel their SUV’s and buy Muffy’s new prom dress. Workers in other parts of the world only want one of those things right now: A living wage. As it was in the beginning of the Twentieth Century in America, corporations in other countries can call whatever tune they desire vis-à-vis that wage.

And that era—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—is the Holy Grail of our new rulers. Cuba and the Philippines were taken in the Spanish-American War to the nation’s cheers. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and other corporations were unassailable. Labor law was a gleam in the worker’s eyes. For the most part, the press was an instrument of American policy rather than an impediment to it.

The press—the linchpin of Ike’s “alert and knowledgeable citizenry”—has become part of The Complex. One gets Brittney and OJ and missing white women and the whitewash of breakdowns in regulatory agencies like the Food And Drug Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture inspection services and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and mine safety and the Consumer Protection Agency. As in President William McKinley’s era, Americans killed, maimed, poisoned, disabled, or disenfranchised by corporate indifference have little standing. We get blow-dried pap rather than the adversarial, inquisitive journalism we need. The presence on-air of stalwarts like Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Bill Moyers, Stephen Colbert, and Ted Koppel are exceptions rather than the rule. Belief and opinion are elevated to the level of truth and fact. They, too, are victims of The Coup.

Pre-emptive war and torture—concepts that American and international law forbids—are arrows in the quiver of this nation’s “War On Terror.”

Mercenaries operate exempt from any law in this country and abroad.

Our Fourth Amendment rights are gone.

The Writ of Habeus Corpus—one of the oldest and most cherished canons of our legal tradition—has been swept aside with no more regard than a horse’s tail has for a fly.

Our government denies us access to information for which our taxes have paid; information to which we are constitutionally entitled.

Our nation’s law enforcement agencies collect information about us without our knowledge or consent and threaten punishment under penalty of law if we reveal the issuance of a “National Security Letter.”

Did The Coup happen when Richard Nixon was pardoned while some hapless man convicted of selling marijuana or stealing a car languished in jail?

Did it happen when I decided that I was afraid of having my friends and neighbors know that I thought our democracy has been hijacked?

Did The Coup succeed when I allowed myself to be silent in the shadow of a mountain of lies?

Will it continue in spite of who’s elected to be our next president?

The government that won World War II and ended Jim Crow and brought millions out of poverty and despair and sent Peace Corps emissaries to the corners of the earth and saw to it that our food, water, air, and land were clean is no more.

Dwight Eisenhower expressed his desire that security and prosperity flourish together. Who will see to it that The Coup fails in killing that desire?

When did The Coup succeed? When did the fox get the keys to the hen house?

UPDATE: Read Glenn Greenwald as often as you can. His opinions are informed, detailed, and cogent. Some of what you read here about legal/constitutional issues has its genesis in my reading of Greenwald's analyses.

Howl!

2007-10-03T00:41:00.000-10:00

A public radio station has declined to broadcast one of the great modern poems, Howl, by Allen Ginsburg because of fears that prohibitive FCC fines against "obscenity" in the work may harm the station and/or the network.

Allen Ginsburg's baring of his soul was a clarion call of expression that informed art of all kinds in its time and for all time. Howl is everything that is great about America as an idea and Americans as a people.

Celebrate freedom of speech.

Howl!!!

The War

2007-10-02T23:24:00.000-10:00

Ken Burns's compelling and continuing documentation of the American Experience has regained its poetry. After the triumph of The Civil War, there was a series of missteps. Jazz was saved by its subject. Baseball couldn't save Baseball. I confess that I can't separate my regard and admiration for Mark Twain from the sheer volume of information offered in Burns's documentation of his life, but the man who came and went with Halley's Comet eluded the Florentine Films magic.

The simple, straightforward elegance of The War is born of Burns's return to the concept of letting the people who endured the story tell the story. The film crew picked people from four American cities: Luverne, MN, Sacramento, CA, Waterbury, CN, and Mobile, AL. The people from these cities and towns who recount their experiences lend weight and poignancy to the assiduously amassed footage of the carnage and the horrors that were World War II. I don't know if he did so consciously, but Burns picked on-air testimonies that echo the letters that imbued his Civil War with so much pathos, humor, and humanity.

If you haven't seen Terence Malick's movie Badlands--a fictionalization of the Charles Starkweather-Caril Anne Fugate crime saga of the late Fifties--I recommend it highly (Starkweather's first murder had its genesis on my fifth birthday). It's a movie about murder, madness, and the Test of The Small Town. And I can't imagine it without the honey of Sissy Spacek's voice drizzled over it. So it is with Burns's The War. Keith David's narration of the film is a masterpiece. His voice becomes of a piece with the testimony of the people who lived the war even though he is much too young to have participated. David's narration is crafted from the words of Geoffrey C. Ward and they share a signal accomplishment in documentary filmmaking.

Wynton Marsalis's score is inspired. Those who lived during the time will not be able to distinguish music composed for the documentary from music of the period. A deft mix of original music and familiar themes make The War an emotional, transporting experience.

I lift a glass to Purtie Lee Drake, Mozee Thompson, and Joe Simons--warriors of that great conflict who have passed on. Thank you for all that you and your comrades have given us. We are in great danger of losing the legacy you helped pass on to us, but your examples of sacrifice and dedication live on within your children. Truth and justice are eternal. As a nation, we will find them or they will find us.

Woe be unto us if we do not accomplish the former.

Why A Mac?

2007-10-02T00:12:00.000-10:00

Twenty years ago this coming December, I made my first visit to the Apple Campus in Cupertino, California. I had an interview in the second week of December of 1987 for a position as a contractor in the System Software department. I almost hit another car on the way into the parking lot. The first thing I smelled on entering the lobby was fresh popcorn. The first two people to greet me were Jane Leech and the late Richard Riffey.

My first thought? I had arrived at a company I could work for for the rest of my life.

Turns out I spent most of the next fourteen years there.

I'll go into some details about my times at Apple later but I want to try to convey why I think people considering a new computer should consider a Macintosh now.

First of all, a successful virus hasn't been written for the Mac yet. A lot of people will tell you that it's because there are so few Macs to infect. That's not true. The truth is that it's too hard to write an effective virus for the Mac. There are those who'd argue that it's too difficult to write a legitimate application for the Mac, but the argument stands. When Windows was invented, the conventional wisdom was "why would more than one person want to use a computer?" The architecture reflects that thinking. The advent of computer networking and the Internet would expose the flaw in that philosophy and Microsoft has spent uncounted amounts of money dealing with it since then. As frustrating as it is for true hackers, Macintosh file sharing was created to accommodate a specific user granted access by a specific password. And these had to be EXACTLY CORRECT or you couldn't get in. Still secure to this day.

I was hired on as a contractor December 13th of 1987. I spent the next fourteen years dedicated to a cause--a cause that was shared by thousands of other people. The cause was the creation of a machine that would allow people to express themselves in whatever way they chose to do so without undue attention to the machine itself. My specialty was quality assurance--specifically, human interface. That meant insuring the part about "undue attention to the machine." That meant attention to a lot of little things. Things like having the system cursor disappear while you're typing--something so small you didn't notice it until you used a machine that didn't have it.

One of the advantages of Macintosh is consistency; if you know the operating system, you'll always know where to find what you want. The menu bar across the top of the screen contains known quantities and if what you want isn't there, it's not your fault--it's the fault of the company supplying the program.

When you get a Mac, you get all the software you need to do the things you need to do. iPhoto automatically understands your digital camera. iMovie understands your digital video recorder. iTunes deals with any ordinary .mp3 file. Buying the software to replicate these functions on a PC more than accounts for the Macintosh price difference. Add that to the saving (both monetary and operationally) of not having to buy anti-virus software, and you're talking real money as well as peace of mind.

Finally, I return to something I said before: By-and-large, a Mac stays out of your way. It lets you do what you want to do. The last thing I worked on before I left Apple to start my own consultancy was wireless networking. I still haven't found an operating system that allows more ease-of-use or more security if you're looking for a machine that has wireless.

I fix Macs for a living and I do so exclusively. The virus load on PC's is just too much to deal with in a reasonable amount of time, so I'm not unbiased. Countervailing opinions are welcome.

I Feel For Clarence Thomas...

2007-09-29T23:00:00.000-10:00

I just ran across a Washington Post article flogging the upcoming book by Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. No plugs for the book here. Thomas is an odious, pathetic figure. Like Condi Rice, Thomas's canon derives from continuing to suck the intellectual teat of a white person who was once a mentor (An original idea?! From Condi or Clarence?! Adjust your medication). But what struck me about the review was the extremity of the racial pathology evident in Thomas's apparent take on his life.

One passage in particular screams I NEED HELP:

As a child in the Deep South, I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along," he writes. "My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.

When you decide that the ACLU is more dangerous than The KKK and you're black? You have left Planet Reality. You've left it abruptly enough and completely enough that we have to conclude that you're going to be gone for a while... like maybe forever.

Here's what the country's premiere black jurist has to say about the effect affirmative action had on the one credential that gave him entrée to the position he holds:

I'd graduated from one of America's top law schools -- but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value.

Did they rig his tests? Did they pass him the answers to the DC Bar Exam? Did he get the same dispensation George W. got at Yale? Since Clarence Thomas his own self considers his Yale Law Degree a sham, how does he drag his ass to the bench every day? How does he look in the mirror? Why hasn't he resigned and moved in with Ward Connerly?

Here's a passage about the night he learned of his confirmation:

But by the time he was confirmed, he said, the prize meant little. Instead of watching the Senate roll call, he drew himself a bath. His wife came to tell him he had been confirmed 52 to 48.

"Whoop-dee-damn-doo," Thomas writes.

Where to begin? The effects of realizing that you have to live out your existence as a black person in America can be enormous. You can go with "Oh, well! What The hell!" or you can curse God like Captain Kirk cursed Khan for leaving him so completely in the shit. Thomas has chosen the latter.

I actually feel sorry for Thomas. Someone very close to me has the same attitude toward black people as Thomas does. To this person, black people--his own people--are dangerous and scary and the source of life's deepest and most original pains. I can say from personal experience that the faces of my earliest pains--my deepest, most traumatic, rawest humiliations--those faces were black. Do I avoid black people? No. (The man I admire second-most after my brother had a rough time growing up black and he's a bit difficult to communicate with, but he has a heart of gold and I love him as I love my brother, but don't tell him).

It's still really tough for some black people in this country. The Jena 6 and my previously-noted BillO Bloviations (see archive) are all I need to say on the subject for now.

Racism is what brought us to Iraq. Racism is what has us threatening Iran. As my history teacher at the College of San Mateo, Dr. Charles Haight, taught me, "follow the money!" Who benefits from racism? Who benefits from denying entire populations their dreams simply on the basis of appearance and how do they benefit?

Race is a lie. A vicious lie. Clarence Thomas is Exhibit A. I'm sorry for him.

UPDATE: I saw Clarence Thomas's interview with 60 Minutes last night. It was the portrait of a person being eaten alive from the inside. I hadn't heard the title of his book when I first posted. The title--My Grandfather's Son--obviously is freighted with Freudian implications. We'll let his analysts sort those out. But it sticks out for me because it brings to mind Ron White's Dictum: You Can't Fix Stupid. No matter what Thomas means, the title is about his father--the one that abandoned him. Can't be read any other way. Sorry.

Visitors

2007-09-26T18:31:00.000-10:00

I had a very pleasant lunch with my friends from the mainland, Gary Brainin and his wife Sandy. They spent most of the day tooling around the island and stood at the southernmost point in the United States--a feat I haven't accomplished in almost six years of residency. We ate at Quinn's, a restaurant very near the pier where tenders from the ocean liners land.

It was nice to see familiar faces and catch up with the doings of some of our friends from the Usenet group ba.singles (hi, everybody!) The sky was steely grey and it rained like the devil in some places, but the Brainins hit a good number of the high points on the island. It was a joy to see them.

Get It Out Of My Head!

2007-09-26T00:29:00.000-10:00

If you click on the following link and can't get the tune off your mind, let me say here and now that I warned you!

Bananaphone

BillO Goes To Harlem

2007-09-25T16:39:00.000-10:00

Well, hush my mouf! Bill O'Reilly just found out that black people's restaurants are just as nice and normal as everyone else's! Bill's sojourn to Sylvia's in Harlem was a revelation:

And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin.

Now, at this point, Juan Williams--one of Fox News's house negroes--should have been up in BillO's face like a father whose kid just dropped an f-bomb in church. After all, O'Reilly was talking to and about him.

We all know O'Reilly's a right-wing fathead; it's his job. But this was a bell-ringer. (BTW, if you get cable, find Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. He's smart, he's progressive, and he's got his foot so far up BillO's ass, that Bill can smell shoe polish). But it was Juan Williams's duty to call Bill on his patently racist comments--not enable them. To enable ignorance that thick and creamy is to condone it.

Maybe we can get Juan one of those little jockey outfits and a lantern and put him on BillO's lawn. He can't do any worse than he's doing already.

Update: Catch New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's Monday column about Congress's denial of voting rights for the residents of the District of Columbia. Also, the New York Times has discontinued its Times Select subscription "feature." Catch Herbert, Paul Krugman, and Frank Rich when you can.

Aloha!

2007-09-23T19:20:00.000-10:00

Welcome to MacDaffy's House, my entry into the blogosphere.

What will we talk about? Politics, music, screenwriting, Apple, and any other subject that comes over the transom. I'm an active participant in Salon's Table Talk discussion (mostly in the White House threads).

A special aloha to Feyabe, who just lost her partner Howard to a bout with cancer. She sent a blog that carried pictures and comments from his memorial. It was quite touching and is--quite possibly--one impetus for my creating this place. I'm hoping that this blog can be a true community for the exchange of ideas, rants, information, empathy, sympathy, and action.

Condolences to Feyabe and all those who love Howard, aloha oe to Howard himself, and--again--welcome.