Saturday, December 31, 2011

Make One Thing Sacrosanct in 2012…


Another year is about to be come an irretrievable part of the past, joining all other years in memory, in the imagination.
It’s customary to make a wish for the coming year, and so I’ll make mine known here. In 2012 I would like a bill proposed to make the camera, whether a video camcorder or a cell phone’s tiny sensor an inviolable and untouchable personal possession.
Every time authorities block a camera’s view, or confiscate a recording device, they do so because they are about to do something they don’t want seen by others… they are about to do something wrong. No police officer, national guardsman, agent… -no one funded by my tax dollars has the right to cover their tracks by stopping someone from recording reality.
It would be great if there were a law on the books that protected the right to record, photograph and expose, -in a sense the right to bear a camera (the way many in America insist laws should protect the right to bear arms.)
Just a thought, just a wish I have for 2012.
Happy New Year.
-SJ

Sunday, December 25, 2011

"You Can Get Jail Time for Killing a Child Molester."



File that under the many things I learned this year, -another long year where at certain points I felt stupefied at all the things improbable that were made real. Some things I just learned over again, like making a proper Windsor knot before the Power Considine wedding, or the limitations of lenses in photographing moving subjects and even static ones.

Bin Laden was cornered and shot dead; -so much for ever-present, omnipotent Fu Manchu-like super villains twirling their mustaches. They can get shot in the head just like anyone else. As for the foreign policy and militaristic overreach they inspire or enable,
-that’s harder to kill. That’s our ongoing war to fight as a citizenry if we care to heed President Eisenhower's warnings.

I learned the battle against what we call Fascism will never end. Tomorrow’s "Dick Cheney" is out there, -he’s probably in college right now, learning how to be this century’s great offstage dictator, although like all his predecessors he’ll be missing some fundamental thing that’ll tip us off. He’ll have some inhuman reflex, -like the inability to not shoot his friends in the face while on vacation, -or that curious inability to smile without letting you know he’s the devil’s own.

I found out that American administrations can actually end wars and occupations, if that’s what they suddenly decide they want to do. The desire to "do" can uncomplicate things mighty fast. The Iraq war Xmas 2011 deadline was nice to be sure, but how about two Xmases ago? -Or three, or four.... I don’t know that there’s been any satisfactory explanation as to why now as opposed to earlier times other than vague statements about "stability."
Is it ever to early or too late to end a war that was started on a lie?
-No. Never.
Remember to say "Welcome home."

Currently News Corp. is embroiled in a phone hacking scandal centered on its disregard for privacy and civil rights, and Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are still referred to as people who work in the business of journalism? I found that the word "news"can be thrown at any enterprise; -kind of the way you can found a religion on the premise of a flying spaghetti monster, (or a dead Jewish rabbi-carpenter on a cross.) People can try and de-legitimize the legacy for the New York Times for its support of the Iraq War (The Left) or its relentless backtrack on the war and reportage on the Yellow Cake claims (The Right) but there is nothing as destructive to the concept of journalism as the fact the FCC will do nothing about the fact that Fox "News" Channel, includes the term "news" in its name and product description.
They are an opinion and disinformation network whose focus is Right wing, wealth-protecting elitist propaganda.
All they can do is deny it, as they deny so many other things on a 24 hour cycle.

Having a Black president and a Black Attorney general doesn’t mean the Constitution is any safer. The Patriot Act provisions were extended... And there’s that business of guns going to Mexico.

There are still a lot of stupid people loose in the world emboldened by the "me-too" culture of the early 1980s that continues today, bigger than ever. Misinformed people aren’t ever confronted if they are angry enough. Opinions are given the weight of fact. A lie can be given the same authority of a fact when no one has the guts to point it out. People’s stated beliefs are accepted as counter arguments to reason in America, -and around the world, religious fundamentalism continues to spread like a wildfire of cancers. People still focus and get fired up about stupid and inconsequential things. -Case in point, this blog, founded by MyCue 23 where we have discussed every subject under the sun, for better or for worse and drawn some heavy arguments from self-perceived adversaries, and people who just out-and-out don’t like what we have to say, has had one post that stands above all in terms of total numbers of visitors and vitriolic reaction:


You’ll note I didn’t bother responding to a single one of those replies because frankly, they speak for and refute themselves quite adequately. I was going to post a follow up to that post on his birthday called, "Michael Jackson: Baby Fucker." but whatever people may think about me or MyCue 23, we don’t post on here to upset or antagonize readers, even the people we don’t agree with. The fact that a post about Michael Jackson that points out the obvious problems with how his celebrity immunized him from due process of allegations (that for example recently ended the tenure of coaches at Penn State and Syracuse) drew such emotion and passion (and typographical errors) but not a single cogent argument against my notion that Jackson would likely have ended up in jail had he not been so talented, so famous and so wealthy (like many other celebrities and artists) really says it all, and frankly proves my point. I saw no need to write "Michael Jackson: Baby Fucker" this year.

Well, there’s always 2012...

But the greatest thing I learned this year, a small, precious thing I had long forgotten since I last marched on Washington DC in 1989, was the simple fact that the people have the power. For better or for worse. This year, in Wisconsin, in Cairo, in Athens, in downtown Manhattan, people defied every mechanism of control that manages our daily oppression and started a new era of defiance, freedom, visibility and citizenship that cannot be rolled back. I learned that the words I read in a comic book more than twenty years ago, were more than just an empty, theatrical threat, -but a suggestion as to what our responsibilities to each other really are as a society, and as a world.

A merry Christmas day, and happiest of holidays to you all.

-SJ

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Over.



Many will be home by Christmas. Iraq will begin a long drawn out process of assembling itself, possibly for the first time in the modern era as a centralized state and not a conglomeration of fiefdoms... -or not. They have a lot of dead to bury and account for.

I hope most of the armed services personnel can get on with life after being put in the service of an American administration’s opportunistic power grab disguised as preemptive foreign policy. The whole of government and the nation still owes these men and women an apology for risking their lives on a strange bet made by the Bush administration. The 9 year war in Iraq has now ended. It has ended after the spending of many more billions of dollars and after many more lives than were promised by President Bush in his stilted, laconic, bragging forecasts. No will hold him or the conflict’s true architects, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, accountable. They all got away with this crime free and clear. -That this war made millions for Dick Cheney’s friends in industry is never directly discussed, as if his refusal to answer any questions he doesn’t like could somehow operate as reasoning, justification, or policy.


The war is finally over Mr. Cheney. Thankfully, you and your Nixon-era cadre are finished too. I don’t think the country could survive another bout of what you call “keeping us safe,” incompetent, lying thieves that you are.


Merry Christmas.


-SJ