Nearly eight full months after being shot in the head by a political terrorist (who could hear the dog whistle from his house), Rep. Gabrielle Giffords made a surprise appearance today to vote for the debt ceiling plan.  I draw two conclusions from this event: first, if the extent of potential human depravity is staggering, the capacity of human courage and compassion is equally great…something which is deeply encouraging in often difficult times.  Second, if Giffords could make this kind of an effort to attend this vote, there must be something she saw of value in it.

And indeed there was: the ending of a hostage crisis, the establishment of some basic sanity to political discourse, and a plan which–shockingly!–seems to have, again, left Boehner and company with a bitter taste in their mouths.  As this article from The People’s View succinctly demonstrates, in the end this plan is a bad loss for Republicans, and begins a long overdue process of adding back two critical factors into the American public discourse: taxes can be not only acceptable but often desirable, when fairly distributed (and we have a long way to go to reach that state of affairs), and the absurdly bloated defense budget is long, long overdue for trimming–nay, slashing–nay, clear-cutting.  If the debt ceiling debate produced nothing else, these two outcomes would have been enormously beneficial, but as Deaniac from TPV points out, it produced much more.

None of this is to say that this is a delightful state of affairs, or that negotiating with irrational hostage takers is a fun way to spend time which ought be spent on figuring out how to address critical concerns about foreign policy, the environment, clean energy, civil rights, restoring economic fairness and creating jobs.  But it is to say that again, as usual, President Obama has turned something disastrous into something potentially game-changing.

Courage from Rep. Giffords.  Competence from President Obama.  Such things require commitment from us–a commitment I hope most Americans will have the wisdom to provide in the weeks and months ahead.

Blogger, know thyself?

From The People’s View, a fascinating article about where the Glenn Greenwalds and Jane Hamshers of the world–you know, the ones who became liberal when a black man took office and dared to create and sustain progressive policies without consulting them first–get their respective bread buttered.  The next time self-described left wingers start throwing the term “corporatist” around within earshot, ask them if they’ve seen any investment disclosure statements from the Huffington Post lately.

Give a Man a Quarter and He Can Play One Game, Teach Him to Write in Basic and He Can Feed a Village (Really), They Don’t Make Video Games the Way They Used To (and Get Off My Lawn!), Russ Can’t Help Falling In Love…Again…, Is This the Text That Launched a Thousand Ships?, How Rabbits From Certain Places Can Help You Recover Your Voice, How Many Meppers Does It Take to Get One Mepper a Date, Angry Pictures are Angry, and Chemistry = Not Fat.

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From time to time, I use this space to relate my frustration with the trappings of capitalism and its various profit-motivated aggravations. It is a constant wonder to me how badly people will treat each other when small pieces of dirty green paper are on the line.

I’ve banked with Wells Fargo for about a decade and a half at this point, and have been able to avoid all manner of fees and annoyance because I have a grandfathered account that’s almost older than the debate kids I coach. So while this mainline banking institution has hiked fees and lined its pockets with all manner of shady nickelings and dimings, I’ve enjoyed remarkably simple, direct, cheap financial services.

Until this week. When suddenly, with the end of the month, a $7.50 fee for using bill-pay shows up. I admit that I’d been leery of signing up for bill-pay as a new aspect of my free checking when I did it six months ago, but I did it six months ago amid promises of absolutely no fees ever I swear, so I went with it. And never got charged. And that was all well and good.

So I march into my local Wells Fargo (formerly Wachovia) and ask them why I was suddenly charged without warning or notice. And they tell me that $7.50 is just the cost of bill-pay. And I relate that I’d never been charged before. And they look with consternation at the proof this is true. And then realize that my account is a 14-year-old fossil of a bygone era.

And then they tell me the whopper of all-time to explain why I’ve suddenly been charged fees: “The federal government recently outlawed free checking accounts.”

They did what?

So I started poking around the Internet and Googling some things. And I’ve come upon articles like this that explain why free checking is fading. Not, however, why it’s illegal. Only why it’s illegal to try to bilk free checking customers out of additional moneys, and thus why banks no longer find it profitable to offer free checking. I can’t wait to go back into Wells Fargo and tell them what the reality of the situation is.

They tried to sell me a new account, of course, with bells and whistles. I instead cancelled bill-pay, got my fee refunded, and asked, in detail, whether other mystery random fees would start to pop up on my long-held account. They assured me absolutely not. So we’ll see. For now, they’re not forcing closure on my “illegal” account and that’s good enough for me. Since they haven’t outlawed the post office yet, I’m going back to checks and stamps.

Greg Runs the Gauntlet of the Spa Castle, Uniforms Vs. Au Natural: Fight!, To Every Horde, Turn, Turn, Turn, The Horror of Red Bumperman, The Joy of Having One’s Skin Ripped Off, and Zombie Kings.

Download Mep Report #125

Mini Cup Round 3 (Brandeis A vs Brandeis/BU) from Will Crocker on Vimeo.

Warning: You may need an attention span for this.

Any other divisive political footballs only exist to distract you from the fact that we are funneling mountains and mountains of currency directly into the machinery of destruction. Our lives are, for the most part, an attempt to rationalize and deny and ignore the atrocities that are being committed with our tacit consent. Unless you are actively doing something to oppose the constant growth of our Military Industrial Complex, your presence serves to bolster it. Your taxes bolster it. Your votes for major party politicians bolsters it. Your purchases at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target bolster it. You are an accessory to murder by default. If you don’t like this new association, then do something to change it.

I’ve always felt the turning point in the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign was the moment when the sight of then-candidate Barack Obama after wrapping up the Democratic nomination was almost immediately contrasted with now-failed-candidate and angry man John McCain, in front of a sickening green background and performing to an audience which sounded more like a canned laugh track, giving a nasty, pitiful screed about the man who would trounce him in the election only a few months later.  One man represented the best of what America would like to imagine itself as–intelligent, broad-minded, appealing to the better angels of our nature–and the other represented the impossibly tired bitterness of a rapidly disappearing part of our society.  The choice, and thus result, was never more stark.

Fast forward twenty-six months, and we find ourselves dealing with a massive tragedy–not because of the number of people killed and injured (how many Iraqi and Afghani citizens have died every single day during America’s adventures overseas?), but because of what the attack says about the level and intentions of our political discourse and our overwhelming obsession with guns.  And just as before, we’re presented with a contrast.  On one hand we have the half-term governor of Alaska, whose defining characteristic is how little time she spends doing any one job, sitting in front of an empty stone fireplace (I assume most of the camera crew has already packed up and headed home) and describing how much it hurts to be a victim.  Not Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who lies in intensive care in an Arizona hospital after being shot in an assassination attempt, of course, but Sarah Palin, who has put aside her dog whistle for the moment to discuss her First Amendment rights (she’s left Sharon Angle to discuss the Second Amendment ones) and avoiding “blood libel” (I’ll leave it to her speechwriter to explain whether the horrifically inappropriate term was used out of intention or shocking stupidity.  I’m sure it’s unfair even to accuse the speaker of anything other than the best possible motivations, after all.)

On the other hand we have now-President Obama’s speech, invoking not the politically driven aspects of what happened (which I’ve discussed elsewhere) but the things which matter most at a time like this–what should ultimately bring us together.  While Palin spent the majority of her speech feeling sorry…for herself, President Obama spent the entirety of his feeling sorry for others–most notably the nine year old girl Christina-Taylor Green, whose only crime was in believing that she would be safe outside a Safeway with a member of Congress.  “I want us to live up to her expectations,” he said, in a powerful reminder of what ought to matter most to all of us.  One speaker appealed to her rapidly fading base, raging against the dying of their light; the other appealed to everyone, as he always does, as he always has since entering the American consciousness.

It was another reminder of how very different the two philosophies are, and another reminder of how very different our country would be had the first one–me first, guns second, and damn all the rest of you who don’t agree–won out over the second–others first, put away the weapons, and join together in common purpose to repudiate hatred.  It’s a contrast which Sarah Palin will never understand, for she lacks the interest in anyone other than herself to recognize it.  But although the conflict is ongoing, it is a limited one, for her supporters have already lost the war only they wished to fight.  Nothing made that clearer than listening to the rhetoric of an exceptional President again, for yet another time, soaring above violence and appealing to hope rather than despair.

As Robert Shrum put it: “At the end of the day, after listening to the president, we’ll know why he’s president and she never will be.”  It’s like comparing apples and oranges.  And as always, there simply is no comparison to be made between those things.

Beyond expressing my sorrow for the lost and injured and all those affected by this tragedy, I have little to say about the horrific events in Arizona yesterday except one thing.  Regular Mep readers / listeners will know all of us here put a high value on communication and the power of rhetoric; the two greatest speakers of the twentieth century (arguably) were Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler, and I don’t think anyone needs a cheat sheet to determine which person pursued the good and which the evil.  What yesterday conclusively, definitively proves is that rhetoric is not an unalloyed good.  It is a neutral tool, and it has consequences. 

When a group of people, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, spew the same kind of language–”target,” “reload,” “crosshairs,” “bullets of justice,” and on and on–it is only a matter of time until the consequences are felt.  And calling for civility “on both sides,” when the simple truth is that one side calls for violent, bloody revolution and the other calls for immediate legal remedy, is a colossal and shameful cop-out.  Yesterday’s events are the absolutely predictable result of the dog whistles the Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, and Sarah Palins of the world blow at every opportunity only to raise their hands in mock horror when something (vandalizing property, death threats, shooting 18 people including a federal judge and a congresswoman–execution style, in the head) happens as a result.

Don’t be fooled.  Don’t allow political leadership to make the false equivalency between the rhetoric “on both sides.”  No such equivalency exists.  Don’t allow pundits to claim “it’s a stretch” that publishing a map with crosshairs over specific people and waving around automatic rifles to get the approval of a gun-obsessed culture leads directly to violence.  It isn’t a stretch.  This is more than shouting fire in a crowded theater.  It’s taking a can of gasoline and a box of matches, setting them down next to the theater and giving the people outside a meaningful look before turning your back and walking away.

It’s criminal.  It’s evil.  But most of all it is absolutely, completely, utterly predictable, and the purveyors of such shameless rhetoric know it.  It is up to us and the rest of our supposedly civil society to call them out on it before they bring that society crashing down upon us.  Speech has consequences.  It’s time we acknowledge not only the effects of violence–but the cause.

Hell yeah, I want my pony!

This article at The People’s View should be required reading for all those interested in discovering what some parts of both the right and left of the blogosphere have to gain in trying to destroy (fortunately unsuccessfully, I think) President Obama–or, more accurately, what they have to gain in upping the ante on false outrage in a public forum.  (Here’s a hint: it’s the same thing anti-corporatists are always claiming (often rightly) is the end goal of every politician.)  One wonders how much time MLK or Gandhi would have had for this kind of kabuki.

Presuming that you’re an American reading this, the odds are fairly strong that you heard this juicy tidbit in the internet/sports rumor mill today. The story is about a woman who is adored for her ability to play pretend, who filed for divorce from her husband, who is adored for his ability to throw a sphere into a standardized hoop.

Unless you are a facebook friend of mine, or happen to follow CERN’s twitter stream, you almost certainly weren’t appraised of this story today. That one told of the most complicated device ever constructed by your species, spawned something that, until fairly recently, was thought to be a purely theoretical type of stuff and sustained it for longer than it had ever been sustained.

I would love to say it was a good day for the human race. I’m not so sure.

The story that mattered today, by the way, was about the creation and sustenance of a particle of anti-matter. This type of negative matter is so difficult to see and/or create, because it literally annihilates normal matter when the two come into contact. And it was only by virtue of the most powerful magnetic array on the planet that the CERN scientists were able to stabilize one atom of anti-hydrogen for about a tenth of a second. Perhaps a standard news-soundbyte is still a bit long to discuss something that occurred so briefly.

It probably didn’t help the story’s stateside success, that America didn’t accomplish this feat. Certainly Americans were present, but credit goes to an internationally assembled team of scientists that run the Large Hadron Collider 100 meters below Geneva, Switzerland. It is unlikely that Americans would be able to fund and build such a facility in the first place, given our relative awkwardness is doing things below ground.

I’m going to save my ‘humanity is an ignorant, obese, and doomed species’ rant for another day. I just want you to think, for a moment, about the priorities of a culture that readily disseminates information about celebrity marital infidelity, and goes out of its way to avoid even mentioning a once-in-a-generation scientific achievement. Does this sound like a healthy culture to you? Does this sound like a culture that fearlessly bounds into the future ready to evolve and adapt and meet challenges on a planetary scale? Or does it sound like a culture that is so addicted to sensation that it dollops scoops of scandal onto an already overfilled plate of materialism, demagoguery, and myth?

If our attention is constantly focused on the wrong things, then, culturally, we’re learning the wrong things. And if we’re learning the wrong things, we’re not getting smarter. And if we’re not getting smarter, we’re probably not evolving particularly well. And if we’re not evolving, I’m not sure what it is we think we’re doing with our existence – other than squandering it.

Article first published as Matter vs Anti-Matter on Technorati.