Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Shaima al Awadhi

A mother is dead at 38. She leaves five school aged children behind, orphans. Her teenage daughter found her beaten almost to death in her own home. The killer left behind a note: terrorist go home.
When she fled Saddam's Iraq 20 years ago she must have thought that she and her family would be safe in America. She surely never dreamed that the ghosts of Hitler and the KKK would be waiting to take her life.
She was murdered for the crime of being foreign, alien, darker skinned, worshipping Allah, wearing a head scarf.
When you listen to the news on the radio or cable this week you learn that we have yet to exhaust the subject of the Trayvon Martin case but you learn nothing about this entire family being destroyed in California. Why not? Where is the million hijab march? Where are the coast to coast rallies for justice? Whither the endless television coverage of every detail?
Maybe because there is no great controversy? No weird gun laws or police misconduct? Do we really need controversy and manufactured conflict in order to demand justice for a dead woman? Is that what passes for journalism now? That's the way it looks from here and it's a damned shame.
Rest in peace, Shaima.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

James Cameron

The creator of Avatar spent three hours exploring the floor of the Marianas today... I think we're not appreciating what a true genius he is.
Wow

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Zimmerman

George Zimmerman is a cop nerd. There are many kinds of nerds in the world. Star Wars and Star Trek nerds, Civil War nerds and D&D nerds, Harry Potter nerds, the list is endless. I was in the Army with a Special Forces nerd. He had the SF patch sewed on his civilian jacket and baseball hat and he never shut up about how he was going to go off to Bragg and join such and such Army Unit and be one of the baddest of the bad. It took about thirty seconds talking to him to figure out he was all talk. You knew that he would be lucky to finish boot camp and sure enough he washed out. So George Zimmerman is another kind of nerd who attached himself to an honorable subculture to wrap himself in the glory of it. I bet he has a police radio scanner so he can listen to the radio transmissions and watches endless police TV shows and movies and there is no way he possesses the self awareness and judgement and faculties and sensitivity to complex social situations and the ability to function under pressure that a good policeman simply must have. Now these shortcomings are no sin. I presume myself to be similarly limited in many ways and if I was in a high pressure career like policing I would surely make mistakes and somebody might get hurt.
But I am not running around with a 9mm.
And I don't view black people as people who "always get away with it" or "fucking coons"
And I would never track anybody down and get into an altercation that got a teenager killed.
I don't believe that George Zimmerman is a cold blooded killer. But I know, I KNOW that he's a foolish imbecile of a man who was viewing Trayvon Martin through some very dark glasses and that was the genesis of the tragedy in Florida this past month.
Tragic.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Roadside truck repairs

My radiator hose blew out on me today. I was inching through a bad traffic jam near Little Rock and started smelling the coolant. I got my rig off the road and sure enough there's a huge blowout in the short hose right on top of the engine. I called work and let them know what happened. They asked if I could get the truck off the highway and we decided to try the trusty old duct tape temporary repair. Coolant was all over everything under the hood, a slippery greasy mess. By then dusk was falling and I was juggling tape and the flashlight while standing on top of the engine block. The bad part was climbing back down without falling and breaking my collarbone. But I managed well enough. The worst part is that I fear I've ruined my pants by getting the black stuff all over the legs. I added a gallon of water that I had standing by and was ready to try to make the fifteen mile ride to the next exit. I made it with a couple of stops to let the motor cool down. So now I'm parked at a quiet truckstop in Arkansas west of Memphis. There's a shop here and I hope they'll be able to get me on my way in the morning.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

City

My favorite novel is a hard question to pin down, but sometimes my answer would be City by Clifford Simak. It's really a series of short stories that tell of a future Earth populated by intelligent dogs that sit around the campfire trying to make sense of great questions like What is a city? What is a war? What is a man? Where did the robots come from? The stories in the book are the dogs' legends and creation myths told with an immense melancholia. The stories tell of humanity's withdrawal from one another into states of isolation and retreat until we abandon Earth completely. The mood is conveyed with the great subtle skill of a grandmaster science fiction author and City is unforgettable.


Friday, March 2, 2012

Limbaugh

I have been interested in talk radio for years, I remember a forerunner to Rush Limbaugh who had a local show in Fayetteville called Wrestle with Kwessel, a very edgy conservative host who didn't really get a lot of disagreement on his show. I remember Limbaugh's television show and the embarrassingly monochromatic (white) audience he had back in the mid '90s, he spent hours relentlessly blasting president Clinton.
I think the whole Republican establishment is going through a crisis of purpose and the firestorm of controversy that started a month ago over The Pill is a reflection of this crisis. Limbaugh calling this appealing and wholesome seeming woman a slut, prostitute and all the other vitriol he's been hurling at her reflects on him more than her. I think the crisis started a decade ago and it's growing. Bush started it or was a reflection of it. He left his party in shambles and the wreckage isn't being put back together again. The only real purpose and passion we see from them is about keeping taxes low on rich people and the kind of divisive culture war brush fires we're seeing playing out in the new controversy over the Pill.
Limbaugh particularly seems lost at sea this week. The audience he's playing to is getting older and the good old days he's trying to bring back are more and more remote. He has long played the game of ginning up outrage over his antics and now that his sponsors are bailing out on him, I think it's going to begin to look like an unmistakable trend. Limbaugh's Republican Party is a regional party that's increasingly irrelevant to modern political discourse in our nation. They might raise fair objections sometimes to a government policy but they have nothing positive to offer our country now.