buzz twang

What I see in NYC. :Head of a Bes image. Egyptian God. At the Metropolitam Museum of Art.

What I see in NYC. The York Barber Shop on Lexington Avenue.

For Schmulik on a cold Tuesday. Great song by CSNY. The first time I heard this song, (really listened to it) was sometime in the early 80′s, I had my first Walkman, and was standing in the rain waiting for the bus. I can still see the headlights reflecting off the shimmering wet street…

What I see in NYC. Hot dog stands in front of the Apple store on 5th Avenue.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins covers Tom Waits’ classic Heart Attack & Vine… One of the greatest songs ever…

Been quietly absorbing much of the reaction and continuing reaction to the Obama election and the unfolding reality of an Obama presidency. And, am (as always) probably overly fascinated with the reaction of the right wing extremist crowd.

It’s interesting that the dyed in the wool “Obama is a Terrorist/Marxist/Muslim/Arab/Negro/Liberal/Socialist/AntiChrist/Manchurian Candidate/Traitor/Not One of Us” crowd still pounds that bent and rusty nail harder and harder into the pulpy wood with great fervor as if we didn’t hear it the first 100,344,305 times they blurted it out, or that in the words of their fearless leader, the outgoing president of the USA, it’s a matter of: “Sometimes you have to catapult the propaganda” and thus, they hold out a glimmer of hope that it just might finally work if they keep on hammering and hammering and hammering and hammering and hammering….

They present incorrect badly thought out information, (comparing Connecticut and Hawaii birth certificates for example) and even when it is proven incorrect (by multiple sources, again and again), they simply plow ahead as if that truthful information doesn’t exist.

It’s deeply sad and frightening. The level of basic mental separation from reality is deeply alarming. Death threats against Obama are acceptable to these people.

Then there’s those that are wandering around in the desert, looking for a happy meal, anything really, but finding only sand and camel dung, desperatively searching for ammuninition, yet the reality of the times calls for food. Because you can’t eat bullets, or vitrol. In the end, all they really have is their hate. They certianly don’t have any ideas that will help America.

They are indeed, “Losin’ it.”

And, Obama is rising above it all. That’s leadership.

The Rolling Stones, from one of the great rock and roll movies ever… Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones… I saw it for the first time when I was 18 at the now gone 8th Street Playhouse, where the Rocky Horror Picture Show (yup, saw it there too.) became famous…

Yeah.

Dougas Rushkoff has a forward looking post up on his blog regarding Obama and change and the hard work that lay ahead and he makes a number of important points, including:

No, the opportunity is not to create the next great website for modeling bottom-up community activity, but to go and actually do the stuff. It is to participate the public school, work towards alternative energy possibilities, design and install bicycle lanes, argue at work for equal pay for women, assist local agriculture projects, develop complementary currencies and non-profit credit unions.

My faith in the change we need will be strengthened by my own and others initiative. Obama can inspire us, and even remove some of the obsolete regulations preventing progressive activities from taking hold. His ability to lead us out of this mire into a brighter future will be limited, however, by our own capacity to engage.

This cuts to some very important realities that we must deal with.

Real progress and solutions always require a good amount of change and innovation, both sorely lacking the past several years in our leadership from the White House and the private sector. Most of it rooted in a lethargy born of fear, intimidation, arrogance and eliminationism.

The truth of the matter is glaringly simple: conservatism is about maintaining the financial and emotional status quo, and brought to it’s extreme (as we’ve seen in the Theocratic and NeoCon movements) it becomes about fighting any change at all, no matter the outcome, with hatred and lies and a grab for power. Under such strict cognitive processes, monetary concerns and real issues – whether of national security or social security – take a back seat to ideology and the pursuit of power. And therein lay a great amount of chaos, decay, myopia and stagnation. It’s deeply ironic coming from the party of Lincoln, and also quite tragic. The legislative and policy record of the Bush White House will be the final historical testament to a mind set gone awry, a movement of nothingness and disaster run amok.

And, keep this in mind: the “solution” from the conservatives that will surely come forward in the coming days will be to rebrand the same old as new and improved. As conservative pundit and writer David Frum said recently:

One thing that will certainly happen is a fundamentalist response…”‘If only we had been more consistently conservative, none of this would have happened; there’s still a conservative voting majority out there, and Bush alienated them with his too-centrist policies and various deviations from conservative orthodoxy; McCain was obviously unacceptable; and if the voters turned down ham and eggs, it’s because they wanted double ham and double eggs.” That will be one view. How fast, how dramatically, and what form the alternative will take—that, no, we have a deeper problem—I can’t predict. But it will come.

And, it’s already happening. Karl Rove and others have been on the disinfo campaign, touting a version of what Frum states, as has Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

It can, to some degree, be a mild amusement, and chalked up to the rants and silly gyrations of a political party in its final death throes. But, considering the level and severity of the issues facing us not only as a nation but as a planet, such an attitude is not only foolish, but downright dangerous. People are struggling. And, all indications are that it is going to get worse before it gets better.

The success or failure of any civilization is predicated upon the success or failure of certain social structures, not the least of which is the ability of the masses to supply themselves with essentials – food and shelter – in reality, and the perception of what lay ahead is extremely important.

The great success of Mao Zedong in a country of a billion over the course of decades was initialized primarily by a deep understanding of that reality – people need to eat and have a roof over their heads – and the movement continued with great success (for those in power at least) for generations (and still does to some degree) because it was extended into an oppressive movement in order to maintain itself. The first move of all power structures is to attempt to solidify that structures existence – to secure it into perpetuity. And, that is a paradox that literally creates a scenario by which real change and solutions are sorely hampered. Change becomes obsolete. And, in the case of the Cultural Revolution, illegal.

Of course, the very nature of human social groups predicates that all power structures will inevitably collapse under their own weight, since solidifying power and creating change and progressive solutions for the masses – ensuring people have enough to eat and a place to sleep – are not always conducive. Which is usually what happens on a much more rapid time frame here in the USA, since we have elections. At least, that’s the theory.

IMHO, people of progressive attitude look to their leaders for good ideas, and the sharing of those ideas. Just like what we do in forums, and blogs and community gatherings. And, Obama is both a symbol and a working example of that.

The great failure of George W. Bush, if you strip away all of the politics and the hubris, is that he never asked the American people to assist in the struggle that lay before us, he never engaged the great minds and powerful work ethics of the people to deal with the looming and serious issues that were literally laying themselves at our feet begging to be dealt with. He only asked us to spend our money and shop. And, shop we did!

The results are crystal clear for anyone with an ounce of common sense to see.

Real solutions require real work, as Douglas points out.

And, work we shall.

What I see in NYC. The antiquated circa 1950's voting machine where you turn the lever to vote then move the red handle to ppunch the card. A volunteer then turns another lever outside the booth to reset as you exit. whew. Not too crowded but a line is begining to form.

Am off to vote very soon, and will write a short report on that, but wanted to address a few issues for the record.

The word of the day for the next few years will be “legitimacy”, as the ideological right wing bottom feeders who’ve been in power the past seven and a half years, overseeing the debacle that is their deceptive and pathetic response to 9/11 (from Iraq to Afghanistan to the TSA), the abomination that was their reaction to Hurricane Katrina, the politicization of national security and Constitutional rights and law, the over deregulation of the financial industry, the corruption, the bankruptcy of the American economic system and in the coup de grace: the McPalin campaign, likely the most ineptly run in history, and the most egregiously negative. Nake no bones about it:

They will make an attempt to establish that Barack Obama’s presidency is not legitimate. It will be the right wing clarion call.

Let it be said here and now that the right wing extremists will place their hatred and ideology before the public good, before properly thought out and intelligent debate, policy and solutions. Let it be said here and now that we shall see the right wing extremists of this nation publicly attempt to destroy and make movements to sabotage any and all forward movement in regard to any policy that comes from an Obama Administration. You think the Clinton years were fraught with acrimony and hate from the right? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

All for the sake of their precious conservative egos and ideological inner processors which has no off switch. In their view there is no such thing as a good idea or a logical plan of attack if it is not cut from their right wing extremeist ideological cloth. Unfortunately, they simply have an old list of tried and true gimmicks that simply do not work anymore. And, they will cling to it like a cat in a bathtub clinging to your arm.

Gratefully, most American’s have seen through the nonsense.

Yesterday, David Neweirt wrote a prescient post on this over at Crooks and Liars. An excerpt:

Facts don’t matter to people like the Putz and Fund, though. They’re only interested in propagating right-wing bullshit. These guys are setting the table for after Tuesday.

We can count, I’m sure, on four years of hearing how Obama stole this election. After all, the one thing they can’t stand is to admit they actually got their asses kicked.

Read the entire post.

And, like clockwork, this AM, what do we see on Election Day? Right wing blogs are already claiming voter fraud, handled so ineptly that even Fox News can’t support the story. Yup.

(Christy Hardin Smith over at Campaign Silo nails it.)

It has begun. Note how they employ the guilt by association tactic, coupled with generality, (that is: if it’s going on in one place, the entire election is suspect.) Get your druthers on. And go vote!