Tag: Friday Night at 8

As I am resting in my own confusion at the moment, refusing to be swayed by even the best of writing, waiting for my own view to emerge, fragments of visions appear.

Resting in my own confusion.  You see, I have no great position of power so I can freely confess I don’t know what to make of the country of which I am a citizen.

I’ve written a little bit about freedom of information — that accountability is not just catching crooks and putting them in jail, but allowing the citizens of this country to be truly informed.  We have become a wierd mix of incredible secrecy in the halls of power, be they government or private business and no privacy allowed for the rest of us.

That can’t be good.

I have no doubt that the Obama Administration will do everything they can to get as much information as they can about what has gone on these past eight years.  They really don’t have any choice, after all.  Each member of Obama’s cabinet will inherit a big giant awful stinky mess.  Consider the EPA, just as the first thing that came to mind.  Not only will whoever heads the EPA have to deal with the climate crisis and the effects of all the deregulation that has gone on while corporations have basically set policy for that Department, they will also have to confront criminal acts, at the very least politicization of the Department (a’la the DOJ) and at most … well I shudder to think.

This mix of criminality, corruption and incompetence will be quite a challenge.

My question, though, is whether or not they will share all this information with the rest of us.

I think that’s a very important issue.  We can’t make informed decisions as citizens if we are not informed.

Everybody’s talking about the center and where is the center and who comprises the center and then, of course, if you find yourself not included in this new definition of the center it’s like childhood games of musical chairs that moment everyone else grabbed a seat and you’re standing there, going “huh.”

Last one to the trough is a goober!

And the strange thing is I don’t really even know where the trough is or what’s in it or if I’d even like to partake.  But boy do I feel the vibe urging me onward like a madwoman at a sale at Century 21, the Downtown location, yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

Thing is, whenever  I get this feeling, that vibe pushing me along when I don’t recall asking for the shove, I get suspicious.

I start thinking, “is this some shiny distraction?”

Center.  Bah.

Obama speaks of getting past the divisive partisan politics that has sickened this country for so many years.  And he doesn’t only talk the talk, he embodies in his own behavior this philosophy.

Over at Daily Kos, Markos speaks of leaving everything on the road and of crushing the Republican machine.  He also defends being a surrogate in attacking Sarah Palin when both Obama and Biden could not:

I know I harp on this a lot, but it’s an important teaching moment — when Palin was picked, she debuted to sterling approval numbers. Her speech at the RNC was a big hit. She was beloved, and McCain’s numbers skyrocketed as a result. This site and others went on the attack. Republicans were busy trying to build a great story about Palin — hockey mom, “real”, ate mooseburgers, reformer, blah blah blah. We fought back discussing her record, her corruption, her lack of experience, and the results of her brand of “family values”.

Too many counseled that we should lay off her. It’s the curse of the Democrats — instead of trying to move public opinion, we’re constantly trying to “shift the debate to more favorable terrain”. That’s what happened when Democrats sold out our troops and voted for Bush’s war in Iraq. Supposedly, that would shift the terms of the debate from Iraq and terrorism, to more favorable domestic issues. Of course, that didn’t happen. We lost big in November 2002.

Then in 2004, we once again tried to move the debate from national security (Bush is too popular there!), which would be accomplished by nominating a war hero, taking that issue “off the table”. Well, Republicans, masters at this business, went straight after Kerry’s strongest attribute — his military service — and destroyed it via the Swiftboat stuff.

They even tried it this year, going after Obama’s strength — the passion of his supporters — by trying to brand him a “celebrity” on par with Paris Hilton. It wasn’t a bad line of attack until they undermined it with the selection of Palin, their very own “celebrity”.

This is all stuff out of Crashing the Gate and Taking on the System — our fear of targeting our opponents’ strongest points. Yet that’s how you win elections. So excuse me if I belabor the point, because it’s an important one.

People criticized us for taking on Palin, saying that we were ignoring McCain. But she was his biggest strength, and as such, it would be tough to knock McCain down if she wasn’t knocked down first.

Ultimately, we were successful beyond our wildest dreams — the McCain campaign has been forced to stash away Palin in Cheney’s undisclosed location, and even needs McCain to chaperone her during media interviews.

I remember when I, along with many other bloggers, were bitching about the endless stream of Palin diaries … yet many of those diaries, even the badly written ones, accomplished real citizen journalism in showing Palin’s weaknesses, most especially the corruption of her Governorship in Alaska.

Old family story.  My mother would never admit she was wrong about anything while we kids were growing up … with six children and little money, I guess she felt she had to be stronger than human or everything would fall apart.

Anyway, one day we were getting out our cereal for breakfast and my sister says, “Ma, this milk is spoiled!”

For some reason my mother didn’t want to hear that.

So she walked over to the table, drank some of the milk right out of the carton and proclaimed immediately “Sweet as sugar!”

A split second later the milk registered on her taste buds and she exclaimed “Sour as hell!”

It became a family joke, of course, used on many different occasions.

I once heard a woman say that having her purse stolen felt like being violated … not rape, but in the same vein.  Now with the giant handbags women wear in New York City, I’d say it’s more like having your car stolen.

I haven’t checked my 401(k) statement yet – I was going to, but I forgot my password.  It’s probably a lot less than it was.

I found it surreal that so many people made a point of saying that Sarah Palin’s “performance” in the debate last night was all right, she didn’t make any big gaffes, etc.

What have we come to that it boils down to “performance,” in the literal theatrical sense of the word?

The problem is, to me, that both McCain and Palin and the Republican machine are left only with lies, trying to cover that up with “performance”  — and in the meantime our Democratic nominees have no one to really debate with.

What it would have been like had there been a real challenge of ideas?  I can hardly imagine it, but I can enough to know that I’d have liked to see both Obama and Biden have to state their case, in specifics, as to why they were the better choice.

At this point, they are the only choice.  And the US is not the better for that.

No one brought up Katrina or the over 300 people still missing from Hurricane Ike, or how folks are coping with the floods recently deluging Iowa .  No one brought up the poor.  No one brought up immigration.  And that’s just a few examples.  They couldn’t … the entire debates and campaigns now are directed to the desirable “undecided voter.”

I understand that.  I understand that’s politics.  But there are consequences to this kind of politics.

If you wish to destroy, you need power.

If you wish to create you need power.

How do we tell the difference?  How do we know whether our actions destroy or create?  

‘Course if you worry too much about it then you probably won’t do anything at all, will become paralyzed and indecisive, “Do I dare to eat a peach?”  And no one wants that, I’d imagine.

In hexagram 34 of the I-Ching “Power of the Great,” the oracle claims that what is great and what is right are not separate, that real power has rightness inextricably woven into it.

So perhaps destroyers don’t have power, but merely force.  Perhaps those are two different things.

And maybe the way one obtains power has something to do with it as well.  Maybe if you go about trying to gain power the wrong way, you end up with only force.

With some dynamite anyone can blow something up, something way bigger than their own physical strength would allow.

We also have opportunities to gain personal power, which is why freedom is such an important right to us.  We want to make our own decisions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That is a kind of power as well,  I think.

(Peggy Lee, “Why Don’t You Do Right,” with Benny Goodman, etc., courtesy of YouTube’s nik 1297)

The rich want to get richer.  Rich, rich, rich.  Ah, the good life.

‘Course there’s old money and new money and probably a whole lot of other categories as well.

If you look, you’ll see.

If you listen, you’ll hear.

If you touch, you’ll feel

That’s what I’ve learned since posting here at Docudharma.

buhdy asked me to be a contributing editor to a new blog he was forming.  I had heard this story before and never was much interested in joining new blogs.

I had done so once, joined a new blog, that is, after the 2006 election.  I had worked on Election Diary Rescue (which I’m doing again this year) and through reading all the stories by Daily Kos diarists of their on the ground experiences, my heart was transformed.  I had never read before about individual experiences of grass roots politics from people who weren’t professional writers, or even all that interested in writing as a vehicle for communicating more than information alone.

Anyway, it was a great experience, even though it was a lot of work, and after the ’06 election I was invited to join a blog that would track the progress of our new representatives.

Fresh off the high of EDR, I accepted.  I got very involved in the nuts and bolts of government, even started a column entitled “Nuts and Bolts,” wrote about the pros and cons of Nancy Pelosi picking Steny Hoyer or Jack Murtha as her House Majority Leader as well as other subjects I felt dealt with the nuts and bolts of government.  Other folks wrote great posts about various Congressional reps.

Well the EDR high wore off, and I think it did for some others as well, because the blog didn’t last, or maybe it has a new name now, I dunno.

So I wasn’t all that excited when buhdy contacted me.  For some reason, though, I said yes.  I was asked to commit at least to writing one piece a week, an original piece that I wouldn’t post anywhere else.  I thought that was a fair agreement.

I’ve done a lot of blogging this week, about Hurricane Gustav, about New Orleans, about Haiti.

It’s Friday night, and I’d like to write about something that doesn’t have so much to do with current events and politics.

Although I am no longer an observant Jew, I was brought up in the Jewish faith and still have a great love for it.

In my family, my mother would light the candles every Friday evening to begin the sabbath.  My mother wasn’t always a happy person and she had a terrible temper … but when she lit the candles, no matter what mood she was in, it was an awesome sight to behold.

She’d put a white silk scarf over her head and take a match to the two white candles, then make a gesture with her hands over the candles as if beckoning the flame.  She did this three times.  Then she put her hands over her face and recited the blessing.  She’d stay there a little longer after making the blessing and I found out later from her that she used that time to pray for specific people who were having troubles, or for something on her mind.

She always looked so peaceful while saying the sabbath prayer, after she took her hands away from her face, it glowed.

She learned the Jewish prayers from my grandfather on my father’s side, who was a rabbi, but worked as a shoe store salesman and didn’t ply the rabbinic trade.  She had a great love for him and told me he was a wonderful teacher.

When I asked her what she said in her prayers, I found out she said very simple things, like “may she be well,” or “help him with his problems, please.”  She was always a woman of few words, so I wasn’t surprised by that.

I keep thinking, for some reason, of Patrick Fitzgerald, as an authentic American.  I remember when he would give press conferences on the Libby case and no one was able to spin what he said.

And I think his acceptance of limitation had something to do with it.

The I-Ching says (Wilhelm/Baynes edition), in the hexagram of “Kou/Coming to Meet”:

The superior man always stays where he belongs.  He comes only into his own domain.  … The inferior man has to depend on a lucky chance.

I sometimes forget that Scooter Libby was convicted on four of five charges, convicted of lying and obstruction of justice in the Plame affair.  I sometimes forget this because, of course, Mister Bush immediately pardoned him.

But Patrick Fitzgerald was able to make the case and convict Libby.

I think of the word “limitation” because of how Fitzgerald spoke during those press conferences.  He didn’t try to moralize or speak politically.  He spoke only of his job and explained what obstruction of justice meant (the notion of “kicking sand in the umpire’s face”) and stuck to the facts of what he could say.  He never deviated from this no matter what the press asked him.  So there was nothing to spin.