Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Not There Yet
We’re heading into Christmas, 2005 — not the season, but Christmas itself. If you have packages to send to relatives and you want those packages to get there by Christmas, you have got to send them today. It’s Christmas. Merry Christmas.
And the state of the news-sphere is…the Bush administration may have broken the law. We’re not quite sure yet. Stay tuned.
I have two memories that are relevant to this, one recent, one distant. The recent one has to do with this summer, when the Karl Rove, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, outing a covert op, or not, blah blah blah whatchamacallit scandal was…well, I’m still not sure what it was doing. It wasn’t getting started, because it already started. It wasn’t reaching a peak, because it’s peaked since then. Let’s call it a “resurfacing.” Back in that hot season, as well as now in this cold one, the Bush administration may have broken the law…we weren’t quite sure yet…stay tuned.
Come to think of it, with regard to that whole Rove/Plame thing, it’s five months later. Can anyone guarantee me the Bush administration broke the law? Or that it didn’t? That Valerie Plame was a covert op? That she wasn’t? So I guess that’s another law…which President Bush’s crew may have broken…we’re not quite sure yet…stay tuned.
See the pattern?
Yeah, it has to do with the wheels of justice turning slowly. Okay, I’ll buy that as a possible explanation, but that’s where my distant memory comes in.
I was sixteen, and the Equal Rights Amendment was reaching its expiration date. The Amendment failed to be ratified by the required thirty-eight states, and this touched off a debate about where women were headed in our society. Nobody with a reputation worth protecting, actually placed said reputation on the words “they’ll be headed back to the typing pools faster than you can say ‘ugly silver dollar’ if we don’t do something quick,” but a lot of people with a lot of clout tried like the dickens to make people think that. The torch-and-pitchfork waving reached a fevered pitch until the 1984 elections, when the feminists decided they had become so powerful, anything was possible. They decided they could put a radical-feminist New York limousine liberal on Walter Mondale’s ticket as his running-mate, and send her out to screech away about “This Administration has…”, repeatedly, into the most powerful microphones network money could buy, in a dreadful mother-in-law sick-chicken tone-of-voice that any married man has come to dread. She could do this all year long, the feminists decided, and in the end Mondale would be victorious — the time had come, after all. If you have the power to do something, you’d better do it, so they did.
The rest is history. Really history. Geraldine Ferraro got Mondale’s ass kicked so thoroughly, they made history.
What does that have to do with crimes the White House may or may not have done?
Just this. A sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old doesn’t know a whole lot about life, but I notice I had some questions then that I still have as a thirty-nine-year-old man. In this blitz of newspaper articles and magazine articles and television commercials I saw between 1982 and 1984, I noticed this common theme, sometimes pronounced verbatim, sometimes adhered to only loosely, but always there: “We’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet.” Nobody dared to question how far the feminists had come since the mid-sixties, and yet, nobody dared to question how much still had to be done — nevermind that no one seemed to have the balls to list exactly what that was.
A sixteen-year-old is abnormally inclined to call bullshit on this, because when you’re sixteen, something that started sixteen years ago seems pretty ancient. But the problems I had back then, have not deteriorated with the passage of time; to the contrary, time has only crystalized my issues. What is this “we’ve come a long way but we’re not there yet” over sixteen years? What the hell are you trying to do? Paint the white lines on I-5 from San Diego to Birch Bay, by hand?
You got a problem, you fix it.
Again, I understand the opposition more than I’m letting on. They were trying to change a culture, and yes, that does take time. So there is truth in that little slogan, but there is also a lot of bullshit.
And there is bullshit in saying “The White House may have broken the law, we don’t know, stay tuned.”
It’s bullshit because in both cases, problems are solved by our media. Pressure is not brought on the public figures who have the power to solve the problems, unless the media says it should be. And once the media says that pressure should be brought to bear, nobody can oppose them. In short, the media has all the power.
And the media makes the money off the existence of the problems.
Since I cast my very first vote in this lifetime against sick-chicken mother-in-law screeching Geraldine, twenty-one more Novembers have bid me goodbye. Women have…and it’s really not hard to find someone willing to say so…come a long way, and *sigh* they’re not there yet.
We are supposed to be such a break-neck, go-go-go, strung-out-on-Starbucks society. The light turns green, your foot doesn’t have time to press down on the gas before the guy behind you is honking. This is the one time of year we all feel regret over not spending more time seeing the people we love, instead of running stupid errands that don’t matter and doing stupid work that doesn’t matter. But in a week or two we’re all going right back to the ol’ routine, and we all know it. It’s the way we are.
Okay, if we’re consistent about that…and you’re slapping the women at work in the ass, and you know it’s wrong, then stop. If you somehow have the authority to decide, on-the-spot, what everybody in a company is making per year, and you pay the women thirty percent less, and you know that’s wrong, then stop.
If the White House did something illegal, then issue some more indictments. If not, drop it. If you can’t prove they did something illegal, but you think you can prove it with some more research, then go research. Otherwise, shut up.
What is up with the arguing and wrangling, month after month?
What is up with this fighting “for equal rights,” for four decades?
Logically, it doesn’t hold up. We all know it doesn’t. Nobody solves their problems at home this way. You don’t like the way the furniture is arranged, you just rearrange it, and by tomorrow it’s a done deal.
But these publicly-visible issues, which are either illegitimate as issues, or if they are legitimate should be fixed overnight, drag on for years. We all take it as a given that there must be some reason why it takes so long, which we don’t understand. But no one steps out of the mists to explain for us why this is. Why do we put up with it?
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