Drones And Our Philosopher King

It’s taken me several days to process the startling news of the leaked memo from the White House concerning our philosopher-king’s new and improved license to kill. It seems that the phrase “imminent danger” now means something closer to, “seems suspicious”.

With the rise of the drone as a neat, clean, killing tool, governments can now exert their will with a single machine rather than having to go to the expense and aggravation of marshaling troops and public opinion to support their foreign policy objectives. Under former President Bush, drones were used to go after Al-Qaeda types hiding in straw-roofed huts in Pakistan. This President has managed to make Bush look like a weak kneed pacifist, wracking up kill after kill of swarthy terrorist types along with any innocent friends and neighbors who were unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Instead of Code Pink protesters swarming Pennsylvania Avenue with signs screaming, ”Obama=Murderer”, this killing frenzy has been greeted with silence by the left. But with the release of this memo, even the most sycophantic members of the loyal press are snapping out of their hero worship long enough to think about how awful this new power would be in the hands of a future (shudder) Republican President!

The new policy gives the President the authority to order drone strikes against even American citizens abroad who the President believes might be a threat to national security, but with the new meaning of words made famous by this administration, the lack of specific prohibitions against killing Americans on American soil gives pause. That slacker Bush toiled under the timid definition of “imminent threat” which restricted the kill order to Americans involved in activities that actually  constituted an imminent grave danger. For example, surveillance cameras pick up Joe packing the back of his van with a thousand sticks of dynamite, while on the front seat there’s a street map of Washington DC with the Pentagon circled by a red sharpee, along with a worn copy of the Koran. That’s an “imminent” threat. Under this new definition of “imminent”, all it might take is intelligence reports that Joe was seen in the middle east aisle of the local library checking out biographies of Bin Laden then going to an Arab film festival, smoking a Hookah pipe and drinking really strong coffee.

I’m fully aware that there are some weirdoes in America. Among my fellow citizens there lives every strata of social and political deviants known to exist on the planet. But, the idea that we would allow any one man or woman to possess the power of judge, jury, and executioner of one of our fellow citizens is an outrage and an insult to our founding documents. In the 236 year history of this nation, there isn’t one single President who I would trust with this power, and few who would even dare want such authority. With such flimsy evidentiary standards as those advanced in this memo, every American citizen should be appalled at so stunning a power grab, at such an evisceration of due process.

So far, the only thing we Americans can manage to be appalled by is the possible loss of the Hostess Twinkie.

My Dad and Thomas Jefferson

The other night, I read the final two chapters of Jon Meacham’s “Art of Power”, his masterful biography of Thomas Jefferson. The great old man was dying. In painstaking detail, Meacham described the physical struggles and bouts of melancholy that plagued him in his last days. But to the end, Jefferson’s mind still had moments of clarity, and in those moments his thoughts were of the great events of the revolution, and his obsession with the well being of his family.

After the last page was read, I sat in silence for awhile, as I often do in such moments, trying to take it all in, trying to process so monumental a life, so magnificently lived. Jefferson was a great man with admittedly great flaws, but remains one of the few men from history with whom I would love to have dinner.

As I sat there staring off into the distance thinking of Monticello, my cell phone began to vibrate on the reading table beside me. It was an e-mail from my sister. My Dad had fallen now for the third time in one day. Something was wrong. Suddenly, his legs had become weak and his gate unreliable. We would take him to the doctor and discover a badly swollen leg and foot. He would be admitted to the hospital for treatment of the infection.

So for the next several days we will all visit him there. We will monitor his progress, and sit with him when we can. He will make it as easy as possible on us by being cheerful. He will be grateful for every visit. He will make conversation even though he would rather sleep. He will eat whatever awful food is put in front of him. He will inform me of the latest news of the world as I marvel at how he manages to be so peaceful, while his body continues to betray him.

While Thomas Jefferson was the great man of history, my Dad has always been, and still remains the great man of my life.

Beyonce's Show

I suppose that I should begin this post with a warning. You are about to enter an “old fuddy-duddy zone”. Watching Beyonce’s halftime show the other night made me feel every day of my 54 years and then some. It was a twenty minute blitzkrieg on the senses that left me exhausted and bewildered.

This woman has an incredible voice, but she is no singer. She is an exhibition, an object of fantasy. Within the first two minutes, she tore off the wrapping paper of her outfit and flung it into the crowd, and performed the rest of her show dressed like a Victoria’s Secret mannequin. Amidst dazzling pyrotechnics and pulsing video images, she showed 108 million viewers more athletic ability than Joe Flacco ever dreamed of having. Her dance moves were pure eroticism. She gyrated and hip-thrusted across the stage like a Las Vegas showgirl on steroids. What actual singing she did seemed beside the point, a mere accessory to her sexual objectification. When it was all over I wasn’t quite sure what I had seen. It certainly wasn’t a vocal performance, more like an X-rated jazzercise workout. I certainly had gotten a workout. I suppose after several years of worn out rockers like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, the Super Bowl people felt that some youth, energy and vitality needed to be injected into the proceedings. Mission accomplished.

The Super Bowl has become the image America projects once a year to the world, and each year it gets bigger, louder and more aggressive. It’s an all out assault of glitz, an extravaganza of frenzied energy. The world would be forgiven for thinking that America may very well have lost it’s mind. Is this who we are? The numbers say yes.

In the middle of it all came the voice of Paul Harvey, a recording of a speech he made in 1978 to a meeting of the Future Farmers of America. My television was treated to two minutes of still photographs, showing that most unglamorous thing, hard, back-breaking, solitary work. There were no swelling violins, no music of any kind, just silent images of the country we used to be before the Super Bowl, quiet, steady and decent. Harvey’s words sounded like poetry to me.

Next year it will be even bigger, bolder, louder. The technology will be cutting edge, the envelope will once again be pushed. Maybe Justin Bieber will do the halftime show. He might rip off his shirt. Can’t wait.

The Super Bowl vs. The Dowager Countess

Super Bowl XCVII is now in the books. There was plenty of violence, ridiculous strategy, confusion, moments of laughter, and times that made you want to cry. The game? No, I’m talking about the commercials.

Loved the Clydesdale ad, but can’t for the life of me figure out how it is supposed to make me want to drink Budweiser. On the other hand, the Dodge ad featuring the voice of Paul Harvey talking about God creating a farmer on the eighth day of creation was a two minute long masterpiece that had me seriously considering selling my Cadillac CTS and buying a pick up truck. The similarly long Jeep ad showing soldiers coming home from war lost me when I heard Oprah’s voice, since I associate so many negative things with her.

There were some funny ads too, the Oreo spot particularly so, as it revived the “great taste-less filling” battles of twenty five years ago. The scene featuring a police officer whispering into a bull horn was classic. However, the most delicious line of the night belonged not to a Super Bowl commercial, but to the Dowager Countess over on Downton Abbey.

Violet had summoned Dr. Clarkson to her house for a meeting in an attempt to get him to change his story about the events that led to Cybil’s death. The controversy had caused a serious breach in Robert and Cora’s marriage, and Violet was doing serious damage control. The good doctor objected to Violet’s request on the grounds that he found it very difficult to tell an intentional lie, to which we were all treated to this classic exchange:

Dr. Clarkson: I find it very difficult to lie.

Violet: Do you and I have nothing in common? “Lie”…is so unmusical a word.

If, the next time I enter a voting booth, The Dowager Countess is on the ballot as a candidate for President, I will cast my first joyful vote in thirty years!

Racist Commercials. It's All The Fault Of The Berenstain Bears.

For several years now, the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl have featured organizations of the aggrieved calling press conferences to discuss racist commercials. This year there are two that I’m aware of, but I’m sure there are more. The offending companies are Coke and Volkswagen as follows.

The Coke commercial features a swarthy young man of middle eastern extraction on a camel in the middle of a desert. It is hot and he peers out on the horizon and sees a giant cold bottle of Coke, oasis-like in the distance. Suddenly a group of Mad-Max types come roaring by on motor cycles, racing towards the Coke. The race is soon joined by a busload of chorus girls equally thirsty and intent on getting there first. Meanwhile, our Arab man is seen tugging desperately on the reins of his camel who refuses to budge. When the contestants reach the bottle they discover that it was just a sign advertising Coke and that in fact the Coke bottle is another 50 miles down the road. End of ad.

I will now quote someone from something called the “American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee”….

“Why is it that Arabs are always shown as either oil-rich sheiks, terrorists, or belly dancers? The Coke commercial for the Super Bowl is racist, portraying Arabs as backward and foolish Camel Jockeys, and they have no chance to win in the world.”

Ok. First of all, the Arab shown in this commercial was neither an oil-rich sheik, a terrorist, nor a belly dancer. He appeared to be an ordinary run of the mill Arab man, a Joe Camel, as it were. In addition, not only did he have no chance to “win” the bottle of Coke, nobody else did either, which was the whole point, as far as I could tell, of this moronic ad in the first place. The last thing I thought when watching this commercial was that it was possibly offensive to Arab-Americans. However it was offensive to viewers like me, expecting hilarious and inventive ads during the Super Bowl. Now, it WOULD have been racist, offensive, and much more awesome, if after the Mad-Max guys and the showgirls reached the Coke bottle, our sweaty Arab man reached into his vest and pressed a red button detonating a bomb hidden inside the bottle blowing them all to smithereens!

　

The second offending commercial features a dreary office building filled with drearily dressed middle-management Minnesotans. They crowd into a dreary elevator and someone bemoans how much they hate Mondays. Then a very white man in the back of the elevator speaks in a rich Jamaican accent, “Don’t worry mon, everyting is gonna be alllright!” Later we see four equally white men riding to lunch in a hot red VW Beatle, all deliriously happy and speaking fluent Jamaican. The tag line of the ad is…Get In. Get Happy.

A New York Times columnist instantly declared the commercial, ”blackface with voices”. A CNN critic was appalled at the suggestion that “all black people are happy”. All of the perpetually aggrieved media groups failed to ask the Jamaican government and it’s tourism officials what they thought of the condescending, racist suggestion that Jamaicans are happy. When some intrepid reporter finally did he discovered that they were thrilled with the commercial, and terribly “happy” about the publicity.

Now that the subject of racist ads has been broached by our media, I would like to get in on the action. Just the other day, I was greatly offended and perhaps permanently scared by another vicious ad by the people at Volkswagen. The scene is a suburb somewhere, peaceful streets, finely trimmed front yard, with a white man still wearing a shirt and tie throwing a baseball with his son. All is well until we see the father trying to teach his son “how” to throw the ball. He winds up and makes the most pathetically unathletic attempt at throwing a ball seen in this country since FDR threw out the first pitch in the 1938 World Series. Picture a girl in the midst of an epileptic seizure trying to throw a ball and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how bad it was. The tag line of the ad encourages the viewer to buy a Volkswagen so…“you can have something worthy of passing down to your son”.

Seldom in my life have I seen such a brutally racist ad. It plays on the vicious stereotype of the white suburban man’s lack of athletic ability as well as his total lack of self-awareness. This is just the latest in a long line of advertisements depicting white men as inept morons, clueless fathers, and shiftless bums who not only lack athleticism but are totally devoid of ambition, any sense of fashion, and the slightest inkling of romance. If an anthropologist from 200 years in the future were to appear on our shores and his only information about our culture was derived from watching television commercials, he would no doubt conclude that white men were the scourge of the planet.

This all started with the most subversively vile books ever written…The Berenstain Bears. I remember being at first slightly annoyed when I started reading them to my unsuspecting children. Every story was the same. Brother and Sister Bear encounter some problem. They first consult Papa Bear, the dumb as a box of rocks father, who invariably gives moronic advice that when followed results in a world of trouble. Enter Mama Bear, the mother/savior of Socratean brilliance who with characteristic patience, foreBEARance, and common sense saves the day by giving the “correct” advice. Of course, Sister Bear is twice the athlete of Brother Bear who shows early signs of being equally as helpless as the old man. The fact that this family of brown bears live in a tree is never explained, neither is the fact of what Mother Bear could possibly have seen in Father Bear back in the day that could have led her to want to marry such a clod. The first of these wretched titles appeared in 1962. America began to see commercials featuring inept manhood shortly thereafter. Coincidence? I think not!

I Will Never Complain About The Weather Again

My daughter has a dear friend from college named Leslie. They spent 5 weeks together in Australia on a mission trip back in the day, and have been fast friends ever since. Leslie spent a week in my house a few years back, and I found her to be a perfectly normal girl, smart, funny and delightful. But since graduating from college, something has gone terribly wrong.

This morning, on my Facebook wall comes news that Minot, North Dakota can look forward to a HIGH temperature today of -15 degrees, which will “feel” LIKE -49 degrees. Inexplicably, Leslie lives in Minot.

Now I’m sure that Minot has some virtues, I’m sure it’s hardy inhabitants are the salt of the earth. I even hear that nobody in Minot ever locks their doors at night. But, there’s a reason for that which has nothing to do with idyllic country living. Who in God’s name would be willing to venture out of doors in -20 degree weather to steal anything??

I think it’s high time that we apologized to the good people of North Dakota and ask them to get the hell out of there, that it was all a terrible mistake, a colossal misunderstanding. See, when Napoleon blundered into selling the place to Thomas Jefferson 200 years ago, the plan was to use it as the nations meat cooler. When Lewis and Clark passed through they were supposed to put up a huge sign that said, “ NOT FOR HUMAN HABITATION”, but they were so freaking cold they couldn’t afford to stop. I mean, the place is so cold, even South Dakotans think you guys are nuts.

What on earth does one do when it’s -20 all day? I suppose you could bundle up and drive into town to…oh, sorry, the car door is frozen shut. Well, you could boil some water and have a cup of tea with… oh, sorry, pipes are frozen. So, you end up getting on Facebook and showing all of your friends a picture of your local forecast with it’s hideous -49 degree wind chill and you ask, “Is this real life?”

No, Leslie. The answer is …no. Bless your heart.

Scandalous Headlines!!

Three headlines dominate my digital newspaper this morning:

“ A-Rod at Center of new Major League Steroid Scandal”

“Ray Lewis Linked To Banned Substance”

“ Democratic Senator Linked to Under-aged Dominican Prostitutes”

The first two headlines come as no surprise. I’ve always thought Alex Rodriguez capable of anything, and I never believed his carefully crafted admission that he had used steroids for only a brief period of time from 2003-2004. The only thing about the Ray Lewis story that surprised me was that the banned substance involved was “deer antler spray”. Who knew that spray derived from the antlers of deer could have such therapeutic qualities?

The third headline would have been a huge shocker to me, if only it were real. See, I made it up…not the story, but the headline. Let me explain.

Yes, Bob Menendez is a democrat, and he is a senator from New Jersey, and he most definitely is hip deep in a scandal involving raucous, alcohol-fueled sex parties with under aged prostitutes from the Dominican Republic. There’s even a well-heeled donor, a private jet and all sorts of inappropriate payments from said donor to the good senator. Trouble is, I really have to search the internet for any reporting on this story. When I do find something, the headline writers never see fit to list senator Menendez’s party affiliation. Probably an oversight, I’m sure. A simple Google search of past scandals involving republican lawmakers in similar embarrassment never fail to prominently feature “REPUBLICAN” in every headline.

The relative lack of journalistic interest in this particular story is baffling to me since it comes with the one sin that political beat writers usually love to hang on politicians…hypocrisy. You see, senator Menendez was the guy who was in such high dudgeon last year when the President’s security team had been caught procuring prostitutes during a trip to Columbia. The good senator went on record as saying that any secret service agents involved in the procurement of prostitutes should be fired immediately. You would think that some up and coming reporter at the New York Times or the Washington Post would be all over a story like this, one so rich with irony and sordidness. Perhaps there’s a Pulitzer to be won. But, this story is left to the likes of Drudge and Brietbart. See, Menendez is a loyal and valuable member of the team. He’s a liberal democrat, and well, its all very well and good to browbeat the Larry Craigs of the world, but Menendez’s vote is too valuable, and although his behavior would appear to be despicable, he’s “one of us”. There is hope, however. I remember the embarrassing story a year or so ago about the ill-named congressman Weiner, and his nude photo-texting controversy. For weeks, only Brietbart, Drudge and TMZ covered that one, but after awhile the mainstream boys were dragged kicking and screaming onto the scene, to report the degradations of a liberal politician. Let’s see how long it takes this time.