And Chernobyl was just a tiny boo-boo, right?

Well that's settled then. Even though there was a huge out-of-control blaze in a nuclear waste incinerator in Japan, that released enormous clouds of smoke hundreds of feet into the air and burned hotly enough to take 2 hours for firefighters to control, the AP reports that there was no radiation released into the atmosphere. The reporter also notes how heavily dependent Japan is on nuclear energy, implying that a major accident at a nuclear plant could really spell trouble for the citizens and the industry. But the journalist didn't connect the two things, big fire + vulnerable industry, far enough to actually say that.

So we're supposed to believe that Japan's major source of energy is totally safe and that blazing nuclear waste doesn't give off any byproducts, and that nuclear waste burning up into the atmosphere doesn't release radiation, and that the gigantic protective suits the firemen were wearing when hosing down the fire were just comfy winterwear or perhaps traditional garb, historically worn by firemen in such ceremonial acts as dousing a flaming pile of radioactive sludge, and that the nuclear industry would never, ever cover up an accident that potentially exposed millions of people to radiation, because nuclear power is our friend. Three Mile what?

I call bullshit on this. Can anyone prove to me that flaming nuclear waste burns totally clean? If that's the case, why don't we burn plutonium instead of using weak-ass nuclear fission?

Chicago-style Deep Shit

Primaries were yesterday, and Chicago is trying to fuse two elections systems (touch-screen and paper/scan ballots), and what a motherfucking fiasco. The city, which prides itself on having election returns counted by 8 pm (or one hour after the polls close), for some reason couldn’t count the ballots in a few key races last night. Let’s speculate as to why, shall we?

What’s the real result of an election screwup like Chicago had yesterday? How about an election for Cook County Board President, overseeing 30,000 county employees and a 4 BILLION DOLLAR budget every year, that has gone to a manual recount today?

The candidates, machine puppet John Stroger (who is black) and Forrest Claypool, something of an independent Democrat (who is white), could not be more different. Mayor Daley, the unions, Governor Blagojevich, and the Cook County machine all supported Stroger, the 20-year incumbent. Nobody supported Claypool.

The kicker is that Stroger had a major stroke about a month ago and is, by unofficial accounts, almost dead. The official word is that he’s stable, alert, carving soapstone jewelry, and bench-pressing 900 pounds. In other words, he’s probably already dead and the machine just needs to keep up the charade until after the primary, when Daley will appoint another puppet to fill the position.

All night last night, this was the one race that stood out. Not just because Claypool was winning for most of the night, but because so few ballots had actually been counted. Cook County and the City of Chicago have separate election boards (though both are run by Daley stooges). By midnight, the county had tallied about 60% of its ballots, but the city had only reported about 35%. Now, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Cook County—the suburbs—will vote for the white candidate and the city will vote for the black candidate. Lest you think I am being a racist shit, that’s exactly what Stroger’s campaign said on television at 11 pm last night: ballots from Chicago had not been accounted for, thus disenfranchising black voters and robbing John Stroger, the house Negro of the Daley machine, of his chance to lick Dick’s boots for the next 4 years.

In the angry press conference at which this allegation was made, Stroger’s people also accused Claypool’s campaign of having something to do with this affair, though they wouldn’t elaborate. They all then fled the hotel where they were gathered for a victory party and went to the Board of Elections, where they huddled with Langdon Neal, the Chicago Board guy, and David Orr, the Cook County Board guy, and discussed what to do. I shit you not. This was on camera and commented on by local news anchors, who covered the election clusterfuck all night last night, live.

Now, it could be me, but isn’t it transparently ridiculous when the machine-backed candidate accuses "the man" of trying to derail his campaign? As one reporter scoffed last night, "Elections have been stolen every year for the last 100 years in Chicago. Is Stroger serious about this? Isn’t he part of the problem? He was elected, originally, by one of Daley’s "hundred man armies" (gangs of men, usually city workers on the clock, who travel the city and vote repeatedly as well as getting out the vote) that are now being investigated, and we all know that."

Stroger’s people were at the Board of Elections talking lawsuit this and malfeasance that, and getting in the faces of Neal and Orr, but it was all for show. These guys play golf together every week. They married each other’s sisters. This ain’t no thing, as they say on da streets.

Claypool, for his part, didn’t know what the fuck to do. In the space of four hours he went from building a solid lead over a corrupt incumbent (who is probably brain dead, but my condolences, shitbag; you work for the machine, you suck my balls), to being accused of election tampering, to being sued for everything up to and including causing Stroger’s capillary hemorrhage.

The heads of the Boards of Elections took pains to assure reporters that all ballots were accounted for and that all votes had been recorded. Just not, uh, counted. Because…well, just because, OK? Seriously, that was the response. Anyway, just as they were giving these assurances that they had all the votes, a wily cameraman for ABC 7 News took video of trucks pulling up outside and workers unloading box upon box of new, heretofore unseen ballots. So much for trusting the system.

Does it make sense that white people in Chicago pulled shenanigans and collected black votes from the South Side, put them into their cars, and then took them away somewhere, in an attempt to throw the election to Claypool? Would Daley sell out his own vegetable that way?

Or does it make more sense that this whole disenfranchisement thing is just a thin smokescreen to distract from the fact that Stroger’s people saw how badly they lost in the suburbs and needed more time to fix the South Side ballots? That one, the simple explanation that points to the machine’s influence and the endemic corruption of city politics, is the best answer.

Never say the Democrats didn’t learn anything from Bush in 2000. They dragged this thing out way past midnight, forcing the city to eventually suspend vote counting at 2 am, and more votes will doubtless "appear" today when the count resumes at 1 pm (WHY so late? Several reporters asked, Langdon Neal never answered).

And wouldn’t you know it: after midnight, when most people went to bed, a large batch of South Side votes magically appeared downtown and swung the tally for Stroger. As of now, at 2:15 pm in Chicago, Stroger holds a 53-47 lead on Claypool with 89% of precincts counted. Uh huh. Suuuuuuure.

It is interesting that almost every race except this one had a declared winner last night, isn’t it? Somehow, Bobby Rush and Rahm Emanuel got re-nominated without anyone ever seeing most of the South Side’s ballots. Somehow candidates to the Illinois legislature were elected without anyone seeing the South Side ballots. Somehow judges, bond issues, and tax increases were voted upon and decided, apparently in the absence of the majority of the South Side’s ballots. In the hours of TV coverage of this fucking embarrassment, not one person asked how that was possible.

It’s just business as usual in this town. We all work for the machine everyday by our complacency. Shame on the Democrats, shame on blacks on the South Side, so desperate for a representative in County government that they’ll vote for any piece of filth Daley shoves at them; shame on us all.

Where's the Rest of Me?

In other news, the woman who in 2004 got 44% of the vote against Henry Hyde, that intern-banging cum-swapper, didn’t get the Democratic endorsement this time around, despite the fact that Hyde is retiring and the candidate, Christine Cegelis, lives in the district.

Instead, Democratic rocket surgeons, true to form, put up an Army vet named Tammy Duckworth for the position. Duckworth has no political experience and doesn’t live in the district (almost all of her funding came from outside the district, too). She did not campaign, instead leaving that to the puppetmasters who threw her hat into the ring for her (really, it’s that much of a farce; read on): Dick Durbin and Barack Obama (whose stock in my eyes is falling with each party-line blowjob he slobs up for the DLC), who in turn got their orders from on high, somewhere in the vicinity of Howard Dean’s office.

Oh, what DOES Tammy Duckworth bring to her campaign? You might rather ask what she didn’t bring. Tammy Duckworth has no legs.

I shit you not. She lost them in Iraq.

But there were the shills, the pussy-hawks of the Left: (who else?) Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, offering up their support and their dignity to a novice candidate who helped push aside another Democrat who paid her dues. Throughout the campaign, her surrogates—or is it benefactors—were all over TV calling her a "war hero" and "the most qualified person (they) could think of." No explanation of what qualities she would bring to the job, exactly, or why not having legs anymore makes her a "hero."

No, it pretty much went like this: "Look, Tammy lost her legs in Iraq. Vote for her."

"But why? What does she know from politics?"

"She has NO LEGS…or didn’t you see that? Vote for her!"

"But, but, she’s unqualified! And you have a qualified candidate right over there!"

"Goddammit, Tammy didn’t LOSE HER LEGS IN IRAQ to have people question her! Now, I say she’s the candidate and I say go vote for her!! DO IT!! Or do you LOVE OSAMA? He’s over there right now, playing a drumset made entirely of American soldiers’ lost body parts, and he’s using Tammy’s legs for sticks! SHE HAS NO LEGS!! NO LEGS!! NOOOOO LEEEEEEGS!!!"

So, to recap: the Democratic Party, apparently having forgotten all about how Max Cleland—the legless vet from Georgia—lost to a smear campaign run by some faggot named Saxby Chambliss in 2000, has nominated an inexperienced puppet veteran with no legs to challenge for an open seat in a GOP district in which said puppet does not reside. In the process, the Democratic Party has alienated a stronger candidate who had a following in her district but was stripped of money and exposure by the betrayal of the DLC. This is the theme of these elections: Look, America! WE know some veterans, too! We still don’t have a coherent policy or any reasons you should vote for us, but we LOOOOOOVE us some veterans! Yessirreee!"

Tammy Duckworth won the nomination, by about 3 percentage points. Against a candidate who got no money, no support, therefore ran no campaign, and, unfortunately, has two legs. At least Christine Cegelis still has her health.

Kill the Party to Save It

Those wacky Democrats are at it again. No, I don't mean cow-tipping or leaving flaming poo-bags in front of Dennis Hastert's office. The Democrats are on the damn high road again--just like they were in the last two elections when they refused to challenge what were clearly fraudulent election results in Florida, Ohio, and anywhere else with electronic voting machines, Republican Secretaries of State (who were also Bush campaign managers), and large gullible populations of voters.

Yep, the party of professors and pussies has decided not to pursue impeachment against Bush (nor even, it appears, censure). That's the conclusion I have arrived at, anyway. The rationale is consistent with the Democrats' whole sorry record for the last five years.

Quite simply, they don't want to be seen as bad people.

That's the whole riddle of the Democrats. There was a post on Democratic Underground last month that alleged that the hallmark of a Democrat is that he's a good neighbor. This is exactly the problem. We aren't good neighbors, or at least we ought not to be, to fucking assholes like...well, name a Republican. Until we act like BAD neighbors, in fact, by making this a very dangerous country in which to live if you're a fucking pig, we will continue to lose.

To stretch the neighbor thing a little more, there are two kinds of neighbors (excluding for a moment the kind that are drug addicts or porn producers and as such want nothing to do with you): the kind that waves at you when you see them outside, keeps mainly to themself, but also shows up at your door at 3am when you're having Armageddon 2006 Bass Party at your house and tells you to shut the fuck up. This person also makes no bones about his disapproval of your SUV purchase and thinks you ought not let your kids play in the road. This person isn't afraid to be the bad guy when you're out of line.

The other kind of neighbor waves at you when you see them outside, keeps mainly to himself, and otherwise leaves you alone no matter what, except to tell you that he's here to help you if you ever need anything.

Which one is the better neighbor? Which one do you think a Democrat would pick? Which one would Nancy Pelosi pick?

Impeachment, if we can leave bad metaphor land, is not an option for the Democratic Party. This is a decision that will dramatically weaken it in the long- and short-term. But I can't shake the feeling that those spineless shits actually do think that, in 50 years when people look back on this era, coming as it did right after an impeachment proceeding in the 1990's that hurt the nation immensely, that those future observers will recognize that another impeachment would have irreparably damaged the United States. The obvious objection to this is that Bush already has and continues to irreparably damage the United States, but I think the Democratic Party just doesn't want to be the one that gets the blame for dynamiting American politics. Naturally, they wouldn't even think of NOT taking the blame.

Of course, this is all tea leaf-reading. It means nothing. But do YOU have a better explanation?

Zinnsanity!

Interesting article by Howard Zinn over at Smirking Chimp, via The Progressive. In it, the "people's historian," who just last year made another gazillion dollars on his document reader to accompany his incredibly shitty A People's History of the United States (notice, not THE People's History of the United States, because eggheads like Zinn don't believe in specificity or firm stands on anything), asserts that "we," including the media and the public, were fooled into Bush's war. He then proceeds to argue that, had "we" but known our US history and the stories of presidents continually lying us into wars since 1776, "we" never would have fallen for Chimpy's Desert Adventure.

Howard, Howard. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...better take off my shoes for this. And my pants, too, so I'll have one more appendage upon which to keep track of my growing hate for you, you soft-headed fool. See here as I begin with the last one first and wave my literal and figurative dick at you.

NOBODY was "fooled" into the Iraq war! People may have rationalized it; the media may have told it that way. That doesn't make it so! NOBODY believed that shit Powell and the rest of the monkey-fellaters from the White House were selling about WMD's and Al Qaeda. And anybody that says they believed it, whole hog, uh I swear I am just that fucking retarded, yessiree--those people are LYING TO YOU.

But the great Howard Zinn has figured this all out for us. See, those assholes aren't trying to cover up their gleeful support for a war they COMPLETELY UNDERSTOOD AND/OR SUPPORTED, no; they're just innocent victims of that big, bad ol' government that always treats people like shit and lies to us and my goodness what can WE little old things do about it?

Fuck you, Howard. Move to a fucking anarchist farm out in Vermont or else grow up. The problem with the "people" is the THE PEOPLE. It's not that they don't "know history" (or, to be clear about what we're talking about, that they don't know YOUR brand of history), it's that they can't conceive of how to confront the liars telling the obvious lies. The solution to that, it seems, is a better politics, not a better history. History is not a proactive force, it's a retroactive one. Anyone who tells you differently is either a charlatan or a moron. Either way, he's an historian.

Deaf and Dumb

Should we laugh at tragedy or is "tragedy" just a word that people use to excuse idiotic behavior?

Read all about the Texas beauty queen who--I shit you not--got hit by a train while walking home and, uh, guess what? She was deaf.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to smear myself with chicken fat and tease wild dogs.

Abortion Really Sucks

Well, that didn't take long. So vacuuming out your uterus is now illegal in South Dakota (or is it North Dakota? Or was it Kansas? Jesus, we seem to have a lot of fucktards lining up to refight that whole culture war that the Left supposely won, don't we?). Apparently, about eight other states have begun putting anti-abortion legislation into the pipeline, not realizing as I do that abortion is the saline solution.

Now, let's revisit the whole filibuster issue again. For all the shit-sucking Democrats out there who derided the idea of filibustering Alito (I'm talking to you, Barack Obama) because it would be a better use of our time "to win elections" (which you can't do these days without control of the Supreme Court--or hadn't you noticed, Senator Fundraiser?)...FUCK YOU ALL.

And, for those who argued that filibustering was overrated, since nothing really horrible has ever been averted by a filibuster (what are you, the master of a parallel universe? You can't argue a negative principle as though it were factual! What if the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act could have changed the future and led to the discovery of the 9/11 plot? That's RIGHT, arguing like that IS a sign of being a complete fucking moron!!), I say: congratulations! You now have your proof that filibustering is really a useful tool to have in reserve for those epochal times when someone who is avowedly going to shred your civil rights is about to be made a Supreme Court Justice. But, like Sen. Obama, you assholes who tried to defuse the filibuster will just have to eat this steaming plate full of shit. It's yours. Nice work.

Now, I'll be looking for you to win some elections and overturn this shit. Get busy.

The filibuster just shoved a rusty coathanger up your twat. What are you gonna do about it?

Read the Book, Bitch

I dug up this review the other day. I wrote it in college and boy, does it stink. I stand by--I think--my dislike of Linda Gordon's truly pedestrian and schizophrenic The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (yep, there was a moment there in 1999 when history was just that goddamn precious). But this review has big problems, the least of which is that you can't tell what I'm talking about if you haven't read the book. Guess that was before I learned what an "audience" is. The upshot is, if you want to know what's going on, you'll have to read this book (get it from the liberry, not Borders. It ain't worth a dollar.), which is probably how all reviews should be written.

If you want more on the truly unique Clifton-Morenci relationship, there are two pieces of modern history that put the spotlight on this company town vs. worker-village death struggle: Copper Crucible, an account of the 1983 strike that broke the miners' union and showed the future of labor relations under Clinton, who hired Bruce Babbitt, the Governor of Arizona at the time, to be Secretary of the Interior. You might also see Barbara Kingsolver's (I know, I hate her too.) Holding the Line, which looks at the same strike through the eyes of the women involved. Either would be a better read and a better insight into Clifton-Morenci than Linda Gordon's bleeding uterus screed.

REVIEW:

Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999)
"Linda Gordon, a noted women’s historian, tackles a rather odd project in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. In collecting a large volume of information about the 1904 "kidnapping" of white, Catholic orphans sent from New York City to live with other Catholic (albeit Mexican) families in Arizona mining country, Gordon takes on and attempts to spin out the narrative through the various lenses of race, gender, class, labor, and religious history. Though there is an inherent danger in attempting such a broad project, Gordon is fearless in her execution. That the end product is a bit muddled should not be surprising; and though one may not be able to satisfactorily answer the "so what?" question upon putting the book down, that does not in any way diminish the feat of presentation she achieves.

In a stirring and, in some ways still shockingly relevant opening, Gordon describes the ways in which parenthood in turn-of-the-century America was influenced by class: the more you had, the better. Economic considerations, mostly shaped by the developing rigidity of class lines at the time—which helped drive a significant portion of the population into the underclass—dictated the very conditions of motherhood. The children of the poor, perhaps hustling on the street to raise the family income, could be and were snatched off the street and consigned to orphanages or put up for adoption. The Catholic New York Foundling Hospital was at least sure of where its supply of "orphans" came from: they were dropped off by their parents, who had ostensibly recognized the futility of their own lives and hoped for an improved future for their children. The orphanage workers then placed the children into "good Catholic" homes, getting to which could entail even the seemingly extreme measure of cross-country transportation via railway. These "orphan trains" were a sad symbol of the price of children.

Gordon lightly continues this class thread for the remainder of the book, although, regrettably, it is not her main focus. She shifts gears to include a labor perspective of the mining town(s), Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, to which the New York orphan train was headed. Born out of personal ingenuity and initiative, Clifton-Morenci was by 1904 a booming copper mining community, located at the intersection of three distinct ethnicities: Apache, Mexican, and "Anglo," or "white." Here is where Gordon’s narrative begins to tangle. Throughout her dissection of the corporate dynamics of Clifton-Morenci and her long recounting of the 1903 strike that polarized the town, Gordon can never really separate the race factor from the labor analysis. One begins to wonder, in fact, if the events of the following year (the "abduction" of the white children) really had roots in the strike, or were more closely related to racial attitudes that pre- and postdated it.

But that is not the only problem. Gordon goes on to address notions of gender in the mining community, asserting that it was the white women of the community who objected so strongly to "white" children being placed in "not white" homes that they forced the political machinery of the town to act on their behalf, thus challenging but at the same time reinforcing women’s place in the public and domestic spheres. As the preceding sentence hopefully suggests, there is also a whiteness argument at work here. If I may be permitted to mix and mangle a metaphor: In scattering her interpretation over so many areas of analysis, Gordon has failed to layer her evidence properly into a coherent whole, and instead muddies the whole thing a little more with each new angle. In the final accounting, what is the trumping factor: race, ethnicity, class? It would seem a bit tame to profess that the incident, and hence our understanding of it—even if we buy that history must be seen through a "panoramic" lens—can only be called a confluence of many factors. If there are so many potential answers that none can be picked and explored on its own, then whence any larger (or smaller!) meaning in history?

On a pickier note, there are conceptual problems with Gordon’s account. For one, it seems odd to call 1904 Arizona the "wild west" (x), especially in light of the fact that one of the "stolen" children was sent to a man in Los Angeles. That is no misprint; it appears that Arizona was not even a frontier anymore—as Turner could have told the good people of Clifton-Morenci back in 1893. And yet, it is this "pioneer" mentality that Gordon cites in her rather weak chapter on vigilantism. The notion of whiteness that runs through the story also seems too convenient, and Gordon gets in a little trouble speculating about the role it may have played in the whole affair.
It is this same kind of speculation that rears its ugly, though often unlabeled by the author, head enough to derail the story. Gordon is just too fond of building card houses. With whiteness theory as backup, she feels comfortable telling the reader that the Mexicans wanted white children so they could "lighten up" and improve their status. Which of course leaves some questions: How does one lighten oneself after birth? And, what happened to Catholic duty, so prevalent a theme earlier in the story? And, why would the Mexicans, if they were trying to move up in status, not realize that there was a resistance to this that would come from the white townspeople—the same (acutely self-aware, Gordon’s whiteness evidence claims) townspeople who had just last year prevented Mexicans from getting a pay raise?

On a related note, what are we to make of the assertion that "They (the posse) believed they knew the Mexicans, and conceived of themselves as wanting only the best for the Mexicans, so of course they were sure that they knew what the Mexicans wanted and what was in the Mexicans’ best interests." (156)? Are "we" so sure? Where in the story is the evidence that the whites were much concerned about or even that they infantilized the Mexicans? Maligned them, certainly, even relegated them to lowest-class status, but how did paternalism get mixed in—and what of the paternalism of the Phelps Dodge men who ran the company town of Morenci? Gordon is not making equally insulting speculations about Charles E. Mills, company man and unqualified whitey, and his treatment of his white "children." A final word about evidence and about Mills (and an indication that some of this book is simply an attempt by Gordon to show off how much research she did): Gordon pokes fun at the strikers of 1903 for calling Mills, who had just fled town, a "coward," noting that Mills had served in the Rough Riders and later accepted a commission into WWI. Clearly, he was no coward. Except that it takes no special degree in history to see that being in the army and being the focus of an angry mob are two very different things. When Carnegie had the Pinkertons shoot down the strikers at Homestead while safely ensconced in Scotland, nobody called him merely prudent.

In the final accounting, Linda Gordon has given readers a very readable, highly debatable book, and that is a good thing. There is an interpretation for everyone in here, and enough for others to arouse a little jealousy and hopefully spark a squabble over the boundaries and proprietary rights of scholarship. Gordon is clearly a committed researcher and talented writer, just be careful how momentarily close you allow her to get—that panoramic perspective can become mighty narrow, mighty fast."

Was that penance? Was it sublime? Just crap? All three, in a barf taco is my vote.