Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts

Friday, May 05, 2017

Tempting the whirlwind in Jesusland?


Good, white, Jesus-lovin' people in Louisiana -- which clearly loves dead Confederates much more than live children and poor people -- are quick to tell you this is a Christian nation.

They'll tell you how the gays and the liberals and the politically correct are ruining this nation. They'd be quick to tell you how nothing's more important than family.

And then they'll go out and vote for the scoundrels who -- when they're not picking their pockets after yelling "Look! Welfare Cadillac! Baby mama with an EBT card! -- will construct budgets that savage the poor and the sick as they deconstruct civil society and the infrastructure of self-government bit by bit by bit. Year after year after year.


Louisiana State Capitol
This, because it's in the Bible (somewhere in the back) that the good, white, Jesus-lovin' people of Louisiana are absolutely entitled to another new pickup truck or another goddamned bass boat, but under no circumstances are obligated to pay one more penny in taxes. No matter what.

Our schools are crumbling. No new taxes.

Our roads are worse. No new taxes.

Our state universities have been savaged by budget cuts, people are laughing at us . . . and you don't want to know what people are wading through in the basement of LSU's library.

Does any of that affect football?
No, not at LSU -- that's self-supporting.


No new taxes.

Our social services and our health-care system have been cut to the bone. Actually, we had to remove a leg and a few fingers as well. If we cut any more, lots of people will die -- especially the disabled.  Blame Obamacare! No new taxes.

THE LATEST chapter of The State That Cut Off Its Nose Because It Already Cut the Budget for Soap and That Smelly Stuff That Goes Under Its Arms is told in the pages of today's edition of The Advocate in Baton Rouge:
The Louisiana House has agreed to a nearly $29 billion spending plan that has full funding for TOPS scholarships in the coming year but doesn't fund the state agencies that oversee health and social services to the levels that leaders say is needed to pay for critical programs.

House Bill 1 now heads to the Senate, where it will likely be changed in the coming weeks as lawmakers work to reach an agreement on the budget that begins July 1.

(snip)
Huey P. Long's grave, state capitol
During the course of the debate, House Democrats had pushed back on areas that affect health care, prisons and social services, including foster care, but there was little movement.

"It's a transparent attempt to cut the budget deeply and hide those facts by telling the Division of Administration to do the dirty work," said House Speaker Pro Tempore Walt Leger III, D-New Orleans.

After the Appropriations Committee had advanced its spending plan earlier in the week, leaders in Gov. John Bel Edwards decried the proposal as "draconian," "gruesome" and "a nonstarter."

Edwards, himself, said Thursday after the entire House approved the budget in a mostly party-line 63-40 vote that he was looking forward to working with the Senate to craft a more bipartisan proposal. He said the House Republican-backed measure is "flawed" one that "would send us tumbling backwards."

"We can't move Louisiana forward if we're standing still," Edwards said. "Their budget guts health care, children’s services and veteran services to levels that endanger the health and welfare of the people of Louisiana. When politicians craft policies without the input of the experts in a field, you know you’re getting a bad deal, and that’s how this budget was drafted."
Edwards had originally recommended a budget that boosted the Department of Health by an additional $235 million to fund optional and behavioral programs. Part of that money originally meant for LDH was then shifted to fund the popular Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, a scholarship program for Louisiana high schoolers who attend college in state.
TOPS was funded at about 70 percent in the current year's budget.

Edwards, a Democrat, had listed TOPS as his No. 1 priority for funding if the Legislature agreed to tax proposals that would generate more revenue.

Edwards administration has argued that the funding levels offered in the House budget proposal would threaten the state's compliance with federal orders regarding behavioral health services and cut the number of psychiatric beds; eliminate jobs that deal with child welfare; and lead to furloughs for some prison inmates.

"This impacts people's lives," said Rep. Sam Jones, D-Franklin. "This is life or death."
HOW DOES one describe this budget, this approach to governance in a state whose day job appears to be protecting old statues of dead traitors and slavers, and whose hobby seems to be steamrolling the disabled, the sick and the poor? Many of whom, by the way, happen to be the descendants of those slaves victimized by the memorialized dead traitors.

How's this for a start?

Despicable. Wicked. Depraved. Blasphemous. A budget from the bowels of hell in a state bucking to become hell on earth.

"For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written."


I think that covers it.

Do you remember what various fundamentalists -- notably TV preacher John Hagee -- and others said about Katrina being punishment from God, because New Orleans?

Assume for a moment that's how God rolls -- that He's still in the business of Large-Scale Smiting. Assume also that Jesus, who is God, meant every word He said about "blessed are the poor," "suffer not the little children" and "whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

Assume the Lord was making a point central to His plan of salvation -- and the nature of good and evil -- when He related the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

FINALLY, let us assume that the Savior of the World, the Creator of the Universe, wasn't shitting people in Matthew 25:31-46:

31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Gov. Huey P. Long

FOR THE SAKE of argument, what if we're accountable not only for what we do individually, but also the governments and societies we craft through our individual actions, activism and votes? What if those political entities, states and nations also are subject to divine scrutiny and divine judgment?

Louisianians -- particularly the white, conservative ones -- are fond of telling the world how God-fearing they are. One can assume a great many of them are quite well-pleased with the Republican-imposed budget bill now headed to the Senate. Because taxes, big gummint and leeches sucking at the taxpayers' teat.

How do they square the circle of loving what Jesus clearly hates? How do they so embrace the laundry list of ways to torture the poor, the halt and the sick (while devoting the savings from that to benefiting the rich and middle class) -- quite literally all those things that holy scripture devotes so much space telling us Jesus so hated.

God-fearing? I'm not so sure the South -- Louisiana -- is even Christ-haunted anymore.

And what if the crazy preachers and doomsayers are right about "acts of God" really being acts of God's wrath?

According to that model, New Orleans got drowned and 1,577 Louisianians killed because of gays, trannies and titty bars. What the hell do you think God will do to the Gret Stet because of this? Or, for that matter, this?

Lord, have mercy . . . because my home state surely has none.

Monday, November 16, 2015

NOW they're worried about homelessness


The good news: American right-wingers are focused on homelessness now.

The bad news: I think the Republican Congress is about to eliminate welfare, food stamps and the rest of the "social safety net."

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Louisiana's grand prix of political obscenity

In a state notoriously indifferent to the needs of its citizens and -- let's face it -- the idea of fundamental civic decency, Louisiana legislators have no problem with the short bus having to go up against Indy cars in the race for tax dollars.

Guess who won.

In the Gret Stet, it's a matter of the survival of the fittest -- and the richest. And state senators aren't shy about putting taxpayer dollars where they're not needed to make sure those who can fend for itself get an even bigger head start on those who cannot. But in a state where one former governor was known as "The Silver Zipper" before he went off to a federal penitentiary and a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard almost became governor, the obscene is nothing to lose sleep over.


The Advocate in Baton Rouge reports on the Senate Finance Committee stripping funds dedicated to aiding the disabled as just another thing during a day in the life of the Louisiana Legislature. Which, unfortunately, it is.
As LSU battled for the SEC Tournament Championship on Sunday, the Senate Finance Committee was at the State Capitol unraveling much of the Louisiana House’s work on the $25 billion state spending plan.

Out went $63 million in cuts to contracts, state government jobs, overtime and technology expenses. Out went reductions to economic development programs. Out went some of the extra money for the disabled community.

Additions included $4.5 million for a Verizon IndyCar Series race at the NOLA Motorsports Park in Jefferson Parish. Gov. Bobby Jindal had committed to find the money for facility and track improvements.

“We’re taking money away from the disabled community and giving it to motor sports?” state Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, asked Sunday night as he thumbed through 47 pages of amendments.

The committee’s chairman, state Sen. Jack Donahue, jumped in when a Senate aide gave Claitor a vague answer about the funding being part of the overall plan.

“The answer to your question, Sen. Claitor, is ‘yes.’ Alright, any other questions?” said Donahue, R-Mandeville.

Claitor was the only committee member who voted against the sweeping amendments. On a vote of 10-1, the committee approved the changes to House Bill 1, the state operating budget for the fiscal year that starts in July. The bill now goes to the Senate floor for debate.

The state budget funds schools, hospitals, prisons and other public expenses. The House had to fill a number of funding gaps. Jindal didn’t include enough money for public schools or the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, also called TOPS.
OF COURSE, the NOLA Motorsports Park is a private facility, owned by a rich doctor whose family runs one of the world's leading builders and operators of offshore-service vessels for the oil and gas industry. If, as a lawmaker, you're going to be shameless, go big or go home.

Sadly, "go away" doesn't seem to be an option here.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Still there, nowhere.


Spring is here, and the abandoned homeless camp in the middle of Omaha isn't.

Abandoned anymore, that is. When we visited the site in February, it appeared that the person or persons using the primitive flop had wisely flown the (ramshackle) coop for the winter.


Nestled in the treeline between a park and the Keystone Trail -- and across the Little Papillion Creek from an apartment complex and supermarket -- the rough lean-to shows signs of life. And liquor.

Bicyclists ride by and joggers plod past the wooded flop without noticing what, and who, might be yards away. Ditto for the skate-park skateboarders and the softball players.

Because you don't notice a shelter that isn't much of one, however, does not mean it's not there. And because we long ago stopped noticing those among us who are cash poor but -- oftentimes -- flush with addiction, mental illness or both, it doesn't mean they're not lurking among the trees and brush of the urban greenscape. 

Or perhaps a downtown bus shelter.

Or a park bench.

Maybe beneath an overpass.

Or a van down by the river, for all you know.

We want "something done" about the problem when the homeless start to annoy us. 

When they don't, it's all good -- we go back to worrying about the zombie apocalypse . . . which doesn't actually exist. 


The spiders, after all, aren't in our clothes.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

%*(#!^& brilliant!


OK, this isn't safe for work. Or your little kids.

But come to think of it, neither is life.

Anyway, watch the brilliant video that came out of a social experiment by the British poverty charity, The Pilion Trust, to see whether people really do care about the poor. Turns out they do. Which sets the charity up to deliver the advertising kill shot.

Just watch.

Saturday, February 08, 2014

No shelter at all


This was the view Friday of the homeless camp just off Omaha's Keystone Trail.

Sometimes, a crude shelter is no shelter at all -- no good against the cold and worthless in the snow. It looks like whoever was camped here is long gone . . . thankfully.


THE HIGH on Friday was 13. That was a big improvement over Thursday, which started out at 10 below.

If this is all the shelter you have, there's a word to describe you. That would be "dead."

Still, consider there are folks out there . . . in the cold. In rough camps not much better than this. It's what they call "home."

Ours is a society of cracks, through which "the least of these" fall, much like the snow through the gaps in this lean-to.


Lord, have mercy.

Thursday, February 06, 2014

Disappearing in plain sight


This is the Keystone Trail, right in the middle of the middle of Omaha.

You'll find yuppies and bobos and DINKs and hipsters and bikers and joggers and slackers and workers and old folks up and down its paved pathway beside the Little Papillion Creek whenever the weather isn't totally unfortunate.

Sometimes, you'll find idiots like me there even when the weather is unreasonably unfortunate. Not today, however. Too much snow, too damned windy and cold.

Some things . . . some folks whom you might find there, you'd probably rather pretend aren't there -- there right under our reasonably affluent noses. But evidence is evidence.

Like this. Right under our noses.


IT'S QUITE easy today to routinely ignore what's right under our noses. In our society, we all live in our own little worlds, and we all live by those whose worlds are a lot like our own.

No longer are we forced to exist cheek and jowl with the great unwashed, so we don't.

And they become invisible, even when they're in plain sight. Or, as the case may be, tucked just into the tree line.

Would that all our failures were as out of sight and out of mind as the homeless, some of whom -- beset by mental illness, addiction or whatever -- never come in out of the cold. Even when it's snowy and 10 below, like it is this harsh February night in Omaha.

I hope whomever this encampment belongs to gave in to the siren song of central heating at a local shelter. A lean-to this crude can't keep out the snow, much less the subzero cold.


MAYBE WE fail to notice what's right under our noses -- or pretend we don't notice what's right under our noses -- because we're just overwhelmed. We are so overwhelmed by our own problems and clutter and, yes, demons that we figure we can't afford the luxury of contemplating or acknowledging those whose problems and clutter and demons have left them wandering through the Nebraska deep freeze.

As opposed to merely being distracted and stressed out.

Me, I don't know. I'm just spitballing here.

Whatever is the case, the evidence is clear that none are so blind as those who will not see. "Those," of course, being you. And you. And you.

And, by God, me.

Tuesday, November 05, 2013

The red dawn of a new day? Oy veh.


We Americans think "the social gospel" is just fine.

Just so long as it stays where it belongs -- between 30 and 33 A.D. The Bible talks about things from long ago in the Holy Land, allowing us plenty of time and distance to reframe both message and Messenger a bit more to our liking.

We can deal with that. Things were simpler then -- it was before Obamacare.

But if you really want to see the fit hit the shan, start preaching and teaching -- and, Dow Jones forbid, living -- "the social gospel" today . . . which is to say living "the gospel" today, because Christianity isn't an à la carte deal, it's a combination plate. That combination plate gave "orthodox" Judaism gas in 33 A.D., it gave the Romans gas for 280 years, give or take, and it gives everybody gas today.

Particularly, Pope Francis' renewed emphasis on "the social gospel" -- you know, "blessed are the poor" and "the meek shall inherit the land" -- has a whole lot of "orthodox" Catholics in a toot. The latest blow-up comes in the wake of a couple of American speeches given by one of Francis' trusted advisers, Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras.

There was, for one, writer and editor John Zmirak on Rod Dreher's American Conservative blog:
Cardinal Maradiaga’s vision of the future of the Catholic Church is really a yellowed snapshot of the past—of the recent past of the Anglican church, which has buried the clear and consistent doctrines of Christianity, in favor of social activism on behalf of foolish and counterproductive policies. The result was predictable; it became spiritually irrelevant, a decorative tassel hanging from the left wing of public opinion, while its most fervent believers split off to found new churches that actually taught the Gospel, or decamped for Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. If the Catholic Church follows its lead, to the point where it throws infallibility into question, the same thing will happen. Expect a torrent of converts to the Orthodox Church—made up of the most active, fervent, believing, Catholics.

As a North American who is grateful for the relative religious and economic freedom that produced a successful country, I reject the Marxian bromides being offered by men whose countries have never known such freedom. Amidst all Maradiaga’s rhetoric about Gospel solidarity with the poor, I smell more than whiff of brimstone, of a national and regional envy that has no clue how to lift up the impoverished, but would happily settle for tearing down the prosperous.
WHAT WAS the pope just saying about the dangers of ideology? And what exactly prompted such a furious reaction?

Stuff like this: 
The Church is not the hierarchy, but the people of God. “The People of God” is, for the Council, the all-encompassing reality of the Church that goes back to the basic and the common stuff of our ecclesial condition; namely, our condition as believers. And that is a condition shared by us all. The hierarchy has no purpose in itself and for itself, but only in reference and subordination to the community. The function of the hierarchy is redefined in reference to Jesus as Suffering Servant, not as “Pantocrator” (lord and emperor of this world); only from the perspective of someone crucified by the powers of this world it is possible to found, and to explain, the authority of the Church. The hierarchy is a ministry (diakonia = service) that requires lowering ourselves to the condition of servants. To take that place (the place of weakness and poverty) is her own, her very own responsibility.
ME, I was thinking "About damned time!" 

I also was thinking "This model either would have made the Scandals a lot less likely, or it would have enabled lay Catholics to deal with them a lot more effectively -- through less clericalism and more ass kicking." But that's just me. I'm a Bad Catholic who can digest clericalism and humorless scolds on the religious right no better than I can soulless Marty Haugen ditties during Mass or cheap-gracers on the liturgical left.

If I were just smarter and holier, I would have been able to discern the Red Menace lurking beneath the surface of passages like this from the cardinal's Dallas address:
There is no possible reform of the Church without a return to Jesus. The Church only has a future and can only consider herself great by humbly trying to follow Jesus. To discern what constitutes abuse or infidelity within the Church we have no other measure but the Gospel. Many of the traditions established in the Church could lead her to a veritable self-imprisonment. The truth will set us free, humility will give us wings and will open new horizons for us.
If the Church seeks to follow Jesus, all she has to do is to continue telling the world what happened to Jesus, proclaiming His teachings and His life. Jesus was not a sovereign of this world, He was not rich, but instead He lived as a poor villager, He proclaimed his program – the Kingdom of God—and the great of this world (Roman Empire and Synagogue together) persecuted and eliminated Him. His sentence to die on the cross, outside the city, is the clearest evidence yet that He did not want to ingratiate himself with the powers of this world. Shattered by their power, He is the Suffering Servant, an image of innumerable other servants, defeated by the ones who rule and call themselves “lords;” but it was He, poor, silenced, and humiliated, who was designated by his Father as His Beloved Child and whom God Himself resurrected on the third day.
THE MAN even referenced that noted pinko, Blessed John Paul II:
In contemporary pontifical magisterium, we have two significant benchmarks: John Paul II’s 1990 Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, and the apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, from the same pontiff, in 2001. “In Redemptoris Missio, the Pope teaches us that the Church is a mission. It is not that she has a mission, like she has other traits; she is herself a mission. Everything in the Church should be weighted and measured in regard to the mission of converting the world.” 
And in Novo Millennio Ineunte, Blessed John Paul II challenges the Church at the end of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, to leave behind the shallow waters of maintaining the institution and travel to the deep waters of evangelization. That is what Jesus tells his disciples in Chapter 12 of Luke, adding: “Duc in altum, put out into the deep.” [Luke 5: 4] This means that the Church will convert the world not by argument, but by example. There is no doubt that doctrinal argument is important, but people will be attracted by the humanity of Christians, those who live by the faith, who live in a human way, who irradiate the joy of living, the consistency in their behavior.
FOR WHAT it's worth, my wife and I are converts to the Catholic faith. No one argued us into the church; a number of people loved us into it.

Meantime, the Rev. Dwight Longenecker worries that the gospel will get lost in a sea of "social work." Because, obviously, all you need isn't love. Or something like that.
I am not so much worried about what Cardinal Maradiaga said, but what he left unsaid.
And there the Church, in humble company, helps making life intelligible and dignified, making it a community of equals, without castes or classes; without rich or poor; without impositions or anathemas. Her foremost goal is to care for the penultimate (hunger, housing, clothing, shoes, health, education…) to be then able to care for the ultimate, those problems that rob us of sleep after work (our finiteness, our solitude before death, the meaning of life, pain, and evil…). The answer the Church gives to the “penultimate” will entitle her to speak about the “ultimate.” For that reason, the Church must show herself as a Samaritan on earth – so she can some day partake of the eternal goods.
Really? The Church’s foremost goal is to provide housing, shoes, health and education? Surely the church’s foremost goal is the salvation of souls. To be sure we must be engaged in feeding the poor, but in his talk on the New Evangelization the Cardinal does not mention the salvation of souls or the spiritual work of the church or the sacraments at all. Is he simply a social worker dressed in red, and does the red indicate more of his political opinion than his status as a cardinal?

REALLY? What part of "the answer the Church gives to the 'penultimate' will entitle her to speak about the 'ultimate'" is unclear?

Again, I am a convert. I was "penultimated" into the Catholic Church. After all, God meets you where you are, not where He thinks you need to be. Where you need to be is a process -- one lasting a lifetime.

By the way, I only can assume that the good father's cheap shot about Maradiaga being a "social worker dressed in red" or maybe just a Red, period, was for the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls. I've seen stranger things done -- in all sincerity -- for the sake of kingdom come.

Ideology takes the invitation that is the Christian gospel and makes it into a hammer. Ideology takes suffering souls and turns them into nails -- into the proverbial Them.

Ideology say: Us, we so holy.

I'M NOT sure how much the cardinal's American trip told us about what direction the Catholic Church is headed. I fear the collective cerebral hemorrhage we're seeing so early in Francis' pontificate tells us a lot about the Catholic right.

"Cafeteria Catholicism," alas, is a bipartisan thing. And the cafeteria is getting crowded.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

SMASH RUNNING-DOG VERBAL DIARRHEA
OF DILETTANTE U.S. REVOLUTIONARIES!


Does anybody in his right mind take crap like this seriously?

I found this hand-scrawled tract lying on the ground at Omaha's almost-dead, soon to be razed Crossroads Mall today, and I think there's a metaphor somewhere in that circumstance. I'm also thinking somebody watched "Reds" five times too many. Sheesh.

What's worse is that I agree with the general sentiment, hiding though it be in a steaming pile of outraged agitprop. Yes, the growing inequality of our society is a bad thing -- it's a very bad thing if you're the minimum-wage bug and not the overcompensated windshield. And what Wall Street bankers and bond traders have gotten away with the last decade (and more) is outrageous.

You can't even call it beating the rap. There's no rap to beat, and that is an affront to both social justice and civil society.

Furthermore, balancing a budget on the backs of those who most need "entitlements" like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid when the "1 percent" -- indeed, even the 10 percent -- are well capable of paying a fairer share of taxes would be fundamentally unjust. Cruel, even.

WE ARE our brother's keeper -- this comes from a Very High Authority, indeed -- and a society for which that is not an organizing principle is one that would be, in a word, brutish.

There's a lot you can say on this subject in support of reining in Wall Street and bestowing a little governmental mercy upon Main Street, not to mention Skid Row. It all would comport with what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," and some of it might even persuade a few Fox News Channel viewers.

Hand-scrawled tracts parroting a bunch of Leon Trotsky's B-sides?  Not so much. 

It's a natural fact that anywhere you land on God's green earth, those who are quickest to lend a helping hand -- to share with you whatever they have -- tend to be those who can least afford their own generosity. It doesn't take much for these souls to "give until it hurts."

"The widow's mite" wasn't just something Jesus pulled out of thin air.

BUT the thing is, those in our society who have the most right to be damned angry at their plight generally aren't half as mad as America's outraged, tract-scrawling, fill-in-the-blank-occupying dilettante revolutionaries, whose sound and fury thus far has signified pretty much nothing. Kind of like John Reed back in the day.

Frankly, I think America's have-nots deserve better representation.

Friday, November 23, 2012

People of Walmart do that thing they do


Look at this.

It must be Black Friday, and this must be the People of Walmart.
 
Yet Walmart management has a problem with its employees who demand a living wage, decent treatment and decent benefits to deal with the kind of mindless, consumerist barbarism the retail giant encourages every Black Friday. No, the retail giant hasn't cornered the market for this kind of mob mayhem, but there's a reason why you see so much of it at Walmart and other stores aspiring to Walmartishness.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., bloody well knows every single thing about its clientele, and management knows everything there is to know about the "downmarket" they target. Plenty of people at corporate know their sociology in addition to their retailing.

And management damned well knows what's likely to happen at "X" number of random locations on Black Friday, and I'd also wager it knows which "doorbusters"  are most likely to provoke the kind of mayhem you see here . . . and where.


NEVERTHELESS, the Bosses of Walmart are perfectly happy to send the Associates of Walmart into the violent maw of the People of Walmart, who were set off by the Marketing Strategy of Walmart . . . and pay them the Crappy Wages of Walmart for the dubious privilege. 
Oh but ain't that America for you and me
Ain't that America somethin' to see baby
Ain't that America home of the free. . . .

Sunday, July 22, 2012

'Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld!'
('These Atrocities: Your Fault!')


Ever been on a plantation tour in the South and heard all about the lost glories of the Old South -- that idyllic life the planter class enjoyed prior to the martial unpleasantness that brought it all to naught?

Were you amazed at how little you hear on some of these tours about the slaves upon whose backs was built this life of privilege and beauty for the few . . . the proud . . . the wealthy and white?

Ever turned on the TV and seen one of those stories about post-Soviet life in Russia, where you always see some raggedy protest by old pensioners with hammer-and-sickle flags and pictures of Lenin and Stalin, lamenting the passing of the dictatorship of the proletariat and all its attendant glories?

Were you amazed at how the gulags and captive nations never quite fit into the narrative of nostalgia for Soviet greatness?

Yeah. Me, too.


THIS
REMINDS me of all that. And the warped, warped culture of idolatry and denial surrounding Penn State football and pervading State College, Pa., needs to follow the Old South and the Soviet Union into the ash bin of history.
Cloresa Turner drove to central Pennsylvania from Virginia to see the statue of veteran Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.

When she arrived in State College on Sunday and saw that it was gone from its place outside the university stadium, she clasped her hand over her mouth.

"He's done so much for this university. It's sad," said Turner, of Martinsville, Va. "To wipe it all away is like he meant nothing."

Construction vehicles and police arrived shortly after dawn Sunday, barricading the street and sidewalks near the statue, erecting a chain-link fence and then concealing the 7-foot-tall statue with a blue tarp. Workers used jackhammers to free the statue and a forklift to lower it onto a flat-bed truck that rolled into a stadium garage bay as some of the 100 to 150 students and other onlookers chanted, "We are Penn State."


(snip)

The Paterno family issued a statement saying the statue's removal "does not serve the victims of Jerry Sandusky's horrible crimes or help heal the Penn State community." The family, which has vowed its own investigation, called the report by former FBI director Louis Freeh the "incomplete and unofficial" equivalent of a charging document by a prosecutor and said the only way to help the victims "is to uncover the full truth."
NO, THEY'RE not s****ing you.

It's not an act for the tourists like proud faux Confederates re-enacting Pickett's Charge
or drunken Kappa Alphas getting their Ashley Wilkes on in hopes of making some Southern belle swoon like Scarlett. This is the kind of true-believer devotion to Baal that gave us the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws, because Reconstruction wasn't thorough enough and didn't last nearly long enough.

"Look away, look away, look away . . ." JoePa fans.
Some who came out to watch the statue's removal were angry that it had been done with so little notice that many missed it - "It was under cloak of darkness," said Diane Byerly, 63, of Harrisburg - and worried that stiff sanctions from the NCAA would punish the innocent while possibly destroying businesses that rely on the commerce from the tens of thousands who flood State College on game days.

"I think there's ways you can punish the parties involved without affecting all of State College," said Richard Hill, a 1967 graduate from West Chester.

Chris Stathes, 40, a lifelong Penn State football fan who has a daughter at the school and manages two State College breakfast eateries, said shutting down the program would devastate area businesses.

"Football season, that's our moment. From the time we open our doors in the morning until kickoff, there's a line out the door," he said.

Philip Frum, 24, who works on research projects for Penn State, said he hoped the statue would be erected elsewhere, such as at a nearby Penn State sports museum.

"This statue was a symbol of all the good things he's done for the university,"
Frum said. Any NCAA penalty that shuts down the football program "will be just as bad as taking down the statue," he said.
LinkOH . . . I hope it's much, much worse.

A culture that throws its children into the flaming pyre for the sake of Baal -- also known as "our peculiar institution," "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and big-time college football -- deserves every bit of divine wrath it calls down upon itself. It needs to be obliterated for the sake of the world . . . and for the sake of those under its thrall.

In Germany after World War II, we had a name for a similar effort. "Denazification," we called it.

Today, let the "de-Paternofication" of the Pennsylvania State University begin.


UPDATE: The Philadelphia Daily News just posted this story. Good grief.

Where is the Red Army when you really need it? What's next, tales of Penn State faithful barricaded in their man caves with the little woman, a 9 mm Luger and a couple of cyanide capsules?

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Bowing down before the Nittany Lion


Let's get one thing straight right now.

The entire sport, culture and establishment of American college football is not worth the innocence of a single child.

Fans, coaches and administrators at Penn State thought -- and likely still think -- otherwise. That is why Jerry Sandusky was allowed to keep on raping young boys for years and years after pretty much every coach and administrator at the university knew he was the worst sort of degenerate -- the felonious pinnacle of pedophilic perversion.

If the man were in Texas, he easily would fall under the banner of "needs killin'."

Anywhere else, I would hope that, at a minimum, not one person would think that the son of a bitch should ever again see the light of day. It's a no-brainer.

Let me amend that. It's a no-brainer everywhere but State College, Pa. In State College, Pa., the former defensive coordinator of the Nittany Lions was allowed to befriend, groom and sodomize underprivileged and at-risk boys for at least 13 years after people at Penn State first realized there was a problem --
and a big one -- with Jerry Sandusky.

THIS WAS all in the name of preserving the good name of Penn State football. Of preserving the big, big business of Penn State football.

Ultimately, the indifference and the cover-up caught up with Coach Joe Paterno, President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley and senior vice president for finance and business Gary Schultz. And when the university board of trustees fired Paterno, effectively closing the stable door after all the horses had made a run for it, thousands of Penn State students responded by rioting in downtown State College.

And it was out of fear of the mob that the board balked at reneging on the lucrative "go away quietly" package it had negotiated (as all hell was beginning to break loose) with Paterno -- who now, after the Grim Reaper caught up with him, too, stands before the highest court of all. Turns out that people don't take it well when their false gods and warped culture come under attack, no matter how justly.

SO NOW the NCAA gets the ball on downs. And in this interview Monday night with PBS talk host Tavis Smiley, NCAA President Mark Emmert refused to rule out the "death penalty" for Nittany Lion football.
Emmert said he's "never seen anything as egregious as this in terms of just overall conduct and behavior inside a university." He added, "What the appropriate penalties are, if there are determinations of violations, we'll have to decide."

The last time the NCAA shut down a football program with the so-called "death penalty" was in the 1980s, when SMU was forced to drop the sport because of extra benefits violations.

"This is completely different than an impermissible benefits scandal like [what] happened at SMU, or anything else we've dealt with," Emmert explained. "This is as systemic a cultural problem as it is a football problem. There have been people that said this wasn't a football scandal.

"Well, it was more than a football scandal, much more than a football scandal. It was that but much more. And we'll have to figure out exactly what the right penalties are. I don't know that past precedent makes particularly good sense in this case, because it's really an unprecedented problem."

OR, AS ONE
sports-law expert put it last week, “Let’s face it, a football coach raped kids and he did so facilitated allegedly by another football coach and athletic officials, and some of the crimes occurred in the Penn State showers. I think that’s sufficient nexus to the team.”

Given that, I was glad to hear the death penalty for Penn State is on the table. God willing, it soon will be off of the table and into effect.

As a rule, false gods need to be sent packing. When the worship of college football and the corruption of the big money made off of it leads to university officials tolerating child sexual abuse by someone associated with the football program -- as the by-then retired Sandusky obviously still was -- that particular false god needs to be killed, its graven image melted down and the ground it once stood upon plied with salt.

I DON'T give a damn that people will lose their jobs. I don't give a damn that motels and hotels in State College will lose money. I don't give a damn that players will have to scramble to find new teams.

No job, no business and no full-ride scholarship for any "student athlete" -- and the fact I felt compelled to put that in quotes is part and parcel of the corrupting influence of this particular false god in all too many cases -- is worth the innocence of a single child.

Penn State football can go to hell. And all the people who fed the monster, who bowed before the false god that it became, need to spend a few years of quality time with the Real One, making amends and doing penance.

I don't know whether or not Jerry Sandusky "needs killin'." But Penn State football sure as hell does.

Just do it.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

America's Caucasian problem

(Photo//Paul M. Walsh)

Apparently, the United States has a major Caucasian crime problem.

I mean, get a load of these alarming statistics in an opinion piece by
MSNBC political analyst Edward Wyckoff Williams, recently reprinted in the Louisiana Weekly, New Orleans' African-American newspaper:
The truth? As the largest racial group, whites commit the majority of crimes in America. In particular, whites are responsible for the vast majority of violent crimes. With respect to aggravated assault, whites led Blacks 2-1 in arrests; in forcible-rape cases, whites led all racial and ethnic groups by more than 2-1. And in larceny theft, whites led Blacks, again, more than 2-1.

Given this mathematical truth, would anyone encourage African Americans to begin shooting suspicious white males in their neighborhoods for fear that they’ll be raped, assaulted or murdered? Perhaps George Zimmerman’s defenders should answer that question. If African Americans were to act as irrationally as Zimmerman did, would any rationale suffice to avoid arrest?


(snip)

It seems that the media in general and white American society in particular prefer to focus on crime perpetrated by African Americans because it serves as a way to absolve them from the violence, prejudice and institutionalized discrimination engendered for generations against Blacks. It offers a buffer against responsibility, a way to shift blame and deflect cause and effect. But the truth, and numbers, tell a different story.
NO DOUBT about it, this "mathematical truth" certainly gives one pause.

I cannot conceive of any rationale that possibly
could justify arresting any black American who did any damn thing to a dangerous Caucasian, the raw crime numbers being what they are. I mean, when you have a white population 5.74 times as large as the U.S. black population raping and committing larceny TWICE as much as blacks -- hell, getting arrested period twice as much as blacks -- I don't see how the government just doesn't lock up every last damn cracker on the probabilities alone.

Naturally, some people may be scratching their heads at what they see as a crazy and illogical notion, but that's just because their math is racist.

Oh . . . and as Walker Percy once famously wrote, "The center did not hold."

Help! Help! The mobs are being repressed!


Whatever the Trayvon Martin shooting was in February, chances are it wasn't a hate crime.

Whatever the Trayvon Martin killing was that cold and rainy night, it wasn't premeditated. Prosecutors admitted that much by not filing first-degree murder charges against George Zimmerman.

But a lot of things being done in the young "martyr's" name absolutely have been premeditated. And they absolutely were hate crimes.


ONE OF the latest happened Saturday in Mobile, Ala. The story comes from WKRG television there:
According to police, Owens fussed at some kids playing basketball in the middle of Delmar Drive about 8:30 Saturday night. They say the kids left and a group of adults returned, armed with everything but the kitchen sink.

Police tell News 5 the suspects used chairs, pipes and paint cans to beat Owens.

Owens' sister, Ashley Parker, saw the attack. "It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed." Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using "brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on."

Police will only say "multiple people" are involved.

What Parker says happened next could make the fallout from the brutal beating even worse. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said "Now that's justice for Trayvon." Trayvon Martin is the unarmed teenager police say was shot and killed February 26 by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.
BACK IN FLORIDA this past winter, it's probably true that Zimmerman profiled Martin because of his age, gender . . . and race.

Given what's happened since that day in February -- not to mention the daily diet of violent-crime reports on TV and in the newspaper -- why do you think that might have been? It doesn't make profiling any less sad. Nor does it make profiling any less regrettable.

But it sure as hell makes it quite understandable.

In the real world, thugs don't get to complain about brutality. And unjust, violent mobs don't get to whine about injustice. That dog won't hunt.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Justice for Walgreens!


I just love how principled and socially conscious today's young people are, don't you?

When faced with the senseless shooting death of a Miami teenager amid questionable circumstances, these south Florida high-school youth responded by giving the rest of us a much-needed lesson in civics. A lesson in responsibly seeking redress of societal grievances.

They peacefully and respectfully demonstrated in favor of a full and fair investigation of the death of Trayvon Martin, calling for racial harmony and enforcement of the law free of favor or prejudice. Bless their little hearts.


The youth remained orderly, looking straight ahead as they sang hymns while an angry white mob ransacked North Miami Beach Senior High School, pummeling and spitting upon many of the nonviolent teens.

OOPS. My bad. I was watching a web video of Eyes on the Prize while I was checking out the national news, and I got kind of confused.

Note to self: Contemporary TV news reports are never on 16-millimeter back-and-white film. It's all videotape or digital video now . . . and in living color.



THE FOOTAGE from Friday's teenage protest in North Miami Beach is immediately above. Again, my apologies for the mix-up.

No, it seems that during last week's protest, a mob of little barbarian hooligans decided that "justice for Trayvon" entailed ransacking a local Walgreens.

This is because, for one thing, being angry justifies anything in today's culture and, for another, rumor has it that George Zimmerman, the Sanford, Fla., neighborhood-watch guy who shot the youth last month, "liked" the drugstore chain on
Facebook once. I think.

Local 10 television news got it straight from the junior lynch mob's mouths:
"I don't think they were doing it, like, to be malicious or whatever. They were just in the moment where they weren't really thinking right because they were so angry," said student Jenny Sincere.

"It showed bad character because that's not what we were out there for," student Eric On-Sang said. "A few just made us look really bad."

Some students admitted Tuesday to being part of the rampage.

"I'm not going to lie. I was one of the people that was pushing in there because I was mad," one student said.

When asked whether the incident may have hurt their cause, student Christopher Paul said, "Yeah, it kind of did, yeah. I was just angry. I don't know what the rest of them were doing. I was just trying to make a point for Trayvon. That's it."
WELL, so long as they were trying to make a point.

Consider it made.