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ineffable beauty, unspeakable evil, etc

Author: timmuky

Dead people who haven’t died yet, or Notes on the shameful sport of golf

By timmukyPosted on Posted in ineffable beautyTagged , , , , 10 Comments on Dead people who haven’t died yet, or Notes on the shameful sport of golf

Saturday I had whipped myself into a keen sense of anticipation to play in the first-ever competition between the place where I play golf and another place where people play golf.

If I called them “clubs” you would think there was something exclusive about them, but they are open to all. I guess there’s a pretty lax collared shirts/no denim code, rarely enforced. Think country clubs are garbage? So do I.

I’ve played plenty of informal golf games–skins with buddies, local charity scrambles–but I had never been in a proper competition, where mulligans can’t be given or bought, and where your opponents are entitled to stand silent while you have to sweat out the slidy four-footer you ran past the hole.

This was to be modeled on Ryder Cup competition. Fourball the first day, individual matches the next. My teammates decided we would all have to buy two team shirts in different colors: yellow Saturday, green Sunday. For me that was almost a deal-breaker, but we at least were allowed our own choice of headgear.

So  … totally stoked! But on Saturday morning, while warming up, disaster struck. My back went into spasms, and I could barely bend to touch my kneecaps, let alone my toes, or swing a golf club. My partner had to load me into my car.

I drove home and watched football on TV flat on my back. I was hugely resentful of all that mobility as I lay there sucking bourbon from a sippy cup.

Was pretty certain I wouldn’t be able to play on Day Two. But lo, I awakened, and the back wasn’t too bad. Lots of stretching and ibuprofen. While still sore, the mobility had returned. I could play.

My opponent marked his balls with little blue crosses (“I’m playing the Jesus balls”). Oh here we go, I thought, but there was no follow-up proselytizing. In fact, Rick turned out to be an extremely nice guy. Super intense, he really wanted to win, as I did, and our match was entertaining.

I drove to the fringe on the short par four third, then almost chipped in. I was two-up at the turn. Rick got one back with an insane reversal birdie from nowhere on number twelve (topped drive, 210-yard three-wood to three feet!). We then had four straight tense halves, both of us playing better with each shot.

On sixteen, I had two feet straight uphill, and Rick had a four-foot slider. He said “good-good?” with a little sideways grin, and I blurted out “sure.” Which surprised him. AND me. What the hell are you doing? If I made and he missed, that’s the match! Maybe it was a stupid thing to say, or MAYBE I was enjoying the match too much and didn’t want to win or lose on a missed short putt. Perhaps that was karmically good, because on the next hole I lagged a 40-foot downhill putt with 10 feet of break to six inches, and he couldn’t get up and down.

So I won. Hat off. Shake hands. That weird southern backhanded pat on back. Our team won too. Down a point after the fourball, we got six of the eight possible points on Sunday. And there was rejoicing, of a sort. Nobody whooped it up or trash talked. We were the mature guys or at least the older ones, median age forty-eight or so, while our opponents were generally younger, more athletic, long-hitting hotshots, median age 28. (I think some of them might have whooped, given the chance).

A gang of golfers from both teams assembled above the eighteenth green to watch the final matches.

A late September afternoon in central Kentucky, in the sky a scattering of silvery sun-specked clouds, the visuals partially courtesy of the coal-burning EW Brown Generating Station just across the Dix River from the course. The shadows dappled faces wrinkled and/or reddened by a lifetime of drink and/or high blood pressure.  One opponent had a bucket hat covering a large bandage over his ear where he had a tumor removed. Another couldn’t play as he was recovering from a liver transplant. I didn’t know everyone’s story, but knew for certain more than a few of us were getting treatment for cancer.

I think it’d be safe to say the group skewed 90 percent Republican, with maybe a sprinkling of centrist Democrats. If we ever started talking politics, it would get ugly in a hurry, but we never would.

We joked about spraying each other with champagne as the real Ryder Cup team winners are wont to do, but there was nothing like that. I had brought along my bourbon sippy cup for medical reasons, in case the back really flared up, but it never did. Now my warm Old Heaven Hill was as good a celebration drink as I could muster. Others sipped on Michelob Ultras or Ale-8s. Almost everyone was smoking.

The winning team had its picture taken with a tiny cup. I am hoping that photo will still be hanging on the clubhouse wall long after I am gone from this earth.

When I got home my kids hugged me and said “Congratulations, daddy. You’re the champion,” because they felt my extreme disappointment on Saturday–and because Heather probably told them to do so. And because I am still in that sweet spot in parenthood where your children have an unwavering belief that you hung the moon.

I know we are leaving our kids to a world that will only get hungrier,  meaner, more dangerous for them, and their children. And you could make the case that instead of using every ounce of energy to make their world better, spending time on the golf course isn’t exactly helpful. I could not really make a coherent challenge to that.

Louis CK has a quip something along the lines of  “We are all dead people who haven’t died yet.” It’s kind of pathetic, but celebrating this tiny victory in a meaningless game, played by grown (and rapidly aging) men, combined with the autumnal vibe–well, it felt a little Chekhovian, the end of something.

It was also, it must be said, more than a little euphoric.  Yesterday, bathed in that golden dusk light, it really did feel amazing not to have died yet.

 

And then there’s Mort

By timmukyPosted on Posted in afghanistan, bombing, militarism, politics, war, war on terrorTagged , , No Comments on And then there’s Mort

It’s hard to compete with the sheer star power of the DNC attendees:

And then there’s Mort. Forgive me for this, but I did not even know Mort Sahl was still alive (he’s 85), and from the looks of his twitter feed this morning, very much kicking. He provides a welcome dissent to the USA USA Support the Troops nuttiness that just went down in Charlotte.

The Democratic Party is dead. You witnessed the execution. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Nancy Pelosi told Dennis Kucinich that impeachment of Cheney and Bush was off the table. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Biden said the Special Forces are the finest warriors of all time. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when no one in Charlotte asked Obama if he made up a kill list every Tuesday. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Biden said any place is a battlefield when our enemy is there-a dir quote frm Michael Hayden, the fmr Dir of the CIA. #DNC2012

It died a little every day when the Press never told you the truth. MSNBC, FOX; Vanilla or French Vanilla? #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when it embraced homosexuals but left Bradley Manning in solitary confinement. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Jack Kennedy’s daughter addressed the convention. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when it went from the loving arms of Jack Kennedy to an arranged marriage with Barack Obama. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Obama became an agent of the Middle Class and never mentioned the Working Class. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when the First Lady kept talking about the Troops. This President is in five wars. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Obama condemned Romney for being wealthy. So was Roosevelt and so was Adlai Stevenson. #DeathoftheDemParty

It died when Obama refinanced the auto companies and forced the workers to accept a lower wage and no health insurance. #DNC2012

It died when neither Bernie Sanders nor Howard Dean ran against Obama. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Barack Obama became a hostage to the CIA and the Pentagon. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when the first Liberal voted for the Vietnamese War. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Barack Obama ignored Congress and sent cruise missiles into Libya. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died when Kerry didn’t ask for a recount in Ohio. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

You too can be a Democrat if you have enough room in your closet for your conscience. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

I may have aroused your anger. But I can’t seem to raise your conscience. #DeathoftheDemParty #DNC2012

It died because the Liberals don’t want to do anything just– they just want to feel good. #DeathoftheDemParty

 

Hollywood actor judges two presidents with a single set of criteria

By timmukyPosted on Posted in bombing, civil liberties, following obama over a cliff, militarism, rule of law, torture, war, war on terrorNo Comments on Hollywood actor judges two presidents with a single set of criteria

John Cusack has moved me to rescind my personal rule to ignore what actors  say about anything other than what they do well–which is generally speaking to look good, spend a lot of time at the gym, and learn their lines.

Unlike most of the opinionated members of his profession, Cusack has been intensely critical of both the Bush administration and the current one. He uses a single set of criteria to judge both Bush and Obama. Imagine that!

Apparently, Cusack is also an old school friend of Jonathan Turley, who blogs most expertly on legal issues, in particular those having to do with civil liberties. He has published a meaty interview with Turley which should be read in it entirety. I just wanted to excerpt this terrific little passage, which is especially appropriate this week, as we crown our emperor in the non-union Democratic stronghold of Charlotte.

CUSACK: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an ongoing moral fiasco — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go?

Read the whole thing.

Hmm.   The version of this interview published in  truth-out.com contains a lengthy preamble by Cusack that doesn’t appear on the Turley blog.  It ends with a  provocative question that I think answers  itself.

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I started to think about what it would mean to vote for Obama…

Since mostly we hear from the daily hypocrisies of Mitt and friends, I thought we should examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the “progressive left”, which seems to be little or none at all.

Instead of scrutiny, the usual arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are made: We must stop fanatics; it would be better than the fanatics—he’s the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians—and of course the Supreme Court. It all makes a terrible kind of sense and I agree completely with Garry Wills who described the Republican primaries as ” a revolting combination of con men & fanatics— “the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.”

True enough.

But yet…

… there are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed.

All political questions are not equal no matter how much you pivot. When people die or lose their physical freedom to feed certain economic sectors or ideologies, it becomes a zero sum game for me.

This is not an exercise in bemoaning regrettable policy choices or cheering favorable ones but to ask fundamentally: Who are we? What are we voting for? And what does it mean?

Three markers — the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me…

Mr. Obama, the Christian president with the Muslim-sounding name, would heed the admonitions of neither religion’s prophets about making war and do what no empire or leader, including Alexander the Great, could do: he would, he assured us “get the job done in Afghanistan.” And so we have our democratic president receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he sends 30,000 more troops to a ten-year-old conflict in a country that’s been war-torn for 5,000 years.

Why? We’ll never fully know. Instead, we got a speech that was stone bullshit and an insult to the very idea of peace.

We can’t have it both ways. Hope means endless war? Obama has metaphorically pushed all in with the usual international and institutional killers; and in the case of war and peace, literally.

To sum it up: more war. So thousands die or are maimed; generations of families and veterans are damaged beyond imagination; sons and daughters come home in rubber bags. But he and his satellites get their four more years.

The AfPak War is more H. G. Wells than Orwell, with people blindly letting each other get fed to the barons of Wall Street and the Pentagon, themselves playing the part of the Pashtuns. The paradox is simple: he got elected on his anti-war stance during a perfect storm of the economic meltdown and McCain saying the worst thing at the worst time as we stared into the abyss. Obama beat Clinton on “I’m against the war and she is for it.” It was simple then, when he needed it to be.

Under Obama do we continue to call the thousands of mercenaries in Afghanistan “general contractors” now that Bush is gone? No, we don’t talk about them… not a story anymore.

Do we prosecute felonies like torture or spying on Americans? No, time to “move on”…

Now chaos is the norm and though the chaos is complicated, the answer is still simple. We can’t afford this morally, financially, or physically. Or in a language the financial community can digest: the wars are ideologically and spiritually bankrupt. No need to get a score from the CBO.

Drones bomb Pakistani villages across the border at an unprecedented rate. Is it legal? Does anyone care? “It begs the question,” as Daniel Berrigan asks us, “is this one a “good war” or a “dumb war”? But the question betrays the bias: it is all the same. It’s all madness.”

One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League Asshole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some shithole for purely political reasons?

“squabbles around the edges about who’d get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in bailout, bombing, civil liberties, corporatism, corruption, energy policy, environment, liberalism, militarism, obama, plus ca change, politics, rule of law, war, war on terrorNo Comments on “squabbles around the edges about who’d get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game”

Bruce Dixon’s Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On improves and expands upon the point I was trying to make in my WASSUP post a while back.

Basically, I said what is Off the Table is far more important, and more dangerous, than what the parties are arguing about.

Dixon looks back to the post-Civil War era as a comparable era of malign consensus:

Too much agreement between Republicans and Democrats has always been bad news for those at the bottom of America’s class and racial totem poles.

Back in 1875, Frederick Douglass observed that it took a war among the whites to free his people from slavery. What then, he wondered, would an era of peace among the whites bring us? He already knew the answer. Louisiana had its Colfax Massacre two years earlier. A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic bombings, shootings, mutilations, murders and threats had driven African Americans from courthouses, city halls, legislatures, from their own farms, businesses and private properties and from the voting rolls across the South. They didn’t get the vote back for 80 years, and they never did get the land back. But none of that mattered because on the broad and important questions of those days there was at last peace between white Republicans and white Democrats — squabbles around the edges about who’d get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game.

Like Douglass, the shallow talking heads who cover the 2012 presidential campaign on corporate media have noticed out loud the remarkable absence of disagreement between Republican and Democratic candidates on many matters. They usually mention what the establishment likes to call “foreign policy.” But the list of things Republicans and Democrat presidential candidates agree on, from coddling Wall Street speculators, protecting mortgage fraudsters and corporate wrongdoers to preventing Medicare For All to so-called “foreign policy,” “free trade,” “the deficit” “clean coal and safe nuclear power” and “entitlement reform,” is clearly longer and more important than the few points of mostly race and style, upon which they disagree.

Read the whole thing….

I’m going to get straight to work hammering out a clever little acronym that contains all fifteen of Dixon’s points. It might take me a while.

Hillbilly heroin, the crazy check, “fee income” and a moderately symbolic shark tank

By timmukyPosted on Posted in debtTagged , , , , , No Comments on Hillbilly heroin, the crazy check, “fee income” and a moderately symbolic shark tank

I would like to recommend two great articles to tide my two dozen readers over, while I steel myself to actually return to writing for this here blog  again:

1. A World of Hillbilly Heroin: The Hollowing Out of America, Up Close and Personal, by Chris Hedges, with illustration by Joe Sacco, creator of the fantastic Footnotes in Gaza.

sacco1

Amazing, heartbreaking stuff:

The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check” — payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI — a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival.

“They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. “They will insist to us they are crazy. They will tell us, ‘I know I’m not right.’ People here are very resigned. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.”

2. The Unconstitutional 40 Years War On College Students, written by the feisty and always worth reading Moe Tkacik for Reuters, and reproduced on her wonderfully titled blog daskrapital.

And as they became more steadily impervious to the usual laws of credit and debt, [college loans] became bigger and more profitable. In the years since the Bankruptcy Reform Act passed, the nominal price of college tuition has risen more than 900%. Over the same period the median male income—again, nominally—has risen 165%. And since the percentage of the workforce boasting a bachelor’s degree has expanded from less than 20% to nearly a third, I don’t have to convince you that the median de facto ROI on those diplomas has diminished greatly over the same years. Which brings us to the second way in which the student debt bubble differs from all the others you’ve seen. It is legally impossible to pop. By law it can only grow very fast or even faster.

….

Naturally, this story has its brighter side of enterprising corporate leadership generating shareholder value. The finances of Sallie Mae, the former government sponsored enterprise formally called SLM Corp. are a bit difficult to divine, but the operating profit margin is over 50%. It will surely surge higher if CEO Albert Lord executes on his current strategy of turning the $700 million “sweet spot” that is its “fee income” division into a billion dollar business. “Fee income” means collections, but student loan collectors “do things that no other industry could get away with,” a veteran debt collector named Joseph Leal told Student Loan Justice. They stalk, threaten family members, and jack up loan balances by thousands of dollars at whim, and they do it all with impunity because they are legally entitled to garnish your wages.

Fee income is not just a sweet spot for Sallie. Premiere credit, formerly the collections subsidiary of its fiercest rival Nelnet, is so flush it keeps a 3,800-gallon saltwater shark tank in its main lobby, as explained above. The margins on college loan sharking are so grotesquely fat that the government even rakes in a juicy cut: in 2010 the Department of Education reported collecting $1.22 for every dollar in defaulted student loans it had guaranteed—and that’s after the sharks and their shareholders and the obligatory outright fraud had taken their first round of cuts. Between a quarter and a third of about $850 billion worth of federally guaranteed loans are already in default, so this is real money we are talking about. Given the $23 trillion worth of other securities the federal government has pledged to guarantee over the past few years, we can only expect the default rate to surge higher.

When I started this post, I intended to comment on how these two pieces have little to do with each other, but now I’m not so sure.

Scenes from rustic life

By timmukyPosted on Posted in UncategorizedTagged , , , No Comments on Scenes from rustic life

Hello! Still here…… but just barely.

I mean those last couple of posts are textbook phoning it in.

It’s summer. We have guests visiting from New York and our kids are getting along wonderfully. We are eating and drinking and having a great time, and my cows are (finally) dropping calves.

Honestly, have not had a spare moment to think about what I think about what is going on in the world outside my beautiful little bubble life.

I look at this blog at the moment as some exceedingly foreign thing. Opinions. Meh. I will be back, probably.

Meanwhile some pictures!

Since May in “We’re all gonna die”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environmentTagged , , , , No Comments on Since May in “We’re all gonna die”

slug we're all gonna die....

Alex Balk has amassed quite a collection of ominous news items, and this screen grab only covers the ones he has noticed since LATE MAY.

Have a hard time deciding which of his comments I like best. At the moment, it’s between “Hope you can swim, coastal elitists” and “Too dry to frack! What a world.”

Not unrelated, George Carlin’s “Saving the planet” is never far from my thoughts:

“It’s like farming in hell”

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, politicsTagged No Comments on “It’s like farming in hell”

Along with the heat and the drought and the super derecho, the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign. So far, the words “climate change” have barely been uttered. This is not an oversight. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have chosen to remain silent on the issue, presumably because they see it as just too big a bummer.

And so, while farmers wait for rain and this season’s corn crop withers on the stalk, the familiar disconnect continues. There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious.

Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker

 

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