who's the stupid vice-president now?

Joe Biden's ridiculously uninformed comments about the swine flu epidemic, are further proof (like a Cheney/Hannity interview) that there are absolutely no intellectual qualifications required in order to become Vice-President of the United States.

closet minded

The Fox Network, which stills bills itself as a news corporation, has decided not to carry the Presidential address tomorrow evening, but will instead air an episode of Lie to Me. Lie to Me, for those who may not know, isn't another appearance by the mope Dick Cheney on Hannity, but rather more like a lite version of 24. Lie to Me attempts to offer the same demands for the truth as the wacky 24 but without the torture, threats, and explosions.

Speaking of Hannity. He now offers a service, called Hannidate, that purports to bring like-minded conservative singles together. A quick check of the site revealed that there are no single conservative women within a 25-mile radius of the Warrior Ant Press World Wide Headquarters. Is this because all the true conservative women are all happily ensconced in dutiful marriages?

But strange thing; Hannity must be a bit of a hypocrite. Try this for fun. Change the search terms to search for same sex encounters and viola! a huge list of willing prospects comes out of the wood work, or in Hannity's case, out of the proverbial homophobic closet.

privatizing the imagination

Artists played a largely unheralded role in Obama's victory. But they had been tugging the national unconscious forward for decades, from the multiculturalist avant-gardes of the 1970s and '80s to the hip-hop rebels of the '90s and 2000s, plying a fearless, sometimes even unruly kind of polyculturalism. By the final months of the election season, these artists had secured Obama as the waking image of change.

Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the forty years after Richard Nixon's 1968 election sealed the backlash of the "silent majority" were community organizer and artist.

Obama was both. So why haven't community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?--Jeff Chang writes in the May 4, 2009 edition of The Nation

I won't pretend to speak for community organizers. Or artists for that matter. But I will say this. Many artists are engaged, enthralled, even moved by the opportunity to effect change. However the Office of the Presidency is a centrist collective that defines America around an abstract, advertisable notion of America. Change has permitted us to color these advertisements with a broad swatch of diversity but as a whole it's the family value meal that graces our tables.

Interestingly enough, the number of Americans who claim to be full-time artists is nearly equivalent to those who claim to be farmers (about 2 million). Real farmers, those with a isolationist view of their lifestyle and a second job in order to maintain it, have more in common with most artists than the typical farmer depicted on television. Seed corn hats, cotton print dresses, and children who respect their elders cross all demographics. People who fail to understand that are the only ones surprised to learn that courts in Iowa have upheld same-sex marriage. That said, the farmer, or at least his corporate surrogate with the K-street lobbyist, is still given a place in the national dialogue. This while the collective conscious seems to believe that artists take pride in selling their drawings on the street corner to keep themselves in cigarette and beer money.

All this could change with in a hurry with a President, or First Lady, who had the temerity to befriend artists, invite them to the White House, and give them a stage to talk about their work, what it means to them, and to America.

Everyone has to eat. That's frequently the rationale for why farmers are so important, which is true, but sadder still when when what's for dinner is so often pre-fab food. Since pre-fab America is still tottering on verge of bankruptcy let's just go ahead and bury it for good.

I propose a weekly dinner at the White House. Or a luncheon. Call it Farmers who Lunch and the Artists who Cook for them. Every week the White House kitchen is turned over to artists who then, in cooperation with small, independent farmers who grow food that isn't livestock feed, cook a meal together and following that, sit down at the table, the big kitchen table in America's White House, and discuss the matters of importance to America. The First Family, White House staff, and a rotating group of Congress are invited to join them, to listen, and to learn.

the creativity stimulus

Images:
Minnie Black, luffa sponge man.
Shawn and Clarissa Langley Family of the Fresh Breeze Organic Dairy Farm.

eric rosen is waiting for guffman

So says my daughter. And she might know. Let's hope for Mr. Rosen's sake that the wait is still on for Guffman.

After the frisky staging of Mary Zimmerman's telling of The Arabian Nights, the Rep has turned in two dreary performances that have left me befuddled. Granted Mr. Rosen, as the Rep's Artistic Director, has every right to bang his own drum. Rosen did have the conviction to turn Sherwood Anderson's classic novel, Winesburg, Ohio, into an unlikely musical, but unfortunately for audiences, the sound and fury of the recent Rep staging of this show was muffled, dreary, and uninspired. Anderson's work served as an iconic inspiration for many teenagers, myself included, seeking a path out of the close-mindedness of Midwestern small towns. Rosen's musical, on-the-other-hand, reminded me of why I seldom return to visit. It's just not that interesting of a place.

Rosen and the Rep deserve credit for working hard to bring new and younger audiences to the theater. Eleven pm performances at the Copaken Stage are a smart approach to liven the Power and Light District with real culture. The typical Rep crowd, which appears to be composed mainly of folks who got close to, but never achieved incredible wealth, scares me with its excess of tweed jackets and designer pantsuits. But as a whole, this doddering crowd has never frightened me as much as the mediocre production of The Borderland at the Copaken Stage.

More than once during the second act I keep thinking that a mass execution will occur and redeem The Borderland from the plodding, unsympathetic characters that moped around the stage during the first act. No such luck. If only the script could have kept up with the sound and lighting in this show it might have been worth a late night. Instead, the plot was completely improbable, the characters unlikeable, and the catharsis irredeemable. Lacking theater, there wasn't much reason for the effort.

muscle up

Invicible from DTroit. A smaller carbon footprint than the Pontiac TransAm and the ablity to shapeshift.

whatever it is we did, errr do...

the long-term pain and suffering inflicted on the USA by the Bush Administration

The recently declassified Bush Administration torture memos contain startlingly precise descriptions of the proposed interrogation techniques. The memos, prepared by Bush lawyers to justify the techniques, read like one giant cover your ass corporate document for a litigious society.

Before the written memos that gave the OK to torture, there were a couple of face-to-face (alluded to in the memos themselves) meetings between Bush lawyers and the CIA client and no doubt, a few phone calls. One can only imagine that at some point during these talks the Justice Department lawyers politely asked Bush Administration operatives,

"now let me see if I understand exactly what you're describing. You're going to strap someone to a board so they can't move, cover their face with a towel, and then slowly pour water into their nostrils. Is that correct? And from what I understand you've said, the prisoner, no matter how much training they have had, no matter that they may be aware of how the process works, the prisoner will react as if being drowned? Correct? The reflex can't be stopped? The prisoner will believe they are drowning, about to die, and will react according except they are strapped to a board. And you also say that you'll do this technique, 'waterboarding is your preferred term?', for about 30 seconds until the prisoner thinks they are about to die and then you'll stop, lift the towel just long enough for the prisoner to gasp three or four breaths, and then you'll pour water down their throat again so the prisoner again has the sensation of death-by-drowning. Correct? And this process will continue for as long as 20 minutes or until the prisoner capitulates? And you wish to know if this is torture?"

The lawyer then goes on to explain that even though water-boarding is designed to, and will result in, the prisoner believing that their life is threatened by imminent death, the technique does not "inflict severe physical pain and suffering". The reason--here is where the fancy lawyering comes into play--is that the term severe physical pain and suffering has been defined by the Bush Administration as one that has lasting mental or physical manifestations. How one can expect a prisoner to believe they are getting ready to drown, spill their guts, and the process NOT leave a lasting mental mark on their pysche is a little unclear. Under this scenario, the process is designed to be so scary as to extract a confession, yet subtle enough that the prisoner wakes up the next morning with no memory of the event.

One really has to wonder about the logic that went into the Bush Administration conclusion that these interrogation techniques weren't torture. The rationale that waterboarding doesn't cause long-term pain and suffering is based on the notion that the US military subjects some of it's own operatives to intense training to let them know what they might expect to happen if they were captured and tortured by the enemy. Waterboarding is used an example of the kind of torture they might have be expected to endure. We expose them waterboarding as an EXAMPLE of torture.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but at some point it would have been nice if the 'family-friendly' Bush Administration had taken a poll of what they loved to call real Americans. The could have described the process to the mother of a US service member who's either going to, or currently serving in the armed conflict, and then asked the parent, OK, if your son/daughter is captured and these same techniques applied, would you consider waterboarding to be a form of torture?

Note to the Obama Administration. The President, regardless of the precedent the Bush Administration tried to establish, does not decide who gets prosecuted for violations of US laws. That decision is better left to the Department of Justice.