Sleepycatz

Happy Festivus

Tomorrow, December 23rd, marks the traditional celebration of Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us. However, as we are going to be on the road all day, I am celebrating this evening. Tonight’s Festivus dinner consists of a barbecued chicken, homemade brownies, and a bottle of Samuel Smiith’s Oatmeal Stout.

As dinner is being prepared, I will begin with the traditional Festivus Airing of Grievances. The number of grievances this year is long, but I will parse it down to the fewest possible:

• Mainstream Media: When I was young, the press was much admired — they had exposed the lies of the Nixon administration, they ferreted out corruption in government, and placed more emphasis on truth then politics. Today the mainstream press has completely abandoned even the facade of fairness or accuracy. It is little wonder that newspaper circulation and news ratings are dropping. If the American news media ever wishes to regain any credibility they have to move towards informing the public, instead of trying to intimidate them with stories of ever present terrorists, pedophiles, and evil black men.Cable news has disappointed me from its inception. It re-runs the same stories every hour without providing any historical context. CNN, if you are going to talk about insurgence and factions in Iraq what’s wrong with historical context? Hell, the British complained about the Iraqi insurgency 80+ years ago. Anyone who knew jackshit about the middle east prior to 2002, could have told you that Iraq was the primary secular state in a region being pressured by Islamists. But you people have no desire to provide any substantive information; you have traded any intellectual honesty for ratings and hair stylists. When you create your news product without regard to truth or context it will be eventually identified as propaganda, and I, for one, am looking forward to continued decline and eventual extinction of big media.
• Conservative Christians: I have no real problems with conservatives — though I may disagree with them at times — and I have no problems with Christians — this country was founded on the belief of religious freedom. However, when you argue that government policy which doesn’t agree with your religious belief is either evil, or discriminatory; that’s tantamount to forcing your religious beliefs on others. The government does not discriminate against Christians, or a Christian sect, by allowing any consensual adult couple to marry. Recognizing gays and lesbians and full and equal citizens of our country does not constitute discrimination of Christianity. Christians, Jews, Muslims, &c, are free to believe whatever they want. There are large religious sects which believe dancing is sinful; does the government discriminate against them because it doesn’t ban dancing? No! The government remains neutral, and allows individual religious organizations to minister in any way they see fit. If the government takes the position that gays and lesbians are unequal because a large religious sect say they’re sinful; is it not taking a position against religious sects who believe otherwise? But those bits of logic are lost on the Christian Conservatives, who proselytize that their belief is the only one which should be recognize and pandered to by our government.Another thing, Christian Conservatives: stop trying to re-write our history. Every day I hear some whacked preacher going on about how are country was founded on Christian principles and how there is ‘No separation of Church and State in the Constitution’. Bullshit. Our country was founded by men with Christian backgrounds, who were primarily deists. Hell, Jefferson wrote his own Bible, because he disliked the irrationality of KJV. I suggest that all of you actually read the Constitution — is there any mention of Jesus, or God? No. Is there any mention of Jesus in the Declaration of Independence? No — do you believe that when Jefferson penned the document he forgot how to spell Jesus and left it out — maybe he put Jeebus and then scratched it out in a draft? NO! There is mention of a ‘Creator’ — but it does no reference the Christian God of today — it simply says ‘Creator’ — You can read your own beliefs into that as I can read mine; that was the point. If you want to go back to the original colonists, then Conservative Christians, your beliefs would have been labeled blasphemous. It was illegal in the early days of the colony to question the Holy Trinity, the Church of England, and celebrating Christmas was highly discouraged. You have every right to believe what you want, but stop trying to run our foreign policy, and make everyone else obey your God’s laws. You are suppose to have faith in God — thus if he wants something big done, won’t he do it himself?
• Pres. Bush & His Chorus: The overall incompetency and mendacity of this president has been so well documented that is requires little further explanation. However, this year he and his cackling chorus of fear mongers reached new low in the yammering spin. In suggesting and stating that any American who holds any opinion which disagrees with theirs is at worst a traitor to their country and at best a fellow traveler, or dupe, they have done more to undermine and destroy reasonable political and social debate in this country than any terrorist or foreign enemy could have possibly hoped for. Shortly after 911, we were all unified as a people, we all felt the pain of those who lost loved ones in the towers, we all grieved for the police and firemen who dies trying to save lives — we were travelers in our common grief. But this president, who claim to be the uniter, used our outrage and our grief to divide us; he imperially made one bad decree after another. And when we started to question him, he decreed that we somehow sympathized with those who brought about our grief and horror. For the President of the United States of America to claim that his political opponents are against capturing terrorists, or are inspiring our enemies is either the ultimate height of fear mongering cynicism or the despotic ramblings of a paranoid. In either case, Mr. Bush and his protectors have shown themselves to be opposed to the very notion of a United States. They have successfully divided us among those who are too afraid to question their president and those who have been betrayed by him. In their bloviations, the president’s supporters have called for the incarceration of political opponents, the suspension of the first amendment, the expulsion if the irreligious, and the replacement of rule of law with executive whim. In other words this chorus has called for the destruction of the United States of America. The result of all of this is that President Bush, and his aids, have shown themselves unworthy of their positions and of any high office. They have taken our unity and broken it with their fearful rhetoric into bickering, impotent, dialogue. The people should not simply be impeached, they should be run out on a rail.

That’s all for the official Airing of Grievances. I will now go off to perform in the Feats of Strength:

Mainstream Hatred

I have been extremely busy with work and personal issues, so I haven’t had time to post here for a bit. However, there arise such ideas in our day and age that immediate outrage and condemnation is so necessary that to hold one’s tongue, even in moments of personal entanglement, is to ignore our responsibilities as Americans and human beings.

This week, conservative commentator, Debbie Schlussel penned an essay which in times of reason and compassion would have appalled even the most cynical American. Ms. Schlussel believes that as Senator Obama’s father was Muslim, and that as his middle name is Hussein, he is not only unfit for public office, but should be suspected as an enemy of the state:

So, even if he [Obama] identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

Schlussel’s updated application of the Nuremberg Laws is about as un-American and offensive as one can imagine. Within her logic of hatred is the notion that our enemies may be judged not by actions but by religion and then by bloodline. A premise which violates the very founding principles of our republic — let us not forget Hamilton — who was the bastard child of a woman imprisoned for her adultery — who was instrumental in the passage of our constitution and the founding of the our treasury system, and is a favorite of conservatives.

Whenever conservatives make such outrages claims as this they inevitably claim that they were were joking or tweeking the nose of political correctness. But make no mistake what Schlussel — and others — are doing is equating racism and bigotry with patriotism. For it the the contention of the Schlussels, the Becks, the Pragers that all those who practice Islam are America’s enemies as are all those who share their heratige. At best, these commentators are the same as those heard on Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines whose hatred and fear mongering led to death of 1,000,000 people in 100 days in Rawanda. At worst, there little difference in their logic and that of those who built the death chambers of Auschwitz or Buchenwald.

It has been said over and over that September 11th changed everything. Apparently is has. When racism and hatred become a symbol of patriotism, any compassion or morality which this country may have stood for has been lost for all times.