More ernie Chambers Hagiography

He's not the main architect in this matter here, but I truly do believe that his presence leads more conservative state senators to employ honest reason in matters such as this,        whereas otherwise the suggestion that those punitive, evil fighting, manly-ass agents of state authority called the police should be subject to basic scrutiny would inspire shocked claims to the vapors and that would be that. 

Then again it might be be the Unicamerals' 'non-partisan' nature that makes these conversations slightly more reasonable here.  Or perhaps it's that the conservatism here is not quite so heavily peppered with Religious right influences or other such culture war flavors of hostile and besieged white male entitlement.  Rather the  here is in some ways still the instinctive conservatism born of 1900's agrarian homogeneity.  Though with Lincoln and especially Omaha assimilating quickly into the culturally liberal 21st century mainstream the Nebraska Right has taken on more than a few aspects of the national rights' snarling bitterness.

I'm not going to Lie

I do have certain ideals for how sports should be.  Nothing moralistic about Great Men and Paternal coaches triumphing out of superior character, fuck that.  I would simply like to feel that I'm investing my time into something truly important when I watch a game.  Two great teams who need to go through each other to win a legitimately difficult championship.

The first round of the NBA playoffs do not come anywhere close to meeting that standard, at all.  They are by the most generous estimate about 98 percent hype, bullshit, and high dollar basketball played poorly.  Yet until yesterday I had forgotten the simply pleasures of going Grampa with sports, to chilll on the couch lightly buzzed and hungover while a competitive enough game carries on directly in front of you on the periphery of your mind.  A game that's actually more enjoyable because you know it's insignificant.   that you need not invest any serious concentration upon either it or anything else.  Thank you, Knicks and Celtics, for giving me a true Sunday.  That was nice.   

Not especially Important: Just a Quick Reminder.

It is quite perfectly clear that Michelle Malkin is conciously and deliberately full of shit. 

She's been having a civil dispute with tax hating brat Grover Norquist you see, and so it is both a simple and neccessary matter to include him in the same demonology of Muslims, Latinos, liberal professors, liberal celebrities, people who don't drop what they're doing when the national anthem randomly appears on TV, etc.  Never mind if it makes any damned sense, because only treasonous cowards care about that.  The first rule of the Other is that everybody else is everybody else. 

Malkin gets bonus points for pointing out the central moral utility of 'condemnation' in her universe.  Condemnation, you see; loud, public, ostentatious condemnation of Them, is in itself a heroically virtuous thing to do; and the reason that bad things happen is only because some of us are not brave enough to properly condemn like Malkin and her followers are.  They are the only true patriots precisely because we are not and only for as long as we are not.  Don't you forget that Buster. 

Soccer Top 10

1. Bayern Munich  (Assuming they win the CL, this team is the new holder of the title of best ever seen by the eyes of Joshua D. Beran.  These guys... they're just, Shit Goddamn.)
2. Barcelona
3. Borussia Dortmund
4. Corinthians
5. Paris St. Germain
6. Juventus
7. Real Madrid
8. Manchester United
9. Galatasaray
10. Napoli

Been Away

Spent the weekend in the old hometown.  I strongly prefer the old two-lane routes that predate the interstate for my cross-Nebraska travels.  The extra hour or so it adds to the trip is more than made up for by the sight of towns, trees, life.  Students in Kearney drinking on their porch; kids coming off out of gas stations with their giant sodas, roughneck truckers and grain dealers trading macho laconic bullshit.  Life.  My cousin found a boyfriend who likes to drink as much as she does while also being far more decent than who she's had before. They're really quite adorable together. 

I heard several people in a North Platte bar state that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should of been left to bleed out.  I was horrified at this, but hardly surprised that many would seek in this way to mark themselves as morally exceptional for being anti-terrorist.  Not to risk the unspeakable fate of being labeled a pussy myself, but there are in the first case several obvious, hard, and practical reasons for why their bloodlust is mistaken.  Doctors, of course, or simply not in the business of punishment.  If someone comes through the emergency door with a hole in him the doctors patch it up, simple as that.  Deserve has never had a thing to do with it and the righteous chest thumpers should be glad for that when they need a doctor for their lung tumors.  I would also ask them to think of how much nonsense the country would have been spared of Lee Harvey Oswald had lived to be formally convicted and formally punished.  Perhaps he would have even confessed and put the whole thing to bed within a week, buzzkill though that may have been for many.  Tsarnaev has a story to tell; a grievance that is at least somewhat new to the United States.  The quest to understand why people do foul things is of much greater use in preventing them than indulgent rage at the obviously foul. 

And this brings me to the more extra-pragmatic moral reasons against seeking the hardest justice possible against this man.  Call me pussy as much as you like but I tell you that if you consider hostility to evil to be the greatest moral good; if you view morality as primarily a vehicle for proving manliness, courage, or willingness to action, than you are quite simply ignorant as to why terrorism is wrong. 

The Tsarnaev brothers have killed one third as many people as the factory explosion in central Texas .        and yet has gotten far more media attention.  Part of the reason why, to be sure, is the fact that the marathon bombing happened in a major city of the Northeast national downtown.  The main reason, however, is the fact that the Texas explosion seems to have been an accident.  There is no one there to damn, despise, look down upon.  It was a tragedy that simply happened, with as yet no morality tale to be tacked on after the fact, and that's simply depressing.  I remember how during the 08 campaign President Obama was criticized by some for referring to 'the tragedy of 9/11', because of course being outraged is so much braver and stronger than being sad. 

There is something inside all of us that passionately loves evil.  The grand expressions of hatred towards evil men are simply part of the fun, part of why we love them.  We love it when death takes a tangible form that can be punched back.  Some people love evil to the point of seeing hostility to it as the only valid organizing principal of life, and demand that their whole culture be organized towards this end and no other.  But it ain't the Song of Roland that got us 80 year life spans and a flag on the moon.  Life is not lived for struggle. The occasional need to protect ourselves from the malevolence of other people must be kept subservient and incidental to the struggle for life. 

Can People Break Copyright Laws by Simply Living Their Actual Lives?

Because I'm pretty sure the story of the Mississippi terrorist/conspiracy monger/Elvis impersonator  has already been told, some derivative guilty pleasure from the late nineties.  It may indeed be showing on Cinemax this very night. 

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Last summer, during the six week stretch of constant 100+ temperatures and no rain, I saw a guitar buskar outside the Grand Theatre suddenly turn towards the sun and shout 'Fuck You God!' This inspired me more than watching 'The Shawshank Redemption', listening to 'Born to Run' and smoking an ounce of crystal meth all at the same time.  This man was a great man.  A Great Man.    

Anyway there's snow falling in the middle of April now. :-[  Hopefully this means that the summer won't get too overheated again, anyway. 

I Confess

I often still dream of moving to the deep Amazon, marrying one of the Native women, and living on the combination ancient ways, modern machinery, hand-me down sports jerseys from the urban world.  Our only contact to that world would be a little transistor radio.  It would catch the signal from the nearest market town just well enough for me to request Donna Summer's 'On The Radio' every night at midnight while we danced drunk on palm wine.  Then in the daylight I would hunt for our supper in between bouts of making love and napping.  Sometimes I would wear a white shirt straw hat and no bottoms while I tended my crop of the highest-grade marijuana on Earth, which I would sell to any other northern renegade who had true and decent cause to take shelter in the rain forest.  I would learn to play "On the Radio' with an old violin; so my new people could know the primal beauty in Yankee music that hides behind computerized lacquer.

I know it's all precious and ridiculous bullshit.  I've never touched a violin.

 

I Don't Know What Exactly Just Happened In Boston Yet

Neither do you.   Nor, barring the existence of some unreleased uber-exciting secret information, do the authorities. Never mind all that; because, according to internet commentators anyway,   the exact details of how and why are already obvious to anyone not blinded by political correctness.  Everybody knows what happened.  Everybody knows that it justifies and confirms their own personal prejudice and grievances, just like every bad event everywhere justifies and confirms their own personal prejudice and grievances. 


It's more times that I can count that I've run into someone who considers getting to the bottom of things to be strictly a matter of physical courage and will.  That the fact of a disaster being being brand new and the details impossible to yet know is no excuse for the cowardice of not knowing.  It's an attitude that sticks in my craw, to state it lightly. 

I Tell You All to the Last Living Person

And I stand behind!!

'Twitter' serves no valid purpose except to post absurd trolls. 

"Hitler was a liberal"

"Suicide is god"

"I support Satan"

"I support AIDS"

etc. 

What you woman must be made to know is that every man lives to dictate what is true for everyone.   When a man is faced by another who makes opposing claims we fight to the death.  Whoever wins is the Truth. 

Tales From North Platte

I remember this man.  The one who within twenty four hours of being paroled from the NE state pen stole a case of Budweiser by simply grabbing it out of the cooler and walking out of the Kwik Stop front door.  He proceeded to drink the first half twelve in the space of an hour.  Then he went uninvited to the apartment of a single mother he was attracted to.  She humored him, allowing him to stay and drink on her porch and not seeming to be either frightened or offended by his presence, but she didn't let him in.  Still he did get away with his entire debauch; partially at least.  I'm sure he got busted for violating his parole somehow at some point; but he fucking got away with this. 

Soccer top 10

The Champions League really is quite fun, once, at any rate,  the bureaucratic bloat is chopped through and the actual contenders are lined up against each other.

1.  Bayern Munich
2.  Barcelona
3. Paris St. Germain (The hype over the great French hope has turned out to be true, sort of.)
4. Corinthians
5. Juventus
6. Real Madrid
7. Manchester United
8. Borussia Dortmund
9. Galatasaray
10. AC Milan

Quick Note Here

Assuming that this incident down round Salina is something more than racism simple and plain.    which is doubtful, but anyway...

'Reverse racism' is almost always a bogeyman to excuse actual racism.  Reverse snobbery, however, is perfectly real.  One should not assume out of hand that the harshest, most guttural form of a particular statement must necessarily be the one pure and true way to make that statement.  I mention this because when I've used the phrase 'jury-rig' in front of some people their response was to give me a condescending 'jury rig huh?' , clearly believing that I was using a meek PC euphemism for the true form of 'nigger rig.'  These people have it precisely ass backwards.  Jury-rig is the original McCoy.    
 It's the more 'colorful' form of the phrase that's the deviation, and should this happen to be way you've 'always heard' such an expression used, then yes, you are in fact completely surrounded by the unambiguously racist, and if this is who the social circle you choose happens to be.....

Seriously: Wyoming

Oil refineries, hidden just off the expressway from Salt Lake to Denver, which is the only road; ranchers and truckers popping out from the hills to mingle with outsiders from anywhere else at the cafes scattered randomly at stop signs given proper names, dozens of miles from any real town.  In these towns are houses painted in colors that are dull and bold at the same time like Greenland's so they may be seen in the blizzards or dust storms that come every day.  In between the towns; wind.  Rocks, rocks, rocks.  Oil, goats, Point of Rocks, Rock springs.. 

Earlier today I read a small bit about Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor,  a place artificially tacked on to Afghanistan in colonial days though to be fair it can not be said to 'naturally' belong to any larger place.  A blasted land, ice and wind.  Hostile to humankind, with the natives of the place suffering a truly apocalyptic death rate especially among the women and children, maintaining themselves only by literally fucking like rabbits, having twelve kids in the hope that one boy and one girl survive long enough to have twelve kids.  I read little on their religion; nominally Islam, something mainstream to advertise that they do in fact have enough knowledge of an outside world to desire a mainstream appearance.  In truth though I'm sure their real faith is based upon cursing the ancestors who were God-damn stupid enough to make them native to the Wakhan corridor.  There's such a thing as Native Greenlanders too.  We are all imperialists bunkered down against lands that reject our presence. 

And there are no roads to the Wakhan, none at all.  No way to deliver a phone call by either wire or air.  No means of delivering the most basic 2k medical care or gift cards to Lane Bryant.  I contrast this to the 4-or-6-lane Interstate 80 of South Wyoming; to the Subway restaurant in places where the zip code was the Subway, to the hundreds of millions spent to make it safe to drive through the endless series of spinal passes and wind at 85 mph; the 24 hour 'auto repair shops' consisting of nothing but a 30 year-old tow truck, a 50-year old shack, and the infantile dependence of their victimized 'customers' upon them.  The Interior West is far more obscenely strange than drag show you come across if you do somehow make the coast.  "Romantic" in as much as loneliness or knowingly futile defiance of the gods is romantic.  Mostly though it is only full of stories and obscenely strange. 

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In other news:  No leader of a major democracy in modern times; not de Gaulle, not Dick Cheney, has been more proudly and openly hostile to human liberty than Margaret Thatcher.  I absolutely don't mean to dance on anyone's grave; it's just that the sight of her name is always going to bring a little touch of cyanide taste to my tongue, you know what I'm saying? She was such an utterly vile elitist fool.

Brief Internet Access

It's gray and misty here, though the mountains that mark the north edge of Boise still have a bleached-green summer sun look about them.  Drought that we've damned upon ourselves probably; yet still beautiful. 

I had a minor freak-out last night after two days of regularly being in public and in the presense of other people; which is to say I'd grown tired of the sight of my closest friends, like an entitled sullen child, but I''ve gotten better now as the climate has grown more austere. All I've come accross have shown me such kindness here. 

I Really do Hate To be Publically Sentimental

But yesterday I came across a scene in Lintel Park.  It was golden dusk when I saw a mixed Black-White family having a grill out for Easter, and while the happily chatted their children were running through the playground with some Muslim immigrant kids common to that neighborhood.  I was deeply moved by the beauty of it; surprised and honored by the fact that this is something I can just happen upon on any warm day.  These are my people.  My neighborhood, my nation, my Lincoln.  A human glory deserving the utmost love and protection. My modern age that I am blessed to have been born into.