Personally

Voting is more important to me than love or certainly marriage.     Not that I myself have to worry much about being impeded by either, I'm a straight White Bachelor. No one who sees me would suspect me of deviant practice or belief. 

The VRA decision was one of the most shameless acts of pretzel logic & appropriation of Civil rights language tropes for the purpose of Santafying the movement that I have ever seen.  And I've seen quite a lot of that believe me.I was a school kid in the nineties. This judgement is more example of how the voodoo of Constitutional 'originalism' appeals chiefly to those who find our original oppressive hierarchies appealing.    Still the same global media eye that brought Jim Crow down has obviously been amplified in strength a hundred fold, so attempts to disenfranchise minorities, the poor, or even just cold strategic dilution of the liberal urban vote is going to have to be very clever.  They are bound to be exactly that, do not doubt this; and we as citizens are going to have to be on our guard as always.  

Brazil

I have always admired the culture and have been seriously planning to go there for the World Cup.  But I suppose that good health care infrastructure and basic human dignity are all a bit more important, so I hope they get all of these things straightened out quickly.  I've been reading about the police clear-outs of poor neighborhoods near the new stadiums and felt very disturbed by them.  It's good to see that people all over are growing less inclined to take The Man's shit, certainly.  Ronaldo is predictably an entitled idiot,   and his hair still sucks. 

There is apparently still no direct driving route from here to there.  I thought that would have been the case.   No fucking romance in taking a plane.  ahh well. 

Hail Ra!!!

Some quick Midweek Notes

I can only hope that this was some sort of dark-humored meta-gag. 


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About the RV's man.  I heard someone yesterday considering buying one that gets seven miles a gallon./  That's singular seven, and uhh, whatever your politics might happen to be, you must know that there's only gasoline for so long as there's a larger civilization to produce it, right?  I mean shit, 'The Road Warrior' was bad enough and most of those people had motorbikes.  And who exactly do you think you'd be impressing with your elderly Midwest suburbanite status symbols?

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I saw this on a friday night sometime in 94.  I was staying up late alone flipping between MTV and Cinemax when this came on and it made me know I was high before I'd ever been high right?

 

 

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The Gretna Ne, Wal-Mart  sits at the literal end of the Omaha metro along Interstate 80; right at the   physical divide between continuous build-up and corn.  My God but you should see how green and lush it is when you look southwest from there.  I am seriously telling you to fly into either Lincoln or Omaha for nothing but that from wherever you are.  No-scenery-state my ass. 

 

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I left the tab open on my box of Franzia red last night and spilt about half, about eight dollars worth, all over to hell.  I got some red wine on the Vollmann book I borrowed from Benson Petshop :/ 

 

Benson is cool sure but is a little overgentrified and cute.  It needs something more than sporadic Mexican food it needs a fixture. 

Bob Kerrey Bridge

I walked over it from Omaha into Iowa on Saturday night with many others and felt halfway choked up with how perfectly beautiful it was.  It was warm but not uncomfortably hot, few mosquitoes out even over the river woods even though it's been wet and just a gorgeous orange glow to the twilight.  Like I said it was perfect; White kids mixing with Latino families from south O or wherever and college baseball fans and the big haired tattooed folk from Council Bluffs.  It was such a blissful 'I contain multitudes' feeling for me.  I was struck at how intensely I love my country and its people who are the country.  In one sense understanding how some could be perversely eager to express this love through killing and dying since after all one cannot have sex with a nation or otherwise 'prove' their love for it through any other dramatic gesture; yet at the other hand being even more reassured that no, the nation is not holy abstraction of power glory or grandeur or any flag meant to represent that.  The nation is only the sum of the small fleshy and transient us, and that we are worthy of love not because our identity or culture will outlive ourselves but precisely because nothing about us will.  

On the Iowa side a hobo with a very elaborate camp taking up about forty square feet of river bottom complimented my hat. 

Since it was "My" Congressman who Started This Asinine Argument Train

Though thankfully it was not Fortenberry of Lincoln and the rural east who made the most ridiculous soundbite. 

All the same though, it's like this you sorry bastards.  I know the claim that Dutch elderly and disabled are being "cast off" is deliberately meant to sound foreboding in a way that doesn't actually mean anything that could be verified. Still The Netherlands fall solidly under whatever one defines 'The West'  be. Dutch people built New York. Rich Dutch-Americans have been interbreeding with rich Anglo-Saxons since bundling maid days. There have been Dutch presidents since before Scottish people were considered White. There are daily direct flights to Amsterdam from even second tier cities like Minneapolis.  The cultural ties between North America and the Low countries are beyond integral.  One can no more paint the Dutch as fiendishly alien then they could the D.A.R.  Nobody is that fucking Republican. There are at any given moment tens of thousand of Americans in the Netherlands who can see for themselves that the old and infirm are not being renewed there.  Tell me, House GOPsters,, is it the legal weed that makes these loyal friends and cultural kin to us open season for slander in your eyes? Or are you really as fucking stupid as you pretend to be?  Do you perhaps honestly believe that we are that fucking stupid?    

This is Happening

Of course it has nothing to do with race; no of course not.    

Never mind that the national border is the obvious prerogative of the national government, that the proper means of enforcing immigration law can only possibly be whatever the federal government decides they are, that only an idiot would claim the feds are in any way bound by some higher truth of the sanctity of borders or culture, that Nebraska Arizona or any other state which takes it upon themselves to enforce what they imagine immigration laws to be are illegally overstepping their bounds.  It is only about respect for the law you see.  Illegal means illegal you pc ninny and race has nothing to do with it. 

I have Yankee-born very White family members who have been to prison for crimes they were indeed guilty of.  They're out now and are licensed to drive because why wouldn't they be?  Their crimes had nothing to do with driving drunk running someone over or anything else related to a car.  So why deny them access to a livelihood just to show a righteous willingness to make Snidely Whiplash suffer?  This is a very strange idea and would only be the more so if posited as obvious common sense.  But then I guess what makes a thing common sense is whether or not it's the proper sort of people who are saying it, not whether or not it makes sense.

Yes, I know, 'driving is a privilege not a right.'  I agree that this is true.  A license to drive is not a right but it ain't no fucking Nobel Prize either.  It is not and was never meant to be understood as a reward for being especially law-abiding and good and you know this. 

And yes, of course it is only about respect for the law and has nothing to do with race.  The continued belief that 'The Illegals' are sucking up welfare, (in brave, True American defiance of all reality.)  has nothing to do with racism, of course not.  Cultural essentialism is totally different from racism don't you know?  There's magic dust in the air that makes people who were born here intrinsically righteous rule-obeying and industrious in a way that they are not.  Even when those people do deign to work they obviously do so only for the hedonistic pleasures of money.  While when we work it's because we are filled with a great sacrificial duty to our families or the concept of work itself.  Everyone knows this.    

I think many if not most of us would agree that America is special because anyone can be one.  (So long as.... kiss my ass.  America is special because anyone can be one without condition.)  The fact that our beloved country is, before all else, a physical place that one can just walk into is I suppose an especially primal or even rude reminder of that.  But if you fear that a larger more heterogeneous and more complex population would dilute your own personal specialness for living in a special country.  Sorry, but you and I are not in any way special for being American, and we have never had the right to feel or desire such a thing. 

Truly

I am in love with 'Random Access Memories' in a way I haven't been with an album since 'Kid A' and thought I was too old to ever be again.  I mean damn; Nile Rodgers just vamp vamp vamping away like damn I want more.  And club music had indeed grown kind of formulaic paint-by numbers sledgehammer monomaniacal before this came along. 

Don't Know if I can Handle a 'Full Weekend"

Spending more than two hours in someone else's company has always created this horrible tightness in my stomach that doesn't go away until I've had four or five days of being alone.  Growing up with a family taught me to hate the concept of family, hate going our for special occasions, hate being considered special or important and hate being loved.  People who love you feel entitled to have you respond when they speak to you and this is a pure tyranny with no positive benefit in return.   When I grew up and moved out on my own it was the being alone which was the sum of my ambitions and the only thing that mattered.  Having this Sunday completely to myself is beautiful. 

It's the End of Unicam Season in Lincoln

This combined with summer for the U leaves us as the overgrown small town we are at heart.  But hey, Micheal Buble is coming. 

  Mr. Senator  Chambers move' to abolish the death penalty went much further than the quixotic moral protest it has been in years past.  If not for a filibuster it would have fact have gotten majority passage in the leg.  It was Chambers opponents who acted out of pure symbolic defiance this time around.  The bust served no strategic purpose whatsoever.  Our provincial chipmunk of a governor had already said that he would veto any DP ban that came his way and overcoming this would have required precisely the same super-majority as shutting down a talk-off. 

It was pointless, like I said, inspired so far as I can tell by the fear that even almost banning the death penalty would get us laughed at by Texas in the showers after gym class.  More than that though I'd say the ability to kill the debate was exactly that, an attempt to will the existence of this debate out of existence.  There's a strong need among the right-wing to see themselves as the embodiment and definers of what is true, natural, and normal.  Support for the death penalty is central to that because it helps them to believe that their society is intrinsically good, that solving social problems is a matter of having the courage and vital strength to punish  evil that exists completely outside oneself instead of the painful vulnerable vertigo of self-examination.  'Eye for an eye' is in no sense the instinctively known true penalty for murder or any other outrage.  It has only ever been a means of asserting superior worldly status; the paternal right to inflict suffering on others for everyone's own good. 

But conceding for the moment that everything I just said is nonsense; it isn't, but just go with me here.  Even if opposition to the death penalty is wrong it has still become permanently established as at least a strong minority position.  Those who support the death penalty are of course entitled to believe that they do but they will never be able to dismiss disagreement on this matter as alien or beyond the pale.  We are here to stay, and the day will come when your chivalric fantasies of  true justice are taken by the mainstream for the poisonous claptrap they are.  You will be the strangers living outside the normative values. 

I'm Curious

If there should be a drunken barbecue murder in north Omaha this Sunday, would it be seen as a dramatic historic event to be remembered and reenacted for the enlightenment of future generations? 

I Have Drunk Two Liters of Coffee Today

This may sound cold given current events, but those who do not live in tornado prone-regions seem to sometimes have the notion that these storms are some kind of apocalyptic ultra-death rays.       This is not actually the case unless it is.  What I mean by that is that while nothing human-built is able to withstand a direct hit from even a moderately strong tornado, and probably never will be, the storms are small in area, so that even if a twister is directly over your town right now the odds of being hit by one are quite small.  Of course if take no precautions when a warning comes and you do get hit then you are going to be killed in a hundred different ways at the same time.  Your family would be lucky if you leave a recognizable corpse that only needs a single coffin.  All in all though the odds of being murdered by nature are a good deal lower here on these Plains then they are in earthquake or hurricane country.  So there's that.

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Wooot!     Yes, it was only a friendly but that doesn't confront me.  What sort of does is all the talk of this being a 'morale booster' for the Men's national soccer team.  Come the hell on now people, this isn't AYSO.  You're supposed to win at home, yeesh.