Knuckleheads to Dine at South Lincoln Eatery

I'm of two minds about this.  On the one hand I suppose that; for so long as private gun ownership is going to be widespread and there are going to be those who insist on taking their guns everywhere, that open-carry is preferable to conceal-carry.  It's struck me that the recent trend of concealed-carry laws do nothing to advance 'gun rights' per se; not even by the most absolutist interpretation of the 2nd amendment, but rather were carried out so that gun fetishists could be reassured by social authorities that gun ownership was socially normative, and that furthermore white rural culture, or rather an idealized fantasy of it, was the eternal American archetype. So yes, if you're going to tote your gun around, please keep it in the open so that I'll know.  It's not as if I was going to piss on your alfredo or anything like that anyway.

Yet at the same time I found myself stricken by this organization's ground rules for the open carry dinner.   "no camouflage or all-black clothing -- keep guns holstered and not bring rifles or drink alcohol." 

I'll be careful to not equate legal gun owners with terrorists here.  Still I'd say that if one deliberately dresses himself 'like a terrorist'; camouflage, ski mask, flag or banner proclaiming the Great Cause of whatever, and of course big-ass gun cradled like an infant, a deliberate intent to intimidate others would be rather obvious and challenged by no one, least of all Short-Fusey himself.  If this group wants to present wearing a gun in public as innately non-threatening, as seems to be the case; then why acknowledge that certain sartorial choices are understood as intended to frighten while asserting that openly wearing artery-shredding weapons carry no such implication.  Why not rifles anyway?  Why not alcohol anyway?  It's true that drinking any amount at all while handling a lethal weapon is bad and banning such a thing within any shooting group is a very basic measure of good sense.  Still if you forbid drinking while carrying, as of course you should; then why go to a restaurant.  I don't like restaurants myself.  I dislike being confined in a space where I'm expected to converse for minutes or even hours on end.  Still I understand that the pleasure that people get from having booze served to them while they eat, (whatever that pleasure is) is a primary reason for why people go to restaurants.   

It comes down again to an imagined and insecure need to be the American Prototype felt by people who know deep down that they are no such thing and that there is no such thing.  People have always gone to restaurants to get mildly buzzed while they get full.  Bringing one's gun to Chez XYZ's has always been understood as a foolish thing to do and had never been common.  And just as the manly-ass old west had much stricter gun control than we do today these people must know that there is no American birthright to be an evil-slaying knight-errant and that no generation of American men has ever been or wanted to be such a thing.  Still I hope they enjoy their dinner at this HF Crave, whatever sort of place that foreign south end establishment might be. 

I Have This Neighbor

Today he informed me that he 'smokes weed every day and tells the cops to kiss my ass.'  The man is an ex-con with arms and body entirely covered by tattoos and three pit bulls.  Not to indulge in stereotypes but if you saw this man you would know without a doubt that he does indeed smoke weed every day and tells the cops to kiss his ass; and good for him so far as that goes. 

He also passes out in his yard from time to time; which is ok for so long as it's still warm and he keeps it to his own yard.  He argues with out Middle Eastern neighbors quite a bit too; which is rather less admirable though it is mostly confined to tiffs over lawn mowing and such.  Mostly. 

It's Been Awhile Since I've Been East

I do believe I'll be travelling to New York and Washington this Fall.  I have family and other people I know there and anyway; I'd like to spend a part of Autumn in cities too large to care about college football for a change.  Also there's the fact that Ernie and the unicam won't be back the work until midwinter and I've never seen a Congressional debate, or Walt Whitman's birthplace, or President Kennedy's grave.  Yes I do believe that this shall happen. 

Govenor Heineman is Not one of Those Dishonest Politicians.

I say this not to praise him mind; at the utilitarian level it would be much better for us if he were.  A deliberate con man must at least be able to think practically, strategically, situationally.  A con man could not get away with seeing himself and his own as too cosmically pure and good to ever need to think this way.

As it is Dave Heineman is indeed acting in an honest matter.  He does indeed honestly speak as he imagines it to be.  He is honestly convinced that people like himself are just better than everyone else; intrinsically cleaner, morally purer, more manly; that only landowners and good solid businessmen can possibly have any good fatherly wisdom of value to others and should therefore have exclusive social control, that the cartoon vision of white rural Nebraskan life and true doctrinaire Republican conservatism is the instinctive default of all decent people; while most of humanity on the other hand, the great galaxy of every kind of outsider, is most decidedly indecent in all the most fantastic ways one can think of. 

And on one specific point of governance I'm sure that Heineman believes quite sincerely that undue empathy for criminals is the only true problem a legal system could ever possibly have.  We have indeed suffered from horrific  failures from our security state recently, and I'd presume to say that it should be quite clear to those of clear eyes that these failures are primarily the result of underfunding and overcrowding, not by any sort of fuzzy-heartedness.  The governor and others could be addressing this problem by say, reforming our drug laws to something within the realm of sanity.  Or failing this, if one insists upon incarcerating our neighbors at the current extreme degree, then at least to fund the prison system at the level it would necessarily require for such Sisyphean work.

But of course we shall get none of this from to soon-to-be-departing Heineman.  Heineman "knows" that taxing and spending are always bad because they are bad because all the good and proper people say so.  At the same time he honestly believes that society is best served by keeping all those Dirty Other People under lock & heel as commonly as possible by as many pretenses as one can think of. 

Give me an old urban machine man if this is the alternative.  If forced to choose I would happily take a slick-talking dirty dealer over a blindfolded straight-shooter any day. 

Part Polish.....

Among other things, and not much, but anyway while Poland can no longer claim to be "surrounded" by enemies per se; (they're getting along with the Germans now, more or less.)  It does have one potential enemy to its immediate east; one that you may have heard about either in the past or just over the weekend, and one of considerably more power & potency than the repressed dress-up loving shitheads of Hezbollah, Hamas, et. al.

Now one is of course a NATO member, and as such a legally declared all for one/one for all friend and ally of the United States.  It is also true that, like many ethnic groups ,the Poles have managed to survive as a people in spite of a history that  often than not is tragically brutal;  filled with the most truly apocalyptic violence, suffering, deprivation and repression and still "we" live on.  More than this the Polish people, both in the old country in among the US diaspora, have earned a soft spot in the hearts of many here for our general warmth, love of family, and might I say wry intelligent wit. 

Still I for one would never be so fool as suggest that the United States has a sacred honor-bound duty to always take the Polish government's side in all disputes forever.  I would never suggest that it was not just a matter of American patriotism, but the only true American Patriotism, to defer to Polish foreign policy prerogatives as it they were the larger stronger and more powerful patron of us.  Why I even mention that I would never suggest such things I don't know; because of course it's beyond fantastic and I know I'm tipping at a strawman here.  It's frankly impossible to imagine anyone suggesting such a thing out loud now isn't it?  The greatest barstool jingoist on the Great Plains would give a great drunken-belly laugh upon hearing such an obviously stupid proposal, and as for such wretched nonsense ever being taken seriously by anyone in the halls of government;You'll sooner live to see someone run for Senate on a platform of mandatory public gonorrhea and win.  

I am only human dear reader.  In the future soon I hope to address actual bad ideas that actual functioning-if-misguided people could ever possibly have.  As for now you have my thanks for indulging me and my apologies for having wasted your time.  Good day now. 

Today I Have Nothing for You :-(

I do of course offer my sympathies to the victims and families of MH flight 17.  There seems to be, at least so far, some deliberate malice here; of course it makes the situation no better or worse if there is or not.  Fuck death. 

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Still for those of us still alive in comfortable non-war zones there is nothing to do except to feel the pleasure that the dead cannot feel anymore.  And it is, after all, 90's rock season.  So here y'all go:

Remembering

I had a friend in Junior High who was not a bully himself, but who sometimes did identify with and smile at the abuse heaped on designated outsiders by bullies.  He would commonly insist that "the rules", the junior high rules, for how to dress, how to interact with girls, what music to listen to and how, were the indisputable truth indisputably universal and most of all indisputably important.  I my part would generally disagree though in a knee-jerk way and not especially well.  I was not cool per se.  I was smart but more '14 smart'; blindly contrarian, an empty Trapper-Keeper sort of rebel. 

Looking back now I realize that my friend believed that THE RULES OF BEING COOL IN JUNIOR HIGH were both universally mandated and of great cosmic importance because he was in Junior High and of course he was of great universal importance. So in exploring the link between childhood bullying and adult bigotry-authoritarianism; well that is a thing right now and also rather fraught, so maybe I won't attempt something so grand as that right now. 

And yet, to hear something like the tired 'football vs. football' debates or any sport vs. sport debate, one gets the sense that their our athletes and coaches who need to believe that their particular games have exceptional powers of measuring moral fiber in order to justify their own hard work, along with fans who fear they'd be exposed as damned fools, (Which is what we sports fans are fully aware of being deep down) if the games we've invested our emotions in did. not have such powers of moral detection.

At the social level there may be those afraid that if; for example, white rural/suburban US culture is not Just Better than everything else in all details great and small, that is there is no inherent harm in that culture being altered by integration, immigration, the whole galaxy of liberalizing social forces, than their own identities are lies and that the great amount of work put into being responsible & conscientious solid citizens was a life-long waste.  In one's apocalyptic raving about Kids these Days or Welfare or Those People taking over there may be a protest-too-much woundedness in having invested oneself deeply in living "The Good Life" only to be blithely told by some liberal do-gooder that actually there is no "The Good Life."

Though again, I attempt nothing so grand as all that.     

Update: Real Americans Sleep with who They Lie With

The Justice department is sending a single member of the oh-so-menacing "Community Relations Service" to look into the Norfolk parade shit-headedness.  Doug Powers of Michelle Malkins website has bravely rode to the rescue.*

Just to give you some further idea of what sort of people are white knighting this thing the last post from Malkin herself was this pathetic piece of petty lameness   which attacked a perfectly neutral observation from Michael Bloomberg that Colorado is extremely wide-open compared to the Northeast.  Of course this perfectly neutral observation does have the seeming benefit of being completely true.  From the flip side I remember being shocked by "suburbs" 30 miles from the core of New York or Chicago having the same density level of midtown Omaha or Denver.  Yet apparently to point out that Western cities aren't quite as city as Eastern ones, as has been observed many times by many people over many years, is in itself to condemn the Westerners as hopeless Yahoos. Malkin knows this.  She's on "our" side and she's coming to our rescue.  She goes on an epic spiel about how New York is a terrible hellhole and how Coloradoans are godly pro-gun who love America too much to hold anything but hatred for America's primate city.

This dishonesty here is just too damned obvious for even Ms. Terrorist Scarf.  I realize the conceit of outrage being its own proof of strength & courage is Malkin's entire 'thing'.  It's what she does for a living; it is who she is.  Still if one feels the need to lick  residue from the bag to get their fix they should at least find a place to do so privately. It is simply untoward to fein all out in public like that.  If the true-blue conservatives of Northeast Nebraska feel the need for outside help from this so-called "attack" then even they must surely have too much pride to accept it from the likes of this.   




(*For some reason Powers takes pains to point out that it is "Eric Holder's Justice Department; which it indeed is for now;  and if Holder and his Suede Denim secret feds were indeed consciously evil that would indeed be a hell of a problem for all of us.  Still the real trouble with villainy are the material effects of villainy, the villains themselves are mere vehicles.  So to pointedly call it "Eric Holder's Justice Deparment" is... well I don't know.  It's almost as if Powers is catering to a crowd more interested in having cults of anti-personality to hiss at,  and so attain a cartoonish sense of heroism, than they are in honestly assessing actual threats to the nation's well-being.)

Governor Wants to know Where The Innocent Refugees Are Hiding

Or; just to be fair on magic phraseology; where the ILLEGALS, ILLEGALS, ILLEGALS, ILLEGALS are hiding!
 
 The answer governor, is everywhere, all around you, staring at you through your window at all times.  Just three blocks from your house; at what used to be a nice solid White owned cornor Those People congregate along with all the other riff-raff who ought to be locked up.  There we wait.  There we congregate and wait for you to close your eyes and sleep.  Bwahahahaahahaaha!

Lost Track of the News Abit While Away

I saw or heard nothing about this until several days after; and to tell the truth this is one liberal who finds it a bit eye-rolling but not shockingly evil.  Norfolk could be said to be a bit more 'perfectly' Republican than the Platte Valley hubs of similar size; slightly more self-righteous and 'bougie' if you will but only by subtle degrees.  I suppose it is a bit disturbing that a community could be so politically monochrome that this can be done in a parade before the general public with all reasonable expectation of unchallenged approval; but then it's also true that I myself rarely associate with anyone other than hipster/bohemianradical/humanist/witches etc. 


As for the racial element; well it's there and it's fucking bad, no question about it. Still there's nothing to be done for it except disapprove, as is being done, and let the people of Norfolk deal with our disapproval however they will.  Do they want to be a part of the wider society or see themselves as pure Superamericans living above the general society and beyond our right to disapprove?  It's their ball. 

In My Mother's House There Were Too Many People

My sister has moved back in with our parents temporarily, and my aunt was there for a time' along with my little cousin Abby who was in North Platte for the summer to establish Nebraska residency so she could get a driver's license then she could in Sacramento.  Her father (my cousin Aaron) is a Union Pacific rail man there who speaks of moving back to Nebraska permanently.  He doesn't like queer people non anglophones or 'hippies'.  He is simply not a California guy.  My aunt is waiting for the city of Greeley, Co to pay for the bullet hole in her car from this incident;  and also for the cost of cleaning off the bloody hand smears.         

In addition to the human menagerie were the three dogs, one of them a new one; a year-old rescue who was abandoned at an interstate rest stop in winter.  Why anybody ever does such a thing I've no clue.  Write 'PUPPY 10$' on a piece of cardboard drive to a big box parking lot and wait. No more inconvenient for you than that. 

I slept on a military cot of my fathers that was apparently much older than I am. He was in intensive care for  Hyperkylemia.   5-hour energies nearly killed him.    But overall the 4th of July was a godd time.  

Comparatively Speaking

Lincoln is both "liberal"  by Nebraska standards and rather conservative and staid by college town standards.  By most normal measures, inasmuch as there are such things, the capital is very much a Peoria; slightly Democratic leaning at about the same rate as the nation at large; with ratios of rich-to-poor; white-to-minority etc. also lining up pretty cleanly with the national mean. 

This story is not about Lincoln politics per se,  it's about the slightly less doomed than usual Dem candidate for governor choosing a Lincoln area pol for his running mate.  Still the chair of the state GOP felt the need to say that this running mate, Jane Raybould, represented the 'liberal ideals of Lincoln."   (The Republican chair is himself a Lincolnite; unless he's a south of Hwy 2 man, in which case not really, as I'm sure we'd both agree.)

I am well and truly heartened by this language.  It falls well short of the outright hatred expressed towards coastal cities or President Obama's Chicago;  still one can be assured that her city is "making it" as a good place to live if it is being otherized by rural/suburban right wing conformists. It's a sign of Lincoln and Omaha gradually becoming fairly substantial Democratic strongholds, real threats to a Republican reign over Nebraska that GOP officials; from the governor on down, will tell you in plain sincerity they consider to be a moral entitlement.   When "People's Republic of Lincoln" becomes a common truck stop dig; and the day is coming soon when it will be, that's when we'll know for sure that our city has upped its game from a nice peaceful and serene place to live to an downright badass to live.  The Onion A.V. Club shall be coming to test our pizzas any day now. 

This One Time Under the Sea

The original cut of "Thelma and Louise" was twelve hours long, with the last ten consisting of Thelma still alive though impaled on some piece of Corvette at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, bleeding to death at an imperceptibly slow rate, though not so slow that she doesn't feel colder than human words can describe once the sun goes down; a perfect and absolute dark with not even the undifferentiated gore that used to be Louise to look upon anymore.  Eventually the coyotes come; not a pack of coyotes mind because there's no such thing.  Coyotes are solitary beasts though these ones did eventually reach a rough agreement for each one to snatch itself a small piece of fresh Thelma and then scurry off to wait its turn again.  It's all very Herzogian.