Tell you what: I’ll buy the next round if you shut the fuck up for five minutes.

Angry, stupid, übernationalist white people have been grumbling the same fucking thing ever since somebody made the mistake of enfranchising people you didn’t think deserved it, who then proceeded to commit the crime of voting for shit you disagreed with. And every time they do, scary shit tends to happen.

Hell, in the early 1930s, an upstanding Wall Street executive named Gerald MacGuire went to Europe explicitly to study angry, stupid, übernationalist white people, primarily World War I veterans pissed because they had been sent into the bloodiest meat-grinder in human history because some inbred aristocrats wanted to make sure other inbred aristocrats didn’t rape more of Africa and Asia than they did. This, of course, is a perfectly respectable reason to be angry, but that’s not the point. The issue is not the validity of your anger — it is the persistent and apparently generational stupidity you employ in directing it.

MacGuire conducted his research on the Croix de Feu and Italy’s Blackshirts on behalf of some of the most influential men in the U.S., the veritable captains of industry.  Their plan was to employ MacGuire’s findings in a plan to build an army of American military veterans to oust Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the presidency, nip FDR’s New Deal in the bud and thereby enact a heroic Restoration of the U.S. Constitution. So when conservative online enclave Newsmax not long ago wishfully envisioned a coup d’etat against Obama, or when a flurry of Real Americans for a year loudly suggest weaponry might be a solution to the results of an election, you might see where these aren’t really new ideas, nor have their proponents been recorded as historic champions of liberty.

One immediate problem occurs: that we seem to be operating on two different definitions of “liberty.” As used by the Tea Party “movement” in the U.S., or the coup plotters in the U.S. in 1934, “liberty” is like the American flag; its zealous defenders have become so entranced with the thing as an icon, they no longer remotely suss the meaning behind it. For them, for you, Mr. Proud Tea Partier, “liberty” doesn’t refer to due blessings bestowed upon humanity by the social contract of a democratic republic. It is about how those blessings get divvied up and who, by their measure, is owed more.

In the U.S. in recent months, much of white übernationalist anger has been in defense of the liberties of rapacious, Malthusian health insurance and banking companies, whom Obama and the Congress have been attempting all too timidly to rein in. That’s the conversation we’re having over here in Reality. Through a right-wing filter, however, problem-solving seems to translate as “forwarding a Hell-programmed heresy writing the preface to Armageddon.”

The real crux behind this apparent epoch-making, life-or-death struggle is that, of course, it has been engineered wholesale. You did not join spontaneously in a great crusade of Restoration. You, like that great unformed army that might’ve slain FDR, have been recruited by American corporations who do bad things and want to go on doing them unchecked by society. They need you to make it look like their doing bad things has broad support, or any, as what exists of it isn’t broad. You are the loud, annoying evidence of the kind of bad things they are willing to do to keep doing bad things.

That’s all you’ve ever been.

Gerald MacGuire worked for Grayson Murphy, owner of a brokerage house and director of one of the banks owned by superfinancier J.P. Morgan, the most powerful man in American business. In the summer of 1934 MacGuire, also an officer in the American Legion, solicited two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner and retired Marine General Smedley Butler to lead an army of 500,000 Legionnaires to Washington, where they would wrest the government from Roosevelt, murder him, or reduce him to figurehead status.

It seemed a tall tale even to Butler. Fortunately, the general knew the American Legion’s imprimatur, that it had initially been financed by American capitalists, including Murphy and Morgan, to re-purpose U.S. military vets as strikebreakers and had long aped its bankrollers’ reactionary politics. In 1923, Legion commander Alvin Owsley publicly drew parallels with Italy’s nascent Blackshirt government. “The American Legion is fighting every element that threatens our democratic government — soviets, anarchists, I.W.W., revolutionary socialists and every other Red,” he told an interviewer. “Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”

Regular readers know that the Surly Bartender

When the Surly Bartender was still wet behind the ears, little more than a Surly Anklebiter, he would regularly try to bullshit his mother with bald-faced lies, with the surety that if she didn’t have “proof” that it was me who threw the shoes across the room and broke the champagne glasses (which, tragically, she and Surly Papa used on their wedding day) then I was free to go. That kind of dishonesty drove her to distraction, and as I aged out of that mentality as a Surly Stripling, I began to see her point. Liars are useless people.

Many years later, when I was serving a 13-year-sentence in the New York City public education system as a Surly Social Studies teacher, I got to confront such blinding bullshit on a regular basis. Mostly from the administration, but sometimes, even from the kids, and it made my blood boil.

Lately, the political dialogue in the United States (and likely elsewhere) seem to be suffering from an inundation of such look-you-in-the-eye-and-lie balderdash.

Of course, there were the eight years of the Bush administration and all that wrought. LIES! Flat out LIES! Lies that lead to the death of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of “the enemy,” even if that enemy was an infant or a gray haired old lady in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that’s not what’s got the Surly Goat at the moment. Karl Rove can write his lying memoirs. He’s St. Peter’s problem, now.

This particular vintage of rage started to ripen during the last Presidential campaign, when the media was abuzz with speculation about how Barack Obama’s race would affect the election. You remember, right? The conventional wisdom was that the polling numbers for Obama were inflated because people who actually wouldn’t be caught dead pulling the lever for a Black man would lie to the pollsters about it because they didn’t want to sound like racists. Or how Hillary Clinton would clean up in Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia because of all the rednecks living out that way. And, sure enough, in many cases, such logic was correct.

There are racists in America, and publicly, at least, the vast majority of them tend to lie about it. We know they’re there, but when you try to pin them down, as when the Congressional Representative from Western Pennsylvania, John Murtha, had the balls to say of his constituents: “There is no question that Western Pennsylvania is a racist area…”  he was roundly attacked.

What Murtha said was the goddamned truth. I know, I grew up in Upstate New York, not too far from Western Pennsylvania and if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone talk about “the niggers” in my local bars, I’d be a Surly Millionaire by now. But who got called to the carpet by the media? The racists in Western Pennsylvania? Hell no! It was Murtha who was excoriated in public. “How dare he speak of his constituents that way!”

Somehow racists in America have become like subatomic particles: you can speculate about their existence, but when you try to observe them, you can’t know their speed and location at the same time. We agree that some percentage of Americans have a tendency to be racist, but if you ever try to call someone out on being  a bigot (unless they’re a crazyass, robe-wearing, cross-burning, Nazi-Pride-Parade-marching fool) then you’re the asshole. That shit has got to stop. The guy who looks both ways to make sure that none of “them” are around before telling a racist joke is as guilty of racism as I was of breaking them champagne glasses all those years ago. That there is no evidence of the crime beyond his chuckling asshat friends means nothing.

Therefore: “Guilty,” pronounces the Surly  Magistrate!

Let’s take a famous example of racism overlooked in modern America. One of my favorite piñatas, Bill O’Reilly, is, at least in some circles, still a respected member of the idiocracy, and yet he’s already outed himself as a bull-headed bigot. Anybody remember his comments back in 2007 after having dinner at restaurant in Harlem? He actually said, “I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City… there wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘Mother-effer, I want more iced tea…there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

Look, here’s a fundamental truth: until Bill O’Reilly can “get over it” and realize that he’s seeing the world through racist eyes, then, well, he’s a fucking racist. End of story. Even if he thinks he’s not! And you can, in fact, call him out on his bullshit when he or one of his ilk denies it. You should. It’s how we progress as a culture.

So, to the bigots hiding in plain sight amongst us, please, if you’re going to hold Neanderthalian opinions, be proud of them! Sing them out! It will make tolerating your surface-level stupidity and your deep-in-the-bone evil a lot easier for the rest of us.

The Surly Bartender has a question:

We’re not far from that now – and as is the nature of things in this increasingly ridiculous world – it looks as if the nose pickers and soap stuffers might well win the day to the detriment of us all.

The Surly Bartender, an expert on many things, cannot claim to have a profound depth of knowledge when it comes to “carbon forcing,” a “high albedo environment in Greenland,” or “evapotranspiration,” but for our purposes that doesn’t really matter. Chances are you’re clueless about such things as well. And that’s the point. Even those of us who have made an attempt to become familiar with the science have little of value to say about it. Really, I can say, “it’s anthropogenic,” you can say, “nuh-uh, it’s the sunspots” but neither one of us actually has a clue what the hell we’re talking about.  Most of us have a high school Earth science understanding of the situation and as laymen we can’t comprehend the dynamics involved. Said another way, we should all have the decency to accept that our level of understanding planetary climatic systems is like unto a carrot’s understanding of Bach.

So, let’s step back from the science. There is still a part of this debate we can analyze: the changing public perception of the science.

Over the past three years, the American public has grown increasingly skeptical about global climate change. First, the numbers: According to a Fox News / Opinion Dynamics Corporation poll, in January of 2007, 82% of Americans believed that Global Warming did exist. Whereas, in December of 2009, that number had dropped to 63%. And I’ll make a Surly prediction – by the end of the summer, when the media debate will be in full blossom – that number will have dropped to about 50%.

Whether that prediction comes true or not, one still has to ask, “What the hell happened in less than three years?”

I’ve got a Surly Theory: It’s all Al Gore’s fault.

Now wait, stick with me. During the early part of the decade the public mind wasn’t much engaged with global climate change. Back then we were all pretty busy worrying about terrorism, war, and Shakira’s otherworldly hips. That is, until our attention was pulled to An Inconvenient Truth. Gore’s movie focused the nation’s attention on the reality of global climate change in a way that had never happened before, and by doing so, Gore woke the beast.

The movie was pretty good fare as far as boiling frogs and drowning polar bears go. But the most compelling evidence presented was in one of the documentary’s quieter moments. Gore’s team had taken a random sampling of 10% of all peer-reviewed papers written on climate change in the past 30 years (700 our of 7000 studies) and discovered that ALL of them were in agreement on a central theme: Global climate change is occurring and human influence thereupon is undeniable.

To certain vested interests this demanded a rebuttal, lest those of us in televisionland feel compelled to demand action. And those who have reason to fear change, or who can profit from continued debate, decided upon a quite conscious tactic. Having lost the scientific argument, they chose to attack the public’s perception of the science. If the public could be made to doubt the consensus, then the waters would be sufficiently muddied to prevent any actual change.

I know this makes you uncomfortable. People playing scientist don’t like discovering that they are the experiment. But that’s the only reality that makes sense – unless, of course 20% of America recently snuck back into climatology school without me noticing. I have been drunk quite a bit lately, but I think I would have picked up on that.

When thinking about this, it makes sense to remember that there are about a ba-jillion dollars at stake here. Huge industries are built around releasing carbon and greenhouse gases into the environment and it is in their financial interest not to stop. Nations fight wars for these corporations. You really think they’re sitting out the debate? Take just one example: a few years back a Right Wing think tank, the Exxon funded American Enterprise Institute, offered $10,000 to any climatologist who would write a paper calling “the consensus” into question.  That might sound like small cheese, but with a budget of a million dollars, they sought to buy 100 scientists who would go on television and undercut the threat to their empires. Now that’s value for money.

K

Diddle: To insert ones fingers into a soft moist place and twirl rhythmically. To many this definition of ‘diddle’ may suggest a sexual connotation, but to me it simply says ‘Grandma’. Wait. Let me clarify. I’m talking about noodles here. Wait. Let me clarify further. I only diddle with Grandma on Christmas Eve. That still doesn’t sound good. OK. My Grandma and I diddle noodles for the whole family all day, Christmas Eve. My brother helps. So does my mom. Yeah. That sounds right.

Diddling is a Christmas Eve tradition in my family. I’ve been doing it ever since I was a little kid. So has my mom. Even my Grandma has been a skilled diddler since she was a youngster. Which amazes me because she’s incredibly old. Almost as old, I think, as those Bristle Cone Pines in California. And those are supposed to be the oldest trees on earth at something like 89 years. She tried to tell me once that HER mother diddled as well, but having read Genesis I view this statement as illogical.

One of the keys to diddling a good noodle is getting the right amount of milk. I’m not sure why this is, but to listen to my Grandma tell it, I can only assume that if the wrong amount of milk is used, one’s only remaining recourse is to burst into tears and await death. The milk is perhaps as important as the egg, and the egg is really the soul of the endeavor. The milk and the egg must be diddled together and expanded to birth the noodle. And there’s a little salt involved as well. But of course you wouldn’t want it too salty.

I still feel like maybe this whole thing doesn’t sound right.

So every year on Christmas Eve my Grandmother Jane, who has consumed the better part of nine bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream, will stagger out into the living room and say something like “OK! Time to start diddling!” By this time our beef has been simmering for several hours, so it really is diddling time. This is also the cue for me, my brother, and my father to ‘remember’ that we still have Christmas shopping to do (as in all of it) and that we must go to the mall immediately.

Most years this shit does not fly, because my mother has ensured that we finished our shopping the previous day. She does this by employing a variety of tactics such as begging, threatening us with completely unnecessary exploratory surgery, or, failing that, doing our shopping for us. My brother will say “Oops! Forgot to do all my shopping. I have to get to the mall.” And my mother will say, “No you didn’t! You’re getting me your gall-bladder. It’s already wrapped. In YOU. Now get to diddling.” It really is a magical time of year.

We all file into the kitchen where Grandma slurs something completely incoherent at us, which leads to a rousing game of ‘What the Hell Did Grandma Say’, after which she hands/throws/drops in our direction a bowl of flour with a little depression in the middle. We each add a little salt, crack an egg into it, and then pour in a little milk. I add an amount of milk which my Grandmother declares is too much, and then my brother adds an amount that she declares is too little. But here’s the kicker: It’s the exact same amount of milk! We know this because we’ve taken to measuring the milk with the same kind of micro-pipette used in DNA testing. We are left to assume that Grandma, who has had multiple eye surgeries, can see, without magnification, actual individual molecules of milk. Because to suggest that Grandma might be wrong about anything noodle or diddle-related would be grounds for familial excommunication.

Now it’s time to argue about how many noodles we will need, a noodle being defined as one egg worth of noodle dough. This leads to a discussion of who will be attending our traditional family feast, which has, oddly enough, not been discussed at all up to this point. The usual suspects are all well accounted for and assumed to be coming: aunt, uncle, cousins, that lot. The only real wild card is Carol, a dear family friend whom we all love very much and whom we welcome to every big family event despite the fact that not one of us can stand her company for more than one minute and 15 seconds (a record held by my mother). So we settle on a number, usually five or six, and then make some other number between four and eight, the important thing being that there is a discrepancy between the number decided upon and the number produced, as contradiction makes the noodles taste better.

Here’s a question: how do you know when your noodle is completely diddled? It has to do with firmness. A well-diddled noodle is firm, but not hard, and it shouldn’t be sticky at all. If it’s sticky, by God, you are in for a world of trouble. Because it’s time for the hard part. Now that the noodles have been diddled, and diddled well, they must be flattened. My brother and I, who are responsible for the bulk of the rolling, begin to pray that my Grandmother hasn’t forgotten her big, purple, metal rolling-pin, because the little wooden one that my mother annually fails to replace is a real piece of crap. It is thin and spindly, and while it could easily be used to stake up sagging tomato plants, as a rolling pin it is virtually useless.

We take turns rolling the noodles. It takes a lot of flour. On the rolling surface (or ‘kitchen counter’ as we like to say), on the rolling pin, on myself, on the floor, and, I think, on the dog. Once the dog is properly floured I can begin to roll. I am an excellent noodle roller, unlike my brother who always tears the noodles and rolls them into weird, amoeba-like shapes, and who should probably stick to toaster-shaped items as his sole culinary endeavor. Really. I’ve seen him fail to properly microwave canned soup. And he’s 30. Take it out of the can, guy!

My brother and I take turns rolling one noodle at a time, mine getting progressively better, his slowly taking on the appearance of Jackson Pollock paintings. Grandma, whose job is basically done, occasionally wanders over to mock my brother and remind both of us that “It’s not thin enough until you can read a newspaper through it.” An absurd claim since, to the best of my knowledge, she has never been able to read.

At this point it’s getting close to dinner time and we would be cutting the noodles into strips, or ‘noodles’, were they dry enough. But of course we started much too late in the day so my mother has to get out the hair dryer and blow flour all over the kitchen, but not dry the noodles out too much or they will crack which, I’m told, really pisses off Jesus. Cutting is another moment wherein Grandma has a chance to shine by telling us how wide or skinny to slice them. It is also the only point in the noodle process, from diddle to consumption, when we can basically ignore her.

Eventually the cut noodles go into the water that the beef was cooking in all day, where they become gravy, then we all settle down to drink until someone realizes that we don’t have nearly enough potatoes. We run around awhile, eventually submitting to the grim reality that there is absolutely nothing we can do about the potato shortage, after which we settle down to drink and chat with newly arrived guests and eat too much cheese.

Soon we all congregate around the big table where Grandma is passed out, and it’s dinner time. Here is the proper way to eat Beef and Noodles on Christmas Eve.

1) Wake Grandma.

2) Take a giant chunk of beef, which is tender and delicious, and put it on your plate. DO NOT OFFER TO SERVE OTHERS! The table is very big, and the platter is very heavy, often with hilarious results.

3) Take an absurd quantity of potatoes, preferably before anyone else, because there aren’t enough and you won’t get seconds. People will point out the potato shortage. Ignore them.

4) Take a giant ladle full of noodles and apply to the potatoes as with gravy. Take as much as you like, there are WAY too many noodles.

5) While reaching for string beans, notice something out of the corner of your eye. Turn and realize it is your brother’s unwashed index finger buried up to the second knuckle in your tender and delicious chunk of roast beef. Notice that he is smiling at you.

6) Smirk, get the beans, and when he’s reaching for the rolls drop an olive into his wine.

7) Gorge. Merry Christmas.

Kevin Petrie hails from Seattle but lives and works in Antigua for no readily apparent reason whatsoever.  He is lucky to have a family who allow themselves to be publicly mocked.

A

Thanks, Joe. It’s a hell of a read.

The Editors

Freedom comes in many forms in America, and new forms are constantly being created. The latest has been freedom from basic financial security. The weakened economy has given corporatists an excuse to, as they say, “let workers go.” Which sounds as if companies are granting employees some sort of freedom: “Go on George, twenty years on the job is long enough, so git outta here. Have yourself a ball!”

By that measure, there have never been a more free people. Now benevolently relieved of their job responsibilities, millions are free to do almost anything they choose, go fishing — or take up the banjo. At the moment 14 million Americans have been granted freedom with another three or four million expected to be pardoned before the economy “levels out,” meaning more people will lose their jobs, but at a slower rate. Of those 14 million liberated souls, six million are so free they can even take the family on a year-long round the world trip, if they so choose. They need no longer report in at the (un)employment office because their benefits have expired. One little suggestion for their trip abroad: visit the guy in Asia who now has your job. With a little effort, I’m sure you can get over the barbed wire topped steel mesh fence enclosing the factory’s “attached employee housing compound” in Sichuan Province.

But luckiest of all are those American workers who get to have their cake and eat it too. According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an additional three million adults over age 25 have both jobs and unprecedented leisure time. These are the working Americans living on “unintentional part time employment.” This term carries overtones of some sort of accidental consequence of something the worker did. As in: “Oops, silly me! I didn’t realize that I cannot support a family on 17 hours work and $120 a week. So now I must spend all my newfound leisure time seeking more “unintentional underemployment.” One must admire government speak for its subtlety. Intentional or not, these working folks are experiencing unprecedented new leisure time opportunities as Americans. Whoopee! Sleep in four mornings a week!

Depending on how you look at it, the American people are either freer, or simply getting better at what we have always represented to the world — a bunch of powerless and unquestioning mental midgets. My money is on the latter.

Midgets can seldom see over the fence. Consequently, we see the world from inside the fence and on such small terms as paychecks and families, and no farther. We cannot identify even with a national level struggle for the same things we want, much less the global one for human dignity and fairness in labor. Exclusive devotion to family is the chief virtue here, along with maniacal devotion to the closest football franchise. Moreover it’s the only responsibility a man has, the sign of a good man, a real man. Accepting “personal responsibility” for the credit card bills. That one’s personal responsibility might also extend to the larger world is incomprehensible.

Meanwhile union workers at downsized Sony and 3M plants in France hold CEOs hostage and threaten to burn down the factories, resulting in larger severance packages and raises for those not made redundant. That’s the downside of mental midgetism, every fence is a tall fence. Knowing stuff is too much work. Then too, the fence was made quite a bit taller by the American media blackout of the French union action. I mean hell, J.T., those unions are communist!

My friends abroad tell me it is pitiful to watch such unquestioning bovine Americans. I tell them it isn’t much fun to watch from the inside either.  Swamped in the manufactured spectacle, fear and distractions we call American culture, few among us notice what our nation has become – a slickly packaged totalistic and authoritarian state of a type new to history. That there has been any loss of self agency among the people is incomprehensible. Two subsequent generations to mine never knew what life once was in America. While not perfect, it was not so thoroughly policed and minutely administrated. For most now, present conditions are like the atmosphere or the weather. Just there. Just the way it is.

The condition among adolescents makes me want to cry. Passing through school metal detectors is a part of life. Being subjected to a piss test to join the chess club, or sniffed by a German shepherd police dog while being lined up against the lockers along with the rest of the student body? Paramilitary terrorist drills in high schools and middle schools? A kid being led out of study hall in handcuffs? Don’t even think twice about it. It’s just the way it is. And, if I may ask, exactly what is it? Well, one New York State school board calls it “Parental freedom from fear.” The Columbine shootings provided the excuse to embed these things into society. Nine-eleven provided the authority to implement them anywhere and everywhere. So now it’s just the way it is.

Regular readers will know

Oddly, no single thing truly pissed Sr. Surly off in these past two months. Customers have generally been thoughtful and colleagues silent. So, for this column, rather than focusing, laser-like, on a particular issue of global importance and resolving it with a flaming shot of insight, the Surly Bartender will set his aim more generally. But, being a bit of an stickler for an intellect as polished and ordered as his bottles, the Surly Bartender will subsume all of the lesser issues into one general rubric entitled: Please Stop With The Bullshit, because people (or institutions) that bullshit themselves are a constant source of irritation for us all. And bullshit should be addressed.

The idea for this column came while on a recent trip with Continental Airlines – though to single them out is unfair, it’s the entire airline industry these days. The experience was pedestrian, I’m sure you’ve had it yourself. It started at the gate, when the security zombie pawed through my carry-on luggage and found a tube of toothpaste. The zombie then informed The Surly Bartender that he was in violation of the airline’s anti-paste and gel protocols, which require all toothpaste (or hemorrhoid creams, or lube or whatever) be stored in – at maximum – 2 ounce tubes.

Now, mind you, I had so squeezed and crushed my felonious 10 ounce toothpaste tube over the previous month that it couldn’t have had more than an ounce an a half left in it. And forget that, had I wanted, I could have carried 20 two ounce tubes of whatever happy-making terrorist goo my heart desired and still not have violated government’s paste weight regulations. Still, I did not, at this point, lose my mind. I didn’t get smart-assed or ask the zombie if he believed that one 10 ounce tube of toothpaste was inherently more dangerous than 5 tiny 2 ounce tubes. Nope, I just handed over the paste and let it go, annoyed, but understanding that – at least in some silly ways – the airlines are trying to keep us safe. Even the Surly Bartender understands that sometimes you’ve just gotta play along.

While on the plane, just before take off, the head airhostess (or was that the airhead hostess?) did the standard dance with the Mae West inflatable and the in-flight instructions for serenely surviving a plane crash. Afterwards,  she came over to my row and knelt down.

The guy seated next to me was still talking on his Star-Trek-Stupid looking Blue Tooth device. (Here’s a small request made to any reader who actually wears a Blue Tooth device. Please archive some photos. They will be funnier in 10 years than faded pictures of a guy wearing a leisure suit and earth shoes, juggling pet rocks.) But I digress.

The guy with the Blue Tooth in his ear was yapping away loudly about his portfolio and was clearly a dick, but that’s not the point. The hostess, kneeling, said to him in a voice that sounded as if it had been computer generated to create calm in a totalitarian state, “Sir, you’ll have to turn off your cell phone now, and keep it off for the duration of the flight. Cell phone signals can interfere with the plane’s communication devices.”

At which point Mr. Blue Tooth dutifully apologized and turned off his phone, and had I not really wanted to remain on the flight and get to the bar that was my final destination, I would have screamed, at the top of my Surly Lungs – “BULLSHIT!”