With a few exceptions, The Surly Bartender has held his tongue for the better part of the past year, but like a carbonated bottle of rage into which the world has dropped too many Mentos of crazy, it’s time to explode.

We’ll get to that later, but let us start with politics north of the Rio Grande, which have recently centered on lunar colonies and state-mandated vaginal probes. Now, as regular readers know, I’m a fairly Progressive Surly Bartender and inclined to find a Republican / Conservative worldview lacking in clarity, depth or logic — but this time around it really does seem like their candidates for the presidency should be touring the nation in a mini-car, and emerging onto the debate stage wearing squirt-daisies, clown shoes and big rubber noses.

As of this writing, there are still four candidates in the race, and given the eradication of campaign finance laws, there will likely be at least three candidates for the foreseeable future. First in current national polling is Rick Santorum — a latter day Savonarola, seemingly unable to stop obsessing about the m-m-m-moral d-d-d-decay of a sex-sex-sex-ually libertine society. Good lord, I’m glad I don’t live in that man’s head. He’s like a pre-hooker Billy Bibbit, full of repressed lust and desire, tortured by pangs of guilt every time he catches a glance of a woman’s (or, if you think it through, maybe a man’s) body.

Second in the polling is the frontrunner (hrrrmmm?) Mitt Romney — a politician who simply must be an invented character, one I’m imagining has been conjured from an unpublished novella called The Stepford Candidate, written as a lark by George Plimpton and forgotten on a voodoo priestess’ altar during a trip to Haiti in the middle part of the last century. How do you explain his utter inability to behave like a real human being? Easy! He’s only 40 robotic pages long! Double Spaced!

Third is Newt Gingrich, the aforementioned lunar colony enthusiast, whose chronic overuse of adverbs makes me want to frankly, literally, fundamentally kick him in the balls.

Rounding out the field is that old coot, Ron Paul, who, for all his posturing as a different kind of Republican is actually pretty loopy himself, though we’ll largely give him a Surly Pass this time around. We do so with the caveat that, if he’s still around this summer, he’ll receive his very own Surly Analysis.

To understand the depth of the dislocation from reality on that side of the political spectrum, two things must be taken into consideration — and they are intertwined. First, all of the candidates (in fact, most of what remains of that once great political party) are ideologues, and ideologues are the death of legislative governance. That they are ideologues who continue to scream, that “It’s really the Democrats who are crazy socialists” matters little. Even if the major media outlets in the States are unable to detach themselves from the narrative of false equivalence in political debate, facts are facts. Republicans, not Democrats, have purged moderates in lieu of true believers from their ranks. To pretend otherwise is to deny objective reality. Which, of course, is Republican bread and butter.

The second, and related, consideration for understanding Republicans in the early 21^st Century is that they have become unmoored from any sense of actual, factual reality.

Newt Gingrich will bring gas prices down to two dollars a gallon by increasing domestic production, denying the existence of an international oil market, AND the reality that domestic production has increased significantly during Obama’s first term. Mitt Romney assures us that Iran will get a nuclear weapon if Obama is reelected, and will assuredly NOT get one if he is president. What? Does he have anti-nuclear superpowers somewhere hidden in that perfect head of hair? Such a statement goes beyond rhetoric and dive-rolls directly into the land of delusion. Why isn’t it mocked publicly? Why isn’t it discarded out of hand, even before noting that his entire foreign policy team is comprised of the same neo-con cretins who deluded themselves into believing a war in Iraq would cost no more than 60 billion dollars, would be paid for by the Iraqis themselves, and that our soldiers would be met as glorious liberators by the rose-tossing citizens of Baghdad?

They all, to a one, wail that America under Obama is being overrun by “illegals,” while ignoring the quantifiable (and reprehensible) reality that the current president has deported twice as many undocumented workers as did President Bush before him.

And then there is the outright denial of science as it pertains to evolution or global climate change. Good god, is this really the best they have to offer?

It appears that the short answer is: YES.

I’ve opined on this before, but it is true: In the past forty years Democrats have made the transition from being a party guided by an overarching vision of the-way-the-world-should-be, to one that is at its root pragmatic. Take, just for example, the observable facts that the most recent big-picture policy initiatives of the Obama administration come directly from conservative think tanks. It was not The Earth Liberation Front who came up with Cap and Trade as a method to limit the emission of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere; it was a market-based alternative to governmental regulation of pollutants put into the political conversation by C. Boyden Grey, a member of the very conservative Federalist Society when he was working in the Reagan administration. It was not Saul Alinsky who drafted the basis of the current Affordable Care Act (dubbed ObamaCare by its detractors); it was a policy modeled on a Republican idea — one designed by the Romney administration in Massachusetts. Further, the mechanism to guarantee broad coverage in both plans, the much maligned “individual mandate,” was conceived within the walls of the ultra-right Heritage Foundation as a way to keep dirty, hippie, liberal free-loaders from taking advantage of the system. As such, it was championed by Newton Crazyhead Gingrich for 20 years.

As has been often noted, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, “We are each entitled to our own opinions, but no one is entitled to his own facts.” Facts speak for themselves; Republicans of this generation just choose to avert their eyes.

Democrats have, for better or worse, been pragmatic in their design of legislative remedies to complex sociopolitical problems over the past several decades. And what have they received for their efforts? Increasingly more vociferous assertions that they wish to unilaterally disarm the United States and allow godless socialism (with an Arabic accent) to take over our society and jail good, patriotic Republicans in Sharia-socialist gulags wherein they will be force-fed tofu and hummus, while listening to New Age music.

Madness, delusional madness! And yet it surges forth.

A few nights ago, while slapping shots across the hardwood at Café No Sé, a favored customer asked if the Surly Bartender would be commenting on the Occupy protests occurring, at last count, in over 200 cities through out the United States.

Really, is there much more to say?

They are right that political power in the United States is skewed, grotesquely, in favor of wealth and corporate influence. They are right that the health care delivery system in the United States costs twice what it does in any other industrial nation, provides worse coverage and is the cause of over half the personal bankruptcies in America. They are right that deregulation of the financial markets (under Democratic and Republican administrations alike) set the kindling and dried the forest in advance of the inferno touched off by the housing market collapse of 2008. They are right that the household incomes of the bottom half of the population in the United States have stagnated over the past forty years, while the income of the top one percent has increased by 275%. And they are right to note that the tenuous increase in household income over that time (18% for the bottom quintile, and generally shitty for the next 40 percent above) came not from wage increases for individual workers, but by households needing two wage earners in order to keep the wolves from the door

They are right that this has been a long, steady and policy-driven process in which the wealth and political power of the nation has been funneled upwards. For those of you old enough, you may even remember the episode of All in the Family back in the mid 1970s when Edith had to get a job. Norman Lear saw where the nation was heading way back then, though I have a feeling that Archie Bunker would eat his hat before joining Michael (Meathead) Stivic in Zuccotti Park.

The 99 Percenters are right about all that stuff. And they are right about the broader truth that America, after 30 years of assault on the very notion of a civil society, has broken faith with the next generation, saddling them with debt (personal and public) that they are now expected to bear, while not providing them the employment opportunities to do so.

They’re right. They played the socioeconomic game by the rules as were explained to them (take a student loan, take this mortgage) and a job will be waiting for you. Invest in your future and we’ll all rise together. But now they’re fucked. And now they are waking up to that truth and trying to do something about it. Maybe they’ll even make some difference. I sure as hell hope so. But as my Surly Friend and I were houning down the mezcal I thought, “what’s to comment upon any further?”

But the idea of doing a column got under my skin and as I drank about it some more, I came to the conclusion that there are some issues upon which we might reflect. Particularly as pertains to the way the 99 Percenters are being presented in the media, and therefore defined by the first draft of history.

The major media has been pretty consistent everywhere but on Fox News. The story we’re told is that they seem like nice kids, but they don’t really know what they want. Fox, of course, portrays them as anarchists and socialists who know exactly what they want: blood running in the streets! Which, if you think about it, is hilarious as that same organization would happily deride them as a bunch of French speaking, anemic, vegan pussies given half a chance.

Pro forma: Fox is full of shit. But the other narrative is just as off base.  The protestors know very well what they want. Troll one of their websites (www.occupytogether.org), or their Tumblr feed (www.wearethe99percent.tumblr.com) for an hour or so you’ll likely be surprised at the depth and clarity of their message.

What they want in regards to deregulated financial markets is a return to the banking practices before the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which would redivide community banking practices from investment banking practices. There are also those who would take it a step further and demand that the largest banks and financial institutions (the ones that are “too big to fail”) be broken up into more manageable, and less dangerous, sizes.

Come to think of it, I’d be down with that, too.

What they want in regards to the disproportionate influence wielded in our political system by wealthy individuals and corporations is equally as clear: They want publicly financed public elections. They want an overturning of both Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United v. The Federal Elections Commission (2010), two decisions that, respectively, declared money to be equal to speech and that it was unconstitutional to place limits upon the spending of that money when advocating for a particular candidate or idea. Some of them even want a Constitutional Amendment to reform campaign finance regulations (as recently offered  in Congress by  Democratic Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico.)

If you talk health care policy with most of them, you’ll hear a fairly informed explanation about the benefits of a single payer system, or the mollifying effects of a robust public option on the predatory nature of the insurance market when left to its own devices.

Student loans? You’ll hear support for programs that would decrease debt loads for professional degrees that lead to careers in public service, like general practice medicine, teaching or nursing. Also along those lines, they want a strengthened and modernized G.I. Bill.

Oh, and they want jobs.

Virtually everything they want is already in the public debate, but is stymied in Congress by the pernicious effects of money in politics. Virtually everything that want is out there, but not covered in the media because there is no action on those stymied bills.

Their message is not radical, even if the methods of occupation are. But, generally speaking, they have come to the realization that their interests are not being served because of the nexus of power and money that finds its roots in Wall Street.

Now, if you want, you can also find people carrying the torch for animal rights, or anti-death penalty crusaders, or those wanting to warn us all of the impending alien invasion, but the core message — delivered at the absolute center of a financialized economy — is that the game has been rigged and it is effecting the health, safety, security and economic opportunities of the vast majority of citizens in a supposed democracy.

Almost despite themselves, the media seems to have understood the central point — that this is about an intrinsic unfairness in the United States — and the debate’s center of gravity has changed from deficit reduction to income inequality, but you still don’t get much detail. It’s far easier to run a puff piece on the wackos, the drum circles and the wiggly thing they do with their fingers while consensus building (Google “99% and wiggly fingers” and you’ll see for yourself) as that makes  the news more entertaining, though less informative. But the representatives of the 99% that are out there in public squares around the country know what they’re talking about. They know what they want, but their answers are as complex and varied as the questions. Sadly, that doesn’t play well in the modern era of sound-bite journalism.

F

Oh, so funny . . .

I’m trying to think of something funny about the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan. Something real ha ha, grab-your-belly, split-a-side-open funny. Because if I don’t think of something funny, I may just have to be carted off in a straight jack.

Hmmmm . . .(that’s me thinking). . . hmmmm . . .

I think I have something! I recently read about restaurants in New York and California using hand-held Geiger counters to check the fish they have imported from Japan. That’s kind of funny.

I can envision the menus of the future: “Dear, why don’t you order the BP Louisiana Crab Cakes with the Light Crude Salsa and I’ll order the Low Level Radiation Yellow Tail Tuna with the Leukemia Prophylactic Sea Mouse. Then we can share. I love sharing.”

What else?

There was the article about the Russians who just sent back a shipment of cars from Japan because they registered high levels of radiation.

“Boris?”

“What is it you want, Uri?

“Those cars we bought from Japan, they are glowing, Boris. Much radiation.”

“Strip out engines and stereos. We sell those on black market. Then send cars back and tell them not to fuck with us or we will make borsht of their loved ones.”

Here’s one more Fukushima funny. US Ambassador to Japan, John Roos, last month made a public display of support for Fukushima products by visiting a shop in Tokyo and buying Fukushima sake purportedly as a gift for his wife.

This is the man the president of the United States hired because, as he put it, Roos is “somebody of superb intellect and outstanding judgment.” Wow!

“Hi honey.”

“Welcome home, baby. How were things today at the office?”

“Oh, not so bad. Things are little crazy with the nuclear thing melting and all, but overall it was a good day. Did some shopping, thought maybe I’d take a martial arts class. And look, I bought you a gift, a nice bottle of Fufushima Sake. It’s got an extra kick.”

“Oh honey, you’re so sweet and thoughtful. I love you.”

Is there anything else that has me tickled cutaneous-radiation-syndrome pink? Oh yes, here it is, the biggest knee-slapper of all, the giant guffaw, the choking  cesium 137 chortle:  Nuclear Energy, now more than ever, is being flogged around the world as SAFE, THE FUTURE, THE SALVATION FOR GLOBAL WARMING, THE GRAND SOLUTION TO OUR EVER-GROWING ENERGY NEEDS.

God that’s funny. I love that one. Sheeeit. I’m laughing so hard I’ve got the hiccoughs.

Or not so funny . . .

In 1976, at the ripe age of 16, a few friends and I hitched hiked toward Riverhead, Long Island, about 25 miles from our hometown of Huntington. We hitched out there to protest the building of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. We were young, long-haired, bell-bottomed and probably a bit stoned.

But we were also concerned, and not naively as it turns out, but rightfully. We had read somewhere, probably a pamphlet handed out by Nader’s Raiders (an environmental and consumer activist group formed by the then young Ralph Nader), that several of the engineers who had worked on the project had resigned over safety reasons, saying 1) there was no safe evacuation plan in case there was a serious problem at the plant (imagine the chaos of hundreds of thousands of cars racing towards New York City on already traffic-jammed highways); 2) the plant was too near the MacArthur Airport and that an accident involving a jet could be disastrous; and 3) the plant was built dangerously close to the Long Island Sound and that any form of radiation leakage would be harmful to both marine and human life. Also there was evidence of Mafia involvement in the building of the facility which lent further concerns as to the quality of the construction.

It seemed to make sense to me. Shoreham Nuclear Plant: BAD. So off I went to protest. This was still a time when teenagers and some of their elders were concerned about these things and protesting seemed to have some impact.

At the protest my friends and I hung around the fringes, listened to some speeches, and collected more flyers from tables from a number of anti-nuclear energy groups. The police were there to keep order, and it was a good thing because across the street was another group, those protesting for the building of the plant. For the most part this group was an angry mob and ready to break heads.

What impressed (or perhaps depressed) me most — and this is probably why this memory is still so vivid to this day — is that their signs and banners were painted with slogans like Shoreham Means Jobs, and Don’t Take My Father’s Job Away.

There were others touting the safety of Nuclear Energy, but the ones that stuck with me were the ones that framed the argument in terms of jobs. There did not seem to be anything rational about it at all. It just seemed plain moronic. “We need work today, good paying work, so why should we listen to your bullshit of potential disasters tomorrow. Our experts say it’s safe, so it’s fucking safe. Now get the fuck outa here.”

I remember hitching back home and thinking, “Do people really think like this?” I think up to that point I had a different perception of mankind.

In the ensuing years I kept up with what was taking place at Shoreham. The plant’s construction was halted and then started again, protests mounted and then dwindled, a portion of the plant was activated and so on . . .

Nuclear energy and nuclear weapons continued to be a hot topic of public and political debate. Those pro-nuclear energy continuously proclaimed the safety of it, that measures had been taken to make the plants fail-safe and that protesters were alarmists who did not understand science.

Meanwhile those against nuclear energy continued to warn of human error, that there is no place safely to dispose of nuclear waste, cancer, half-lives of radioactive material and the like. Then, three years later, on March 28, 1979, on my 19th birthday, I was awakened by the clock radio. I was in my college dorm and a bit under the weather as I had celebrated the night before. The voice from my radio said something about a nuclear accident. I was not sure if I heard it correctly. I turned up the volume.

The Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania had a stuck valve. There was the possibility of a core meltdown. A state of emergency had been declared. People were being evacuated from the immediate area.

To this day Three Mile Island is pegged in my mind to my birthday as a reminder of a horror just barely averted. Such shortsighted arrogance.

The Surly Bartender is used to confronting complex issues,

As the interconnected parts of the world now know, a few weeks ago Julian Assange and his website, WikiLeaks.org, released the first tranche of  250,000 classified, confidential or secret cables that passed between United States Embassies and the State Department in Washington during the years since 1966. This “document dump” has provoked powerful reactions both from the organs of global power and defenders of free speech. There is the usual rogues’ gallery of entrenched elites or sycophantic wannabes calling for, quite literally, the assassination of Julian Assange and the execution of Bradley Manning, the indicted but untried Army Private suspected of culling and delivering the documents to WikiLeaks in the first place. There has been support for Assange and Manning, as well, notably by a group calling itself Anonymous. Much of the debate has focused on  the rights of the state versus the rights of the individual, but very little of it has considered the new context that surrounds all issues of security and free speech in the age of global connectivity. In my own  endearing and Surly way, I’m going to try to do that here.

But to start with: Manning, Assange, and the facts of the case –

Bradley Manning, some eight months ago, was a Private First Class in the United States Army, stationed in Baghdad. He was awaiting discharge for something the army termed an “adjustment disorder.” To read about Manning is to feel for a confused kid who thought the Army was a good choice for putting his life together, but discovered he didn’t like being treated like a cog in a larger machine, and he came to hate what that machine was built to do — kill people. I have a feeling that if I ever got a chance to meet the kid, I’d like him.

But that is unlikely, as he is being held in solitary confinement (23 hours in his cell, 1 hour in an outdoor cage everyday) in the Military Brig at Quantico, Virginia in conditions that many consider torturous.

He faces charges for transferring classified material to his personal computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source: WikiLeaks. The information he allegedly passed include two videos of military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which show United States armed forces acting in galling disregard to innocent lives. Further, it is believed that he is the source of the diplomatic cables. He is facing 52 years in prison.

Interestingly, the story did not seem to boil over with the release of the videos, which were also aired through WikiLeaks, and the Surly Bartender has respect for Manning and Assange for bringing that information to light, but it’s with the diplomatic cables that the story becomes far more gray.

Thus far, no nation has arrested Assange for his publishing of classified information, and we can only hope that none does, as such a decision would set a grotesque precedent for any country that aspires toward freedom of the press. Assange has not committed a crime substantively different than the ones that The New York Times, Der Spiegel, or Random House commits daily when they publish classified information gathered from their reporters and authors. Writ short, while maintaining any semblance of a government by law, you can’t arrest Assange without also arresting Bob Woodward. News IS the release of classified information.

But Assange, like other national security whistleblowers before him who didn’t follow the established rules of the journalistic game, has found himself accused of other crimes — embarrassing ones of a sexual nature. I’ll give the charges no more coverage here, other than to note that both Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and Scott Ritter, former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector in Iraq, were both similarly accused in their time. The charges could well have arisen against Assange naturally, and if so the guy should face punishment, but my gut says that I’ve seen this movie before and there are machinations behind the scene. You can follow that drama online, if you are so inclined.

Yet, while governments are being cautious, legally, with Assange, there clearly have been other actions taken by governmental, military and business elites to limit the fallout from the document dump. Quite clearly, pressure has been put on private companies that provide the electronic support systems for WikiLeaks. Most notably, PayPal suspended processing of any payments to WikiLeaks, and Twitter suspended Assange’s account supposedly for violations of terms of use. Also, WikiLeaks.org, despite having over 20 mirror sites globally, has been difficult to access in recent weeks. My Surly Bullshit Barometer says that none of this is by accident. And, who knows? Maybe someday, someone will leak the records of the phone calls from Langley, Virginia to PayPal’s corporate headquarters. Until then we’ll just have to assume the worst.

The WikiLeaks case has encouraged strident defense, as well. Notably, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has pledged $20,000 to a legal defense fund for Assange as well as the hosting services of his own website. Many progressive columnists have condemned the persecution of Assange as a desire to “kill the messenger.” Ron Paul, the Libertarian / Republican congressman from Texas has publicly and properly asked from the floor of the House of Representatives, “Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?” The unofficial dean of dissent in the United States, Noam Chomsky, has said that the documents reveal “a profound hatred of Democracy” by his national government and he has praised Assange and his battle for a more open society. All of this is predictable, and to my Surly Mind, largely justifiable, but for an open society to continue to function, both transparency AND some notion of a rule of law are required — and the very technological changes that allow WikiLeaks to champion transparency also provide the opportunity to cripple the concept of living by a rule of law. Thus, my dis-ease in this Brave New World. It’s not so much Julian Assange as it is those who may follow.

The Uncharacteristically Civil Bartender

First, for those of you who have not been paying attention to the furor up north, here is a short primer: In 2009 a Kuwaiti-American Muslim of the Sufi sect, Imam Feisal-Abdul Rauf, announced plans to build a Muslim Community Center, similar in style to a YMCA or a Jewish Community Center, at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan, approximately 600 feet from the site of the World Trade Center. Dr. Rauf, who has lived in New York City for 50 years, has served as the Imam of the Masjid al-Farah Mosque in New York City since 1983. Masjid al-Farah, saliently, sits less than 1000 feet from the site of the World Trade Center and has been at its 245 West Broadway location since 1985 without incident. Over his career Dr. Rauf has written several books urging moderate Muslims to speak out against extremists, condemned the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and been sought for counsel by two Presidents. In 2006, Rauf traveled with Karen Hughes, President Bush’s Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, to the U.S.–Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, and remained in close contact with her office until the end of the second Bush term. Rauf has continued working with the Undersecretariat during the first two years of the Obama administration. Most recently he was on a speaking tour to several Islamic nations with the mission of explaining what it is like to be a Muslim in an open society.

One can only hope that recent events haven’t soured him.

Imam Rauf is fully within his rights to build an Islamic community center on private property anywhere he’d like, presuming local zoning ordinances are obeyed, which they have been. The 1st Amendment to the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Yet, the issue arose during a political season, and when the smoldering hideousness of bigotry combined with the hot winds of high-stakes electioneering, a firestorm erupted. Those fires have since spread. Beginning in mid August, Fox News, The New York Post, numerous Republican leaders and several Democrats have been shouting from the rooftops their opposition to the “Radical Imam’s Ground Zero Mega-Mosque” which will “Tower Over Sacred Earth!” and “Defile the Memory of the 9/11 Heroes!”

It has not been America’s finest hour.

The scenes of protest around the Park 51 site, particularly on the anniversary of the September attacks, were bitter and vehement — including at least one man tearing pages from a Koran and setting them on fire while a chanting mob urged him on. Throughout the fall this ugliness has echoed back and forth from the American Street to Right Wing Blogosphere. Then the noise machine of a 24-hour news cycle which drowns out reason amplified and distorted nearly all of the facts.

This Imam is precisely the type of moderate Muslim the American political establishment has long called upon to condemn extremism, and he has answered that call. But prejudice has a blinding internal inertia. Hopefully we can still reverse its progress.

First, some facts: Dr. Rauf is currently using the Park 51 site as overflow space for Masjid al-Farah, a mosque that is, according to the New York Times, one of the “most progressive in New York City.” Rauf hopes that the community center, which will include a cooking school, a basketball court, an auditorium, a restaurant as well as a “prayer center,” will serve as a bridge between the Muslims of Manhattan and the larger community of New York City. Importantly, though almost completely overlooked in the media, Imam Rauf is adamant that Park 51, as the project is known, will house a prayer center, but will not be a mosque. According to the Imam’s wife, the reason is this: by Islamic tradition no Muslim — regardless of their ideology — can be kept from the sanctuary of a mosque. As a prayer center Park 51 will generally be open to people of all faiths, while at the same time, entry can be denied to radicals and extremists, or even just more conservative members of the faith. One reviewer on salotomatic.com (which purports to be The World’s Most Comprehensive Guide to Mosques and Islamic Schools) noted that “While, overall, the people [at Masjid al-Farah] are welcoming, they are not very welcoming of anyone who has a more conservative interpretation of Islam than they do.”

Take that for what you will, but it seems clear that the congregants at the al-Farah Mosque aren’t Osama’s Muslims.

But the question arises: can the opponents of the Park 51 Community Center actually accept that there are moderate, peace-loving Muslims who mean America no harm? If so, a second question remains: why, after 50 years in New York City and nearly three decades dedicated to peace and bridge-building, isn’t Imam Rauf celebrated as a progressive religious teacher who stands up to bigotry within and outside of Islam?

I once commented to an economist friend

And so, the free-market-think-tanker wakes up in the morning and has his coffee. As with us all, this leads him to his next activity, taking his morning poo, where he can conduct the totality of his intellectual creativity by thinking “ahhhh, today is a great day to let the market solve all problems.” The laboring hours that follow are simply a repetition of that water-closet rumination, applied to whatever flows across his desk. But let’s follow him through his  ridiculous pantomime of a workday:

At his office his cloying subordinate, suckling at the toes of his master, provides the Fellow with his think-tank task for the day.

“Sir. Sir. The Times is reporting that graduation rates at urban public high schools are abysmally low. Whatsoever should we do?”

“Hmmmm . . .” our hero thinks while scratching his attractively wrinkled brow, “let me apply my analytic skills . . .” he says as he looks suspiciously at his sycophantic younger twin. He holds the gaze for several minutes and then suddenly he pronounces with a flourish: “This problem shall be solved by privatizing education!”

“Brilliant!” ejaculates his serf. “Sir, you are simply BRILLIANT!!! But riddle me this, good nuncle, The Journal questions what should be done to secure the long term solvency of Social Security . . . Pray thee, what doest thou think?”

Assuming a sphinx like bearing, our Randian man falls silent for a moment, while his courtier stares deep into the reflecting pools of his light blue eyes.

There is silence for many minutes. The grandfather clock in the corner beats out the fateful passing of time. And then, “Voilà! I’ve got it. We’ll begin to privatize Social Security!”

“Oh, you are the most wonderful Fellow of all the Fellows in the Land,” cries the Miniscule of Capital as he backflips and applauds the genius of his master before falling at his feet and saying, “But my liege, there are those in the kingdom who warn that liberalizing a part of the wealth transferred inter-generationally for private investment in our current, unstable markets might endanger individuals, particularly unsophisticated investors, by placing them in the path of the fickle winds of commerce and financial chicanery . . .”

Our man at the think tank then looks down at his motley fool with some admiration for his fluidity with the argot of their craft and considers a head-pat of praise. But then, knowing that only the competition of unshackled manimal spirits will encourage this waif to wax onward, he challenges the lad: “You’re not suggesting that the Nanny State is necessary to guide our financial decisions? Our financial decisions are the core of our liberty!” he thunders.

“Oh, no sir. No no no sir.”

“Then you know the solution. Tell me. Tell me NOW!”

Hesitantly the Geckee says to his Gecko, “The solution is then . . . not to only place some money from Social Security into private investment interests, but to place ALL of it therein?”

“Very good, lad. Now tell me why.”

“Because then people will be incentivized to take an interest in their financial lives?”

“Why YES!” he would declare, only vaguely aware that in his mind’s eye there formed an image of the delicate floral pattern upon the walls of his private loo that always so calm him on his morning constitutional. “The solution is to let the market resolve it all!”

And on the day would pass, until it was time to meet Biff and Charles for sundowners at the club.

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.