What’s in Paul’s grab bag? Unconnected thoughts and observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might amount to something:
The Tube
I was 14 years old when The Flintstones began running on TV. Hanna-Barbara was already famous for introducing cartoons to prime time with Huckleberry Hound, so there was a lot of pre-launch Flintstone hype, including breathless articles in Time and Newsweek. I remember reading in one of those articles how Hanna-Barbara was going to take the whole prehistoric caveman theme seriously. To me, that suggested the show would depict actual caveman life, a concept loaded with smart and clever possibilities. Clubs! Sharpened rocks! Man-eating tigers! But of course Hanna-Barbara had no such thing in mind: Fred and Wilma turned out to be just like us, with cars, telephones, televisions, dishwashers — there was nothing prehistoric about them. Even at 14, I understood the deal: producers had to gear shows to the largest possible audience in order to sell cereal and soda pop. But I was bitterly disappointed, and after the first episode I never watched The Flintstones again.
My grandson is here for a one-week visit, and when he’s not doing cannonballs into the pool he’s watching Spongebob Squarepants on Nickelodeon. Spongebob and his fishy friends live in the ocean, but other than the occasional bubble and a wavy blue overlay during the title sequence, there’s nothing of the life aquatic in the cartoon itself. The characters don’t swim, they walk (and for all I know have cars and bicycles too, along with telephones, televisions, and dishwashers). During one episode my grandson and I watched, Spongebob knocked on the door of an undersea castle surrounded by a moat — yes, water under water.
I suppose that if anything on TV was aimed more than one or two notches above the lowest common audience denominator, there wouldn’t be an audience. That if The Flintstones really had been faithful to the prehistoric caveman theme, Fred & Barney would have looked and acted like those ape-men at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and network execs would have ditched Hanna-Barbara faster than they bleeped out Jack Parr’s joke. That if the producers of Spongebob Squarepants tried to introduce more submarine realism they’d quickly lose the kids, their parents, the sponsors, and their shirts.
But for what it’s worth, I’d watch.
White Trash
Riding my motorcycle home yesterday, I followed two white chicks in a Honda Accord up the scenic highway it is my privilege to live alongside. Halfway up the road one one of them threw a bag of fast food garbage out the window. I’m just speculating, but I bet those two women are all for rounding up and deporting undocumented migrants, and if you asked them why, they’d say, “Because they’re ILLEGAL!” Pigs.
Speaking of My Grandson
We’re having a fine visit. His parents put him on the Southwest flight from Las Vegas to Tucson last Friday and we picked him up at the airport. They’re driving down this Friday to spend the 4th of July weekend with us, then taking Quentin with them on a summer vacation road trip to LA. Quentin’s having a pretty good time, as are we, and we’re certainly getting a lot of use out of the pool. Here are three photos from Monday (click thumbnails to enlarge):
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More pix at Photobucket.
Today Q and I are making a wood model of a Blue Angels F-18 (we couldn’t find an F-15), a surprisingly difficult task. The box says “3 or older” but it’s actually more on the order of building a pinewood derby car, a task most fathers with sons are familiar with, one that requires close supervision and a certain amount of hands-on assistance. But by golly, Q is doing most of the work himself.
Later this afternoon we’re going back in the pool. Unless it rains, which is possible — southern Arizona’s “monsoon” season started a few days ago. Why the quotes? Because “monsoon” in southern Arizona typically means less than an inch of rain, spread over thirty days. But hey, it’s the only weather we ever get, and that’s why we make such a big deal over it.
Current Events
Reference the Kagan hearings, the ongoing oil spill, Afghanistan, etc, I have little to say and almost nothing to contribute, other than to note that Republicans, as always, have defaulted to the asshole side of these issues. Watching that piggish racist Jeff Sessions grill Elena Kagan, I’m astonished anyone would vote Republican, ever. What the hell is wrong with people, why the hell are we wasting lives in Afghanistan, and when in hell did a 10% unemployment rate become acceptable?
Grassroots Movements
Two weeks ago a town in Nebraska adopted an anti-immigrant law making it illegal to rent to non-citizens. Almost immediately, one of my little Facebook friends posted a cut & paste status update taken from some teabagger web site, claiming that this isolated outbreak of intolerance, along with the nativist madness affecting Arizona, now represents an official GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT!!! (exclamation marks his).
You never hear of grassroots movements on the left today. It’s not that there aren’t any, it’s that they’re not reported on by the media, fixated as they are on all things conservative. You may recall the grassroots movements that swept away legal segregation and brought our troops home from Vietnam. There are plenty of left-leaning grassroots movements going on today. Obama and the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t be pushing to rescind Don’t Ask Don’t Tell if there wasn’t grassroots support for stopping it. And when the corporations, privatizers, and deficit hawks come after Social Security and Medicare I wager there’ll be a huge grassroots movement in defense of these socialist programs.
So why are we letting the right co-opt the phrase? The trend of grassroots movements in America has been progressive, not reactive. Grassroots movements ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, stopped child labor, gave working people living wages, and generally made this country a better place to live. There may well be a grassroots movement building toward ending free trade with Mexico and imposing tariffs on imported goods, and I suppose you’d have to call that reactive, not progressive, but the idea behind it is to bring jobs back to America, and that won’t be such a bad thing. But to describe outbreaks of racism and anti-immigrant nationalism as a grassroots movement? That’s just wrong.
Obamar Is a Socilist
I was hoping Obama would turn out to be a socialist, but he’s let me down at every opportunity. He gave us a health care bill that helps insurance companies far more than it helps people. There’s no public option, and advocates for a single-payer system like Medicare weren’t even allowed to participate in the debate. He appointed a deficit-reduction commission that’s totally focused on cutting public benefits while totally ignoring out-of-control military spending. Apart from some temporary census jobs, he hasn’t pushed for any increase in government-funded jobs, nor has he done one damn thing to decrease our ever-growing unemployment rate. He’s letting industry deal with the oil spill and pressing on with plans for more drilling. He’s turned out to be every bit the war hawk George W. Bush was, and he’s kept Bush’s team of Wall Street power players on to manage the recovery plan started under Bush. There are more guns in circulation today than there were under Bush, and gun rights are constantly expanding with zero pushback from the Obama White House.
So I’m always confused when my Republican friends insist that Obama is a socialist. What has he proposed, let alone done, that’s in any way socialistic? How, exactly, is Obama a socialist?
I think I finally figured out the answer.
He’s a Democrat.