WCGreen
WCGreen's JournalBack in the 70's, when I was still tethered to my mother, she made it clear that I was to attend
Catholic catechism.
There were many things that I questioned, being that I had already started to explore alternative faiths, stuff that was different from the rote religious experience that was offered by the churches in the Irish and Eastern European neighborhoods where I was raised. So I was skeptical at the onset.
She wanted me to be confirmed even though my parents had divorced and my mother thought that continuing a spiritual upbringing in spite of her being to suffer a de facto excommunication by the Vatican. She felt sure that I should not be tainted by her blasphemous action against god and church for kicking my alcoholic and abusive father to the curb.
Which, of course, of being sound mind, I thought the actions taken by the church against my mom was more than enough for me to walk away, thank you very much. But she wanted me to be confirmed so that I could be sanctioned into the Army of God in case there was a new Crusade against the heathens who control the Holy Land and I had been a problem child, I agreed.
But I never promised my mother that I would suffer the religious rhetoric gladly. So I girded my loins and attended in full ostentation and made it clear I was in attendance against my intellectual protest with the cock assurance only a 10th grader can have.
Now I had just finished studying Inherent the Wind in my 10th grade Honors English as well as reading the bible not as a spiritual exercise but as part of a literary exploration of where story telling developed which also included The Odyssey and The Iliad.
In the classroom, I challenged and compared in every single way I could. The poor woman trying to teach a class after doing what she did all day to earn her keep did not deserve my puffed up chest and posturing and questioning everything and anything.
Finally, she asked why I was bothering to attend the class if I was so dead against these matters of faith.
I told her about my mothers' situation after class and found out that she was in fact a nun who had left the order. She asked me to have my mother call her and she would talk to her about me.
Turns out the woman met with my mother and brought up annulments that were being given in other cities that had Cardinals that are more liberal. My mother had her first marriage annulled and was able to find peace with her faith.
Me, I never went back to those classes but maybe, just maybe, especially looking back from 40 years on, there was a divine spark that set the action leading up to my mother finding peace with her god
So if Corporation are people, my friend, shouldn't they be paying Medicare and SSI...
Just wondering, you know this corporation as people idea. If they are, well then all profits should be taxed after the fact 7.65% on the "Person" and then kick in the other 7.65% that the corporation, acting as a company, should pay the match.
Just wondering.
We can send them checks when they retire on the Cayman Islands and pay for all their medical costs. They can relax and hang out at the pool with the Limited Partnerships and S-Corporations. You know what they say about S-Corp, those little devils....
The numbers are tanking...
Ratings for most news shows have been tanking for decades. The only upticks have been when Fox adopted their bellicose stance against everything liberal.
But after this election, a funny thing happened on the way to the Sunday shows and that was the realization that maybe there was something about this recent election that might be worth looking at.
And sure enough, the ratings for Fox News started to drop while noted progressive talks show like Rachel Madow have found a base and have built a growing audience of people who want to hear more about what is really going on.
The truly epic election night meltdown of Karl Rove was proof that Fox News was nothing more than a partisan hack and the "moderates" had had enough.
The best part is the GOP has no idea how to fix the problem with the changing demographics. It seems they have adopted a double down posture and so we get overblown bullshit that turns the tragic deaths of Benghazi into a political talking point and the mindlessly grandstanding over Republican Hegel nomination for Defense Secretary.
In the end, have they no shame...
That whole era in US history is full of awful, disturbing behavior on the part of politicians,
pundits and publishers. These three powerful centers in DC and New York and London had to sate their ravaging desire for revenge.
A lot of people were out there protesting including me. These turned out fo be the last real political events I attended before I fell ill.
But the media wouldn't waiver one bit, they shut down coverage and if any media light was shone on the protest it was through a prism to make those protesting appear to the be the scarlet other.
Every time I went to a protest it was populated by people from all walks of life including many clerics and middle class people frightened into protesting this vanity war.
I was hopeful but was never truly optimistic about stopping the glee for revenge that ran rampant through the media.
The media was tighter back then, more in control of the delivery of news. Plus the right wing media machine was still ascending and ready to take the "Conservative" message beyond their normal audience.
It's a horrible time to look back on, it's a disgraceful chapter in our history and I firmly believe that this particular war will prove to be the tipping point for the fall of the American Empire.
Freedom Fries....
Why that wont happen is because multi-party systems are tailored for a parliamentary system
of coalition building and distribution of power were as a two party state is winner takes all.
The coalitions are built within the two party system. From time to time, one of the two party's will implode and reform pulling in more special interest groups to build a majority.
Shared democracy keeps those coalitions on the outside while a winner take all system incorporates them within the two party's.
on edit. When that happens in the US, it is called a realigning election which just means the players move from one party to another when the music stops. The best example in modern times was when busing to integrate schools came on line in the late 60's and early 70's that expedited the white flight from urban centers to the suburbs. The Republicans became the law and order party, meaning we will protect you from the colored people, and everything shifted. It's happening again as the racial divide is not as relevant as it was in the 70's thru the late 90's. 9/11 just prolonged the realignment.
When I was a kid back in the late 60's...
There was this three story used and new bookstore called Kay Book store. It was next to the best Army/Navy store on one side and a dirty book store on the other. I use to take Cleveland's version of the Subway, the Rapid Transit. For on dime I could get on about ten blocks from my house and get off at the Terminal Tower and walk up and out onto downtown Cleveland....
I remember it in black and white and I guess that was because the sandstone buildings had absorbed so much of the pollution from the Industrial Flats just west and south of downtown.
Still, there was the giant pretzels, the smell of roasting nuts that you could buy fresh by the ounce, and the half milkshake half ice cream cone that Higbees had just around from the corner of the terminal that abutted to the basement of the department store.
But the real treat was Kay Books. I always went to the top floor first to look over the huge pile of Comic Books that the deliver guys brought back from the drug stores and malt shops and five and dime stores that sold comic books.
There was always a few that I had missed and on a rare occasion, I would find a mint book from a year or two before that had been over looked.
The main floor was crammed with books of all kinds but it was the basement that all the old stuff was that I checked out only a few times. There were all these wonderful books from the late 1800's filled with obsolete text books that talked about science that was set aside.
When they shut the book store up in 1983, I went over one last time, this time I was in College. Downtown was on it's last legs, everything of worth was in the suburbs by now although there was nothing like Kays anywhere that I knew of. I bought a few books, looked around and left that part of my life behind.
I have this curse which I have turned into a gift...
The gift of knowledge and awareness.
You see every day I have to do these breathing treatments in order to clear out my lungs. I do four sets spaced out throughout the day, Each one taking 20 minutes.
At first it was boring because part of the treatment means wearing a vest that is filled with air and then vibrates so as to loosen up the gook in my lungs to ultimately stop me from drowning. I know, I know, TMI.
But, I discovered a wonderful time to make it pleasant and fruitful.
We have full on set cable with all the movie channels and most of the regular cable. I think we have over 350 channels.
At first I would watch junk but after awhile that proved boring and as monotonous as the sitting there with no distraction. So what I did was added th digital copy feature to our cable box and each week I scour the offerings on all channels and usually find four or five things that will get me too the next weeks fair.
In the last three year I have seen almost every Shakespeare play, for good or bad, every great movie from the earliest days of cinema to the latest blockbuster as well as informative and other dramatic shows.
Of course I watch crap, I have a fondness for super hero shows so I record all of them. But my life has been made more satisfying with my LED 40" window on the world.
From the beginning, I was against the Iraq War. Most people on this board probably share this view...
I knew that we would fall down a very deep and very dark rabbit hole once we sent the first sorries over the border.
I knew, like probably everybody else on this board would agree, that new tactics, new impersonal ways of waging war, new guidelines would be offered along new and closer lines to be drawn in the sand once the shooting started.
Why I was, as most of the people on this board would surely agree, so opposed to the state sanctioned violence projected from my country to settle international disputes is because of the blow back that will surely come our way. Not tomorrow, not next year and maybe not for decades, but mark my word, we will be judged in the future for the particular dogs of war we let loose in the guise of drones.
The creeks flowed a lifeless blend of yellow and orange...
Sometimes they smelled like rotten eggs but most of the time they just flowed down from the mountain were the coal mining was done. This was before fracking, before mountain top mining, before strip mining had come in to favor.
There were deep mines around, many abandoned when they the seem petered out. They just left all their stuff and moved on, chasing after another seem. There were a lot of abandon mines shouting out from the sides of the mountains. We were warned to stay out of them mines which made them all the enticing.
Right around eight o'clock they would sound the lunch siren for the second shift which my grandma called the go to bed siren. That's when we all came into the house after running around the yard, chasing the chickens or standing to count the coal cars on the train as it ran by. Most of the little ones got to the teens and lost interest but the older kids counted them down and argued how man cars that train was pulling. Sometimes there was two locomotives and we would try to get the engineer to wave and blow his horn.
All the ground water at the borough level reeked of farts. The conditioners got most of the stink out but couldn't rinse the taste away.
So we drove up into the mountains, higher than the mines, with gallon plastic jugs to get the cooking and drinking water from natural streams. Up home in Cleveland we drank kool aide, at grandma's house we drank sweet drinks from the supermarket over at the county seat.
I have seen this disarray before in American Politics...
You know, when one party seems to be self imploding because there are intractable southern conservatives proving to be more than a nuisance to one of the two major party's.
Up until the election of 1968, most Southern states could be carried by only one party and that party was the Democrat. Sure there were occasional out layers just as the Northeast would occasionally go for a Democrat.
But after Segregation became the rule of the land, the Democratic States switched to the coded language of the GOP, Law and Order was their main theme starting with Nixon and reinforced by Reaagan's so-called Welfare Queen, the South went Red.
Now the last remnant of those Bible Belt have formed, with the help of DC Conservative organizers, into the Tea Party.
Without a doubt, the Tea Party will insist on fealty to their cause and if there is no satisfaction, they will split and form their own party.
We are in a realigning election cycle and the Conservative Coalition is starting to fall apart. It usually splits between the intractable and the pragmatic, the ideologue and the deal makers, and culminates with dominance of one party rule for a decade or so and then the seems start to fall apart again.
The last realigning cycle was played out with the help of Ross Perot which saw the House switching over to the GOP because of the dominance of the GOP controlling the District Drawing process in 92, 02 and then again in 12.
If the dem's can hold the Senate and take the 2016 president ency then the House can be had and the realignment will have played out.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: Cleveland Ohio
Member since: 2003 before July 6th
Number of posts: 45,558
