Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Paul Krugman's surprise: "In Defense of Obama," Rolling Stone. Excerpt:

Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token concessions.
    But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.

From a Greil Marcus interview: “'When that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama',” Salon. Excerpt:

But with Barack Obama, racism has become ordinary discourse since his election in a way that it wasn’t before, and the contempt and the ridicule with which Republicans treat him. Not even Bill Clinton, who they felt they could disparage because they thought he was a dumb white cracker, not even Bill Clinton has been treated the way Barack Obama has been treated. He’s been treated as if he’s an impostor, an interloper and as scum.
    I mean, the things that have been said about Michelle Obama, the way she’s talked about on Fox News, you know, forget about Twitter or comments on news stories or anything like that where all the morons live, but the way she’s been talked about, can you imagine Laura Bush ever being talked about that way? Laura Bush actually killed somebody. But that was never mentioned, that was never talked about, because it was impolite to bring it up.
    Anyway, don’t let me go on like this. But, yeah, yeah. And when you look at the things … when you look at the murder of Trayvon Martin, when you look at the murder of Michael Brown, when you look at those situations, it’s not unrelated to Obama being president, but it’s more the way in which the country has reframed itself or rewritten itself since his election, with all kinds of people saying to themselves, maybe never putting it into words, just feeling it, “There’s a fucking n—er in the White House? Well fuck you, n—er, whoever you are.” And an inchoate loathing and hatred that seeks out its targets.
    I’m not a psychiatrist, I haven’t sat down and interviewed George Zimmerman or the cop who shot Michael Brown, I don’t know what their motives are, I don’t know what kind of people they are, what kind of childhood traumas they have experienced. But I don’t think it’s nuts that in a certain way, when that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama.

This is not a joke? "GOP’s 'reparations' insanity: Why Thom Tillis’s latest screwup is so important," Salon. [Tillis is the North Carolina Republican candidate contesting Democrat Kay Hagan's U.S. Senate seat.] Excerpt:

For people inclined to see most of U.S. politics as heavily influenced by the country’s shameful history on race – a group amongst which I count myself – Tillis’s argument, his conflation of redistribution and race, couldn’t have been more revealing....Tillis’s comments came in 2007, before there was a President Obama, before there was Obamacare and before conservative media began talking about reparations as a matter of course.

When Posner speaks, Republicans listen: "Highly Respected Conservative Judge Rips 'Voter ID' Laws – and the GOP – in Blistering Opinion," Daily Kos. Excerpt:

A strong antipathy runs through Posner's opinion here, one that should be taken seriously. Posner appears to appreciate the deeply un-American purpose of these laws and he spares no effort to take their essential fiendishness to task, even as he lays their invention at the feet of his own Republican Party. This is damning stuff, the likes of which has never been fully articulated in Judicial opinion. The fact that Posner is the one articulating it will have a profound effect on the "debate" about these laws from this point forward.

It occurred to me the other day that the coming election has a "nightmare scenario" – a 50/50 tie in the Senate. The fate of the next two years would be in the hands of the second stupidest man in the chamber, Joe Biden. (John McCain is still there, so Biden is only number two, as much as he tries.)

Endless? "Degrade and Destroy," London Review of Books. Excerpt:

An American aged thirty hardly remembers a time when the United States was not at war. And if the prognosis of the 10 September speech can be trusted, this generation will be far into middle age before the chance returns for a politics that is not overhung by continuing war. We simply live with wars and expect propaganda for further wars. The forces stirring behind the scenes (the hunt for dwindling energy resources, Israeli and Saudi regional ambitions) are as unfamiliar to most Americans as the religious passions that have stirred our endless succession of wars.

Favorite roads. Furka Pass, Switzerland:

Furka Pass (el. 2429 m.) is a high mountain pass in the Swiss Alps connecting Gletsch, Valais with Realp, Uri. The Furka Pass was used as a location in the James Bond film Goldfinger.

I'm in the midst of reading Dick Cavett's Talk Show, a compendium of his NY Times columns. Try it, You'll like it...

Joseph Campbell on religious myths as art:

Let us ask, therefore: What can the value or meaning be of a mythological notion which, in the light of modern science, must be said to be erroneous, philosophically false, absurd, or even formally insane? The first answer suggested will no doubt be the one that, in the course of the past century, has been offered many times by our leading thinkers. The value, namely, is to be studied rather as a function of psychology and sociology than as a refuted system of positivistic science, rather in terms of certain effects worked by the symbols on the character of the individual and the structure of society than in terms of their obvious incongruity as an image of the cosmos. Their value, in other words, is not that of science but of art: and just as art may be studied psychologically, as symbolic or symptomatic of the strains and structures of the psyche, so may the archetypes of myth, fairy tale, archaic philosophy, cosmology, and metaphysics. [Joseph Campbell, The Symbol without Meaning," Flight of the Wild Gander, pp. 98-99]

The best I can tell from this personality test is that I am a mean, cheap s.o.b., but we all knew that already.

Winston Churchill loved paraprosdokians, figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is…surprising or unexpected. For example:

• Where there's a will, I want to be in it.
• The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it's still on my list.
• Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

This girl is amazing!

Here's a funny one:

Post by Vidworthy.

Limerick-inspired verse of the week:

Nortin married young, the love of his life.
Though marriage runs through spotty times of strife,
    their love survived their youth,
    and now it's very truth:
Nortin still thinks his girl his trophy wife.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean