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2013: The Year White Men Like Me Become Extinct

Posted in On Massey, tagged , , , , , , on December 31, 2012 | 2 Comments »

White Men who are extinct. These Civil War veterans in a gesture of reconciliation.I am a white male middle-class heterosexual Protestant. I am becoming extinct. It’s the end of the world as my people know it. And in the words of REM, I feel fine.

I don’t mean we are becoming literally extinct, of course. But white men will finally cease to be the only face of power in the United States and much of the world, western and otherwise, in 2013.

Don’t expect us to go quietly. Some truly spectacular gerrymandering, even by American standards, could leave the House of Representatives in the hands of white men who do not represent a majority of their party, much less a majority of their country, through the end of the decade.

We’ll continue to shout the world is coming to an end. But it is not the world coming to an end. It is only our world ending. Year by year, we’ll shout louder and year by year, more and more of our country will turn their backs on us and go about their business of freedom, not based on our principles and demands, but on their own. Year by year, we’ll get older, until we are too infirmed to shake our fists or write our checks or cast our votes. Then we’ll die. And that will be that.

The Massey family can reliable trace its presence on the American continent to 1696. I am related to that family through my father’s father’s mother. Other branches of the family tell the story, less reliable, of relatives that ran a make-shift hospital during the Revolutionary War. We talk about a real great great grandfather who is rumored to have been at Gettysburg, although evidence proving this tale is in short supply.

A story more likely to be true is the German-speaking ancestor who got off a ship in Philadelphia and began walking west. At every farm where they spoke German, he asked if help was needed. At the first one that did, he settled and eventually married a daughter of the family. So were the seeds of new lives in a new world planted, including my own.

Looking at this history, I do not think or feel I am any more or any less American than any other person born here or any person who takes the oath of citizenship today or any person who simply thinks some day he or she might like to take it.

As many have said before – including our newly re-elected president – “American” is not a race or a nationality or a gender or a religion or a culture or a language or a sexual orientation or a certain sufficient quantity of money in pocket. It is an idea to which all people should be able to aspire, and which all people should share, equally. Here and other places.

I am aware how far short of its ideals the American project has fallen, and know the pain of this failure has fallen on others who are not myself.

But 236 years of painful progress has still yielded progress and more is coming. This progress will be fitful and slow, always compromised, sometimes bought off or bargained away, thwarted, threatened, stalled, mocked, ignored, and attacked. Still it will come.

The seeds of new lives will be planted in fields once denied. A new world will grow again as it has grown before. For that I am grateful. And with that, I send my New Year’s greetings to you all

PGM

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A Modest Proposal for Protecting School Children from Gun Violence

Posted in Made-Up Truths, tagged , , , , , , on December 21, 2012 | 15 Comments »

Guns are patrioticThe recent tragic murders of young students and teachers in the Sandy Hook Elementary School move us to demand the US government take strong action to protect our children from gun violence.

The many responsible voices calling for armed officers to patrol schools, and for teachers and administrators to arm themselves, are important steps toward responding to the crisis.

However, these steps are not sufficient to protect our children. Gunmen who enter schools knowing there are police officers or armed teachers in the building will simply kill the adults with weapons first, then turn their guns on the unarmed children. More Sandy Hooks will be inevitable.

Therefore, we are calling on all people serious about protecting children from gun violence to create a national program to arm all school children.

Each child should be given an age-appropriate handgun as well as training similar to the instruction required to earn a concealed-carry permit in many American states.

Young children should be given a .22 pistol with no recoil and a trigger break pull pressure set at 1.25 pounds to ensure that small fingers can fire the weapon with relative ease.

Older pre-adolescents should be armed with .38 pistols and high-school age students with .45 handguns. Members of the ROTC and the football team should be armed with assault rifles, after they receive additional training and certifications. Twenty-round magazines should be standard for the handguns of all children regardless of age.

Guns should be integrated into school curriculums to increase the readiness of our children to use their weapons in self-defense. For example, word problems such as this one could be added to elementary school math programs:

Three men carrying assault rifles enter your classroom. You are armed with a pistol containing a twenty-round magazine. How many rounds can you fire at each gunman, assuming you fire an equal number of rounds at each? Are there any rounds left over? If so, how many? Show your work. Extra Credit. You should aim at the center mass of a man carrying an assault rifle to increase your chances of killing him before he kills you: True or False?

We estimate this program will require spending of $625.00 per child, with $475.00 going to pay for a reliable firearm and $150.00 to pay for training.

With 43 million school-age children in the United States, the total cost of our proposed program is 26.9 billion dollars.

We can assure those concerned about the size of the federal deficit that our proposal to arm children is revenue neutral and may even run a slight surplus.

This is because public health experts estimate that 7% of children in each generation – or just over 3,000,000 boys and girls – will die from accidental or intentional misuse of their weapons.

It costs $80,000 to provide each child in America with a public education. Therefore, the deaths of these 3 million children will save taxpayers 240 billion dollars per generation.

These savings will cover the cost of the program as well as the projected short-term and long-term costs of caring for the estimated 34% or 14.6 million children who will be injured by accidental or intentional misuse of their weapons.

While we recognize that these are not an insignificant number of deaths and injuries, we believe that the other 28 million children will be saved from gun death or injury as a result of our proposal. We also believe these deaths and injuries are a reasonable price to pay for the preservation and protection of the constitutional freedoms Americans enjoy.

As a result, we urge each of you to contact your representative and senators in Washington DC and demand they swiftly enact a comprehensive program to arm all children in the United States. Thank you for your support.

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Tyrants Destroyed: Politics in the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov

Posted in Vladimir Nabokov, tagged , , , , , on November 23, 2012 | 4 Comments »

Bend Sinister Vladimir NabokovFor most of his life, Vladimir Nabokov declared himself indifferent to politics and expressed his satisfaction with never having joined any group or participated in any organized human activity.

Nabokov insisted that there were no “messages” in his work. He expressed contempt for literature that discussed general ideas, offered social commentary, dealt with everyday “reality” (a word Nabokov frequently put in quotes), or promised human interest.

Instead, Nabokov said he valued books that were grounded in the imagination and talent of the specific writer, and which offered aesthetic bliss which he recognized by a thrill in his spine.

Nabokov’s own novels seemingly confirm these principles. They are deeply idiosyncratic; full of dense word play, complex patterns, and recondite references; and deliver a great deal of what looks like misanthropy.

All of this argues you won’t find a trace of politics in Nabokov’s work just as he claimed. But here’s the thing. I don’t believe him. And neither should you.

The first reason you shouldn’t believe Nabokov is he knew from personal experience that indifference to politics does not stop politics from affecting you.

Nabokov and his family escaped the Russian Revolution in 1917. His liberal politician father was assassinated by Russian fascists in 1922. Nabokov fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and soon to be Nazi-conquered France in 1940 to protect his family and in particular his wife, Vera, who was Jewish. His brother Sergey died in a German concentration camp, where he was sent after speaking out against the Nazis.

The second reason you shouldn’t believe Nabokov is that while he may have bragged about never having joined any group, he also took great pride in his adopted country of the United States.

Strong Opinions Vladimir NabokovNabokov described himself as “American as April in Arizona” and said he felt a “suffusion of warm, light-hearted pride” when he showed his American passport at European borders (Strong Opinions, p. 98). He kept his US citizenship, and continued to pay American taxes, even after he and Vera moved to Switzerland.

By contrast, Nabokov was outspoken and unrelenting in his contempt for the leaders of the Soviet Union and the vast harm they had done to the Russian nation. Nabokov also had no problem arguing with the American liberals who continued to embraced Soviet propaganda long after they should have known better.

The third reason you shouldn’t believe Nabokov is that he consistently stated that the worst act a human being could commit was an act of cruelty. He believed that cruelty was the essence of all tyrants, and it is cruelty that he condemned in all his major novels.

This condemnation of cruelty can be hard to see because of Nabokov’s techniques as a writer, however.

Nabokov never wavered in his dislike of plainly written novels with obvious messages, and this dislike was reinforced by his observation that bad writers and bad leaders were much alike.

Nabokov saw bad writers and bad leaders as equally trite, vulgar, and stupid. They both thought and wrote and spoke in a debased language of general ideas, and both believed that human beings can be reduced to a few general “types” that are easily defined by commonplace characteristics.

Nabokov expresses this idea most succinctly in his short story, Tyrants Destroyed, when he wrote, “the real human being is a poet and [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet” (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, p. 446).

Nabokov also seems to have understood that the bad writer, especially the bad writer with a good reputation, actually legitimized the propaganda of a dictatorship’s officially sanctioned authors. If Balzac or Lawrence or Camus were first-rate artists, rather than second-rate scribblers, then the novels of approved Soviet writers could also be great works of art rather than tools of manipulation and misinformation.

So Nabokov responded by creating a highly personal – sometimes, stubbornly personal – body of work that emphasized the uniqueness of his characters and the originality of his imagination.

This approach, in itself, was an attack on authoritarian states like the Soviet Union, which insisted that the group was more important than the individual and which were threatened by any work that didn’t enthusiastically celebrate the state’s manifold virtues in a manner easily understood by the average person.

Pnin Vladimir NabokovNabokov’s work was also a relentless assault on cruelty. Nabokov didn’t usually link cruelty directly to a dictator, although the tyrant Paduk in the novel Bend Sinister is an exception. Instead, Nabokov created brilliant, charismatic monsters who blinded readers to their viciousness, monsters such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Kinbote in Pale Fire, and to a lesser degree Van Veen in Ada.

Nabokov could also take the side of those who suffered cruelty, most famously in the character of Professor Timofrey Pnin (a refuge from Soviet Russia like Nabokov) and but also with characters such as the philosophy professor, Adam Krug, from Bend Sinister who is helpless to stop the bungling thugs of that book’s tyrant from murdering his only child.

As usual, Nabokov expressed it best. In October 1971, when Nabokov was 72 and had finished writing all his major works, he said this to the interviewer Kurt Hoffman (Strong Opinions, p. 193):

“I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and the cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.”

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The Democrats are the Real Party of Ayn Rand | Election 2012

Posted in Ayn Rand, tagged , , , , , on November 11, 2012 | 4 Comments »

The Ayn Rand postage stamp from the US Post Office

Does anyone else find it ironic that Ayn Rand appears on a postage stamp? Or that she appears to implicitly endorse government controlling the price of mailing a letter? But I digress.

Paul Ryan. Ron Paul. Alan Greenspan. The Republicans are the party of Ayn Rand, right?

Wrong. The Democrats are the real party of Ayn Rand.

Now I don’t mean the whole “any government other than police equals instant tyranny” Ayn Rand. Or the “I’m a genius, leave me alone, if you left me alone I would have already invented hyper-drive or a fusion reactor or whatever the heck it is in a gulch in Utah” Ayn Rand. Nope, those Ayn Rands the Republicans still got locked up. I mean…

The “Existence Exists” Ayn Rand

We hear a lot about this in Atlas Shrugged and it apparently applies both to people who have read the novel and people who … well … really have a whole lot better things to do with their time than read Atlas Shrugged.

But I digress. It seems that Romney and big Republican donors and Republican pollsters and Republican pundits really did think Romney was going to win.

And all that crap they dumped on Nate Silver and every poll except Gallup and Rasmussen and David Axelrod was sincere crap, not just the standard-issue “I talk up my side and talk down your side when I’m on tv” stuff the everybody does all the time no matter who they support.

Which lead to the spectacle Tuesday night of the Republicans denying existence was existing even as it was existence-ing itself into existence. And after everyone else had noticed. But this isn’t the only reason the Democrats are the real party of Ayn Rand.

The “Those Who Are Thinking Are Thinking” Ayn Rand

It’s hard to believe the party which spent its impressionable teenage years reading Siddhartha out-thought the party which spent them reading The Fountainhead, but they did. The 2012 Ayn Rand data-crunching cage match goes to Siddhartha.

But losing the title of “the party of Ayn Rand” doesn’t stop there. All the Republicans saying the reason they lost the presidency is because their candidate wasn’t conservative enough, despite a great deal of electoral and demographic and polling data to the contrary, and instead believe the key to winning is to repeat their core beliefs more and more frequently and more and more fervently rather than …

Wait a minute. That does sound a lot like Ayn Rand. But I digress.

The other group coming up short in the “those who are thinking are thinking” category are the Republicans suggesting that all they need to do is change their “tone”.

This implies Republicans believe they can promote policies such as God wanting women to have babies resulting from rape, or driving anyone who doesn’t look Anglo-Saxon across the southern border of the United States with electric cattle prods, or risking recession to defend tax cuts for 2% of the population – and if they get nice looking people in nice clothes to explain these policies really nicely (hello Paul Ryan!) – the people getting screwed by them won’t notice because the people getting screwed are easy-to-manipulate idiots.

In “the those who are thinking are thinking” versus “the those who are thinking are thinking” show-down, I’m putting $20.00 on the idiots.

Now before the Democrats get too happy that they are the new party of Ayn Rand, I’d like them to embrace one more Ayn Rand.

The “I Can Do Simple Arithmetic” Ayn Rand

You don’t have to be a free, self-sufficient, independent genius to do simple arithmetic and the simple arithmetic is this. Obama got 50.8% of the popular vote. Romney got 47.9% of the popular vote. About 61.7 million people voted for Obama. About 58.5 million voted for Romney.

That, Democrats, is not a landslide. That is basically fifty-fifty.

And when you think about how badly the Republicans blew it with women and Latinos and young people, there are a lot of votes against Republicans – rather than for Democrats – in that group.

So Mr. Obama, please remember. Data is data. Existence exists. You have power and momentum, but not a mandate and not a free hand. Listen to the whole country. Think about what you hear. And get to work. Ayn is counting on you.

** My apologies for drifting out of my usual topic of consideration. But I mentioned several books, so that makes it okay, yes? **

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Ayn Rand Talks Fantasy Football | Made-Up Truth

Posted in Ayn Rand, Made-Up Truths, tagged , , , , , , on July 13, 2012 | 7 Comments »

Ayn Rand talks fantasy football

In our previous installment of Made-Up Truth, we were pleased to present a transcript of The Football Circus show featuring special guest commentator, Barack Obama, discussing fantasy football.

This week, Made-Up Truth is delighted to offer a transcript of TFC’s all-time most popular segment, featuring iconic author Ayn Rand. Let’s get it going!

[Lights come up. Lively music plays. TFC appears sitting at a desk with a distinguished looking older woman. She wears a severe expression and is dressed in a formless grey shroud. The woman’s skin seems both pearly and translucent.]

TFC: I’m happy to introduce our guest commentator this week. Please welcome novelist, pseudo-philosopher, and Tea Party inspiration Ayn Rand. Give her a hand folks!”

[Lively applause from the audience.]

RAND: Thanks, TFC. It’s great to be here.

TFC: It’s great to have you. So, I guess there’s an after-life after all. What’s it like?

[RAND fixes TFC with a cold, angry stare.]

TFC: Moving right along. First game this week is …

TEAM BARBECUE at FUBOOZERS. What do you think, Ayn?

RAND: Adrian Peterson is a better running back than Maurice Jones-Drew, so Fuboozers will win.

TFC: Okay, I agree Peterson is better. But what about Kitna versus Brady? Brady’s the better quarterback, but Kitna has a good match-up versus Detroit. And the BBQs have a stronger team overall. Both these guys are living in the cellar, but I’d put my money on the Barbecues.

RAND: Peterson is a better running back than Jones-Drew, so Fuboozers will win.

TFC: Right, I heard that. But there are seven other players. I gave you reasons why I think the BBQs will win. Let’s have a conversation!

RAND: Peterson is a better running back than Jones-Drew, so Fuboozers will win. I am thinking and you are not.

TFC: You can’t ignore all the players except Peterson and Jones-Drew.

RAND: I am thinking and you are not.

TFC: Look, that’s not an argument. You told my producer you would offer startling insights and persuasively reasoned opinions. We flew you in Business Class from frickin’ Limbo. We put you up at the Four Seasons. You ate all the Chex Mix in the Green Room. We have the right to expect better.

RAND: I am thinking and you are not.

TFC: You’re not going to make me give up by being a mono-maniacal bitch about this.

RAND: I am thinking and you are not.

TFC: You make…

RAND: I am thinking and you are not.

TFC: Jesus! Okay, fine. Fuboozers will win. Happy?

RAND: Now you’re beginning to think!

TFC: Next up, we’ve got…

KICK-ASS FLOWER KIDS at THE MIGHTY MUSKRATS

RAND: The Flower Kids are naked hippies rolling around in the mud doomed to die with all the other naked hippies rolling around in the mud doomed to die. Naked hippies covered in mud doomed to die can never win a fantasy football game. Ever.

TFC: The Flower Kids won the AWFL Cup a few years ago.

RAND: I am thinking …

TFC: … and I am not. All righty. And the Muskrats have been scoring a million points lately, too. Now, let’s look at…

THE PEACH STATE REBELS at TEAM BIG GOVERNMENT

RAND: Bah! Government lawyer! Team Big Government is a moocher, parasite, looter, bloodsucker. He wants to enslave true, powerful, good, productive, and creative minds. He hates and envies those who can think because he cannot. He steals the wealth of corporations and their heroic chief executives. If he is not stopped, America will crash into ruins within the next six months. I do love his world-famous turkey burgers, though.

TFC: Let’s hear it for those turkey burgers. I take it you think the Rebels will win?

RAND: Duh.

TFC: How about we keep it moving, folks. Here’s one.

FOUR ACES at THE EVIL PETES 

RAND: Evil doesn’t exist. Evil is what the weak, the stupid, the venal, and the thieving call the achievements of society’s geniuses. Because The Petes are weak, stupid, venal, and thieving, they are Evil. Because they are Evil, they do not exist. It is impossible for a team that does not exist to win a fantasy football game. The Four Aces do exist. Therefore, they win by forfeit. You cannot fault by logic.

TFC: And we wouldn’t even try. Okay, our next game is …

ROLLING THUNDER at THE HANDSOME GUYS

Ah, the Handsome Guys. They remind me of Nathaniel Branden. Nice boy. Little slow on the up-take. It took a while for Nathaniel and his wife to see the logic of Natty becoming my lover. But once he did, mmm-mmm. Yes, they are much alike. I can’t wait to sample their succulent man-flesh. On your knees and get busy, bitches!

TFC: Are you talking to me or the Handsome Guys?

RAND: The Handsome Guys, of course. Who else?

TFC: Just checking. So we can assume the Handsome Guys are going to score a lot this week?

RAND: Oh yes!

TFC: Good luck to the Handsome Guys with that. Here is our game of the week:

RED HOT CHILLY WILLYS at DARTH VADER RAIDERS

RAND: This is what happens when you put the good of others above your own happiness! Anakin Skywalker was a genius. He could have been John Galt’s son. What did those socialist Jedi do to him? They made him feel guilty for wanting to be himself. The result? The universe plunged into tyranny and darkness! Billions dead. Mindless Bolshevik clones running everything! If I could get my hands on that little green freak, Yoda…

TFC: Woah, hey, calm down. Fiction. Completely made up. No relationship to reality at all. Just a story.

RAND: It is? Really?

TFC: Yes, I promise. Do you think The Willys have any chance this week?

RAND: With the way The Raiders have been playing? Honestly, no.

TFC: Let’s finish with …

THE CHIP CHOMPERS at THE LONE STAR WRANGLERS

RAND: Excuse me. I have to take this. Alan Greenspan is asking me a question on his Ouija board.

[For several minutes, RAND stares straight ahead and mutters. Some phrases are audible, including “Deny everything” and “Issue counter-accusations” and “On your knees, bitches!”]

RAND: I’m back. Sorry to make you wait. Old friend.

TFC: No problem. What do you think about the Chompers?

RAND: This is a tough game, but I think the Chompers will pull it out. You have to like Rodgers over Schaub the way Houston is playing. I think Ricky Williams will have a better game than predicted with no one at quarterback in Miami to throw the ball. The Wranglers have got Cowboys and I see a let-down coming after their big win against the Giants last week. You know, football is a funny game. You can look at all the numbers, but still … any given Sunday. Well, I’m picking the Chompers.

TFC: Hey, you know, that was pretty good. I’m going with the Chompers too.

RAND: Thanks TFC. This has been fun. Can I come back next week?

TFC: No.

 

More great fantasy football humor can be found at “The Football Circus” blog!

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“The Liberal Professor” | Poems by Massey

Posted in Poems, tagged , , , , , , on June 3, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Here’s a piece of satiric doggerel.

.

The Liberal Professor

I’ve come to tell the world’s gone wrong.

Capitalism has left our State bereft.
(I’ve got my dough in TIAA-CREF.)

Imperial wars make genocide and craters.
(We have to bomb right-wing dictators.)

Materialism causes Souls to die.
(I like black suits and skinny ties.)

The System keeps us all oppressed.
(The People sure have made a mess.)

We need revolution. Thank you.

Could you be a bit more specific?
A concrete plan would be terrific.
The what, the where, the who, the how
Keep high ideals from getting fouled.

I see you’re a Zombie for the Man.
You’re in his pay. You do his deeds.
You eat his Lies and belch his Creeds.

Let us say all this is true. That’s
Why we ask more help from you!

I told you what you need to know
Last time on Tavis Smiley’s show:

How perfect all the world could be
If just you fools would think like me.

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