~ make no mistake, we have no interest in john mccain. we are mystified by the democrats who go into convulsions of heavy panting with the thought that he will somehow grace them with a kind word. the man is a conservative and a republican. he is not a friend. do democrats think that he will someday reveal himself to be the standard bearer of their party, just because george w. bush tore him to shreds in the 2000 primary? does that mean that we can expect joe lieberman and dick gephardt to jump over to the republicans because john kerry talked shit about them in the democratic primaries? lieberman is a bad example, granted, but the point is that these aren’t real people, like dennis kucinich, who have a sense of honour and dignity; they are machines that will accept anything that they are told will help them advance their careers.
as stated, we are not interested in john mccain, or any of the automatons that are droning at the republican convention. we are interested, however, in language, in both a literal and literary sense. therefore, our interest was piqued when we heard this quote on the radio:
“We are engaged in a hard struggle against a cruel and determined adversary.” -john mccain, republican national convention
this sounds familiar to us, perhaps something that general pershing might say to american soldiers who were about to battle the boche.
“You are going to meet a savage enemy. Meet them like Americans.”-general john pershing, 1918
that is not exactly what we had in mind; we were remembering the phrase ‘tough and determined’, not ‘savage’. a quick search brought us disappointing results.
“We are going into battle against a tough and determined enemy.” -mel gibson, ‘we were soldiers’
has john mccain confused his real service in vietnam with mel gibson’s fake service in a vietnam movie? has the republican strategy for domination become so laced with lies and falsehoods that we are cutting the delineation between reality and fiction? does the arrival of schwarzenegger herald an era of swiping riffs from the most base and visceral of action flicks? if so, we might tune in for the convention after all, if we will hear cheney explaining the failure of the war on terror with a line from ‘road warrior’ or ‘lethal weapon 4’.
outside of this circus, this stealing of lines is the most pathetic display of oratory skills since new york businessmen-cum-politicians stood at the site of the destroyed world trade center and re-delivered speeches, like the gettysburg address, written and given by others, because none of our living ‘leaders’ have the abilities to equal the situation in which we find ourselves.
“game over, man!”
~ would the man who sang, “if you have political convictions, keep them to yourself”, appreciate having his post-mortem personage being co-opted by a political party and/or agenda? defend johnny cash [w] doesn’t think that would be the case. the angry red planet agrees, but only if the proposition applies equally to the democrats, greens, libertarians, anarchists, etc.
karl rove has a dry erase board somewhere in texas that contains a matrix with the following elements: 1. the lie. 2. number of minds swayed by the lie. 3. number of minds swayed by reaction to the lie. 4. embarrassment of being caught in a lie. if number 3 is less than number 2, then number 4 is wiped from the board and from consideration.
regardless of the fact that the “swift boaters” campaign has been proven to be a fraud, the percentage of voters who are voting based on kerry’s war record has fallen from 41% to 22% since the convention. the lesson here is that it doesn’t matter how many times democrats prove the accusations false; the psychological effect is the same. don’t we remember the calls that were made in south carolina in 2000? “if you heard that john mccain fathered an illegitimate black child, would it make you more or less likely to vote for him?”..”he did that?”..”i’m not saying that he did, but if he did, would you vote for him?”.
note that we are not saying that we might as well let the republicans continue to tell lies; we are only pointing out that the micromanaging of debunking every salvo is not successful. should we lie in return? or should we ignore them and tell other truths? probably neither of these are the answer.
kerry wasted a lot of time talking about shit that happened in vietnam 30 years ago; in return for that, we all wasted a lot of time talking about the swift boat veterans who were talking about shit that happened in vietnam 30 years ago. partisan politics aside, bush’s presidency has been a disaster; he is the first president to hold office over a loss of jobs since the great depression, the number of americans without health insurance has risen to 45 million, ‘no child left behind’ remains unfunded, 1.3 million more people have fallen into poverty for a total of 35.9 million impoverished amercians,… hell, you know there are a thousand reasons [w] to vote against bush; we don’t need to list them all here.
for these past three weeks, we could have been talking about any number of these failures, but instead we all bickered over stupid shit like how many bullet holes are in john kerry’s boat and whether he turned the boat left or right. with bush’s dismal lack of accomplishment, his opponent should be mopping the floor with him right now; our fixation on whether or not kerry acted like rambo or like sir robin 30 years ago is a good reason why kerry pathetically can barely break even with bush. there’s a war in iraq today that we could discuss; or are we going to wait 30 years until an iraq veteran makes guard duty in kirkuk the focus of his campaign? the republicans’ control of our debate has doubtlessly left a smiley face doodled on that texan dry erase board.
~ an addendum to yesterday”s kerry vs. vietnam rant: perhaps if kerry”s braggadocio about serving in vietnam was tempered with some regret at the entire debacle which cost the lives of 58,000 americans and two million vietnamese, it would be easier to take. instead of talking like vietnam was a great opportunity for someone to demonstrate that he/she can be a bad ass, maybe he could simply state that, though the vietnam adventure proved to be a mistake, he served as honourably has he could while still trusting his government. it isn”t like he has to explain his slitting of sleeping women”s throats, like senator bob kerrey has done. kerry doesn”t have to say “i acted dishonourably” or even “i didn”t kick ass”, but it would be helpful if he mentioned that the entire scene was regrettable and a shameful part of u.s. history – kind of like he did in the 1970″s. there must be some way for kerry to pretend to be as tough of a guy as bush pretends to be – without telling us that vietnam was a lot of fun.
~ for our confused, non-atlanta-based readers, ponce is not a thing, it is a place. it is short for “ponce de leon avenue”, which is a thoroughfare from midtown atlanta out to decatur and eventually stone mountain. ponce cuts through the upscale residential area of druid hills, which was laid out by frederick law olmstead of new york city’s central park fame. the stretch of ponce between briarcliff and decatur still contains the lush linear parks and the nationally registered homes that were built according to the plans of olmstead and his son, j.c.olmstead. the western stretch of ponce, between downtown and briarcliff, where “the incident” occurred, is less pastoral; it is highly developed and congested and inhospitable to human life.
another feature of ponce is that it once served (and still does to some extent) as the unofficial dividing line between whites and blacks in eastern atlanta; the names of streets change as they cross ponce, so that whites and blacks would not have to live on the same street; briarcliff becomes moreland, monroe becomes boulevard, charles allen becomes jackson. you can also see this phenomenon in new york city at 110th street, in case you can”t make it to the south.
we know that the “swift boat veterans for truth” are lying, and we know that they are illegally coordinating their efforts with the bush campaign. both of these revelations have been proved in the popular press. of course, the situation is annoying: the situation in which republicans who haven’t served tear down the military service of veterans (bush vs. mccain & chambliss vs. cleland), in which a former ‘band of brothers’ concocts stories to smear one of their own, in which a candidate claims to have nothing to do with a group with whom he shares a lawyer and distributes fliers. we know all this; is it necessary for democrats to continually tear open the holes in their stories, considering that most of us would never have heard of the attacks if we had not been presented with the ‘defense’. in other words, democrats have only increased these swift boaters’ popularity are we still going to be discrediting these veterans on november 10th?
as stated, it is annoying to hear the lies and spin from the republicans. however, there is something more annoying: watching the democrats waving the bloody shirt and picking through the most excruciating details of the occurrences, such as what the viet cong was wearing, if the arm kerry used to pull a guy from the river was actually the bleeding arm, and whether it is okay so shoot charlie in the back.
have you heard the anecdotes about republicans holding their noses and voting for kerry this november? of course you have, and you should probably know that there are plenty of democrats and independents who will be doing the same thing. those of us who supported a liberal like kucinich or a progressive like dean are not at all enthusiastic about the centrist standard bearer that the democratic machine installed as the nominee.
we can not stress enough how much some of us who are – and were – opposed the the war in iraq, and were somehow prescient enough to understand that bush was going to start it regardless of the forces which noted that it would be a mistake, such as the u.n., our allies, weapons inspectors , the c.i.a. (kerry and his apologists somehow think that there is a difference between voting for the war and voting to give authorization to a guy who is hellbent on starting the war to start the war), find it distasteful and unnerving that kerry is swaggering around like rambo just because some republicans call him a sissy. we would truly be reassured to see him putting some energy into detailing what he plans to do about the quagmire in iraq next year than constantly reiterating that his feelings are hurt when someone declares that he was not a ‘hero’ for four months over 30 years ago.
the republicans know that a lie or smear, even if disproved, will still have enough of an effect in the minds of voters to make it worth the effort and embarrassment to spread the lie in the first place. so while al franken or media matters – both well-meaning – are busy talking about minutiae, such as whose initials were on kerry’s after action reports and how many bullet holes were in kerry’s boat (three), the people whose minds the republicans wished to affect have already been made up, and the republicans have moved on to something else, leaving the democrats to waste time on damage control. they say that generals always fight the previous war; democrats seem to fight the previous week’s allegations.
sadly, the u.s.a. is not a very introspective nation. the angry red planet would like for to see our contests involve more debate, more depth, and less compression, but in a nation that is so full of anti-intellectualism that liberals are chided for having educations (unless the don’t have them, then they are lemmings), it seems that the willful ignorance of the consuming class is systemic, something to which the republican focus groups cater and develop, not something at which they arrive after overcoming some brilliant curiosity. the case isn’t that americans are too stupid to have a sincere discussion, it seems that they just refuse to do so. people don’t want to know where hotdogs come from, so it follows that they don’t want to hear that china is loaning us money to make up for tax cuts made during a war that will allow us to continue to have enough cheap gas to distance ourselves from our neighbors.
we know kerry was in vietnam; who cares? a lot of men were in vietnam; it does not convince us that they are qualified to institute single payer health care and to lead the restructuring of the c.i.a. if kerry hadn’t marched around the nation, saluting like a clown after his convention, then the veterans who he pissed off back in the 70’s would not be coming out of their holes to tear him a new one. the lessons of ’88 were that, if you let attacks go unanswered, you will lose; the lessons of ’00 were that if you answer every attack, you will lose. kerry should have just said ‘yes, i was in vietnam; they gave me some medals for killing some guys; it was an unfortunate time’ and left it behind him. going on and on like it was a great thing to be an american soldier in vietnam (we mean this in the political sense of what are americans doing in vietnam?!, not that there aren’t american soliders who are great), and that it is relevant to making policy today is just going to draw out the ridiculous debate of who is a hero and who is a killer, when most of us would really like to hear such a debate about something that actually matters to the u.s.a. in 2004.
~ is kerry finally trying to appeal to nader fans by utilizing arcane, inaccessible verbiage?
Stewart also sought answers to another hard-hitting question: “Is it true that every time I use ketchup, your wife gets a nickel?” The candidate’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, derived her wealth from her late husband, an heir to the Heinz food fortune.
“Would that it were,” Kerry said.
~ the US military is still holding back from storming the ‘3rd most holy shrine in islam’ because it will piss off the people who already hate them. we don’t see how this war/peace/occupation can be won by an army who is fighting on the terms of the enemy. in world war 2, the british did not have any qualms about killing more french civilians than they killed nazis when bombing caen. seriously, as much as we find the ‘explanations’ about islamic culture by western press laughable and condescending, we probably don’t want to see u.s. marines tearing down mosques, despite our rabid belief in the separation of church and state. although the angry red planet did once say that we’d like to see spain go war against morocco, just out of curiosity.
an incident on ponce: a narrative
subheading: what the confrontation teaches us about miscommunication and assumptions based on sloganeering in an election year, as told to us by a midtown cyclist.
“i have a surplus of stickers and i am running out of street signs and phone booths, so i decide to place one on the back of my bicycle helmet, as it travels a wider area than do the lamp posts and parking meters that usually get them. after it was cropped and strategically placed to cover the graphic of some type of demon’s face which the helmet manufacturer had placed there, i set out on bicycle to acquire some provisions for the next couple of days, namely cultured soy – provided it is on sale.
i only bike a quarter of a mile, from midtown to the red light at krispy kreme, before my first confrontation with the operator of an automobile. the passenger leans out the window and states, “get out of the road…[unintelligible]”. this declaration is so common and uninspired, i respond with an appropriately conventional hand gesture.
this is where things usually end; the driver would continue on to popeye’s or hardee’s for a fatty, high-sodium dinner from a bag, and i would bike down the path for split peas and elephant garlic. however, the gesture must have been too much for the pride of the driver, as she slams on the brakes and swerves in front of my bike, apparently wishing that i fall, perhaps receiving an injury. i have brakes on my bike, as well, however, so i sensibly arrest my forward motion towards the car. the car speeds away from me a second time.
my first thoughts as you haul ass away from our opening confrontation are about how interesting, though understandable, it is that you chose to sit next to me at the light on argonne for half a minute in silence, waiting until you were safely driving past me before offering your advice that i get off the road. then i contemplate what you could have said; your ranting went on until you were too distant for me to hear you, so it seemed to be more than the usual, ‘get the fuck out of the road’. were you mocking my pants? they are too heavy for cycling. is my helmet too bright? i confess that it is. remembering my helmet, i wonder if you were saying something about the sticker on the back. this couldn’t be, though, as the sticker has only been there for about one minute, surely not long enough to already receive attention. besides, there is nothing on the sticker that would inspire any perturbation in a fellow citizen, as far as i can imagine.
in addition to my musings on your motivation, i also have in mind some information about ponce which i believe that you do not share. seemingly unbeknownst to you is the fact that you will be stopped in traffic less than a mile up the road. i am not foretelling the future; i am reflecting the knowledge gained by traveling up and down ponce for almost 30 years. there is no possible way for a car to make it through the sequence of lights from charles allen to monroe without stopping at least once. combined with the traffic two gas stations and five fast food joints, you are headed into an automotive quagmire. at this time of day, it is almost certain that you will be stopped at both. in other words, i am going to catch up to you in a minute or so.
granted, i am pedaling so hard to make it past the light at taco bell that i almost pass you. i know you are at the light in front of church’s chicken, so i break an important rule of mine by moving onto the sidewalk in order to be able to pass the truck to your rear and pull beside you. as mentioned, i am pedaling furiously, so i when i skid to a halt when i see the car tag and the scrunchy in the blonde hair of the driver, i visibly lose my balance. though it was only a little wobble, i concede this fact. the embarrassment from this sign of weakness leads to a moment of confusion as to what i should do next.
as i approach the car, i see that you, the driver, are laughing, and that you, the passenger, have your arms crossed and are staring at the dashboard. the fact that you are not mocking me as i walk to the car door restores the confidence that was shaken by my uncertain dismount moments ago. i am even able to overlook your creepy resemblance to tony shaloub. the fact that you can not turn to face me on even terms has established my superiority in this small scale war of morals.
typically, in a case like this, one says something like ‘what did you say?’ or ‘are you talking to me?’. however, i do not think that i will find a repeat of your position to be enlightening, and i already am confident that you were talking to me. while you still do not acknowledge that i am standing by your car, i open the conversation by twice punching your window as hard as i can, causing the skin on my ring finger’s knuckle to split open. i notice that this must have happened on the second punch, as there is no blood on your window.
in order to impress upon you that i am not a mindless force of violence – that i can also articulate my thoughts verbally – i lay out a set of ideas by bellowing “that’s right!” in your direction. i push my bike forward, and manage a remarkable figure eight in order to make a second approach towards your car. upon my return, i see that you have opened the passenger door while you talk to the driver, probably asking her for permission to exit the vehicle. i figure that she is not listening, however, as she has driven over the curb in order to chase me along the sidewalk in front of domino’s pizza.
this is an interesting strategy; not only is it illegal to drive along the sidewalk, but one can imagine that this infraction carries ramifications that would pale in comparison to those of intentionally driving a car into a bicyclist in front of hundreds of other motorists and a few odd pedestrians. whether you lose your nerve or gain your senses is unknown, as before you can collide with me, i ride between a telephone pole and another car, stranding you behind me.
i reckon that this will be the end of it, as i leave you while i cross the intersection at boulevard. in the middle of the intersection, however, you manage to catch up with me; while i admit this impressive, i am less impressed that you are shouting at me with your windows rolled up—i know you people need that air conditioning in a hotlanta august! – which makes it impossible to hear what you are saying.
when we reach the shell station, i see that you are slowing, perhaps intending to exit your car and bring about an escalation of intensity to the confrontation. i assume that this next phase will have a more physical orientation than the previous, and, despite my demonstration of power in front of domino’s, i have a distaste for violence between men, especially when one of them is me.
as you slow, i suspect that the traffic behind you will not suffer your putting your car in park in the middle of ponce. i stop on the sidewalk, then, anticipating that you will be forced to follow the flow of the rest of the cagers down to midtown place and out to clarkston and decatur or perhaps even snellville.
now, the previously mentioned sticker on my helmet says ‘bush lied’. on the face of it, this is a simple statement; it may open up discussion, but no one can disagree with it. granted, one may not know exactly which lies to which the sticker refers. it could be about a broad, nuanced lie, such as bush’s statement that he is a ‘compassionate conservative’, even though cutting the pay and benefits for wounded soldiers and veterans is not compassionate; running up a $500,000,000,000 deficit – after starting with a surplus – is not conservative. it could be about a vague, smoky lie, such as implying that saddam hussein and osama bin laden were working together because a yemeni went to iraq in the past 10 years. or, and this is most likely, it could be about a solid, indisputable lie, such as stating that there is an imminent threat which iraq poses to the united states – a threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons – when the fact is none of these weapons exist.
which lie to which the sticker was calling attention is irrelevant to politics. “facts are stubborn things”, as president john adams, a federalist, taught us; they are not something that are mutable or adjustable. one can discard them or ignore them, but you can not twist them into something they are not.
the fact is that george w bush has lied to americans. he said that weapons exist; we all know that they do not exist. that’s all there is to it; there is no place between these two facts into which one can place politics. liberals and conservatives alike must accept that these two statements are facts. it follows, then, that by pointing out that a ‘conservative’ bush lied by stating something existed when it did not does not make one a ‘liberal’; any conservative can understand that he lied. they can downplay it, tell us to forget it, or explain it away, but they still have to accept that it happened. therefore, a liberal and conservative alike are able to say ‘bush lied’.
in other words, ‘bush lied’ is not a political statement. while it suggests that i, as the bearer of the sticker, feel betrayed by the president (on the other hand, all presidents except carter have lied, so is it betrayal when you get what you expect?), ‘bush lied’ in and of itself is not something that carries any ideological weight, apart, perhaps, from an ideology such as ‘lying is wrong’.
so, you can understand my surprise when i picked out the word ‘liberal’ from the angry tirade that was being spouted out of the driver side door as your car drove over the curb in front of the shell station. as proved above, ‘bush lied’ is not a liberal statement. if the sticker said something like ‘let us increase the tax burden on the rich so that we may increase spending for social programs such as the national endowment for the arts, veterans administration hospitals, and after school programs in impoverished inner cities and rural areas’ or, perhaps, ‘the gov’t should provide coverage for the 40 million working americans who do not have any health care’, or even ‘i believe that society as a whole benefits when every citizen is able to prosper; therefore our social contract should include a system by which no one is marginalized. that system could be called ‘government’.’ if that were the case, then i could see how you sussed out that i am a liberal. however, as i have not found a way to condense these statements into stickers that will fit onto a bicycle helmet, that could not have been your method for discerning my thoughts on the roles of citizens and government. perhaps you knew that i was biking to a co-op to purchase discounted cultured soy and quinoa? i don’t see how.
if i wanted to convey to you in a short, simple manner that these are the policies i would like to see implemented, i could have just put ‘liberal’ on the back of my helmet; however, this might give you some incorrect impressions, such as, that i am a proponent of gun control, when the actuality is that i support the repeal of all anti-gun laws – that includes ‘assault weapons’—or that i am a communist, when the actuality i believe it is okay to sell something, such as design services for a fortress or wine cellar, without sponsorship by the state. it might be more accurate to use a sticker that says ‘progressive’, as my beliefs in structure are closer to a totality in line with that label, considering it is so open-ended as to be interpreted to represent ideologies of an opposed polarity. however, i think it unlikely that you understand the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’; what’s worse is that you might think ‘progressive’ is an advertisement for auto insurance.
you should see now the futility of using simplistic labels such as ‘liberal’, as the beliefs that the supposed liberals might hold are not monolithic, and two people who are similarly opposed to one ideology might themselves have disagreements on others. such political shorthand might be useful when judging if one should hang up on a campaign donation solicitor, but it is not conducive to the type of discussion into which you apparently wanted to enter during rush hour on ponce.
another misconception that you may have, as you drive onto the sidewalk, apparently to block my path, so that you and your passenger can exit your automobile and deliver to me a beat down, is that a cyclist does not have greater range and maneuverability than a does a car mired in rush hour traffic. you doubtlessly learn this as you watch me make a u-turn in the gas station parking lot, and pedal against traffic to boulevard, a direction in which you find it impossible to travel. i wonder what your thoughts are as you see me stop at the top of the hill so that i may bemusedly glance back and watch you try to negotiate your car back onto the street, where you discover that your fellow motorists apparently have no wishes to allow this. before you are able to move, i am already on my way south to the co-op.
as i cross north avenue, i feel secure in the knowledge that you are going to be tied up in the mess from boulevard down to glen iris for the next 20 minutes, even though there is a creeping concern, as i struggle up the hill to freedom parkway, that you will appear from behind the kroger and pummel me at the instant that i reach the top, winded and cramped. in a moment, though, these thoughts are behind me as i turn onto the path and escape into the trees.
unfortunately, the cultured soy was not on sale.”
~ athletic prowess in the interest of health is admirable; sports are pretty lame when they are competitions dressed in nationalism. ‘sports illustrated‘ is the injection of dope into the veins of the american mind. the ruling class, hampered by technicalities like the bill of rights [w], can’t effectively use the police force to keep everyone quiet, so they rely on sedatives like the olympics and ‘sports illustrated‘ to keep us in our easy chairs. nevertheless, on rare occasions there is a surprise convergence of threads which are usually ignored, leading to a strange, happy occurrence, such as iraqis bitching about george w bush in ‘sports illustrated‘ of all places:
“Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush’s TV advertisement. “How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?” Manajid told me. “He has committed so many crimes.” –sports illustrated
~ we have reached our final design for the self-replenishing cat’s water bowl. a few prototypes failed:
1. plastic bottle in bowl with ridged bottom. ridges were not deep enough for a usable amount of water to be available to cat; plastic bottle toppled when empty.
2. for stability, cut out bottom of empty cultured-soy cup. hole placed in cup near lip of cup to allow for deeper water. cup placed over mouth of bottle. flaw: air escapes through gaps between cup and bottle. water drains from bottle.
3. second cultured-soy cup cut opened and formed into cone; cone inserted in mouth of bottle, so that bottom of cone is even with lip of supporting cup. flaw: air enters bottle in gap between bottle and cone. water drains from bottle.
4. rubber band placed around cone at mouth of bottle. success.
~ we have linked the bill of rights above for the sake of new york city mayor michael bloomberg, who has the misconception about folks ‘expressing themselves’ being a ‘privilege’ and warns us to be careful: “People who avail themselves of the opportunity to express themselves . . . will not abuse that privilege, because if we start to abuse our privileges, then we lose them, and nobody wants that.”
~ as mentioned in our testimonial concerning our switch to wordpress, we now offer the latest feature of the angry red planet, a section tentatively titled ‘tour of atlanta’, which will include site visits of important, overlooked, unappreciated, notorious, and misunderstood sites throughout the city. for the sake of irony, our own professed nihilism, or the post-modern qualification of ‘metro-‘, our first site is not in the city proper; it is about 20 miles from atlanta – stone mountain high school.
~ connoisseurs of irony should note that we ended up writing the code and database for the tour ourselves, thereby undermining the very impetus for making the switch to wordpress about which we devoted so much text and fury. the switch will not be totally futile, as we are considering adding a second log – or perhaps an addition to the current edition – for daily photos. for the past few years the daily photos have been incorporated as links from the text, but as the number of daily images has grown into the hundreds, perhaps they would be better appreciated on their own page. in the meantime, any response or feedback concerning the thumbnailing system we have implemented would be welcomed (re: speed, size).
