La Mission Américaine

Another of my off-topic rants from Fark, reproduced below.

Quantum Apostrophe: Who builds and maintains a social model where everyone has to work despite all the technology and "productivity" we have?

Greedy power-trippers.

But you know the reason the USA can maintain an economy where the numbers of people who are not working or being productive is many times the official "unemployment rate" is super-exploitation of the proles and peasants in "less developed" countries. Sweatshops in Bangladesh, for example. The "major job creators" don't need Americans to grow coffee, sew clothes or dig cobalt; they need us to consume stuff produced elsewhere. And they can sell us lots of cheap stuff because they pay their actual producers so little, while they've got to sell a lot of cheap stuff because there are so many of us to buy it. Unlike former ages where a small group of rich nobles were the primary consumers of most imported and/or nonessential goods (and the poor ate turnips all winter).

As for those Americans employed in "the service sector," do we really need several hundred fast food joints and a few dozen "big box" stores in a city of 250,000 people? For that matter, do we really need cities with 250,000 or more people in them?

If Americans bought fewer cheap imported things and paid more for those goods we do consume the "job creators" would feel less pressure to pay so many actual workers so little, while their profit margins could be maintained by going back to the days of $300 pocket calculators. One problem with that is that instead of paying their workers more to produce fewer goods of higher quality they'd most likely "downsize" immense numbers of workers right into starvation, while squeezing the workers they do keep just as hard as ever; another is that needing fewer of us to buy their stuff means far more of us would be reduced to genuine desperation. Eventually the enlarged numbers of very poor here and overseas would die off from hunger, disease or wars of last resort, while the very rich would stay very rich -- and seem even richer compared to everybody else.

The "traditional" answer was for hoi polloi in "the West" to overthrow the rich and create more equitable societies, which could then reduce the burden on "the colonies" while encouraging revolutions there. But that became a long shot in 1918 when the only revolution to even half-way succeed was in backward and peripheral Russia: the German revolution was crushed by the "Social Democrats," while revolutions failed to even start in the rest of "the West." Which led to Stalinism in the USSR, and hyper-inflation and then the Great Depression in the rest of the "more developed" world; which gave us Hitler, WW2, the Holocaust, and then the Cold War.

In the USA there was potential for revolution in the Great Depression, but the New Deal kept that down and "the Good War" put paid to it. By 1955 revolution was practically inconceivable, and these days -- when everybody's full of junk food and busy twiddling their thumbs on hand-held electronics -- that's just crazy talk.

It's time for a strategic "sea change," a rather drastic one, toward a kinder, gentler imperialism. The "broad masses" in the USA should push our "leaders" toward ever further conquests, liberating one country after another from their local oppressors, the petty warlords, greedy industrialists and "Islamofascists" who do the heavy labor of keeping them down, so that one people after another can join in the global cause -- so that one people after another can share the undeniable benefits of "The American Way." Though the USA is hardly a truly free and democratic society we are much better off then the people in Pakistan, let alone DR Congo; because we owe what we have to the rest of the world we ought to pay them back by raising them up too.

The USA, armed and militant, is irresistible, and the peoples of the world are eager and ready to share what we've accomplished. In which process, by the way, the American people will gain new strength and confidence to push for a better deal and a more just society here in "the homeland" -- which we can then share with our sisters & brothers overseas.

Even a "New World Order" where the whole world is run like the USA currently is would beat the lives that so many millions have now, such as having their hands chopped off for not digging fast enough or being thrown in jail for getting gang-raped. Let's get off our fat asses and stop twiddling our thumbs: it's time we did our part for the rest of humanity.

USA! USA! USA!

Oh Bother. Oh Really.

I really should forget all about Languagehat's blog. Not because it reminds me that I'm a lazy dunce but because it interests & inspires me. It's hard to keep being a vapid airhead with that sort of thing going on. And it's not just his blog but the links he insists on including in it, leading to documents that themselves contain links: of the 13 browser tabs I now have open 11 of them are because of him. Damn him.

Of course the the majority of the linguistics stuff goes stratospherically over my head, I am monolingual and barely literate in that, but some things don't. Such as, oh, How To Do Things With Words (warning: big PDF). As with much of this stuff it's too much trouble to trace back which blog lead me to that, but now that I've got the thing I'll have to actually read it sometime. And perhaps think about it, agree & disagree with parts of it, and let that get to me enough to go get more stuff on the subject. And etc. etc. etc. My poor old brain gets tired just thinking about thinking about it. It's so much easier to play kmahjongg till my half-crippled dominant arm goes numb or until I win one (which can easily kill 2 or 3 hours).

Which is why at 50 I remain a badly self-educated 8th grade dropout still reeking of Unfulfilled Potential. This doesn't usually bother me, it's not hard to be more intellectual & scholarly than most of the people I've encountered in my economically impoverished life, but when I let shit like this happen it can ruin my whole day.

It's even worse that in the intervening couple hours I'd let myself get distracted by a Fark link & discussion that got me so upset that I forgot what I'd meant to say & do here. Whatever it was you can be sure it was staggeringly brilliant, you'd have been so impressed you'd have to send me money and/or tell all your friends about your great new guru, but now there's nothing left to see but the everyday Davy being dazed & abortively crotchety again.

Maybe I'll just take a nap, or have a beer, or one and then the other. Then later, meaning at some unforeseeable point in the indefinite future, I'll come back get all eloquently ratiocinatory & shit and give Languagehat a reason to link to this here thingy. Unless your luck holds out: you really don't want to know how much smarter I am than your average bore, do you.

Let Mom Do It For You

When people talk about "helicopter parents" they're not usually talking about parents whose "kids" are in their 30s, and when people talk about "mama's boys" they're not usually talking about 30-ish women who look like boys. But in this post I am.

And while it's currently fashionable to lob disrespect at helicopter parents and mama's boys, it's not fashionable to defend Lindsay Lohan. But then being unfashionable never bothered me in the past so in this post it won't either.

I'm referring, as those who follow celebrity gossip the least bit already know, to Samantha Ronson's mommy trumpeting to the Daily Mail about how she broke up Sam & Lindsay's headline-grabbing relationship a while back, of course after Ms. Ronson had benefited greatly from all the publicity both in her professional career as a trendy DJ and in her personal career as a B-list lesbian. And now that Samantha Ronson once again became "Sam who?" and since Lindsay is once again newsworthy to a public that would rather not think and a Establishment media that would rather keep them that way, we now get to find out that Sammy's mommy is Ann Dexter-Jones and, upon Googling her, that she designs jewelry; in the Daily Mail article itself we're told that she used to be married to somebody named Mick Jones who is apparently still playing in the ancient rock band Foreigner. (But who is apparently not Sam Ronson's daddy, nor that of Sammy's non-identical twin sister Charlotte who designs fashions, not that anybody should care about either.) These people are in the "news" now only because Lindsay Lohan still is, which unless you're impervious to sledgehammer sarcasm, is clearly one of my points.

The other is, as you might have discerned, the real grownups don't allow their mothers to do their lover-ditching for them nor to dictate which lovers get ditched. Most of us settle this when we're 16, or most of us in my generation did, though things might have changed a bit since the year the Ronson Twins were born (the same year I officially lost my virginity at age 14); it's a bit sad to find that an "edgy" record-spinner was letting her mommy do one or the other when she was twice 16 (i.e. 32). 

However, almost 3 years ago Ms. Ronson herself told The Times Magazine (in an article they won't let me have but that's referred to here) that she's really not gay but in fact a switch-hitter (as is yours truly, though I don't get my panties bunched when people call me gay) and that she's "pretty feminine at the end of the day" (unlike yours truly, really) ; and, more to the point here, in that interview she herself said that she broke up with Ms. Lohan because all the attention from the paparazzi got to be too much. Indeed, to quote that article quoting the Times interviewer quoting her, "To be honest, being with her was more of a headache than anything else. Everything I was doing I was already doing. It just meant there were paparazzi pictures documenting it. It sucked, because I’m a pretty private person and I managed to stay under the radar for so long.” Uh-huh. That must explain how she managed to avoid being seen for over a year with her much more famous then-paramour at several dozen trendy hotspots where ordinary snapshooters were sure to be, let alone professional shutterbugs who finance their expensive habits stalking "people who are famous for being famous." 

Don't get me wrong, I claim to be a pretty private person myself, but I restrict that to not publishing photos of my ugly mug all over the Web and to not including my home address in my White Pages listing, though under one guise or another I've held myself out to be an Internet Personality since 1994, though of course my presence remains totally obscure to anybody with anything better to do (or at least it should for your sake, really). You might say I'm really a pretty private person because I haven't gone all out to encourage stalkers, and because in my repeated requests for Glock-sent euthanasia I have also failed to include my mug shot and the easiest places to find me: this is because (unlike Ms. Sammy) I'm naturally hideous no matter what I do and (also unlike Mlle. Ronson) Lindaay Lohan has never heard of me and would probably care nothing if she ever does (dammit dammit).

As for my mother, my sister and my (late) father, I'm such a pretty private person that unless you're weird enough to spend money on a search you'll have to take my word for it that I have any relatives at all.

To get to defending "LiLo" specifically, i.e. to opinionate myself on the character of someone I know only 5th or 6th hand (and whose movies I've never seen), I will say this: it's not that I don't think she's fucked up, indeed I'm tempted to believe that she might have some "substance abuse problems" and "personality disorders," it's that these things strike me as perfectly ordinary (as in fact they are) and that under the glamour and fake tan spray Lindsay Lohan is a real human being. Indeed to me she's more human than most celebrities because she's one of the few Famous People who remind me of people I used to know pretty well and care a lot for (even if some didn't look nearly so smashing in an ankle bracelet). Furthermore I'm sure that many of those millions of "edgy" people who are on the Dissing Lindsay bandwagon are themselves far from sober and not overly sane, and one thing that is guaranteed to piss me the fuck off is blatant hypocrisy (even when I haven't been guzzling Cafe Zinfandel). Come the fuck off it, fools.

In short, I much prefer the little I know about Lindsay Lohan to the too much I know about the people who "discreetly confess" to having criticized her. In fact this subject illustrates why I'd much rather sit here late at night boozing alone while "surfing the net":  the common run of humanity makes me sick to think much about let alone have to deal with on a daily basis. (Unlike Lindsay Lohan, who might be fun to know.)

"Let s/he who is without sin cast the first stone," and the only people I want to hear from who are offended by something Lindsay Lohan did are those to whom she did something personally: if the only reason you know who she is is because you heard or read gossip about her you don't fall into either category. Kindly get the fuck over yourselves, or at least have the decency to keep your hypocrisy pretty private.

Ya got that? 

(Oh and Lindsay, if you ever want to hang out with a funny-looking old welfare queen I'm not too hard to find if you've somehow found this.)