Let me explain.  It will take a while, but it will eventually come around to the political stuff that is the main theme of my blog.  Patience again, dear reader.

If you do much browsing among a large collection of bookmarked sites, as I do, you naturally see an awful lot of writing from mid-October to early January that relates to “the holidays”.  It gets pretty old, and gets especially lame when you read those blogs where people like to post about their personal lives.  (There are a few such blogs that can be entertaining, but they’re a small minority.)

Some time in January, it lightens up and you think:  “Finally, we can get back to business!” but soon Valentine’s Day approaches, and all those sites feel obliged to say SOMETHING about it, and all their commenters….

I hope you’ve noticed that I’m not like that.  I’ve learned to love holidays, but not by observing them:  by NOT observing them.

For a long time I lived alone, on the other side of a continent from my family.  “Holidays” were simply days off.  Once in a while, a friend would invite me to something holiday-related, but it was only once in a while, and easy to decline if I wasn’t in the mood.

A holiday was simply a day that the rest of the world was occupied with something irrelevant to me, and I could do as I damn pleased:  catch up on chores, attend to my hobbies, whatever.

I also found out that the holidays are a good time to
find out who your friends are — NOT because they give you presents or do anything holiday-related:  quite the opposite.  It’s when they don’t take the excuse of “the holidays” to flake on you.

Do I need to explain this?  Ok, “the holidays” provide some people with an easy excuse not to do anything worthwhile.  One can always say:

“I need to shop for the little monsters.”
“I need to put up decorations.”
“I need to go buy a turkey and prepare it.”

People who feel obliged to actually do such things every year have no day off at all, just a lot of extra work, but that’s not what I’m addressing here.  It’s the fact that, whether one actually does that stuff or not, it’s easy to SAY that one is doing it to get out of something else.  If you really need help with something, like your car breaks down, or you’re in the hospital (as I once was on Christmas Day), this is when you find out who your friends are.

But it doesn’t take a sudden disaster like car trouble or illness.  What if you just want to keep moving on a project that you’re all ostensibly committed to — something that
everyone knew long ago would be a lot of work and would take a lot of time?  If it all grinds to a halt for two months because of “the holidays”, you know where you stand.

This can surprise some people.  The fired-up, newly converted activist who thinks he’s going to organize a massive action for February and starts calling meetings in December will soon find out just how fired-up other people are.

There’s a seasonal calendar that applies to most “optional” activities:

From some time in November thru early January, and from whenever school lets out in June to early September are patches of low activity for many things.  Event calendars can get pretty short during these periods, and attendance is often pared down to a small hard core.  It seems that most people want to cram all their activism into six or seven months of the year.

This can really break a movement’s momentum sometimes.

A campus can be very active, and then everyone goes home for the summer.  There can be lots of actions before elections in early November, and when it’s time to follow through with more direct action,  unrelated to elections, it’s “the holidays” suddenly.  The small core that stay active can begin to resent the summer soldiers.

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This is all pretty obvious to some of my  readers, who have experience trying to organize things.  So what’s my point?  Just a few things:

(1)  Noobs need to be aware of the seasonal cycle so they don’t get surprised, and some of my readers might be noobs.

(2)  The active seasons tend to have lots of activities aimed at similar interests, conflicting with each other.  If you plan something during this time, get the details settled and start advertising well ahead, so others don’t schedule their things on the same day.  In a way, this crowding of the active season has a mitigating effect.  Fewer people show up during the off-season, but there’s less for them to show up to.

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(3) You’ll know that something is really happening when people show up for something in December, or people attend planning meetings in the summer for events in the fall.  This means they’re really interested.  It might actually be a good test for the level of interest to ask people to such meetings and see what happens.

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(4)  When you’re a standing organization with meetings throughout the year, and you notice that your usually small attendance varies little with the season, you are an élite core.  Maybe it’s time to start behaving like one.  See my earlier post, “When is There a There There?”

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There’s also a weekly cycle through most of the year, that I’ve observed through email.  Some people do all their computer work at the office, and disappear from Friday to Monday.  With others, it’s the opposite:  They use the weekends to catch up on their email and other communication.  I’ve never gone so far as to make codes in my address book for who follows which pattern most, but you get the idea.  People who get surprised at such patterns will stress themselves out over their own powerlessness.

I am, of course, a contrary cuss.  That’s why I’m writing my Holiday Post now.

(WordPress stats don’t tell me WHO clicked on something, only HOW MANY clicks there were on something.  From that, I can draw some conclusions.)

This will be another one like that:  Just some things that I need to make sure you all have a CHANCE to understand, if you care to read.  There’s nothing I can do for people who won’t read.

Is everyone tired yet of watching the Republicans campaign for Obama?  Thought so.  Time to think of more serious candidates.  Many of my readers are Greens, and unless you’ve been occupied with other things, like, oh, your actual life, for the last week or two, you’ve heard that Roseanne Barr has decided to run for the Green nomination for President.  Like most things that happen to us, this
presents a mixture of opportunities and dangers:

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(1)  Any kind of celebrity mentioning the GP in the media serves to inform a whole lot of people that we exist who didn’t know it before.

People definitely need this.  You wouldn’t believe how many times we’ve been asked:  “Greepeace?” by people who have “Green Party” spelled out right in front of them on a big banner, because the latter phrase is unrecognizable.  Imagine going to a place where your name “John Smith” is so impossible for the natives to get their heads and mouths around that they decide to call you “Hotchkiss”.  That’s the level of non-communication that Greens usually have to start from in explaining themselves to noobs.

The effect of any kind of celebrity mentioning us could have a similar effect to that of the Nader campaigns in 1996 and 2000, with some notable differences, mentioned below.

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(2)  A showbiz person in particular, known far more for telling jokes than for her politics, is more easily treated as a joke by the msm.  (Notice that we don’t even bother to capitalize that abbreviation of “Mainstream Media” any more.  I will follow this practice throughout.)

On the other hand, the msm have a well-established custom of treating “third” party and independent candidates as a joke in any case.  If one ever shows potential for drawing more than 2% of the vote, the conversation then becomes all about “spoiler” potential.  I hope we’re all used to this by now.

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(3)  Name-recognition alone could easily overwhelm more “serious” candidates for the nomination in the primaries.

This is a BIG thing.  I’m not kidding.  In 2008, Ralph Nader was at no time a candidate for the Green presidential nomination, but somehow people claiming to represent him got him placed on the primary ballot in California with a vague promise that he would declare his candidacy later.  It never happened, yet name-recognition overwhelmed all other candidates in the voting result, despite all GP activists knowing that he was not a candidate.  60% of the voters in the primary ended up not being represented in the convention because they were lied to on the ballot.  This demonstrates the wide disconnect between people who have any communication with the Green Party and the bulk of those who vote in the primaries, and the power of name-recognition.

We’ve had several other candidates for the nomination for some months now.  See:
http://progressgreen.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/four-candidates-seeking-2012-green-party-presidential-nomination/
The other three have been conducting themselves like pretty serious candidates, whether anyone noticed them or not.  I think Jill Stein has received the most attention, and was treated by some as the presumptive nominee until Roseanne came in.  Whether Roseanne would be a better candidate for the overall result we seek is something to speculate on.  But you see the problem here, in having to choose between a big name with little previous acquaintance with the Party and people who have done their homework and paid their dues.

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(4)  Celebrities have generally had a lot of work to do just being celebrities, and haven’t paid much attention to the GP platforms and culture over the years, not to mention internal procedures.  They are more likely than most to misrepresent the Party and make all kinds of confusion as the Party’s processes scramble to accommodate them.

Example 1, about procedures:

As I understand it, Ms. Barr approached the GPCA ONE WEEK before their December General Assembly, expressing interest in being placed on the primary ballot in California.  She seemed unaware at the time that being registered as a FRAKKING DEMOCRAT might be an impediment to this process, or that it was even possible to register Green, or
that we already had several candidates for the nomination. Faced with this news, she temporarily stepped back from seeking the Green nomination at that time.  (Though she immediately re-registered Green)

Now that she’s changed her mind, at this point in the election calendar, I simply don’t know whether it’s possible to get her on the primary ballot in very many states.  Each state has different laws and procedures about this.  A presidential candidate needs to start researching this stuff YEARS in advance.

Example 2, about misrepresenting:

A while back, Roseanne called for decapitation of the rich who refuse to turn over their excess wealth:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/03/roseanne-barr-behead-bankers-who-dont-give-up-wealth/

Ok, yeah, she’s used to telling jokes, and most people will understand it that way.  The trouble is, most Greens would never say this even as a joke.  (I’m an exception.)  Non-violence is one of the Four Pillars, and we consistently oppose the death penalty.

Then there’s the fact that SOME people will not take it as a joke, and might even make some hay out of it.  It’s going into some territory that Greens don’t deal with very well:  the shouting match nature of most of what passes for “discussion” in the msm..

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(5)  Noobs coming into the party due to the influence of that celebrity are likely to think the celebrity is the founder of the party.

…and drop away when they find out about picky little things like expecting party members to do and decide some things for themselves, not to mention an already-existing platform.

We got this a lot after the Nader 2000 campaign.  People came into the Party expecting it to be all about Nader and didn’t adapt very well to the fact that there was a party, governed by election laws, and its own bylaws, with a focus on local elections that could actually be won, and local politics to deal with.

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So, considering these opportunities and dangers I’ve listed, I’d like to just remind people of a couple of things:

I.  Much as we all should try to help with the campaign, DON’T EVER take the presidential nomination too seriously.

There is no chance, none, of getting a Green elected President in 2012, ok?  The candidates will often say “I’m running to win!” because that’s part of the game.  That “I’m going to win!” stuff is just an obligatory thing that no one with half a clue takes seriously.

Winning is not the point of the campaign.  Nor is “spoiling”.  It won’t happen anyway, so don’t even think about it.  If someone brings up Nader and Florida, just laugh.  People who live in swing states and think the Dem is better than the Rep will vote for the Dem.  They always have, as they did in 2000.  They didn’t need Molly Ivins to tell them to.

The purpose of a Green presidential campaign is to:

(1)  get a little media attention to some ……..issues

(2)  provide voters who hate both “major” ……..parties with a way to register their ……..discontent when they would otherwise ……..not vote at all

(3)  recruit people into the Party

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(4)  get enough votes for the Party to establish future ballot access in some states where ……..that’s a requirement

(5)  (very remote chance) get 5% of the vote nationwide and qualify the GPUS for federal   ……..funding for the next presidential election

That’s it.  Those are the objectives.  Focus on them.

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Now, to the point of explaining all this:

Greens, and their associates, have a bit of history of not exactly considering any decision final.  Always some kind of problem with the process, always a focus on the warts in a candidate, or the way something is done.

II.  Far more important than who gets the nomination is how we all,  including the losing candidates, conduct ourselves after the nomination is made.

Roseanne Barr could be a great asset to the GP whether she’s a candidate for President, a candidate for VP, or just a spokesperson for the campaign.  The same is true of all those who compete with her for the nomination.  If you’re not a nominee, you’re a spokes for the nominee.  Got it?

This is what neither Nader nor Rocky Anderson seems to understand:  that a lasting institution needs to be built.  It will take time, starting small, and a lot more than one figurehead..
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What we don’t need is to have anything other than friendly talk among us.  Save the disagreements for private conversation.  Note that very little is private in either politics or showbiz.

So comment, already.

Advice, n.  The smallest current coin.

“The man was in such deep distress,”
Said Tom, “that I could do no less
Than give him good advice.”  Said Jim:
“If less could have been done for him
I know you well enough, my son,
To know that’s what you would have done.”

………– From The Devil’s Dictionary

I wrote a little earlier about the “Occupy” movement, but it was only a snapshot of what I seemed to be seeing at the time.  Don’t take it too seriously.  I haven’t participated enough to be comfortable saying much about it.

…but you know I’ll say something anyway, right?

First, words fail me in trying to express approval.  None of the usual words are good enough.  I tried mixing a few metaphors and could only come up with:

“a canyonful of laurels”
“bro fist of an angry god”
“a shout out for making a magic mark”

Nope, not gonna work.

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“Occupy” seems to be the best thing going right now in the way of a mass movement that might actually accomplish something.  In another time, I’d be there, pretty often, doing whatever I could for it.

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Nowadays, I’m mostly a language quibbler.  Be patient.

Early on, OWS came up with this:  http://www.nycga.net/resources/declaration/ and it’s a nice document, for a list of complaints that doesn’t try to propose solutions.  Having said that, there’s a bad language habit that I need to point out.  It’s far from unique to “Occupy”.  I’ve done it myself,  as have all kinds of lefties and “progressives” since time immemorial.  It’s that “corporation” thing.

<language rant>

When Newton defined “force” as “mass times acceleration”, he didn’t care that this had nothing to do with dozens of other meanings that the word “force” had up until then.  He was taking a word with a vaguely suggestive meaning, and giving it a very specific definition for his purpose.  The same with the definition of “intelligence quotient” as “typical age of grade placement in the French public school system divided by chronological age”.  Many evils can be attributed to confusing vague meanings of words with specialized
ones.

Enter “corporation”.

First, three things that might surprise some of my readers:

(1)  Many of the biggest, nastiest agglomerations of wealth, including the infamous Koch brothers, are not corporations:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39317328/ns/politics/t/report-big-business-turns-small-tax-purposes/#.TwC0hoHQeiQ and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/39316659#39316659

(2)  Many corporations are non-profits doing completely non-political, good
service to the community.  See:  http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/501%28c%29.html

(3)  From:  http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/fecfeca.shtml#anchor257909

Prohibited Contributions and Expenditures

The FECA places prohibitions on contributions and
expenditures by certain individuals and organizations.
The following are prohibited from making contributions
or expenditures to influence federal elections:

Corporations;
Labor organizations;
Federal government contractors; and
Foreign nationals.

(They have ways around this, obviously, but that involves far more than I feel like writing, or you feel like reading right now.)

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A couple of things that the above mean right off:

(1)  A constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood wouldn’t do diddly to keep the Koch brothers from doing what they’re doing.

(2)  When Greens say “We don’t accept campaign contributions from corporations.”, we’re only saying that we comply with the law, where federal elections are concerned.  There’s more to it, of course, but that’s for another time.

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Clearly, “corporate” and “corporation” have a meaning in our culture, probably quite a few meanings, that have nothing to do with any legal definition.  Legal definitions also vary a great deal with the jurisdiction and the particular corporate charter.  If you want to know more about this, read the IRS, FEC, and FPPC web sites just for a start.  “Corporation” seems to have a different definition in each law.

For a long time we’ve been using “corporate” and “corporations” as shorthand for “Big money, which sometimes, not always, makes use of the special privileges granted corporations to do its nefarious deeds.”  It’s something that really needed some shorthand, too. OWS took a step forward by simply branding “the 1%” as the source of evil. It’s a big improvement over what we often did before.

I would suggest expanding on that theme and finding some more phrases that mean “the ridiculously rich, in all their guises, with all their pathologies”, and save “corporation” for when we’re really talking about something’s legal status.  To always say “the 1%” can get old with too much repetition.

.</language rant>

Should I turn this into a contest, maybe?  Who can come up with the best variation on “the 1%”?  Winner gets… uh…. special recognition in these pages?  Maybe I can dig up some
old mathom to send.

Entries will be judged by:

●   brevity
●   easy comprehension by the average American (eighth grade reading level)
●   honesty and accuracy in what it tries to describe

Commence comments.

In case you’re new here, this is a series.  Here are the previous entries:
http://kitchenmudge.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/watch-your-language/
http://kitchenmudge.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/a-good-whine-i-believe-ill-have-another/
http://kitchenmudge.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/hes-doing-that-again/

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Beginning with the most obvious errors:

“I don’t have a clue what this word means, but I’ll use it anyway, and even make up a nonexistent word that sorta sounds like it.”

“on tenderhooks” or “on tinderhooks”

I actually heard a paid talking head on tv say “…they were waiting on tinderhooks…” and
get away with it recently.  Lets’ start at the beginning.

“Tenterhooks” were part of the apparatus for stretching out cloth to dry after being fulled.  (“Tent” is related to several old words for “pull” or “stretch”, part of what you do when you pitch a tent, right?)

To my knowledge, there is no such thing as a “tinderhook” or “tenderhook”, but that doesn’t keep people from pretending.

Textile production isn’t very close to most people’s experience these days, and that’s a good thing,

so when you want to say “waiting, with tension” there must be something better you can use.  How about “straining at the leash”, “with rubber bands drawn”, or “waiting like a Jack-in-the-box”?

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“I’m pretending I know how to pronounce this, without ever bothering to look it up.”

“layzay fair” or (shudder) “lahzay fair”

There are a couple of good reasons for pronouncing a foreign phrase differently from the way a native of that language would:

(1)  The original phrase includes sounds that don’t exist in your own language, so you just try to approximate it with your own language’s sounds.  This would apply to using an American “r” rather than a French “r” in “faire“.

(2)  You don’t know how the original phrase is pronounced, so you make a guess according to the spelling conventions of your own language.  Again, “faire” is quite well approximated in English by pronouncing it like our own word “fair”.

Neither of these circumstances applies to the way many people choose to pronounce “laissez“. Clearly, they know that “ez” on the end of the word is sorta like “ay”, but their brains turn to mush at the sight of “ai” and the double “s”.

This is the age of Google, folks.  Just search for “laissez pronounce”, and the computer will say it for you.  Sheesh.
http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=laissez+faire&submit=Submit
(Notice that there are individual differences among Frenchmen in whether “ai” is pronounced more like “eh” or more like “ay”.)

While we’re at it, try “coup de grâce“ too.  Hint:  it doesn’t mean “stroke of greasy”, though I’ve heard some people consistently say it like “coup de gras“.
http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=coup+de+grace

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“I’ll do anything to avoid keeping it short and simple”

“in terms of”

Obama at a fundraiser:

“…this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.”

Some people try very hard not to use short, simple, common words that everyone understands.  “About”, “for”, and “regarding” are among them, as I observed earlier with “as far as”.  At the time, I had forgotten about this use of “in terms of”, but heard it recently.  Let’s spell it out for the noobs.

An engineer is likely to explain a bridge in terms of engineering, using the jargon of that specialty.  An artist might explain it in terms of aesthetics, using different jargon.  That’s what “in terms of” means.  They are both talking about the bridge, regarding the bridge,
and might be saying something for the bridge.  “In terms of” is not interchangeable with any of these three words.  It means something different.

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“at this point in time”

If “now” doesn’t quite say what you want, there are plenty of time expressions to choose from:  “right now”, “for the time being”, “today”, “for the next few minutes (days,weeks, etc.)”, “as long as (something else goes on)”…

They all say something a little or a lot different from “now”.  “At this point” makes your time expression analogous with something spatial.  That can be useful, if you want to invoke an image of a “progression” of some kind, but the the analogy is ruined by
over-explanation if you add “in time”.

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SAYING WITHOUT SAYING

“not that much”

“Just sayin’” is one of our more useless phrases, the way it circulates these days, but there is something worse than saying:  pretending to say without saying.  “Not much” doesn’t say much, but it doesn’t pretend to say much.  “Not that much”, on the other hand, pretends to specify something.  If the context makes it clear what is specified, fine.  Without any such context, it simply prompts the question:

“Not HOW much?”,
which the user often refuses to answer.  Tiresome.

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SOUNDS FUNNY, BUT REALLY HARD TO SAY WHY

A phrase I never heard in my youth, which seems to be gaining users, but adds nothing to our vocabulary:

“serves to reason”

It can be easily replaced with shorter things like “follows” or “makes sense”.  We make up different phrases for the same thing when we want to put just the slightest difference of
meaning on it.  So what is the slight difference of meaning conveyed by “serves to reason”?  It seems to treat Reason as something tangible, even animate, as illustrated above.  An authority of some kind.  So does the older phrase “stands to reason”.  The latter is a very old use of “stand to” to mean “obey”.  Yes, it’s obsolete and should be replaced, but why “serves to”?  WHAT is being served to reason?  Food and drink?

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“different than”

One of my high school English teachers did this, and I never forgot it.  I spent far too much time trying to correct teachers, and had to let this one pass.  Many people seem to have picked it up from Hemingway’s apocryphal misquote of Fitzgerald:  “The rich are different than you and me.”

“Than” is a word I really like.  It’s used in some of our best phrases like “colder than a banker’s heart” or “more useless than a congressman”.  Let’s not ruin it, ok?

Nearly any grammarian will agreed with me that “different” is followed by “from”, but why?  What’s the difference between “different from” or “aside from” and “rather than” or “other than”?

The difference is very clear.  Each of these four phrases has served Margaritas, anchovy pizza, and crème brûlée to Reason, and She has smiled upon them.  “Different than”, on the other hand, thinks he’s really an actor, and doesn’t take the serving job seriously.  That’s what we’d say in LA, anyway.

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TRYING TO BE LOFTY, WITTY, OR WHAT?

“we the people”

Go back to the most basic elementary school grammar.  “We” is for subjects, “us” is for direct objects and objects of prepositions.  So why do I hear things like “This is an outrage to we the people!”?  Okay, you’re referring to the Preamble in some kind of political discourse.  Fine.  Put it in quotes.

Maybe, without the quotes, you think the ungrammatical nature of it lends a little
dissonance that one might think is expressive or playful, but there’s a thing about playful dissonance:  It only works the first time.  The Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe can say:

One for him and one for he,
and one for you and one for ye,
and one for thou and one for thee…

..and that’s it.  That’s the joke.  It’s over.  Nothing to warrant the frequency with which I’ve been seeing this “we the people” thing.

In writing, you can put “We the People…” in quotes, and it works grammatically, but quoting such familiar things gets old fast even when there’s no grammatical dissonance.

I recently flew, which I do rarely, and got reminded of something I’ll call Mudge’s Fourth Law:

“The loudest voice at the picnic is a child squealing about nothing, while we whisper that the tuna salad is rotten.”

It was demonstrated thus:

When the gate from which your flight is leaving changes, or the flight is rescheduled, or there’s something that you really ought to hear about boarding instructions, the way it is announced is very likely to be unintelligible.

Really.  Anyone reading this now could plug about $30 worth of mics and speakers into the computer you’re using and make an announcement with much better sound quality than the PA systems at the gates in LAX.  If you have decent enunciation, so much the better.  If you know enough not to shout or breathe into the mic and make distortion, infinitely better.

Now compare this to the nice, crisp, high-fidelity systems that idiots install in their cars to broadcast music and stupidity to a three-block radius as they’re driving, and the meaning of the Fourth Law should be obvious.

Sometimes the poor communication of what’s most important is deliberate.  See this article about the cops telling people to get off the roadway at the Brooklyn Bridge:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/10/arrests-lies-and-videotape-the-truth-about-the-brooklyn-bridge-arrests/#more-37837

There’s a also a whole industry devoted to burying the lead and shouting feel-good nonsense.  It’s called “Public Relations”.  They practice a lot of tricks like:

“Hey, I saved an acre of wetlands.  I’m a green company.
Forget my oil spills.”

“Always release bad news on Friday, when half the people are taking the day off early.  Many don’t read the news from Friday to Monday.”

It’s a science that people devote whole lives to.

Should I list a few examples of high-volume, high-fidelity nonsense?

Ok, yeah, the Bachmanns, Cains, Perrys, O’Reillys, Boehners & such are full of them.  Just to mention a few:

“The rich are rich because they are deserving.”

“The healthy are healthy because they are deserving.”

“Government intervention is the root of all evil, unless it’s protecting my property, enforcing religion, or bringing ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ to people who never asked for it.”

“Liberals are all rich people pretending to care out of some guilt, or something.”

“Liberals are all communist revolutionaries who want to massacre anyone who’s not poor.”

But we’re used to this stuff from Republicans.  Of course they’re clowns.  That’s their job.  See “spelling it out for you“.

What’s more worth talking about is when the people who pretend to be on OUR side start trolling like this.  They do it a lot.  Yes, I’m talking about some really high-profile people
who have done some good communication about real issues from time to time.

Ok, confession time.  We often have MSNBC on at home, mainly because the alternatives are so much worse.  That’s one bit of lesser evilism that I’ve settled for quite a lot.  If you
don’t know already, they are mostly shills for the Dem Party.  When they rail against the Dems for being “gutless” and letting themselves be “bullied” by Reps, you know that’s just the Dem Party narrative that they’ve been ordered to promote.

So what’s the Dem Party narrative this week?

Sandusky and Penn State.  Nearly wall-to-wall coverage of one pedophile is almost exclusively what they use to relieve us from the usual litany of gaffs by Rep candidates.

Now, I enjoy watching Republicans drool all over themselves as much as the next guy, but when it’s 60-70% of the minutes used by Al, Chris, Ed, Rachel, and Lawrence, all afternoon and all evening, it gets old.

It also gets old, day after day, to talk about one criminal shielded by a self-serving sporting (Read:  “show biz”) organization.  This goes on for hours throughout the day, on one channel.

This is the bait.  The distraction.  The child shrieking that there’s sand between his toes,  who interrupts all adult conversation.

In exile over on Current, Keith Olberman is at least giving decent coverage to the biggest story of the last two months, the Occupations.  MSNBC mentions this now only when something really big happens, like the bulldozers in New York and the big marches in reaction.  They’re quite happy to piggyback on the occupations for issue advocacy, but rarely have first-hand interviews with participants, as Keith does.

So what’s the rotten tuna salad?

Very little is heard these days about how mass murderers, kidnappers and torturers are shielded by a Dem President, because he’s a Dem, of course.  In fact, Obama’s actions,
overt or not, in the name of “national security” are nearly universally lauded.  The mass murderers are protected because making a big public deal about war crimes and “renditions” might hurt the institution that Obama’s in charge of.   Ummm….. sound familiar? (Penn State again, idiots.  Compare the magnitude of the two cases.)

Case in point:  I still hear Julian Assange referred to on this “liberal” network as “fighting extradition to face rape charges in Sweden”.  In fact, no charges of any kind have been filed against him in Sweden, or anywhere else.  He is simply wanted “for questioning”, and once in Sweden, can be detained indefinitely and extradited to the U.S. without any charges being filed.  See:
http://www.swedenversusassange.com/Fair-Trial-for-Julian-Assange.html
Kinda like the de facto legal system in the U.S.  Once someone calls you a “terrorist” or “gang member”, the Bill of Rights no longer applies.

The brazenly partisan nature of this network’s motives was on full display in Lawrence O’Donnell’s comment near the end of his show on On Oct. 10.  I made a note of this one, because it was so lame.

He took the example of a “sense of the Senate” resolution about taxing people with more than a milliion in income in an attempt
to make a point.  The vote was strictly along party lines.  O’Donnell somehow tried to tell us that this was significant:

“When anyone tries to tell you there’s not much difference between the
two parties, when anyone tries to tell you there’s some sort of protect the
rich conspiracy going on in Washington run by the Republi-crat party, some
ugly governing force that controls both parties, point to this vote.  Point
to July 13th, 2011, in the United States Senate.

“Fifty-one Democrats saying that those earning more than a million
dollars per year should make a more meaningful contribution, and every –
every Republican voting against that.  No difference between the parties?
There’s a million dollar difference between the parties right there.”

O’Donnell worked as an aide to Patrick Moynihan and had other positions on the Senate staff.  He knows of which he speaks… with forked tongue.

Anyone who has worked around a legislative body where representatives are ostensibly answerable to people who put them there knows that there are two reasons for voting for or against something:

(1)  You really want it to pass or fail.

(2)  You want it to LOOK like you want it to pass or fail.

When the fate of the thing being voted on is well-known by all participants, the second reason applies much more than the first.  The vote in this case was entirely for appearances, and had no force of law.  This was a freebie for anyone who wanted to say “I voted to tax millionaires.”  or “I voted against raising taxes.” to the right constituencies back home, without actually doing anything.

So that’s the difference between Dems & Reps:  the groups that they want to dupe for votes.  It’s the easiest thing in the world for a Dem who voted for it to tell his well-heeled contributors:  “I just did that for appearances.”  He doesn’t even have to say it.  They already know it.  They know that, if they play their contributions right, the Congress as a whole will never do anything to really irritate the money, and that symbolic votes are simply an appeal to the poor, dumb bastards who still think there’s a difference
between the “two” parties.

You’ve done some good stuff in the past, Lawrence, but this is maximum fail.  There’s also a lead being buried here.  The lead story, if one wishes to fully understand how corrupt
and self serving both “major” parties are, is that it DOESN’T MATTER whether there’s any real difference between them on most issues.  They fully agree on the most basic issue:  that all other parties should be suppressed.  Any country with a claim to having “democracy” would have more than “two” choices on the ballot.  It would be far easier to start a new party and get it on the ballot.  There would also be an election system that is not plurality-takes-all.  Read FairVote.org if you don’t know what I’m talking about.  Among countries that have any credibility to their elections at all, the U.S. has one of
the worst bodies of election law in the world.

Now this “difference between the parties” thing is likely to start coming up more, with the non-partisan Occupy movement bringing up some issues that neither big party ever really wanted to address.  As people drift in their thinking from protests to elections, the “third option” dream is likely to arise.  It has already, here and there.  You all know what course of electoral action I favor, and I mention it from time to time.  One response I’ve had seemed to think it was nothing to just make another “third” party, skipping over the Greens, for whatever reason.  Some mention was made of avoiding the Greens’ “baggage”.

I pretty well ended the conversation by asking “Do you have any idea what it takes to get a new party on the ballot in all 50 states?”  The GP has been saying everything that the Occupy movement has been saying for 20 years, and already has ballot access in 20 or 30 states, a result of MUCH labor.  Does it make any sense to start over from scratch?

“Baggage”

Yeah, I can think of some baggage we have.  Lots more than any non-member would know about.  There’s none of it that couldn’t be cured by an influx of new members.

But what “baggage” in particular might they have been talking about?  What scared people away from us the most, that a lot of people might have heard of?  Hmmm….  You couldn’t
be referring to that bait of a canard of ducks of carnadas, the “Nader/Florida/Spoiler Effect” thing could you?

Someone I like, who has written some good stuff and really should know better (The bio says “taught political science at UC Irvine”.) recently wrote about “regretting”…”two Ralph Nader votes” (presumably in 1996 and 2000).

This is someone who lived in California at the time of those votes.  Aside from the usual “Blame Nader” canards, this one shows ignorance of the Electoral College.  Really.  Your vote for President in any other state could not, by the wildest theoretical fantasy, have had any influence on the result in Florida.  You really ought to know that.

But that one was easy:  “If the sand between your toes bothers you, knock it out.”  The childish cry usually takes a different form:  to say that Nader shouldn’t have run, because if he hadn’t it would have somehow avoided everything bad that happened during the Bush administration.  Greens have been playing Whac-A-Mole with this for a long time.

It rests on several premises:

(1) That in an alternate universe in which Nader was not on the ballot, all the same people would have voted in 2000 that voted
in our universe.

(2) That in that Universe #2, more of the otherwise “Nader voters” would have chosen Gore than Bush, to a degree large enough to carry Florida for Gore on the first count.

(3) That having Gore in the White House would have made a big difference in the odious policies of the years 2001-2009.

I’ve generally avoided addressing this matter because others have done a pretty good job of it without me.  See:

http://prorev.com/green2000.htm

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/06/09/greens-the-antiwar-movement-and-2004/

…but let’s just make a thumbnail sketch of what’s wrong with each premise.

Premise #1 is the most absurd, by a wide margin.

It assumes that nothing in the universe is dependent on anything else.  Dems know for certain that one of their chief tools in getting out the vote among their own core voters was promoting the “spoiler” fear.  Without Nader in the race, fewer Dems would have shown
up to vote.  Many other things would have been different if you change one element in making your alternate universe, but this is a big one.  Also, the unstated premise of #2 factors in here.  If you assume that most Nader voters would choose a Dem as a second choice, that means that the increased turnout of Greens and independents that Nader created was certainly of benefit to down-ticket Dems, where there were few Greens
running against them.  Without Nader running, Rep control of the Senate would have been solid in 2000, for instance.

Premise #2 is destroyed by Sam Smith’s article above.  Gore and Nader were, for the most part, NOT DRAWING ON THE EACH OTHER’S VOTERS.  When Gore went up in the polls, so did Nader.  When Gore went down, so did Nader.  There’s also a much-quoted article from Al From in which he cites polling data to the effect that, without Nader in the race, Bush would have done better, but I haven’t found the source of his data:
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?cp=1&kaid=86&subid=84&contentid=2919
The DLC is a poor source for facts in any case, but it’s there.

Premise #3 is wildly speculative, and brings in all the old questions of “Man makes history, or history makes man?”

What if Lee had fought for the North?

What if the Indians (both east and west) had had a strong leader against the British early on?

What if Tsarina Elizabeth hadn’t died when she did?

What if Superman had been German?

Let’s just take up the biggest deals of the Bush Administration — the two new wars and new police state powers:

(1)  The Afghan war

Clearly prompted by 9/11.  Yeah, trust the Dems to keep us out of war.

Remember how Dems were always called “soft on Communism” during the Cold War, and got themselves into some deep doodoo fighting that image, LBJ in particular?  How much more would this have applied to a Gore White House after 9/11?

(2)  The invasion of Iraq

Clinton knew that the state of affairs in Iraq was unsustainable.  The murderous sanctions and no-fly zone, imposed by the U.S. and Britain alone, were coming under international pressure.  The no-fly zone was failing to provoke the much wished-for causus belli, but Clinton said that he was leaving it to his successor to decide what to do.  Note that the “WMD” claims we heard from the Bushies were only slight enhancements of what the Clinton administration had claimed all along.  Dems generally give other Dems a pass on anything bellicose, so there would have been much less antiwar movement if Gore had brought up the prospect of invasion.  The burden of proof is really on anyone who thinks
this would have been somehow better under Gore.

(3)  The USA PATRIOT Act

Though ostensibly prompted by 9/11, Everyone knows that the USA PATRIOT Act was a wish list compiled by various “law enforcement” agencies under the Clinton administration.  They were simply waiting for the right moment to push for it.  Burden of proof again.  Overwhelming majorities of both Dems and Reps in Congress voted for it without even reading it.

I doubt that any of us have time for this kind of speculation, but the canards keep on coming, whatever I do.  Our friends should know better.

Comments were sparse, but I mentioned then that people need to feel the oppression in their daily lives.  We’re now in the “American Autumn”, as it’s been called, and something has begun that’s far from a revolt, but there’s no end to it in sight right now.

(See my Recent News Links for articles about the movement in general.)

The idea of “Occupy…” is to say “We’re going to sit here, violating the law if we need to, but still sit here, until you respond.”  It  mimick’s Tahrir Square in that way, but doesn’t yet have the mass response that
would make law enforcement difficult and mess with the economy in a general strike kind of way.

Critics have complained that the demands are not articulated, and there are no “leaders” to represent them.  In a tactical way, that can be a good thing.  “Leaderless” means that there’s no head for the enemy to chop off.  Having no set demands means that you’re
turning the tables on the Man.  Every authoritarian has a certain attitude for keeping people in fear.  I believe it was once best articulated in some prison movie.  (Googling is no help to me for finding which one.) It was one of those “welcome speeches” that are in nearly every prison movie:

WARDEN: You’re job is to keep me happy. When I’m happy,
…………………you’re ok. When I’m not happy, you’re miserable.

Very effective, to keep people constantly anxious, guessing what will make the boss happy or unhappy.  No room for arguing about rules and bringing in the pettifogs, because rules are never articulated.

That’s the kind of society we’ve been drifting into lately, with the executive branch  claiming the right to assassinate or disappear anyone for anything, without even showing evidence.

The occupiers are going the Man one better.  They simply say:  “We are the 99%.  Make us happy.  Until then, we’ll be a pain in ass.”
It’s brilliant, if you can bring it off.

(Late development:  Adbusters has asked people to get behind a 1% tax on financial transactions, which might or might not fly:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/24/us-protests-wallstreet-g-idUSTRE79N61I20111024)

So, after a week of reading about this on the web, I decided to see some of our own local occupations first-hand, if only to be able to talk about them.  There seem to be two separate occupations in the County that arose independent of each other:

One centered on Irvine:
http://occupy-oc.org

And one centered on Santa Ana:
http://occupyorangecounty.com

They each had a march last Saturday, at different times in the afternoon, so it was possible to go to both.

For the moment, I think the opposition to this movement is a little off-balance.  At antiwar demos, it was a frequent occurrence for a troll to show up and try to start arguments.  That happened only once Saturday, in Santa Ana, and didn’t last long.  Expect more of it later.

One thing you’ll hear from the people who don’t like this movement is that it’s the same old “far left” people, or that it’s a front for Obama & the Dems.  I saw right off that that is definitely NOT true.

If anyone doesn’t know already, I used to work in various “leftie” causes locally, but have largely pulled out for sanity’s sake.  That’s explained in some of my earlier posts.  What I often notice when I still go to these things is how many of the faces are familiar.  A good sign for this movement:  Not many.  Nothing like the 50 or 60% that were familiar at the Progressive Summit a while back.  In Santa Ana it was maybe one out of twenty.  In Irvine, one out of ten, including some people I hadn’t seen for quite a while.  NOT the same old lefties trying to cobble one more demo together.  The Santa Ana people averaged a little younger, with a somewhat more confrontational style (four arrested later),
and it brings to mind a requirement for revolt that hadn’t occurred to me before:  a new generation that hasn’t yet burned out on activism.

Many of these people weren’t old enough for Seattle or the Nader 2000 campaign, or even the early Iraq demos.  They also have something we didn’t have then:  a clear manifestation of their grievances in their personal lives — student debt with no jobs.  It’s a situation that’s been building for decades, but has now become ridiculous.

Partisanship was notably absent.  My low-key, small-lettering Green t-shirt was about the only thing proclaiming a party in Santa Ana, and the PDA banner, left over from
last year’s healthcare debate, was about the only additional bit of partisanship in Irvine.  That’s good.  I remember the antiwar demos hijacked by Dems.  Part of what killed the movement.

A downside of this birth-of-Athena thing is that they didn’t really take advantage of already-established means of communication among “progressives” much.  It’s as if they didn’t know such things existed.  Somebody made a Facebook page.
It apparently reached a lot of people, but also missed a lot.  Many politically aware people stay away from FB for good reason.

Assuming for the moment (with known risk) that the Register article was accurate, and D’Marie Mulattieri was the the apparent kickstarter of the Irvine group, I’ve seen or heard nothing about her suggesting previous political activity.  That’s a good thing.  New blood.  Hope she finds her feet and gets more people on board.

What I saw of “leaders” in Santa Ana were also unfamiliar, and most of what they send out seems to be on Twitter.

Looking at the two web sites for the two groups, one very soon gets the impression that it’s necessary to float around among the main web site, Facebook, and Twitter to make sure
of getting all the info.  This is not good.  Back in the day,  we’d have a web site and a listserve or two, and that was it.  If you wanted a calendar to plan ahead, you went to the calendar on the web site.  If you wanted the latest news, or to discuss things with other members, you read your email, period.  It was simple.

KISS is a principle I would try to teach these people if I felt like getting involved.  I tried the “email subscription” for occupy-oc and it didn’t work.  Their web site also lacks a “contact” link such as you find on most web sites.

Having said all that, I wish both groups well, and plan to see them again.  Support them if you can, and I don’t mean with lame “endorsements” (Well, yeah, if that’s you’re thing,
no harm in it.) but with donations and your corporeal presence.  Irvine seems to stay scrupulously legal for the time being, taking all kinds of crap from the local authorities.  Santa Ana seems to take more chances, but still makes it clear that the police are not the enemy.  You might want to choose which one is more your style.

Another late development:  The Irvine City Council seems to have given them permission to camp: http://www.ocregister.com/news/occupy-323785-lawn-irvine.html.   Also, after posting this I found that the email subscription does appear to work.  It’s just that when I originally clicked the confirmation link I got one of those “We’re sorry, the page you requested…” pages.  A tad confusing.

Some readers are undoubtedly more familiar with all this than I am.  Please comment and inform the rest of us.

So, seeing no harm in the Liebster, I thank Olga and go on with the requirements, as she quotes them:

The Liebster is designed to bring attention to blogs with fewer than 200 followers.

The rules:

•    Thank the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them (I did so above.)

•    Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.

•    Post the award on your blog.

•    Bask in the love from the most supportive people on the Internet

A little note of caution about these “awards”:

The most common one seems to be the “Versatile Blogger” award, which asks recipients to turn around and recommend FIFTEEN other blogs.  This sounds really excessive to me, and naturally leads, chain letter-like, to the same “award” coming around to the same people again & again.  But for this moderate “Liebster”, I’ll take the excuse to just point out
some good stuff to you all.

My choice of the five was influenced by several factors:

– I had to guess who has fewer than 200 followers, when this
info is not often posted on their blogs.

– I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already recommended, e.g.,
in the “Local Links” or “Link Collection” pages that you can click on above.

– All of my choices have things to write about, i.e., do NOT
write about writing, or about their mundane lives without relating
them to something larger, or at least being somewhat entertaining
about it.

– They’re not too specialized, suitable for a somewhat broad audience.

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First the fun:

Not sure why, but I like this one.  Sometimes personal stuff, interspersed with current issues of great import.  Just entertaining:
http://raincoaster.com/

Also this one.  Not exactly laser-focused, but fun to read:
http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/.

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Now, the hard information:

Only 25 followers, but real information, about information:
http://theartofaccess.com/

Rania Halek does consistently good writing about things that should concern us all.  I’m very surprised that she has less than 200 followers.
http://raniakhalek.com/

About rationality, science, and philosophy:
http://measureofdoubt.com/
Contains the occasional gem, such as this one, in
http://measureofdoubt.com/2011/08/17/calibrating-our-confidence/

“…the overconfidence police interrogators feel about their ability to
discern honest denials from false ones…”

Kassin and Fong asked forty-four professional detectives
in Florida and Ontario, Canada, to watch the tapes. These
professionals averaged nearly fourteen years of experience
each, and two-thirds had had special training, many in the
Reid Technique.  Like the students [in a similar study],
they did no better than chance, yet they were convinced
that their accuracy rate was close to 100 percent.  Their
experience and training did not improve their performance.
Their experience and training simply increased their
belief that it did.

I’m sure something was accomplished there, though one never knows for sure what.  I’ll go into that later.  Some of this will undoubtedly sound “negative” to some.  Please read the whole thing before passing judgment.

For material strongly related to this rant, you might want to click on “organizing” or “communication” in the “categories” list to the right, and scroll down to read my posts from a couple of years ago.  I’d like to avoid repeating myself.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve pulled WAAAY BACK from organizing much of anything in recent years.  That was so I could have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines and picking at what others are doing.  I spent enough time trying to do things myself, and hearing from the can’t-do-so-I’ll-bitch crowd, and thought they were having much more fun than I.  My turn now.
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So let’s start with the title, and what this Summit was supposed to be about.

The word “summit” implies that it’s a meeting at the highest level, like Reagan meeting Gorbachev, or the Council of Elrond.  A meeting of only the chief executives, or whatever, of each organization represented.  It clearly was not that, seeing the size of the crowd, which was somewhere in the 200+ range.  It was open to the public, and advertised to the public.  Each attendee was left to decide for him/herself whether s/he was someone who should be there.

Many of the orgs represented there, including my own, have very fluid, ill-defined “leadership”, so that presents something of a problem right there.  Some of the faces I recognized were definitely not of the “leadership” variety, but I’m not going there. Pic related.

Maybe the intention was to emphasize that “leadership” is up to all of us.  I’ve been known to bring up that theme myself, but it doesn’t apply in all cases to everyone.
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Ok, maybe the title of the Summit was just a misnomer, and it was really meant to be something to proselytize to the public.

If that were the case, then its success was limited.  If you count the attendees, some were organizers of the event itself, some were there to table for their own orgs.  If you subtract all these, the remainder are potentially new faces.  Looking around, with my past experience in this milieu, there were plenty of old faces even in that remainder.  There might have been 40 people or so who were not already involved in one of the attending orgs.

So it was neither a meeting of top leaders to strategize, nor a public education event.  What was it?  Both?

Well, let’s talk about what each is, and see if we can figure it out.

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A TRUE SUMMIT CONFERENCE

This would be invitation-only, including the most active and influential people.  In the interest of transparency, others might be there as observers, but they would be expected to stfu and let the adults talk.  The talk would probably treat subjects like:

- what each of them has learned about strategy & tactics

- who has what resources that might be called upon in support of each other, and when …and how they might be applied

- how they might communicate on a regular basis between conferences

- agreeing to disagree on certain items and excluding them from the conversation to avoid …wasting time

A PUBLIC EDUCATIONAL EVENT,
…on the other hand, would:

- advertise as widely as possible

- have speakers and workshops …introducing people to the basics of issues …that the organizers want to emphasize

- have tables for various orgs where …newbies can be introduced to each one

- demand nothing of the participants …beyond listening and collecting handouts …(During the event, that is.  There will …naturally be exhortations to do …something when they get home.)

(Some of you might remember the “Evening of Music and Progressive Politics” in Midway City in 1998.  This is what that was, without the workshops.  Just tabling, entertainment, and speakers.  Pretty successful, for what it was.)

There are good reasons for separating the two kinds of meetings:

(1)  Time is very limited, and vets don’t need the constant interruptions from noobs when they’re talking with other vets.

(2)  Experienced activists usually don’t need basic introductions to issues.  If they haven’t picked this stuff up from the usual “progressive” media, they’ve run into people who specialize in issues other than their own in other venues without calling a big conference for such a purpose.  If they are ignorant about a particular issue, they probably choose to remain so to conserve bandwidth.

,

..

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(3)  Likewise, vets can look up other local orgs on the web if they want to, and  probably are on multiple mailing lists.  They don’t need to see a table of literature to be aware of someone’s existence.
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Let’s take a chronological walk, and see what I saw there.

Daniel Shad’s opening remarks explained the purpose:  that he felt alone as a “progressive”, and wanted to see who else was out there.  Well, he must have seen something, and he deserves some praise for putting this together.  So only the choir
was really present for this event, with maybe some rare exceptions.  The choir, it must be remembered, includes some people that you wouldn’t want in EVERY meeting.

Christine Chavez followed, telling stories of her grandfather, and touched on some recurring problems of organizing:

- When trying to work in coalition, there will always be people saying:  “What does this …have to do with what I care about?”  (A much bigger problem, to me, is the limited time …and attention each person has.)

- Problems with delegating work and taking new people into an org:  She suggested …“diversity” as a solution.  (Sounds more like a goal than a tactical solution to me.)

- Keeping people active after a “victory” or setback occurs:  She suggested maintaining …optimism as a solution.  (Again, more a goal than a tactical solution)

Generally, just a “rally” kind of speech to get us thinking and hopeful.  Not bad.

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Good workshop, for a first try

The mixture of “summit” and “public” features was apparent in the one workshop I went to.  It sounded quite suitable for a “summit” kind of thing:  “Power Mapping in the OC”,
presented by some people from CAIR.  It was a strategic thing, about finding out whom you need to influence to get something done.  (They can be forgiven for titling it “the OC”,
as no one did before the TV show.  CAIR has done some really effective work.)

So the general plan was to present an issue that came up a while back, tell how they approached it strategically, and then break up into small groups and let people talk through how they would approach a hypothetical issue to influence decision-makers and reach a resolution.

The opening was a small mistake, adapted to a “summit” kind of thing.  They asked each participant to introduce him/herself.  In a much smaller gathering, of people used to such meetings, this would be a three-minute thing.  With 40 people in the room who weren’t very time-conscious, it took more like 15 precious minutes.

There was a flaw in the presentation right from the start, but neither I nor the CAIR people might have forseen it.  As their issue example, they played the video about the Yorba Linda rally and harassment that I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

http://www.youtube.com/cairsocal#p/u/2/NutFkykjmbM

It was only a six-minute video, and many of us had seen it before.  The presenters must have figured it was the easiest way to explain quickly what their issue example was.

Something about some of the people attending was not so easy.  The video, and its story, were NEW TO MOST OF THEM.  At the risk of making a digression, I found this out by asking for a show of hands.  The presenter asked for comments soon after the video, and most of them were fixated on the events portrayed in the video, rather than how anyone would approach it strategically.  This took up quite a bit of time.

I think they were expecting a much smaller workshop.  When we were asked to break into groups of five or six, it was rather crowded and chaotic.   The one person in my breakout group who knew what he was talking about got interrupted a lot, and I couldn’t even sort out what were valid, relevant remarks and what weren’t.  I had to go.  There might have been quite valuable stuff toward the end, but I had been in the same chair for about an hour, and that’s my limit.

So, if nothing else, some people got introduced to CAIR and the Yorba Linda thing who didn’t know about it before.  That’s a good thing.

I also got reminded of Mudge’s Law, which, along with Tucker’s Law, is a corollary to Murphy’s Law:

There’s always someone who just doesn’t get the purpose of the conversation/ presentation/meeting, and will derail it at the first opportunity.

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Lunch

Pretty good, especially the serving, which simply meant plates spread out on a few tables so people didn’t have to stand in line.  We had been exhorted to sit with people we didn’t know, and I tried that.  As soon as I sat down, people I knew came up to me, of course.  A penalty of being known.  I hadn’t been missing much from those I didn’t know.  Found
myself sitting next to a “moderate” Democrat.  A constant streak of talk emanating therefrom meant that there was no polite way to break into it, if I had wanted to.

There was our Green table to be minded as soon as I was through eating.

Later that day, another law came into play.  Maybe this is Mudge’s Second Law:

Whatever you least expect will happen.

In this case, it was someone who chose a quiet time when I was alone at the Green table to accuse me of something so preposterous I thought it was a trick question, a bad choice of wording, or anything other than what I was hearing.

The Grand Inquisitor continued, with little prompting, to tell at some length the wrongs done by the other party in a messy divorce.  I had misplaced the rat’s ass I might have given.  The story has been familiar to me for more than a year now, and it involves some vague acquaintances with whom I’ve had close to zero dealings over the years, always
strictly business.

Sorry, no bandwidth.

Leaving dissatisfied, my accuser then tattled on me to the nearest occupied table, where they smiled and nodded ’til it was over.  They already knew this person.

You might have read my earlier post about “Whom I don’t know“, in which is stated Mudge’s Third Law:

When something is open to the public, there will be some of the public that one could do without.

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The concluding speaker was Jim Hightower, who needs no introduction for most of us.  He’s an entertaining speaker, always there with the aphorisms and fables.

Spoke of a hardware store that gave extensive advice and had the motto:  “Together we can do it yourself.”

This was probably the best model for what a good summit followed by a semi-public event might be.  The vets would organize and then teach workshops to the noobs.  Wish we all had time for such a thing.

Described how the early progressive movement was cultural.  They held dances at the union halls, hosted Chautauquas & such, since educating the famers & workers was a
large requirement for organizing.

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This would definitely be worthy work for us if we could gather resources for it.  Don’t we wish.

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Observed that King didn’t say, “I have a position paper!”
–It’s important to present a dream to seize people’s imaginations.

That’s certainly a point worth remembering.  Know your audience, how much they can absorb, and what buzzwords and images will be effective.  The rulers are far ahead of us on this.

“Anyone who thinks you can’t herd cats doesn’t know how to use a can opener.”

Didn’t really say what the can opener was in his analogy, but at some point mentioned what he thought should be a unifying theme for all progressives:  corporate money in politics.  Not
a bad idea, but changing this requires some clear definitions.  Some of the orgs present in the room were non-profit corporations.  Lots of
the money we think of as “corporate” comes from super-rich individuals with no corporate name attached.  In any case, he mentioned something scheduled (Oct. 25th, was it?) when
all the “progressive” media would spend a week on that one issue.  Googling has turned up nothing for me about this, and I don’t know how it would reach anyone who’s not already in the habit of following “progressive” media.

No mention of Oct 6th, when an attempt will be made to create our own Tahrir Square.  I guess he thinks that’s not unifying enough?

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I didn’t stick around for the happy hour that followed.  Drinking isn’t my thing, nor is hanging around drunks.  I like clear heads.  They were represented there, and could be found if one looked hard enough.

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I suppose the serendipity of what one might run across at such a gathering is its real purpose, and I’m glad it happened.  I’m especially glad someone else is doing it.

I did, though, observe a local custom this year:  the Orange Street Fair, always held from Friday night through Sunday afternoon of the Labor Day Weekend.  This happens at the “Orange Circle” mentioned in an earlier post.

For those outside the County, this is a pretty big deal here.  Some years, it’s been known to attract up to a million visitors from all over the region.  If anyone doubts that Orange County can still assemble some of the whitest crowds this side of the Baltic, come to the Street Fair.

What is it?

Well, it’s Labor Day weekend.  Doesn’t that tell you right away that it will have nothing at all to do with reminding anyone of the people who died for the 40-hour week, or to end child labor?  Or the crippling Taft-Hartley Act that began the long, slow slide of organized labor in the U.S.?

Of course, it’s just one more festival of meaningless consumption.  What did you think?

The dignity of labor is honored by appointing two days and about four blocks in which it is legal to drink in the middle of the street and spill it on the children underfoot.

Knowing from experience that the evenings there are hell, we went in the early afternoon, when crowds are less sardine-like.  Attendees in the evening are there mostly to get drunk and bump into other drunks.

“Fun” is created mostly in the form of food and music.  The food is pretty good for the most part, including deep-fried goop with powdered sugar and jam.  The Danes know how to do this right.  What more does one need to sustain life?

But there is more:  brats, gyro, teriyaki, pizza, hot dogs, whatever.  It’s officially called the “International Street Fair” because the streets are more or less grouped by the nationality of each food being peddled.  This dates from a time when souvlaki, for instance, was a tad exotic for naranjeros.  In recent decades, the County has acquired the usual mix of restaurants and
ethnic groceries typical of any large urban area, but the Street Fair predates that.  It was once a novelty to find Thai, Japanese, Danish, and Greek stuff all within a couple of blocks.

The food is often sold by non-profits of various kinds as their one big annual fund-raiser.  Not a single labor union among them.

The music is for the usual purpose:  to prevent any conversation.  If a band is playing, and that’s most of the time, there’s no point in trying to talk much within a block or two.  This does not, however, prevent people from trying.  Only the most high-pitched chainsaw voices can cut through it, adding to the noise level.  So this is where people from all over the County might run into each other once a year and be unable to communicate.

Barely represented, only in the German and Greek areas, was traditional dancing, presented by hobbyists, apparently.  Let me explain this to any foreigners that might be reading:

Dancing for fun barely survives at all in the U.S.  There’s dancing by professionals as a performance, and there’s dancing as a strange courtship ritual.  Straight males engage in the latter only to please the females, if at all.  It’s considered “fun” only by some of the females who enjoy such occasional triumphs.

Only in tiny clubs here & there does “traditional” dancing survive, usually based on immigrant cultures that were long ago assimilated in the U.S., and might
not survive much in the home countries either.  Their dances are often frozen in the 19th/early 20th centuries, from before mass communication began to kill low-tech self-entertainment everywhere –  another way in which the Street Fair might remind us of times long-dead.

Ok, the food is on the four streets radiating from the Circle.  The Circle itself hosts booths for whatever someone wants to rent them for.  These might be more orgs engaged in good works of various kinds.

We’ve occasionally considered having a Green booth there, but it’s expensive and, as stated above, not the best place for communication.

Mostly the booths peddle things to hang on your ankles, things to hang in your windows, things to stick in your hair, things to hang on your door, things to hang on your neck…..

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… mostly on the inside of the plaza.  This is the Kaaba of consumption that the pilgrims might travel many miles, and pay dearly for parking, to devoutly circle.

You might be unemployed, getting forclosure notices, unable to communicate with each other, unable to organize around any self-interest, unable to entertain yourselves without the help of professionals, but if you can still drive, eat, and buy trinkets, life is good.

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“I don’t know many words, so I’ll use the same handful for everything.”

We all do this.  I’m the first to fess up.  It’s just laziness.  We don’t want to bother picking the right words, so we fall back on some old, comfortable, VERY well-worn ones.

If I’m sometimes accused of having a “negative” attitude, it might have something to do with how many badly, BADLY overused words of approval get thrown around.  In a way, they amount to damning with faint praise.

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“awesome”

There’s an old, apocryphal story about the filming of The Greatest Story Ever Told.  John Wayne had a cameo as a Roman soldier who, watching the crucifixion, said:  “Truly, this man was the son of God!”

Several takes were done of this line in Wayne’s usual monotone, and the director then stopped and said, “Duke, can you give me a little awe when you say that?”  The cameras rolled again, and Wayne said:  “Aaww… truly, this man was the son of God!”

The point?

Maybe Wayne was just acting the smartass, but there was a time, not long ago, when the word “awe” was
so little used that it might be believable that an actor wouldn’t know what it meant.  Advertising changed that.  A single commercial.  Some time in the late 70′s, early 80′s
there was a much overplayed car commercial.  I forgot the brand name, but the concluding line from the narrator:  “It… is… awesome!” was drilled firmly into the head of anyone who watched tv during that time.  From that time, probably, can be dated the adoption of “awesome” as a general-purpose word of high approval.

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“cool”

In my youth, “cool” had a pretty narrow set of meanings.  It was the opposite of “hot”, in the unwanted meanings of “hot”, such as “angry” or “not to be caught with”, like a hot
potato.  It simply meant “calm”, “nothing to worry about”, “not a big deal”, “friendly”.

I’m guessing that advertising had something to do with this one too, but don’t know for sure.  Somehow its meaning expanded to include anything liked, or merely tolerated, by the speaker, on up to “awesome”.  In the late 1970′s, one of my friends who had some immaturity despite his years remarked on how “cool” the coming movie with Ahnold as Conan the Barbarian would be.  This was a use of “cool” opposite to any other I had heard.  Anything glorifying machismo and violence was distinctly UNcool by my understanding.  It marks for me the point at which “cool” became another catch-all word of approval.

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“amazing”

Used to mean “confusing”, but that was long ago.  Descended to a meaning of “surprising” some time ago, and is now just another substitute for “I like it”.

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“incredible”

Since “credible” is still used in its literal sense, I don’t know how “incredible” became such a vague approval word, but that it is.  More incredible is how its adverb “incredibly” has become just a variation on “very”.

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I have actually heard someone say “incredibly unbelievable” with a straight face.

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“great”

I’m guilty of this one a lot:  using “great” as an emphatic form of “good”.  I blame Tony the Tiger.

It did not always have this meaning.  It used to be a variation on “big”, with no value judgment attached.  Hitler and Stalin were great.  That doesn’t mean they were good.  This use of “great” can still be found, but now it needs to be explained because of the excessive use of its newer meaning.

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“fine”

A much, much older word-of-all-approvals that used to serve for everything from “ornate” and “nearly 100% pure” to “ok” and “cool” in the old sense.  It still survives, surprisingly, with all the competition from the above.

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“ok”

Can’t finish this section without what must be the most-used word in the world, if you count the many languages that have adopted it.  Different contexts and intonations can make it mean almost anything, and it’s become a place-holder like “mmm” or “uuh”.  What could be more meaningless?

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Well, enough with the boring habits.  Let’s get on with some real errors.

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“jerry-rigged”

An interesting composite of “jerry-built” and “jury-rigged”, both of which have meaning, but with some different shades that are lost when you combine them.

“Jerry-built” is said to date from late WWII, when the Germans were short of everything and had to improvise a lot.  It carries a connotation of fast and dirty.  Shoddy work.

“Jury-rig” is an old nautical thing.  “Jury” is from the French “jour”:  for this day.  Ships carried “jury” masts as spares in case the original got damaged.  It doesn’t mean anything
shoddy, just a “Plan B”.

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“as far as”

The phrase brings up an image that there is some distance or extent that one might go to:  “As far as I’m concerned…”, means:  “There might be a lot more for you to consider, but I’m only talking about the part that concerns me.  What I’m saying goes this far, and no further.”

When used as a direct substitute for “about”, “regarding”, or “on the subject of”, without the context making it clear that it’s a topic reduced from a much larger topic, the image is confusing.

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“decimate”

…is not a synonym for “destroy” or “wipe out”.  In its strictest sense, it means to kill or destroy one-tenth.  It was a punishment used in the Roman army for a unit that showed cowardice or mutinied.  In a broader sense, it might mean to destroy a considerable portion, but definitely not all, or anything like all.

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“hopefully”

Your roof will not hopefully last another ten years, because your roof is not a sentient being
capable of having hope…

…but you can hope that it will last.

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“shrapnel”

The shrapnel shell, named after its inventor, was a very specific kind of artillery shell, used from the early 19th to early 20th centuries.  It contained a load of musket balls that broke open somewhere during the flight of the shell, producing an effect like grapeshot, but at much longer range.  It is not used nowadays.

Somehow, every idiot war correspondent got the idea that any shell fragment, or any debris thrown around by an exploding shell, is “shrapnel”.

Someone who gets hit by such stuff is, I suppose, entitled to call it whatever he damn pleases, but for the rest of us it’s
a shell fragment or debris, and has nothing to do with Mr. Shrapnel or his devilish invention..

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“with baited breath”

This must have begun as a pun on halitosis, but has somehow become the usual spelling.  Understandable when the variation “bate” for “abate” survives only in this phrase.  Better to say, “We were holding our breath while waiting.”  People know what it means.

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“point blank”

To say that a victim was shot “point blank” with a small arm conveys so little information that it really is unworthy of mention.  “Point blank” is simply the range within which the
projectile’s drop due to gravity is considered negligible when aiming at the target.  It could be anywhere from 30 feet to 100 yards or so, depending on the weapon and the size of the target.  Reporters on tv are, of course, infamous for useless words.  Be careful not to get sucked into the habits of anyone with perfect hair and teeth.  They are often indicators of evil.

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“jive with”

“Jive” has more meanings than I care to think about, mostly of unknown origin.

There is an old phrase of nautical origin, considering whether something “jibes with” something else.   It has nothing to do with any meaning of “jive” that I know of, but somehow people like to substitute the latter.

The nautical phrase makes sense:  When you change the direction of a boat, sometimes you need to jibe (i.e., move the boom, and thereby the sail, from one side to the other to agree with the new direction).  One of the first bits of jargon on which a seaman’s life might depend is “Jibe ho!”, which means:  “The boom is swinging around.  Look out that you don’t get hit by it.”

– a lesson in how important language can be sometimes.