We Built It on Lies

Certainly there are lies and distortions enough in political campaigns, and neither party has claim to particularly high ground.  The Democrat's fondness for the "I like to fire people" quote is entirely dishonest.  Romney's statement, as made, had nothing to do with firing employees.  According to PolitiFact, here is the full quote.

"I want individuals to have their own insurance," Romney said. "That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."

Similarly, the Republican's claim that Obama insulted small business people by asserting that they didn't build their businesses is equally dishonest.  Here, as reported on both Slate.com and the White House website is the full quote in context.

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

While these sorts of distortions and untruths may be common, it does seem that the Republicans went to a new low to build (pardon the pun) the entire theme of their national convention on an untruth, which they know to be an untruth. While thank Gawd I never watched a minute of the convention coverage and hope to watch exactly that same amount when the Democrats meet, it is my understanding from reading the convention coverage that they were pretty relentless at hammering on that theme that Obama hates successful businesses.

As Gail Collins pointed out in her column today:

“We built it” is one of the themes here, at the government-underwritten convention in a government-subsidized convention center in a city that rose on the sturdy foundation of government-subsidized flood insurance. 

And Bill Keller pointed out yesterday in his column "Lies, Damn Lies and G.O.P. Video", that each of three videos shown at the convention began with the same audio clip of Obama carefully edited so that he appears to be telling small business owners that they didn't build their own businesses.

Each of the videos, by the way, continues with the lament of a hard-working businessman – a Colorado farmer, the owner of a Nevada candy company, and the president of an Ohio electric company – each profoundly insulted by what Obama … um, never actually said. Or maybe the Republicans found the only three businessmen in America who have never made use of the interstate highway system or the Internet, never benefited from farm price supports or a government-backed student loan, never enjoyed a business-related tax break.

Why All the World Envies Americans

One of my students this evening clearly wasn't totally involved in the class, and he apologized.  He said he had had a horrible day and he listed the problems with his banker, with one of his clients and a couple of other things. He concluded by saying "I wish I were an American so I could just go down in the street and start shooting people."

Whenever one of the ubiquitous gun tragedies occurs in the U.S., there are always people who invert logic and say these incidents are not arguments for fewer guns, but for more. If one or two people in that Colorado theater had been packing, they insist, the tragedy could have been at least partially averted. Presumably if a few more Sikhs carried guns to church, the situation in Milwaukee would have been ameliorated somewhat also.

Well, the situation in NYC today pretty effectively refutes that argument.  The final report obviously isn't in, but the NYC Police Commissioner has already said that some of the victims had to have been hit with police bullets, because the assailant's gun didn't hold enough rounds to account for all of the casualties. The police are as well trained as any group in the country in the use of guns, and there were still innocent bystanders shot. Perhaps it doesn't matter because none of the wounds are life threatening.

Remember: Guns Don't Kill People, Bullets Do

Todd Akin is Mainstream Republican

The pressure the Republican establishment is placing on Rep. Todd Akin to drop out of the Missouri senate race because of his stupid statements about rape are hypocritical.

It really doesn't matter if Akin makes distinctions between legitimate and non-legitimate rape or if he believes the female body has some built-in pregnancy-prevention mechanism that kicks in when she is raped. Just wait; bear with me, here.

Sure, his beliefs are unsupported by any scientific evidence, but that is not a disqualification in today's Republican party. At the debates, back when their were ten, or whatever, candidates, every single one of them on the stage denied a belief in evolution and said they believed  in some kind of creationism or intelligent design.

What matters is Akin's unyielding position against abortion, without consideration of the mother's health or if the pregnancy resulted from a rape.  And guess what?  He is mainstream Republican in his beliefs.  His voting record in the House on abortion issues is exactly the same as Paul Ryan's. The Republican party platform expresses his stringent, unforgiving views.

The only reason the Romneys and the Cornyns are upset is because he defended his (and their) harsh position with a stupid opinion that got reported and flew around the world.

How about this for a surreal moment?  The Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, said on Fox News “this is the platform of the Republican Party, it is not the platform of Mitt Romney.” I can see the chairman of Romney's campaign making that distinction, but the Chairman of the Natioonal Committee running away from his own party's platform??!

And, by the way, wouldn't you know without being told that a person named Reince Priebus would be a Republican?

This could be a test for drunkeness

Correction of the Day

I stole this from Andrew Sullivan´s blog.

"C.W. Nevius' column about Most Holy Redeemer banning drag queen performers incorrectly stated that entertainer Peaches Christ appeared at an event at the church's hall with a dildo shaped like a crucifix. He did not appear at the event, nor does he use the prop," - San Francisco Chronicle

The Poisonwood Bible

For those of you who might, like me, have been aware of this book but never read it, allow me to recommend you put it on the list of books to get to one of these days.

The book reminded me that fiction can, if not teach us history better than professional historians, at least flesh it out in a far more meaningful and memorable way. It is true, as Michiko Kakutani points out in the linked review, that the author can be a little heavy-handed at times, but Kingsolver has a point of view that demands consideration and respect, and will probably force the reader of this book to look at the world in a somewhat different way.


Going Native

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The family of a Baptist missionary in the Congo of the 1950's learns some hard lessons about life.

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Related Links

Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'The Poisonwood Bible' (October 16, 1998)

Featured Author: Barbara KingsolverAudio

Barbara Kingsolver reads from 'The Poisonwood Bible'

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By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE By Barbara Kingsolver. 546 pp. New York: Harper Flamingo. $26.

he phrase ''heart of darkness'' occurs only once, as far as I can tell, in Barbara Kingsolver's haunting new novel, ''The Poisonwood Bible.'' When it does, it falls from the mouth of Orleanna Price, a Baptist missionary's wife who uses it to describe not the Belgian Congo, where she, her husband and their four daughters were posted in 1959, but the state of her marriage in those days and the condition of what she calls ''the country once known as Orleanna Wharton,'' wholly occupied back then by Nathan Price, aforesaid husband and man of God. Joseph Conrad's great novella flickers behind her use of that phrase, and yet it doesn't. Orleanna is not a quoting woman, and for the quoting man in the family, her strident husband, there can be only one source -- the Bible, unambiguous and entire, even in a land that demonstrates daily the suppleness of language. ''Tata Jesus is bangala!'' he shouts during his African sermons. It never occurs to him that in Kikongo, a language in which meaning hangs on intonation, bangala may mean '''precious and dear,'' but it also means the poisonwood tree -- a virulent local plant -- when spoken in the flat accent of an American zealot.
The Prices are Nathan and Orleanna and their daughters: Ruth May, the youngest; Rachel, the oldest, a pale blond Mrs. Malaprop of a teen-ager; and the twins, Leah and Adah. Both twins are gifted, but Adah suffers from hemiplegia, which leaves her limping and nearly speechless. The female members of the family narrate ''The Poisonwood Bible'' in turn. Orleanna does so in retrospect, from her later years on Sanderling Island, off the coast of Georgia. The girls, however, tell their story from the Congo as it happens, on the precipice of events, like an epistolary novel written from a place with no postal service and no hope of pen pals.

Steven L. Hopp/ HarperFlamingo

Barbara Kingsolver

Nathan Price narrates nothing. And yet his certitude -- and the literal-minded ferocity with which he expresses it -- is the altar around which these women arrange themselves. We already know his story, Kingsolver implies. Most of what we have always heard, she suggests, are stories told by men like him. ''The Poisonwood Bible'' thus belongs to the women, and it is a story about the loss of one faith and the discovery of another, for each woman according to her kind. As Adah, so bright, so willing to torque the mother tongue, puts it, ''One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.''The Prices travel from Bethlehem, Ga., to a village called Kilanga on the Kwilu River in the summer of 1959, just a few months before Patrice Lumumba becomes Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo -- not long, therefore, before he is arrested and murdered with the complicity of the United States and its President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose photograph Orleanna hangs in the kitchen hut behind their mud house: ''I'd cut it out of a magazine and nailed it over the plank counter where I kneaded the bread. . . . I remember every detail of him: the clear-rimmed glasses and spotted tie, the broad smile, the grandfatherly bald head like a warm, bright light bulb. He looked so trustworthy and kind. A beacon from home, reminding me of our purpose.'' The irony in Orleanna's words is the same irony she uses to describe the early days of her marriage, when there was still room for laughter in her husband's evangelical calling, before her pregnancies embarrassed him, before he returned from World War II a different man -- a man who planned ''to save more souls than had perished on the road from Bataan.'' Nathan Price escaped that road by sheer luck, and knowing it curled his heart ''like a piece of hard shoe leather.''
In Conrad's novella, the heart of darkness is both Kurtz's despoiled purpose and the terrain in which that purpose is worked. In Kingsolver's novel, the heart of darkness belongs only to men like Nathan Price and a local pilot named Eeben Axelroot, a figure from Graham Greene who shuttles spooklike in and out of Kilanga. The Congo is a hard place for the Price women, and its people are unfathomable at first, but Kilanga contains no Conradian darkness. Army ants, drought, hookworm, hunger, pestilential rain, diseases and still more diseases and green mamba snakes, yes, but no darkness. What all the Price women discover -- all except Rachel, ''whose only hopes for the year were a sweet-16 party and a pink mohair twin set'' -- is the near-perfect adaptation of the Congolese to the harsh conditions of their existence, a fittedness that is beautiful in itself. With that knowledge comes the discovery of the Prices' own profound ignorance. Once the comedy of colliding cultures ends, the tragedy begins. As Leah says: ''Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. Especially here.''
The Congo permeates ''The Poisonwood Bible,'' and yet this is a novel that is just as much about America, a portrait, in absentia, of the nation that sent the Prices to save the souls of a people for whom it felt only contempt, people who already, in the words of a more experienced missionary, ''have a world of God's grace in their lives, along with a dose of hardship that can kill a person entirely.'' The Congolese are not savages who need saving, the Price women find, and there is nothing passive in their tolerance of missionaries. They take the Americans' message literally -- elections are good, Jesus too -- and expose its contradictions by holding an election in church to decide whether or not Jesus shall be the personal god of Kilanga. Jesus loses.
And yet, for all its portraiture of place, its reflexive political vitriol, its passionate condemnation of Nathan Price, ''The Poisonwood Bible'' is ultimately a novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women contemplating themselves and one another and a village whose familiarity it takes a tragedy to discover. Rachel is the epitome of America's material culture, a cunning, brainless girl who parodies television commercials and says of Eeben Axelroot, ''I'm willing to be a philanderist for peace, but a lady can only go so far where perspiration odor is concerned.'' Ruth May, the baby, is the innocent whose words betray the guilty; she is the catalyst that splits the Price family apart. When Orleanna speaks of the Congo, many years later, she does so by addressing Ruth May, whose questioning eyes watch over Orleanna's life with more compassion than ever fell from the burning gaze of her husband's God.
These are precious creatures, but none are as precious to the reader as Leah and Adah, the twin and the niwt, as Adah calls herself, referring to her backward condition. Limping, nearly silent, Adah is a verbal gymnast, a dedicated diarist, a profound skeptic. Her father, she reports, probably interpreted her twisted newborn state ''as God's Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees.'' Adah's wit bristles throughout this novel; it is wit of a kind that Leah, a tomboy who eagerly seeks her father's approval, would never use. Leah's, instead, is an entirely ethical understanding.
''The Poisonwood Bible'' turns on several axes, and one of them is Leah's struggle to rebalance herself morally when she finally realizes exactly who her father is. Once she had said, ''My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldiers, while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.'' But when the armor fell, she saw that Nathan Price's ''blue eyes with their left-sided squint, weakened by the war, had a vacant look. His large reddish ears repelled me. My father was a simple, ugly man.''
All the Prices adapt to the Congo, in their way, but Adah and Leah are carried farthest in their adaptation. Rachel accomplishes this by not adapting at all. ''The way I see Africa,'' she says, ''you don't have to like it but you sure have to admit it's out there. You have your way of thinking and it has its, and never the train ye shall meet!'' For Adah, adaptation comes in the form of unforgiving self-discovery, the realization that ''even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.''
Leah, the conscience of this striking novel, is forever measuring the distance she must travel before her adaptation is made perfect. It was so when her father owned her, in her mother's words, ''like a plot of land,'' and it is still so in her maturity -- wed, so to speak, to the continent. In the end, she explains: ''I am the un-missionary, as Adah would say, beginning each day on my knees, asking to be converted. Forgive me, Africa, according to the multitudes of thy mercies.''

As a Freelancer, Heitor says he can relate.

The Art of Writing Obits

This, from the the NY Times has to be one of the best obituary lines of all time:

Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but also thoroughly enjoyed it — and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.

About 30 paragraphs later, is the explanation, for those who hadn't guessed.

Ms. Brown was declared a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a private nonprofit organization, in 1995. Like many landmarks, she had much restoration work done, which she spoke of candidly: a nose job, breast augmentation, face-lifts, eye lifts and injections of silicone and fat into her face to keep wrinkles at bay, among other procedures.

Bring It On

I have been avoiding most of what's been written about Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his VP partner, mostly just because I'm tired of this race and want to take a break from all of the chatter, at least until after the conventions.

My first reaction still is the one that dominates my thinking about it.  Namely, Great choice! Let's have this debate.  The Tea Baggers have officially taken over the Republican Party; let's have it out.  Let's give the country a good look at this Ryan "budget" that the Republicans (even Ronmey) love so much.

One funny aspect of the Ryan story is that, for four or five days before the announcement, I had been reading stories in the NY Times that the Tea Baggers were putting a lot of pressure on Romney to choose Ryan.  So, by the time Romney did just that, I had thought about it long enough to be pleased.  Ok, that's not funny.  But this is.  Apparently, aware that the media had been talking about the pressure to pick Ryan, the Romney camp announced that the selection of Ryan had been made two weeks before the announcement.  Can't have Romney look like he's giving in to pressure (even though that's exactly what he has looked like for over a year now).

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is US

There is a story in the NY Times about a U.S. effort to clean up a limited area that was contaminated more than 40 years ago by Agent Orange.  It appears to be a woefully inadequate clean up relative to the huge areas where Agent Orange was sprayed. But it's a belated beginning.

I probably wouldn´t have made a post about it, but for the fact that I just today finished the book Nixon and Kissinger, by Robert Dallek. It took me weeks of intermittent reading to wade through this depressing book that gave me flashbacks of how much I detested that cynical, manipulative, self-serving duo.

Of course the author points out that the final peace agreement that ended the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war could have been achieved in essentially  the same form four years and thousands of deaths earlier. And he provides a ton of documentary evidence, as if it were needed, that Nixon and Kissinger knew exactly what would happen when the U.S. withdrew.  They knew the corrupt South Vietnamese government couldn't survive without heavy U.S. support.  One of the things they wanted was a commitment from North Vietnam to wait a decent interval before overrunning the south.  Of course it was all about saving face and about Nixon's concerns about domestic politics at home.

But what even Dallek doesn't mention is the inherent absurdity of Nixon's attempts to achieve a "peace with honor."  There was no way to find an honorable end to a dishonorable war. The North Vietnamese had never declared war on the United States and they were never at war with us, except to the extent that we forced ourselves into their civil war with the south.

Imagine England intervening in the U.S. Civil War on the side of the South (a cause of concern at the time) and then getting tired of their involvement and trying to negotiate a "peace with honor" with Abraham Lincoln that would have required the North to abandon and ignore all of the just reasons for which it went to war in the first place, all to smooth the domestic concerns of the Palmerston government in England.  The very thought is absurd, and so was the Nixon and Kissinger idea that we could negotiate with North Vietnam to get ourselves out of the war. The only way out was to leave. The Vietnamese had their reasons for fighting and it had nothing at all to do with us.  As a New Hampshire Senator (a Republican, I think) said at the time, "we should just declare victory and leave."

I'm reminded of my favorite bumper sticker from that era: "How Many Vietnamese Fought In Our Civil War?"

So here it is, almost forty years after the end of the war, and I don't know how many years after the U.S. government has recognized some level of responsibility toward the U.S. servicemen whose health was damaged by Agent Orange, and we are just now acknowledging some minimum level of responsibility to the Vietnamese for this chemical warfare we engaged in. The cleanup we have committed to sounds pretty limited and the story in the Times cites a lot of Vietnamese who are dissatisfied with the tardiness and the inadequacy of the effort.

  Dow Chemical, by the way, still insists there isn't any proof that Agent Orange has any adverse health effects on humans.

Go the Fuck to Sleep

Following up on the last post about the new style of children's books, I will ignore all copyright rules and give you the text because, what the hell? I'm in Brasil.  Besides, I don't think of this as giving the book away; I think of it as an inducement to everyone to go to Amazon and buy it for people they know who have kids or are seriously thinking about it.

Along with the cover drawing which I posted earlier, each stanza below has its own accompanying drawing.


The cats nestle close to their kittens,
The lambs have lain down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear.
Please go the fuck to sleep.



The windows are dark in the town, child.
The whales huddle down in the deep.
I’ll read you one very last book if you swear
You’ll go the fuck to sleep.


The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run, and creep.
I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bullshit. Stop lying.
Lie the fuck down, my darling, and sleep.



The wind whispers soft through the grass, hon.
The field mice, they make not a peep.
It’s been thirty-eight minutes already.
Jesus Christ, what the fuck? Go to sleep.



All the kids from day care are in dreamland.
The froggie has made his last leap.
Hell no, you can’t go to the bathroom.
You know where you can go? The fuck to sleep.



The owls fly forth from the treetops.
Through the air, they soar and they sweep.
A hot crimson rage fills my heart, love.
For real, shut the fuck up and sleep.



The cubs and the lions are snoring,
Wrapped in a big snuggly heap.
How come you can do all this other great shit
But you can’t lie the fuck down and sleep?


The seeds slumber beneath the earth now
And the crops that the farmers will reap.
No more questions. This interview’s over,
I’ve got two words for you, kid: fucking sleep.



The tiger reclines in the simmering jungle.
The sparrow has silenced her cheep.
Fuck your stuffed bear, I’m not getting you shit.
Close your eyes. Cut the crap. Sleep.



The flowers doze low in the meadows
And high on the mountains so steep.
My life is a failure, I’m a shitty-ass parent.
Stop fucking with me, please, and sleep.


The giant pangolins of Madagascar are snoozing
As I lie here and openly weep.
Sure, fine, whatever, I’ll bring you some milk.
Who the fuck cares? You’re not gonna sleep.


This room is all I can remember,
The furniture crappy and cheap.
You win. You escape. You run down the hall.
As I nod the fuck off, and sleep.


Bleary and dazed I awaken
To find your eyes shut, so I keep
My fingers crossed tight as I tiptoe away
And pray that you’re fucking asleep.


We’re finally watching our movie.
Popcorn’s in the microwave. Beep.
Oh shit. Goddamn it. You’ve got to be kidding.
Come on, go the fuck back to sleep.

While I Wasn't Looking, Children's Books Changed

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Words Never Failed Him

The always entertaining, often outrageous, frequently exasperating Gore Vidal. I wish he were still in the world.  Gawd bless him, he was Gore Vidal until the very end.





“We are the United States of Amnesia....We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

The United States is a place where "the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”

On being the godfather of one of the children of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins: "Always a godfather, never a god."

After being punched by Norman Mailer because of a bad review, "Once again, words fail Mr. Mailer."

Ronald Reagan?  "A triumph of the embalmer's art."


On Edmund White: "He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after."


Asked whether his first sexual experience had been heterosexual or homosexual, Vidal answered, "I didn't think it was polite to ask."


There seems to be pretty much a unanimous consensus that Vidal will be remembered for his essays, more than for his novels (or plays or screenplays), and I suspect that is true.


The following is the opening paragraph of a 1963 book-length essay, Tarzan Revisited:

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking. Fascinated as we all are to know what our countrymen think of great issues (approving, disapproving,'don't-knowing,' with that same shrewd intelligence which made a primeval wilderness bloom with Howard Johnson signs), the  pollsters never get around to asking the sort of interesting personal questions our new-Athenians might be able to answer knowledgeably. For instance, how many adults have an adventure serial running in their heads?"