Faster Than the Speed of Thought

--Extremism, Manny Francisco

 Surprise, surprise, surprise! 
--Gomer Pyle, USMC

 Life ... is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing 
--Macbeth (V, v) 

Oh foolish people, and without understanding;
which have eyes, and see not;
which have ears, and hear not 
--Jermiah 5:21
_____________________

RAW is on holiday now, but the news which rustles other feathers has entered our awareness. The responses we witness seem absurd.

[1] On beheadings by members of the Islamic State (IS):

Expected, totally. Go rambling about in their desert, and you can expect to be on IS's YouTube snuff favorites list sometime soon ... plan on it.

This is asymmetrical warfare at its finest. Didn't we just learn this in our most excellent adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq? Isn't this what Israel is experiencing vis-a-vis Hamas? It matters not the names of the players: the U.S. is confronting people who do not share her values-- in their backyard.

The photographer who lost his head was exploiting the situation, and the locals knew it. Professional newsmen or photographers are always looking for the scoop; it is their business. The word is, they want to "document history," but we have already seen enough beheadings and do not need to see more. This is an ugly historicity of our making.

We are exploiting them, and they, us; where is the surprise? Is this placing of ourselves in their grid square -- and the expected resultant sacrificial lambs -- an effort to re-ramp up a United State's military presence abroad?

This is not the first time religious fanatics have shed blood in the name of their cause. Why are we shocked?

Why this need to be horrified, and to jump through the predictable hoops of memorializing those beheaded? While it is a brutal death, to be sure, it is not without sense to those doing the killing. It is merely a method of gaining free propaganda.

If we do not support this lifestyle and their adjudication process, why are we present, creating it, and then documenting it?

IS behavior is not going extinct anytime soon, unlike the language of Wukchumni, which will become so when the last known speaker, Marie Wilcox, dies. So: what precisely is the purpose for the United State's presence in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the areas of IS control?

The press and we have a field day with every new outrage from the Muslim world, but to what end? For example, what of Boku Haram, the Muslim group that abducted the Nigerian school girls? Off the radar, in favor of the latest cause du jour.  New and more grotesque stories are demanded by the commentariat, all to no end.

Lesson: Do not be a part of stirring the pot in Islamic jihadist nations. 

[2] African disease Ebola cured by act of god:

A doctor, one of two U.S. missionaries who contracted the deadly Ebola virus in Liberia and recently cured at Emory medical center, claimed God saved his life in a miraculous direct reply to thousands of prayers. In fact, the miracle was being born white and Christian. If you wish to call this fortunate confluence which afforded Dr. Brantly access to the latest super drug that cured him, then yes, Brantly is the recipient of a miracle.

But if you believe that, you also believe that the prayers of the African victims and their families are somehow inferior, as infected Africans do not usually recover from the virus. Such belief of a favored religion is medievalism at its finest, so to return to point #1 -- why the shock at the power of conviction?

Dr. Brantly further asks his fellow believers to pray for the Africans that their prayers might be heard ... by an obviously Christian-favoring God.

Lesson: Do not go mucking about in Liberia when Ebola is ravaging the nation, and do not claim God favors you over them.

Who Woulda Thunk It?

From today's Slate: Supreme Court Conservatives say the South is no longer racist. You learn something everyday, no?

Lemme tell ya, if there's one thing I know for sure about the South, it is that bigotry still reigns five ways from Sunday.  Do not fool yourself into thinking it is mostly racial; oh no -- far from it.  As long as "they" know their place (=untermentsch), there is a role for blacks.  Not uppity ones, mind, who have pretensions upon your dog or woman or property. Step -and-fetch-it is just fine, thanks.

The highest vitriol may be save for those of differing religions, and I don't mean the crazy Baptists at the Bethel AME down the road. No, their deepest vituperative is save for those not Christian, which includes Catholics, or, "Idolaters".  The reasons for this reserve pool of disdain is deep. But never fear that the United States lacks a sense of coherence or homogeneity; it is just done at the expense of everyone else.

(Ranger essay coming later today.)

\

Is the South Still Racist? SCOTUS Conservatives Don’t Seem To Think So

Ordinary People

I can't read and I don't care
and education's awful
Raisin' heck and writing checks
it ought to be unlawful
--Cornbread and Butter Beans, traditional

Waving to the girls
Peeling out of sight
Spending all my money
On a Saturday night
--Pink Cadillac, Aretha Franklin

I know a place
Ain't nobody cryin'
Ain't nobody worried
Ain't no smilin' faces
Lyin' to the races
--I'll take you there,
The Staples Singers

Often, I am told, they dance a fiery dance
And whirl 'till they're completely uncontrolled
Soon the mind is blank and oh, they're in a trance
A violent trance astounding to behold
--What Do Simple Folk Do?,
Camelot

If you can talk with crowds
and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---
nor lose the common touch
--IF, Rudyard Kipling
________________

Our friend Chief at Graphic Firing Table eloquently eviscerates the Republican Party, 2012. His is effective all the moreso because he grieves for what it once was -- a viable second party for our Republic -- but no longer is.

Ranger will see him, and raise him $100.

Since John F. Kennedy's Camelot we have conspicuously consumptive winners inhabiting the White House, from Martha's Vineyard, to Kennebunkport, back to the Vineyard (with the Obamas). Ranger, like most Americans, was not to the manor born. He attended a state university with a degree in American Studies, and strives to understand his nation's trajectory.

John Kerry was a bespandexed-wearing 2004 Democratic contender against the oil mogul George W. Bush. Now Mitt Romney, he of non-Socialistically-gained largesse, shamelessly flaunts his wealth in a way he thinks the masses will grasp, with mention of his multiple Cadillacs. No one bothers to choke on Clinton's words, because they do not "feel our pain". We the people are as martians to these high-fliers.

Sure, men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt were to the manor born, but they tempered their Hyde Parks with their Warm Springs (FDR's humble Southern retreat). FDR moved amongst the people, in order to get a sense of their trials and travails. Politicians today have lost the common touch.

Yet, the plebs are not rankled at the gulf between they and these fortunate he's because their betters appear to condescend to them; they do this so slickly that the groundlings don't even notice. They do this in the most common form -- by making the plebs feel as though they have some "ownership", that this is "their" society and that together "we" will protect our borders from fearsome interlopers, for instance. What this will do for the proles in uncertain, beyond presumably keeping the pool of minimum wage jobs open for them to compete amongst themselves, while toeing the party line fed to them, which is to rue the day the Other party rose to power and somehow sold them down the river.

Hope is the thing the demogogues peddle. If you hope for change, in four short years I will bring you back to the prosperity that is rightly yours. But not before me and mine get ours, by shorting you and yours in some way beyond the boundary of your horizon. If you are obedient, you may be able to afford daily greens fees and possibly rub shoulders with your betters.

You -- whoever you are -- will like and affiliate with us because we are you, or what you might be, if you pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. Maybe you've lost so much hope that you just hope you can tread water wherever that line is for you. Whatever your goal, we will help get you there. We, under the Hart-Schaffner-Marx suits, are simple folk, just like you.

Make no mistake: Ranger is neither Democratic nor Republican. We are loyal United States citizens who feel like strangers in a strange land when confronting the excess of our leaders. The Dennis Kucinich's of civic life are rare, and painted as space aliens for their modesty. (You have to be nuts not to feed at the trough, right?) So, why do we buy into the shtick?

We work and struggle to do our best for family and country, and the best we get are these spoiled, entitled pretty boys. How does the U.S. really differ from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar or any other country run by potentates?

Does an election = democracy? We laugh at the Soviet regimes for having elections with one candidate on the ticket. We may have two, but does it matter?

Winning an election does not entail the same skill set required to govern a nation. That may be part of the problem: We get money-raisers, but not nation-makers.

--by Jim and Lisa