The Crow's Eye: Blame

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Mar 2, 2011

Blame

I feel like being earnest, tonight. Not in the angry, inchoate manner which characterizes my regular and ill-informed snark.

More passively. Perhaps even quietly contemplative, following the admirable example of Mr. Boyd.

My barber (an ex-cop who hated being a cop, but didn't have enough cousins on the fire department) argued with me over Wisconsin. He thinks Wisconsin's Walker is doing the right thing over there because over here he knows cops in Londonderry, New Hampshire who retired at $125k pensions, because NH's relevant code tabulates the three highest years, not an average across a career.

He's got a point about small town patronage shenanigans in affluent bedroom communities, and we did manage to agree that the job itself attracts sadists, but that has nothing to do with busting unions, or Wisconsin.

So, passively, as a mute reply on my part -

On the turning away:

Us and Them:

4 comments:

Randal Graves said...: Sure, chicanery goes on, always has, always will, but hell, I'll live with a little chicanery if stuff like "losing" 8 billion in Iraq and paper money manipulator bailouts happen with a wee bit less frequency.

Us and Them, *almost* a staple of classic rock radio. Playing it only earns a sternly worded letter from Clear Channel overlords. Heh.; March 3, 2011 at 2:20 PM
K. Ron Silkwood said...: How long will the disenfranchised and the dispossessed tolerate the death from a thousand cuts? Will they ever look up and down rather than right and left? Will a tire iron or a deer rifle ever replace a cardboard sign?; March 3, 2011 at 2:40 PM
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...: Cheers.

MADISON—The head of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association slammed Senate Republicans today after they ordered the detention of 14
Democratic Senators staying in Illinois “with or without force.”

“Politics aside, encouraging the forcible detention of duly elected lawmakers because they won’t allow you to dictate with a free hand is an unreasonable abuse of police power,” said WPPA Executive Director Jim Palmer. “Due to the
fact that Wisconsin officers lack any jurisdiction across state lines, does Senator Fitzgerald intend to establish a ‘lawmaker border patrol?

The thought of using law enforcement officers to exercise force in order to achieve a political objective is insanely wrong and Wisconsin sorely needs reasonable solutions and not
potentially dangerous political theatrics.”

For more amusement, see the BigGoobermint post by "Publius" and read the comments.
~; March 3, 2011 at 10:54 PM
Jack Crow said...: Randal,

It's hard for me to be comfortable with a 48 year old sergeant sucking down $125k in retirement, but I get your larger point. Hell, if it bankrupts a town...

K,

I don't know. People are generally more tolerant of their masters then the historic record ought to allow.; March 5, 2011 at 12:04 AM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.