We are screwed

I have moments of optimism but they are a consequence of my almost naive romanticism. For the most part, I know that we are all royally screwed and that there is no hope. Hope... the drug that political junkies survive on... that maybe, just maybe, this time things will be different and this or that leader will usher in a new era and lead us to a better, more just world.

Bollocks.

The world is full of snake-oil salesmen. Every day I am reminded that the lunatics run the ward. Obama, for all his transformative rhetoric is no better than your run-of-the-mill politician. OK, he got some health care legislation through and he can talk in complete sentences. But his Human Rights record is more appalling than Bush. He has not closed Guantanamo as promised. He has not prosecuted the perpetrators of the torture regime. (There is still debate about whether waterboarding is torture or enhanced interrogation technique). He has not even set up an investigation commission let alone hold anyone accountable. At least Blair gets eggs thrown at him and called a war criminal even if he will never see the inside of The Hague. Cheney goes on Face the Nation and builds the case to bomb Iran. The Obama administration continues the Bush-era abuse of civil liberties in the name of war against terrorism (targeted assassination, anyone). The Nobel peace laureate has escalated the drone attacks in Pakistan. For those of you keeping count, that is 2 actual wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), two wars that won't be called wars (Pakistan and Yemen) and another war in Iran in the pipeline. Civilian deaths are transformed to faceless and uninteresting statistics; dots on a mountainous line. And America continues to undermine UN authority by refusing to acknowledge the findings of the UN High commissioner of Human Rights that Israel used inappropriate force against the Gaza flotilla (they were the only dissent vote). The report indicates that an American citizen was executed at point blank range and the US government doesn't blink an eyelid. Apparently, Israel can do no wrong even when they are demonstrably wrong.

The frustration is heightened by the double standards. Example, statements like "America has to stay in Iraq to prevent foreign influence" - said without any irony. Iranian officials are blacklisted and sanctions imposed on them for alleged involvement in arbitrary beatings, arrests and tortures but America must move forward not look backwards. Why, we are freedom loving people. This is what the founding fathers would have wanted.

My rant is not that things have turned to the worse (it has) but that there is no change. America has made a habit of not living up to the standards it expects of other countries and there hasn't been the slightest dent in this American exceptionalism since Obama took charge.

This bleak hopelessness is nowhere more prominent than in the lack of proverbial balls of the mainstream media. Rick Sanchez, a sort of bumbling idiot of a CNN anchor, got canned last week. Because of remarks he made about Jon Stewart on a radio interview. Sanchez is one of Jon's favourite Pinata, to pick on and make fun of. Especially as a counter-point to Glenn Beck and other clowns of Fox news. Kinda, the "Fox people are crazy; so are the CNN folks" schtik that Jon does for "objectivity". The piqued Sanchez calls Jon prejudiced and uninformed, with a limited worldview. The host suggests Stewart because he is from an oppressed minority, has at least some sense of what "the sting of prejudice" is like. Sanchez replies

Very powerless people… [snickers] He’s such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please, what are you kidding? … I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]

Sanchez is fired for being anti-Semite. And I wonder what is anti-Semitic (or factually incorrect) in that observation. He is not denying the holocaust or wishing the death of jews. He does not support some cuckoo theory that Hamas is a Mossad operation or that 9-11 was orchestrated by Jews. He merely points to the fact that just because someone is Jewish doesn't automatically entail that they are being (or have been) oppressed. He does not say Jews run the media (which is stereotyping but in itself only marginally racist) but that Jews who work in the media cannot claim to be an oppressed minority owing to their religion and what happened to the Jews in the past. Neither did Helen Thomas support anti-semitism by indicating that Israel is occupying Palestine. Asking Jews to return to Germany does not mean returning to the gas chambers. It means that Jews are no longer under siege in Old Europe. Nor did Octavia Nasr, another CNN employee fired for frivolous reasons, support terrorist organisations. The list goes on.

I get political sensitivity. I really do but this is plain stupid. Is there any hope? Nope.

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock - remix

THE .DOC FILE OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a laptop, put in sleep mode on a table
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets
The blinking-light retreats
Of restless nights in free-wifi cafes
And public libraries with internet
Streets that follow like messageboard argument
of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming blog post
Oh, do not ask, "What, yaoi?"
Let us go and post an entry.

In the room the players come and go
Talking of their scores on Halo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the Windows PC
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the Macintosh
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the trackpads in their case
Let fall upon its back the crumbs that fall to keyboards,
Slipped by the flashdrive, made a sudden leap
and seeing that it was a soft October night
Curled once about the mouse, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the desk,
Rubbing its back upon the Windows PC;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the icons that you meet;
There will be time to murder and respawn
And time for all the Chrome and Firefox
That drag and drop a website on your plate;
Time for .doc and time for .ppt
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred fanfics and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the players come and go
Talking of their scores on Halo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Is this wanky?" "Is this fair?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair
With a comment on the level of your player
[They will say: "How his server's lagging slow!"]
My morning cosplay, collar mounting firmly to the chin
My website rich and modest, but accessed by a simple login
[They will say: "But how his content's growing thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the interwebs?
In a minute there is time
For fanfictions and revisions which Google Docs may reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the RPs, archives, messageboards
I have measured out my life with usernames.
I know the voices dying with a 404
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the mods already, known them all --
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase
And when I am banhammered, sprawling on a pin,
When I am banned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the fragments of my browser cache?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the sites already, known them all —-
Sites that are Web two-oh, white and bare
[But on my cellphone, still given to fail!]
It is the javascript impress
That makes them so digress?
Sites that stretch out like a table, or word-wrap like a shawl
And should I then presume?
And how should I log in?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through archived files
And watched the dialup sequences that blink
No more from AOL in lonely Windows?

I should have been a line of ragged code,
Scuttling through the compiler, breaking apps.

And the messageboard, the website, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep...tired...or it malingers
Returning 404, here in front of me.
Should I, after iPhone apps and prices,
Have the strength to force AT&T to crisis?
But though I have wept and emailed, wept and played,
Though I have seen my avatar brought in upon a platter,
I am no hacker -- and here's no great matter;
I have seen the screen of my laptop flicker,
And I have seen the eternal bluescreen hold my eye, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the games, social media, the blogs,
Among the twitters, among some talk of IRC logs,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the fandom with a smile,
To have squeezed the internet into a ball
To roll it toward some ass on Yahoo Questions
To say, "I am Babbage, come from the dead,
Come back to ban you all, I shall ban you all" --
If one, sending a textmessage, autocorrected
Should say: "That is not what I typed at all.
That is not it. LOL."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would have been worth while
After the LOLcats and the macros and the youtube clips,
After the spambots, after the blog space, after LiveJournal trailing on the floor --
And Digg, and so much more? --
It is impossible to type just what I mean!
But as if a new .avi threw the nerves in patterns on the screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, texting or throwing back Red Bull,
And turning towards the PC, should say,
"That is not what I typed at all.
That is not it. OH LOL."

No! I am not Lovelace,
nor was meant to be,
Am on some messageboard, one that will do
To send things viral, start a meme or two,
Edit the wiki, no doubt an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Pwning, sometimes, but anonymous,
Filled with citations, all a bit obtuse;
These edits, indeed, almost ridiculous --
Can you not work Google?

I grow old... I grow old...
I shall add some links to my blog roll.

Shall I change my default pic? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall play some World of Warcraft, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the servers singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen cats talking in capslock on the web,
All up in ur fridge, eatin' ur food
When my laptop lights the darkness white and black.

We have lingered in the tubes of internet,
By URLS wreathed with info, loaded-down
Till cellphones ringing wake us, and we drown.

Politics - Comedy

They are strange bedfellows; politics and comedy. Comedy and comedians can embody the true manifestation of our freedom of speech. Take George Carlin and the seven words for instance. When media outlets like New York Times and MSNBC have begun to act as propaganda tools of the powerful, who do we have but the comedians. To me, nowhere has this fact been demonstrated better than Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Jon was voted the most trusted newsman recently and if anything, it is a telling repudiation of 'real' journalists. His Daily Show has won the Emmy eight years in row. They have not taken this role willingly. The white noise of demagoguery, fear-mongering and name-calling that has taken over our TV sets have forced these comedians to take up serious issues. (I am reminded of the tongue-whipping that Jon gave Tucker Carlson on what used to be Crossfire. He said that he was perfectly happy to go back and make fart jokes all day if the 'real' journalists would just do their jobs.)

There were two interviews in the last week that highlighted the seriousness with which Jon carries his role as 'not just a comedian'. First the interview with former British Primeminister (and Bush lapdog) Tony Blair. I don't watch a lot of TV but I doubt if someone asked Blair, "Are we confronting something with a sledgehammer when we need a scalpel?" or "Didn't we create the problem which we want to solve now?" (namely the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq). And I don't know what others heard but Blair was totally unconvincing in his justification for the war in Iraq or the drum-beating that has already begun to bomb Iran. Jon asks about the disingenuous "...conflating Sept. 11 and the religious extremism and the war to overthrow a secular dictator" and it was like a Frost-Nixon moment for me.

And as if to prove that this was no flash in a pan, Jon follows it up with another brilliant interview, this time of former President, Bill Clinton. To be fair, Clinton stole the show and one wonders how Americans could vote for the bumbling, 'most of our imports come from other countries' Bush. His grasp of Economic minutiae and his ability to communicate are unsurpassed. Policy Wonk Clinton details his ideas and Jon sits back and lets him. At one point he asks, "Why don't I ever hear that from anybody but you?". Seriously, Hall-of-fame stuff.

Last week, Jon and the satirist Colbert (pronounced koʊlˈbɛər) announced that they were going to organise a rally (2 competing rallies, actually) in Washington D.C. This could well be a turning point. It appears that they will move from being passive commentators to political activists. Notwithstanding the success or failure of this endeavour, it is clearly a sad state of affairs when the world needs a Stew Beef to step up. May the Force be with them.

Update: There are no Gods among men. Clinton for all his brilliance is still responsible for much of the present economic mess. The de-regulation regime started during his tenure. Geithner and Bernanke and Greenspan were part of his legacy. DADT and DoMA were his too (though it was supposed to be an improvement on existing law).

Similarly, Jon Stewart has his own failings. In his efforts to appear non-ideological, an objective centrist, he often employs false equivalencies. "The right is calling Obama 'Hitler'. The left is calling Bush 'A war criminal'. Stop bickering, you crazy people on both left and right," is not exactly objective. Glenn Greenwald has more to say and he says it better than I could. Over to you, Glenn.