If It Is Tuesday...

Cape May During Hurricane Sandy

If it's Tuesday, then Monday must be over.

Anyone wishing to argue about space and time continua or parallel string bikinis may simply go take a dip in the moat.

Because, damn it, Monday is over.  We start fresh.  All devices have been charged.  The Manor is pristine, the grounds are pruned, raked, and -- where absolutely necessary -- mowed.  Sven Feingold putters about giggling, so something is up with the latest ManorFest Maze design.  La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore stays on her cell, when she can get reception, because she is *this* close to garnering a position as spokesperson for a major weight loss company that specializes in busty divas.  Just the exercise and muscle toning from running up and down turret stairs and sprinting around Captain Haddock's miniature submarine wormhole gateway will make her lose a few dozen dress sizes.  Should Marlinspike Hall ever successfully be enveloped in a wifi bubble, the Milanese Nightingale may well gain back all the fat she's discarded chasing a phone signal.

Our various herds and fruit orchards are all in their proper states.  The monks next door are reworking their Christmas Catalog of Wasted Calories and the Abbot, Fred, and I have been designated taste-testers.  Life is sweet.

But Monday.

The Mother-Unit that actually raised moi decided to need emergency surgery.  In a test of the emergency surgery system in the coastal backwaters of her slice of paradise, she encountered the requisite number of idiots at the local beach bum hospital over the weekend.  So, in a way, Monday was her salvation, as it brought an influx of actual medical practitioners leaking grains of sand onto the spit-shined checkerboard hallowed hospital halls.

I was a tad bit worried when I looked up her surgeon's credentials to find that he also enjoyed the practice of ophthalmology.

I've not seen her in decades but every description begins with her diminutive stature.  She has everyone and everyone's brother worried about her weight -- no busty diva, she.  I want to scream sometimes.

Oh, about what?  I need to particularize my need?

I want to scream at the "but she's so tiny," "she can't take it, she has no... reserves!"

Puh-leeze.  This is a woman who was a fierce ballerina.  I watched her employ many tricks of the dancing trade as she guarded her lithe status through the years -- as if it mattered once she was no longer expected to enter rooms via a grand jeté.  She is not anorexic in the strict definition of the malady.  Nor is she an alcoholic, nor does she abuse prescription drugs, in spite of a lifelong celebration of Happy Hours and a honking bottle of bazillions of phenobarbital kept in the last drawer of her dressing table.

Anyway, she survived the weekend, and made it through a scary surgery with style.  And got -- with us -- to Tuesday!  Yay, Mom!  Point your toes and twirl, twirl, twirl!

Equally wonderful about this day?  Grader Boob gets his first doses of chemotherapy!  His story has become so sad, beset with that ogre of physical pain and the great deceivers of the mind that pain welcomes. If you're a Dedicated Reader, you've seen me act out that drama, o'er and o'er.  Therefore, rejoice in Tuesday, for shrinking those tumors will result in less pain, and less pain will allow sleep, and sleep will further decimate the pain cycle.

All together now:  "Shrink, tumors, shrink!  Shrink, tumors, shrink! Shrink, tumors, shrink!" I have an accompanying tune in mind, but don't want to limit your creativity as you dance your way through this Tuesday, chanting, cavorting, and casting Grader Boob tumor cells into Tumor Cell Inferno.

Use any musical genre that works.  Though I have to admit that "country/western" somehow doesn't fly. Feel free to prove me wrong. Something in a Texas Two-Step, maybe?  Just be stylish.  This is my brother we are talking about.

He's simply riddled with cancer, the reprobate.  His new oncologist, who seems a very good dood, is starting the meds today whether he is admitted to the clinical trial or not.  And no, I am not stupid.  Prevailing winds, insight, what is not said -- I'm on it.

Given that it's been over 6 weeks since the official diagnosis, it is fair to say that the new oncologist's very life may have hinged on that decision, as I was gathering weaponry to bring down on his toupéed head if something were not done this week.

Would I kill to improve Grader Boob's Quality of Life?  Let me see.  Hmm. Yes, of course I would.

Wouldn't you?  If I were willing to personally extrajudicially execute Pinochet, Jesse Helms, and various other errors, an attempt on the life of someone impeding the life of Grader Boob is one of those famed "slam dunk" decisions. The weird problem with my Kill List, and this has been the case since roughly the 1970s, is that once penciled in for an extrajudicial execution, my Listees just... drop dead.  Or are taken out in the wrong fashion, a tragedy equal to the horror of their continued existence.  If you have any insight into how I might stem the tide of these unworthy deaths and promote the karma-cleansing of my efficient Kill List, the comment section is all yours.

If you're lathered in a cold sweat and thinking of calling the Interwebs Keystone Kops, relax. I was voted the Family Member Least Likely To Commit Murder.

So, it is Tuesday.  The Mother-Unit may yet gambol along the edge of her watery front yard, scotch and soda in one hand, the other arm gracefully indicating the vastness of the Atlantic.  The Brother-Unit may get to drop the F-bomb on another set of undergraduates, or he may be granted furlough to gambol alongside the Mother-Unit, leaving now and then to swim out past the breakers.

Have I told you lately, Dear Readers, that I love you?  Particularly You... That's right, You.

Instructions for Tuesday:

• Point your toes and twirl, twirl, twirl!
• Shrink, tumors, shrink!  Shrink, tumors, shrink! Shrink, tumors, shrink!

© 2013 L. Ryan

My Leftist Easy Answers... USAmerica Can No Longer Afford to Be Stupid

I can do nothing but write honestly this morning.  Part of that is that my computer demands it.  My S-key and my T-key are sticking, a plot to make me slow down.

Listening to "Up With Chris (Hayes)" as I was trying to convince myself that getting out of the bed that I had just urinated on was worth it, there came a segment on the "current" heightening of conflict between Israel and Gaza.  I was quickly reminded of how dumb-downed I've allowed myself to become, not just on this topic -- but on most topics.

I've gotten by as an academic by choosing sides, which makes any even mildly querulous arguments easy.  The stalking away from the fine wooden table, covered with coffee cups or long-necked beer bottles, the sardonic smile, the "I would expect no more, no less of an argument from you,"  the cutting last word.  That stuff.

Never trust an academic -- even one purportedly limited to the teaching of a foreign language and its culture, history, literature -- who has not spent much time in the targeted countries where that language lives.  And trust most those who make it a point to return yearly, or as often as conditions will allow.  "Conditions" meaning states of war, states of peace, visa availability, and a salary that encourages travel, meaning, of course, a university unafraid of the results.  I am thinking of several of my friends, world-class [insert a Ross Perot twang] academics driven by... what was that thing I used to have?  Started with a P. Ah.  Passion.  And underneath the passion?  Love of common humankind.

They're delusional, of course, but they are also the only thing we've got going on, beyond short TV segments aimed at their already established partisanship.  Maybe 2 out of a class of 30 will "get it," and one prays that both of those students are gregarious, insightful, maybe future teachers, themselves.

Who can "explain" -- in language that does not cause hair to bristle and the heart harden, the head freeze -- the conflict between the Palestinian people (in Gaza and their other vast land holdings) and the country of Israel?  People who don't dumb it down, people who can present the history with most of its nuance intact.

How do USAmericans, who have trouble remembering their own history in its varied and various contexts, approach this tragic neighborhood without choosing to be dumbed down?  Look at what the extreme wings of our two pitiful political parties choose to claim to believe -- ridiculous, stupid, obviously untrue things.  With straight faces, Jindal -- an expert in medical management -- can approach the truth and still offer creationism an honored spot in the curriculum of Louisiana's children.  The left can defend Petraeus, defend the White House handling of the Benghazi terrorist assassinations, and deny a blatant threat to national security on the part of the CIA.

I am an extremist, except when I am not.  I believe that my socialist beliefs are very comfortable here, because they have no chance at messy realization.  I have also become intellectually lazy, which make extremism the easiest route to take when wanting to look and sound... well, you know.

Part of the terror is how urban this continual war is.  How the Gazans have no where to go, how Israel controls even the water, much less whether a person can walk freely from here to there.  Yet politician Netanyahu is right -- were 1/5 of any country being bombarded by rockets, no matter how weak, no matter the Iron Dome, that country necessarily defend itself.

But don't you wish to cry out:  But no matter the history?  No matter that Israel's most recent extrajudicial execution of a Hamas leader was the killing of Netanyahu's only real partner in de-escalating the rocket attacks?

Does none of it matter when Israel gets ready to mow the grass?

Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington, as ex-CIA analyst Elizabeth Murray learned. 

In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.” 

The remark, which likened killing hundreds of men, women and children – many of them noncombatants – with trimming the grass, was greeted with a light tittering around the room, which was filled with some of Washington’s most elite, highly educated and well-paid Middle East experts. Not a single one objected to the panelist’s black humor. 

On the contrary, several analysts and experts were grinning at the reference to Israel’s strategy of mounting periodic attacks on the Palestinians to cull each new generation of militants. Such is the nonchalance of Washington’s policy-advising cognoscenti toward the ongoing and systematic genocide of Gaza’s oppressed population. 

The cavalier language is symptomatic of the policymaking community’s increasingly pervasive tendency to disregard and disparage the humanity of Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks, which are often waged by Israel’s high-tech drones and U.S.-supplied F-16’s. There is also a tendency to ignore or downplay Israeli war crimes. 

This dangerously sociopathic attitude is prevalent whether cloaked in a cheap joke or reflected in the failure by the State Department spokesman to condemn or even acknowledge the criminality of Israel’s latest aerial and sea-based bombardment of Palestinian civilians, at least 18 of whom have been killed in the past 48 hours. Three Israelis also have died in retaliatory rocket fire. 

After the latest attacks, the State Department’s statement justified Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as Israel’s “right to defend itself” against the launching of relatively primitive rockets, mostly by radical groups, from inside Gaza. Yet, while the State Department urged both sides to avoid civilian casualties, nowhere was there mention of the Palestinians’ right to defend themselves from various attacks by Israel. Apparently only one side is granted that privilege, according to the U.S. statement. 

The relegation of Palestinians to a less-than-human status by Israel and the United States – especially the inhabitants of Gaza who are perpetually locked into an open-air prison and subject to an Israeli blockade – was noted by MIT professor Noam Chomsky after a visit to Gaza to attend an academic conference. In comments broadcast by “Democracy Now” on Nov. 14, Chomsky remarked: 

“It’s kind of amazing … and inspiring to see people managing somehow to survive … as essentially caged animals subject to constant, random, sadistic punishment – only to humiliate them – no pretext. They [the Palestinians] would like to have dignified lives, but the standard Israeli position is that they shouldn’t raise their heads.” 

Instead of a serious effort to reach a peace acceptable to both sides, Israel seems to prefer a state of endless conflict with the Palestinians. After all, the prospect of peace might require the Israeli government to treat their neighbors as equals and withdraw from territory occupied since 1967. 

So, rather than making meaningful concessions, some Israeli hardliners simply promote the idea of periodically “mowing the grass,” i.e. killing the latest generation of Palestinian militants who sprout up from the injustice all around them. Perhaps that is why Israel broke an informal ceasefire on Wednesday by assassinating Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari in an air strike. -- from "Likening Palestinians to Blades of Grass," Saturday, 17 November 2012 10:59
By Elizabeth Murray, Consortium News | News Analysis from Truth-Out.org

Anyway, I do have opinions on this matter but am blessed not to be living smack-dab in the middle of the facts.  Half of the population of Gaza in under 18.  The Israelis are surrounded by governments and tribes that wish for its annihilation.  Gaza is a concentration camp.  Israel is trapped by long history, as well as the short view.

A rocket is a rocket is a rocket.  An air strike is an air strike is an air strike.  But what is a drone?

I'm sorry, but I am tired now.  And I think of those who have never had that luxury.  Later, I'll come back and, hopefully, add the segments from the Chris Hayes show that woke a small part of my atrophied brain and challenged my nose-in-the-air leftist easy answers.

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