On the DC Street Beat

Call me stupid, but I just don't get the British reference....

...So much for any hope of a return to civil discourse

Miller's Magical Mystery Tour

Poor Joe. Looks like he is running out of straws to grasp in his efforts to prove that no, really, he did win the senatorial election. Thus, in the spirit of Christmas, I offer a few more that he might want to consider including in his lawsuit(s).

1) It's all Wikileaks' fault: Really Joe, you did get the majority of votes, but Alaska's electronic ballot boxes were commandeered by Julian Assange and his merry band of cyberpunks, who erased votes cast for you (sorta kinda like what you did with your work emails). It's all part of the vast leftist conspiracy to take over the world that you and Sarah are so valiantly battling.

2) Little green men are responsible: As those familiar with Roswell and other alien sightings will tell you, Joe, its gotta be illegal aliens - whether terrestrial or extra. Remember a couple years back, there was that weird light that was seen in the sky near Tok? It must have been a saucer full of little green men who have been in hiding ever since, and somehow used their superior technology to queer the election results. Demand a hand recount, Joe!

3) It's climate change: Don't really know how to work that one into the lawsuit, Joe, but since climate change gets blamed for everything nowadays, how could you let this one pass? And since you obviously have your own unique interpretations of the law, arguing that climate change adversely affected your senatorial chances should present no challenge at all to you.

4) It's the fluoride: We've all been told that fluoridated water strengthens teeth and helps prevent childhood cavities, but it's a front, a sham. In reality, fluoridated water is being used to brainwash us, thereby preventing many, many people from being able to fully comprehend your stellar qualifications for the senate seat. Who knew that your greatest allies in this brave battle might just turn out to be Fluoride Free Fairbanks?

5) It's Obama's fault: Enuff said.

Sayonara, Mike!

The voter booting of the uber-grinch, Mike Kelly, can't go unremarked by this blog, where once, in more optimistic times, we blogged regularly and even posted a pic of Mike being burned in effigy. The near-win of Karl Kassel (losing by only seven votes) the last time Mean Mike was up for re-election was painful, but finally the screw has turned.

I could scarce believe it when I woke to otherwise very dismal election news last Wednesday. Could it be that the district 'Dweller and I live in is finally tipping to the more liberal side? Probably not - since our district has led in Joe Miller votes - both in the primary and in the main election. More likely, the late-in-the-day campaign that highlighted Mike's dismal record against organized labor and domestic violence did the trick. Whatever it was, I am grateful. Enjoy retirement Mike, and please, stay out of politics in the future!

So, yeah, as this country continues slouching on its path to government-as-reality-TV, there has been little to celebrate. Still at least two of the three Sarah Clones got a righteous shellacking (although Bachmann is still alive and kicking and as mentally incontinent as ever) and Alaska didnt wake up to the news that Unsavory Joe is our senator (y-e-t). Of course, he is doing everything he can to totally muck up and delay the ballot-counting process, but then could we expect anything less from such as he?

Criminy. Never did I think that one day I would write on this blog that I miss the days of Ted, Frank ( M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I), and all the rest of the corrupt bastards. True, they were less than forthright with their constituents, but by gawd, at least they were old school politics.

Yeah, even Don Young is looking better and better. Sure, he is still a foul-mouthed ass, but nothing like Tea Partiers and Joe Miller to make him look more like Robert Byrd every day.

They had C street smarts (even if sometimes they were too smart for their own good), they knew their facts and if at times they twisted information to suit their own purposes, at least it was clear that they were doing so for a reason other than pure babbling ignorance.

They were arrogant, but theirs was an arrogance born of ability, intellect (OK, maybe not in the case of Frank or Don) and experience. It was not the insanely annoying petty arrogance of Palin and her spawn who take no care to hide the fact that they just don't give a shit about accuracy, fairness, common decency, or truth, because none of that matters to the Legions of Christ when they are inspired by the Spirit, or mama grizzlies or whatever. Or, more accurately, are engaging in the magical thinking that, as any licensed psychologist will point out, goes along with extreme dysfunction. As in Michele Bachmann's case: if she says it costs 200 million a day for Obama to visit India, then it does, because she said so, and that makes it so (and ain't nobody going to prove her wrong).

On the other hand, her suggestion that Obama and entourage "visit" India via videoconference makes a weird sort of twisted sense. In this digitally-crazed age, people like Bachmann are where they are primarily because they reign within a pixellated realm fabricated by cable TV, Twitter and Facebook.

On a completely unrelated topic - 'Dweller and I have been AWOL due to a combination of anomie (the shrill onslaught of the Palin Pods has put the muscle on us) and too much going on in work and personal life.

Maybe I will start blogging about chickens again: they continue to be a constant source of entertainment and useful instructors in the nuances of human behavior in these dark days (and I am not referring solely to the solar cycle)....

The feng-shui is very very very good

....along with other daily marginalia, like the profound relaxation and enjoyment I have been garnering from my new wood-fired sauna, which I hocked my truck to have built. But it was worth it - a balm for the soul in during bleak times.....maybe Obama should try one.

Tourism in a Police State

Pulled aside with ID confiscated and put in a holding pen by gun-toting men wearing dark glasses and with little curly wires snaking into their ears. If you think Green Zone check point or a prelim shake down prior to the next flight to Gitmo – think again. It’s what can happen to you on a tour of the East Wing of the White House – and it’s what happened to this blogger today.

I was told it was because my DOB didn’t match my SS# on the list of people scheduled to tour*, but when the Secret Service told me that at the final check point, I hadn’t yet given them my Social – only my driver’s license. I could see it on the guard’s face as soon as she looked up my name on the list: I was flagged even before I ever showed up – spit out by some database for some reason. And no, I am not paranoid. While I waited 20 minutes before they moved me into the pen, they asked none of the other tour hopefuls (all of whom had nice, safe Anglo-sounding, from-the-heartland names) for their socials. I also noted out of all of the 100s in line during the three-hour ordeal this turned into, none were obviously Arabic, or Muslim, and certainly there were no women wearing hijab.

Welcome to DC.

For several days now, I have roamed the Mall, the Tidal Basin, and the Memorials. You can’t really see any of these monuments without having to peer beyond the jersey barriers. They snake everywhere, and if it isn’t a jersey barrier, it’s heavy duty metal fences policed by flack-jacketed men. My particular favorite are the pop-up barricades that can be raised and lowered at will in the streets around the Capitol. There are men with police dogs everywhere.

The new DC monument: the jersey barrier

What all of this puts me in mind of is Budapest, circa 1970s. As a small child, I was terrified by the men who boarded the train toting guns to check our papers at the border. I was scared to death throughout our whole trip that at some point my father would be taken away by the police (as a former political refugee from this country, it was only a few years prior to our trip to see my grandparents that my father judged it safe enough for him to return). Like DC, every public place had men with dogs patrolling it – in this case Soviet soldiers. We had to show our papers when demanded to do so, we had to register with the government and we had to report where and when we were going within the country. We were not allowed to stay with any member of our family, and our movements were watched.

This was life behind the Iron Curtain. Although it would take another twenty years before the Soviet Union crumbled and the Soviet Bloc fell apart, already its satellites were challenging its viability. As the Soviet government felt more threatened, the more it tried to control its people: more dogs, more barriers and checkpoints, more random ID checks, more roughing up of people by the police and the military.

And now, here we are, subjected to the very same things in our nation’s Capitol – which for so long has been the symbol of the free world. As a child of a person who fled political oppression, it is extremely disturbing and depressing to see how rapidly our government has stripped away our freedoms and has become what previous US administrations and indeed our founding fathers vigorously denounced: a government governed by and governing through fear.

What it is most disturbing about the jersey barriers and the dogs, though, is not their presence, but that so very few question why they are there. Of all the American tourists that I poll as I wander around, no one thinks at all that this “security” is a sign of something very rotten and troubling about our government, its policies and its current global actions and positions. The standard response is of course that “they” want to harm us, and this is the price of freedom.

WTF??? How do jersey barriers maintain freedom? I don’t feel free at all. You don’t dare take your shoes off and cool your feet in the Reflecting Pool, you don’t find kids running around enjoying the grounds of the Capitol, you don’t dare take a picture of much in case they decide to hassle you. It bothers me at a very deep level that most people do not have the ability or the inclination to discern the profound disconnect, or to see that in fact, it is us, the supposed free citizens of this country, that are contained by the dogs, barriers and police.

It bothers and saddens me, but it does not surprise me. No one in this crowd of tourists of which I am a current member should ever dare disparage (but most almost certainly do) the German nation of 75 years ago or question how its government then terminated six million people, without the general population rising up in protest. Behold, here in our country right now is that very same seedbed that grows mindless acceptance by the masses of the oppression of the different, the singled-out, the faceless “other”. It is sown with the seeds of apathy, ignorance and blind faith watered heavily and well by a cocktail of fear, suspicion and intolerance brewed by a sophisticated and technologically advanced propaganda machine.

Although the Bush-Cheney regime created the police state in eight years – it's been in the works for far longer. I wish I had the belief that Obama can turn it around, but I think it is a juggernaut that is going to run him over as well as all the rest of us.

*To get on a tour of the White House, one must submit a request to a member of their Congressional delegation, or if a foreign tourist, through their embassy.

Jail Visits for Dummies...

...Or things they don't tell you at the jail

Should you ever find yourself preparing to visit someone in our local hoosegow, the Fairbanks Correctional Center (or the Fairbanks Country Club as some wags in the Native community call it), the following tips might come in handy.

Getting in the Door...

#1 Don't leave home without your jailhouse cryptogram. This is the little schedule chock-full of abbreviations (GP, M, F, Ad Seg, Max/Max, Ad Seg PC) that, when decoded, tells you what times you can visit "your" inmate (FCC has the peculiar habit of using the possessive when referring to the person you want to visit), based on their sex and the nature of their offense. And like any good church potluck list, depending on the first letter of their last name, it also tells you what day you can visit "your" inmate (for example, Tuesdays, Thursdays & Sundays, L-Z).

#2 Don't go with the expectation that you will actually get to visit: Only eight inmates are allowed into the secure area during any one-hour period. Because the jail is so over-crowded that 41 inmates are sleeping in half the gym, eight inmate slots doesn't really cut it. It can be a scrum to get on the visiting list, and if you actually follow the instructions that FCC provides, the chances of you getting a visit are like that proverbial snowball's, leading to tip...

...#3 Be prepared to waste time: Although FCC tells you, for example, that you can show up between 9:10 and 9:20 to get on the list for a 9:30 visit, don't you believe it. You are going to want to be there by 8:30 at the latest, in order to gain one of the coveted eight spots on the "first come, first served" list.

#4 Sunday mornings are the least crowded, BUT, don't drink a lot of coffee beforehand. Unlike week days, there is no one at the front desk in the visiting area. Therefore, visitors must cram inside the little vestibule (heated, complete with camera and microphone, but no amenities) for at least an hour before their desired visiting time. And you dare not leave to go to the bathroom, step outside for a smoke break, or sit in your car and read or listen to the radio, least you lose that spot in line. (NB: its not your fellow visitors who will challenge your place in line should you need to leave, its the guards. Although they likely won't open the door til just a hair before the visiting hour, if they do, and you aren't there to get your place on the list, they may not honor it, no matter what your fellow visitors say. Since the door is just as likely to open at say 8:45 as it is at 9:29.5, no one dares leave the vestibule, even though it really only comfortably fits six.)

#5 Week days are best for visiting, because although your odds of landing on the visit list are better on Sunday, during the weekdays you are allowed into the jail to wait - where you have access to a bathroom, water fountain, and a bunch of bad magazines.

#6 Morning are the worst time to visit if your inmate is in general population and is on the list to be moved to the North Star halfway house. Although these are the times you are most likely to get in, visiting can seriously queer their chance to get moved. Even with the over-crowding and a spot on that list (its all about lists), if an inmate is not in GP, and in secure visiting instead, a guard won't come fetch them. Nothing takes the shine off a visit like learning your visit cost your inmate the chance to get over to North Star, the Holy Grail of the Fairbanks correctional system.

Once you are in the door...

#7 Dress like a fundamentalist Mormon: No bare shoulders, V-necks, or skirts or pants above the knee. No hoodies, hats, vests, jackets, or translucent or transparent garments. Zippers are a particular FCC fashion no-no. While one can get rid of a polar fleece vest with a zipper by stashing it in the visitor locker, one can't stash one's pants. I haven't had the nerve to test the zipper thing with pants, thus on possible visitation days, my current favorite pair with zippered pockets stay in the closet.

And through the security screening...

#8 Try and grab one of the phones on either end of the visiting row: Secure visiting is just like what you see in the movies or on TV. You are on one side of the bullet-proof glass, they are on the other and conversation is by phone. The phones have notoriously poor reception, so everyone in this tiny room is screaming. Bedlam, it's like talking to a friend long distance in the village. If you are lucky enough to get a seat at the end, you don't have conversations on both sides of you, which makes it easier to focus and to block out the commotion of jail house visiting.

#9 If they "forget" to bring out your inmate, hope for a nice guard. A nice guard is more likely to take pity on you sitting there forlornly without your inmate. Instead of leaving you there to rot for yet another hour, they may come over, lift up the receiver and ask who you are waiting to see. A really nice guard will actually call for your inmate, instead of simply noting the information.

#10 On weekends, don't expect to be let out of the secure visiting area before the hour is up. Perhaps apocryphal, a story has been recently circulating among the FCC visiting regulars that a very pregnant visitor was left locked up in the visitor's secure area for half an hour while guards on the other side of the door ignored her repeated ringings of the buzzer. Although she really had to use the restroom, they weren't about to man that desk where the visitor door buzzer is located, not until the visiting hour was up and they could buzz all of the visitors out.

#11 If you have claustrophobia, visiting in the tiny locked-from-the-outside secured area is probably not a good idea, especially since at peak visiting times, up to 24 people may be crammed in there with you (up to three people/inmate are allowed on a visit).

And finally, prison sartorial elements explained...

#12 Forget the stripes of old. Modern prison wear is indistinguishable from hospital scrubs, except an inmate doesn't get to choose his/her color. Blue is for misdemeanors, yellow for felons, and orange for the hard-core mean mothers who are in there for a good long time.

#13 What's with the pink? All FCC inmates wear bright pink T-shirts under their prison scrubs. This "pink-in-prison" trend was started by that redneck whack nut Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ , who promotes himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff". As sheriff, he, among other highly questionable acts, forced inmates to wear pink underwear as a way to subdue humiliate them. Although one can't say for sure what the thinking is behind FCC's T-shirt choices, it seems a safe bet that the motivator was not the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Not Just a Shoe

If I ever get around to compiling a list of defining moments in '08 - the Bush shoe incident will top the list. Seldom has Dubyah given me much to laugh about (lots to cry about, though) during his reign of incompetency, but today's headlines gave me plenty to snicker at.

The act of shoe hurtling is profound. On so many levels.

My first reaction, knowing little about Iraqi culture, was to snort and comment to my attentive canine crew that Dubyah didn't even rate a pie in the face.

But reading further - fortunately the New York Times was astute enough to provide cultural context for its readers - brought me to greater appreciation of the gesture.

Shoe-throwing. The ultimate insult in Iraq. Could it get any better?

And not just one shoe, but two shoes. Muntadar al-Zaidi is my new hero.

Not only do I love the fact that this reporter would stand up and throw his shoes at a man that deserves so much more thrown at him, but that he would do it first with one shoe and a shouted comment, and then with the other (no word as of yet whether reporters now will have to go to press conferences shoeless, or if TSA will implement a ban on all shoes at airports in response to this latest "terrorist" act).

I also greatly appreciate that Iraq has something that is universally understood throughout that country (and I suppose throughout the Arab world) as the insult nonpareil. The US, melting pot that it is, lacks these gestures of ultimacy. We have no single pejorative, no pithy insult or curse that hurtles from deliverer to recipient and leaves no room for alternate interpretation.

My father has always famously (and bitterly) complained that English was a piss-poor language for cursing. He noted that anglo imagination was limited to off-color commentary about sexual intercourse, mothers, and illegitimate offspring, and lacked the breadth of creativity of the Hungarians, who, in addition to the aforementioned subjects, utilize the entire pantheon of Catholic saints, and incorporate their legacy as horse-riding people of the steppes to boot.

How the Iraqi puppet government handles the disposition of their shoe-throwing reporter will be telling. Will it be an all expenses-paid trip to the lovely isle of Cuba on the Gitmo Express? Will he have as his cell mate that other shoe-loving "terrorist" that tried to take down a plane with his sneaks? Prior to the Bush years, no one would seriously consider internment without end as possible for someone who was simply engaging in his right of free expression (which is, after all, nominally what Bush says our government is seeking to secure in Iraq), but nowadays all bets are off.

It takes no stretch of imagination to suspect that Muntadar may pay a serious price for his outburst. One can hope, however, that the court of world opinion will prevail, thus preventing Bush, al-Malaki and their minions from extracting punishment for this very public humiliation. Otherwise, Muntadar might find himself one among the throng of "enemy combatants" rotting away in the tropics.

I realize that by now most will have seen the huge variety of video clips of this incident out on the web, but still, I cant resist embedding one here. It is truly is a fitting coup d' grace to the Bush Era Error.

Rest in Peace: Liberty, Justice and Freedom

For if they aren't dead yet, they soon will be

OK - admittedly, I have been giving the media a pass in the last few days because I can't stomach the Palinoia, but I have been occasionally popping in on the major media sites. Not once did I see coverage of the St. Paul raids, which happened four days ago. Hats off to my blogmate for bringing my attention to the coverage outrage.

I was in tears watching the various video clips of the raids (I gotta wonder when our government will take a page out of Beijing's playbook and start mass blocking of sites). What rolled forward on my screen were scenes that most of us have seen only in news coverage from Romania, South Africa, Iraq, Kosovo, Beijing, and countless African or Latin American countries that have suffered under an oppressive government.

In other words, ordinary citizens roughed up, searched and detained simply because they disagree (peaceably!) with the current regime. And worse - these people were detained at home. Not on the streets protesting, engaging in rioting or throwing stuff or yelling things or carrying signs. Nope, they were home, minding their own business and here came the police a-pounding on their doors.

Fifty-two years ago my father fled ahead of the police in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution. He escaped because he heeded warnings that the police were coming for him, and because he was a strong swimmer - he swam the Danube to thwart the mined borders. He left not simply because he was a target of the secret police, but because he could not face living under a fascist regime.

Soviet tank & soldier, streets of Budapest, 1956

As a political exile, my father faced arrest if he tried to enter Hungary. My grandparents first saw me at two - when my dad held me aloft over the heads of border guards in the Viennese train station. Although my grandparents could take the train from Hungary to Austria, they could not pass through the border - so they stayed on one side of the iron bars, and my father stayed on the other. No touching, no speaking. Just a small child held aloft over the heads of armed guards. And like so many million others, a family torn asunder by a government run amok.

After the Wall fell, my father and I went back to Budapest together. We walked the route my father took when he ran out of his office and joined the crowds marching to face the Soviet tanks. He showed me the place where my uncle narrowly missed execution at the hands of a soldier simply because the gun jammed. He took me past the building used for secret interrogations (now a luxury hotel - imagine the ghosts and the lingering screams that haunt those finely appointed rooms) and to the recently erected monuments that list his fallen friends. I met cousins who spent 30 years in prison - captured as young men, released as old men broken by decades spent in soviet gulags.

True, we are not yet to the point of tanks rolling in our streets, but the scenes captured on camera in St. Paul are not so far off. Heavily armed men refusing to answer questions and strong arming people; police raiding homes of ordinary people wearing ordinary clothes (certainly not a hint of camo, a kaffiyeh, beret, or pakol among the detainees - only Lands End, LL Bean and perhaps Sears).

After eight years of Bush, the Iraqi war, Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA flights, the growing likelihood that McCain might win the election (I don't think I can weather four years of plastic Palin), and now these raids, I realize that the possibility is growing that I may have to re-enact my father's flight, albeit in the other direction.

And so the screw turns. A generation later, this country has evolved into the very thing my father sought political asylum from : an oppressive police state where civil liberties are curtailed and people are controlled by fear and force.