Adventures of the Keyboard Kommandos

So Cannibal Anarchy/Revolution is better?

Red State fucks want to spend money on wars that others fight for them instead of spending money to help people in their communities.

@ManchuCandidate: They’re medievalists.

@FlyingChainSaw:
True dat, but I’ve known a few of the Canadian versions of Red Staters and most of them aren’t fit to cart the dead let alone be some snooty royal/nobleman.

That’s what I don’t really get about these folks. What gives these folks delusions of grandeur? Is it mercury poising? Fetal Alcohol syndrome?

Shit, I come from a noble background (my parents never let me forget) and if Koreans had the same royalty fetish as Red Staters then I’d be like 8th Low Lord of the Suk Bong Dungpile or some other stupid title. Hell, I count three Korean emperors and the 1st (very corrupt) Preznit of ROK as ancestors and might have some reason to act like a highborn inbred jackass since it is (sadly) in the blood. Fortunately, I grew up a commoner Cannuck who shits on the whole concept of lineage and only treats my family history as trivia.

@FlyingChainSaw: No shit, man. I have been engaged on a bulletin board in a 2-year running battle with an Opus Dei reactionary catholic right-winger who is frighteningly clever, though he often seems not to have any deep understanding of anything, no nuance, thats for sure. Anyway, he does indeed explicitly reject the enlightenment, the renaissance, and science itself (he says its atheistic materialism). He hates Vatican II because it espoused the doctrine of freedom of religion. You should hear him give a detailed moral defense of the Albigensian crusade. Medeival, consciously and literally. And he even knows his medeival philosophy.

We can’t afford it. Neither can our children.

I don’t see the problem here. This is clearly consistent with their opposition to Bush budget deficits the past eight years.

@ManchuCandidate: I think you’re forgetting that this is the land of the free, you filthy royalistcommunist! That means we’re free, among other things, to decide we’re royal! Because we can! We’re free!

I have decided, for instance, that I’m descended from Kenneth MacAlpin, first King of the Scots and Picts.

(The correct response? “Well paint me blue and call me Kenneth!”)

@ManchuCandidate: So would you have command authority over the Long Dong missile battallion in such capacity?

Descended of religious leaders on my dad’s side. At home I guess he’s be the equivalent of at least a cardinal. Unfortunately, I break the chain since you have to live there, have been in training since childhood among other qualifications, and basically have no other life.

@redmanlaw:
Nope. Heh.

I come from a long line of barefoot potato farmers.

Has anyone been watching the Daily Show? Is it just me, or does Jon Stewart’s idea to give the money to us to pay down our debts, which would then go to the banks, giving them money, sound REALLY FUCKING AWESOME?

@RomeGirl: Oh! I thought exactly the same way. It’s brilliant. Problematic to implement though. What if someone’s debt is from gambling or (like mine) booze? How could we be fair about it? Would it be only home owners living in their houses that would get the pay off? What about people who have multiple houses? What about folks who bought $400,000 houses (which unregulated banks approved) when they could only afford a $175,000 house?

FCS got us another C&L link.

But are we ready for our closeup, Mr. DeMille?

Could it be that we’re spending like there’s no tomorrow because, in fact, there isn’t?

Well, at least Barry is gonna attach some strings to that bailout money.

@blogenfreude: We have tits and fucking above the flag. What better can we do?

@WonkRefugee: “How could we be fair about it?”

In the same way we were fair about TARP. Just give everyone a truckload of money and assume they’ll use it responsibly despite all of history pointing to the contrary.

@Marcel Parcells: In a way I agree. Corporations are not citizens – they are corporations (the definition of which includes “many entities”. Fuck it all. If I choose to keep my debt and spend my $$ retail – it’s still going into the economy. On the other hand, I have been thinking of starting a solar powered ganja farm. Way outside of the white market!

@Pedonator:

Sadly, no. It’s a fake out made to look like they’re doing something while the taxpayer-funded orgy continues. Note:

Under the regulations announced today, executives at companies that have already received money from the Treasury Department will not have to make any changes.

Basically, all of the major–and many minor–banking players have already received bailout funds, so the new rules don’t apply to them (of course).

I’m just thinking out loud here, but why not require the bailout funds to be used to write down every mortgage holders’ principal balance at the receiving institutions by 20%, then recast the loans with the new lower payments?

That way you help many people in over their heads, while also rewarding responsible people who never took on more debt than they could afford. It’s obvs not a perfect solution, but it seems the most fair.

In truth, I don’t think any of the proposed solutions are going to work and the foreclosure/REO process will run its course. The only solution–the one they’ll eventually be forced to adopt once they run out of printed funny money ($bailout bux$)–will be to nationalize the zombie banks (Citibank, B of A, etc), sell off their assets and profitable divisions, then liquidate the remainder.

NB: I was gone for a while b/c they downsized my project and moved the survivors to a new space. I have a demi-cubicle now! I can pin stuff on the wall and everything!

The majesty of the law.

@blogenfreude: I took my Navajo rug from my office wall so I could work on the frame a little bit.

@redmanlaw: I have three drawers.

A friend from Santa Fe may be dropping by. We don’t have to clean up or anything. I think he’d like it here cuz we hang in the back of the room at Demrat party functions and throw down the snark.

Meanwhile: Madoff whistleblower rips on the SEC something fierce:

“If you flew the entire SEC staff to Boston, and sat them in Fenway Park, they wouldn’t be able to find first base.”

BOOM! Roasted!

Gregg has an Abramoff problem.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Former_Gregg_staffer_caught_up_in_0204.html

TJ/ Ron Regan just reported that Joe the Plumber is going to run for office, though “he’s not sure the American People are worthy of him”.

Comedy with a “K” right?

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: Does that mean we have veto power over his decision to run?

@WonkRefugee: If you can show paperwork for your debt, you can go to an office somewhere and someone will call up the creditor and conduct a wire transfer as you sit there and WEEP WITH JOY.

And can I just threadjack that Michael Phelps looks le hawt with the goatee. In photos it’s like an exclamation point at the top of his freakishly long, sexxy torso.

Mikey, I hope you already ca$hed those $ponsor$hip check$.

@mellbell:

If only….

@Original Andrew: Ever see his stalker?

@blogenfreude:

I’ll bet no one was laughing when she crushed the cameraman with those tatas.

@ManchuCandidate: This kind of reminds me of a story, but I’m not really sure how to tell it. I’m not even sure it’s a good story, but I’ll give it a shot. I used to live in a tony apt complex in Palo Alto, and even though the complex was fabulous, I didn’t have an apt with a balcony, so I had to smoke outside near the elevator. I’m such a friggin’ addict that over time I became acquainted with most of the people on my floor who would often stop to chat.

I smoked all hours of the day and night, and I saw this one guy a lot. Sometimes he was with his wife and two kids, sometimes he was with what, quite frankly, looked like low-budget working girls. He was always staggering about when he was with his special friends.

So, one day he got out of the elevator alone and decided to chat me up. After a while he invited me to his apt, and I did a quick risk assessment and decided that he was drunk enough for me to kick his ass if he tried anything I didn’t like, so why not?

He slurred about how his wife left him and was trying to get full custody of the kids and his mother had flown in from Korea and was on the wife’s side, blah blah blah, and then he went on this rant about how he was damn near royalty and his grandfather (?) started some hospital in Korea, or donated the land for it, built it, something like that, blah blah. So, he’s drunkenly bragging about his family creds and how he runs some sort of business out of his home and he’s loaded blah blah. At this point I was totally bored and trying to figure out how I was going to get out of there without hurting his feelings. He was clearly the most bereft trustafarian I’d ever met, and I did empathizesympathize. (I do not come from money.)

But then he pulled out some book of his family’s accomplishments in Korea. And there was a picture of his grandfather and the hospital and he went on and on about this damned hospital, and I was like, Wow — he must have some serious self-esteem issues because his family has set the bar so high. On the one hand, he’s proud of his family, but on the other, he hasn’t really made his mark on the world yet (if he ever will), and he’s feeling familial pressure and self-imposed pressure, and on top of all of that, he seems to have a drinking problem. So, I decided to just be his audience. I didn’t offer him any advice or act as a sounding board or anything. I just kept him company until he passed out.

So, Manchu, I’ve asked you for this before, and I’m going to ask you for this again. I am very interested in your thoughts on identity. Before I deep sixed my blog, I had asked several people, and all the Stinquers, if they would write an essay about identity (racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, whatever) that I could post. Now that I think I’m under the radar at work w/r/t my internet persona, I’m going to start rebuilding the blog. Please write an essay about identity for me, Manchu. I would be honored.

@Prommie: Coal miners and farmers. Handymen and janitors. Practical nurses and secretaries.

@Original Andrew: Yes, but it’s anticipated that those who already have received money will be coming back to the trough. In that case, the new restrictions on executive pay will apply to them.

@Original Andrew: I want to bitchslap the asshole who took the pictures of Michael toking and sold them (I’m assuming) to the media. Way to harsh the buzz.

@JNOV:
It certainly does dovetail nicely because his story sums up many of my uncles and cousins.

My father was actually the ninth legit child of a total 13 (yes, gramps got around), but didn’t grow up in the same rarefied air that my older uncles did and is a lot rougher round the edges and more, shall we say, earthier than they are. This attitude I inherited (to my father’s dismay.)

JNOV, my darling, I’m about 3 paras into the essay, but got sidetracked. I will see what I can do. I’m hoping to have something done for you by the end of March.

The only reason I pointed out my family background is that there are a lot of people around of many backgrounds who can lay some legit claim to being royalty or nobility BUT don’t or won’t. Whereas we have a bunch of imbecilic dumbasses who somehow want to return to that stupid age of mankind of master/slave known as feudalism in the mistaken belief they alone lay claim to being idiot “Lord of the Manor.”

Regardless of our family’s legacies, I believe that we make are our own lives. Either we choose to live in the shadows of our ancestors or we make our own. I prefer to make my own (very small) shadow.

@Pedonator: Bingo, spend, what the hell, there is no tomorrow.

@ManchuCandidate: The ones who tout descent from royalty are harmless. Its the ones who think that their current position is functionally equivalent to royalty who are dengerous. Spend time among them, they judge people on their descent, its not rare, its common, they judge people on being from “good family.” Others will be judged deficient because they “come from nothing.” This is the overwhelming sense of entitlement that the children of money have, THEY ARE ROYALTY, they don’t need to trace descent to some offshoot of some european royal family.

The Bush appointees, kids of 25 sent to Iraq to run the country, who had no qualifications or experience, nada, bupkis, yet they felt entitled to it. The legions of morons Bush shoved into the government, the Brownies, he was just the most prominent example. Fucking fucks.

The LNS message board was always full of those kind of statements.

@Promnight:
The Bush appointees, kids of 25 sent to Iraq to run the country, who had no qualifications or experience, nada, bupkis, yet they felt entitled to it.

And got the same, um, outstanding results that colonial Brit nobility got among the brown folk.

Born on third base and think they hit a triple.

@JNOV: I started my family story for you but didn’t get very far. Who cares about the cataclysmic decline of a crazy East Prussian “landed gentry” family?

@JNOV: I’ll do a short essay on identity for you. I am Patrick. I am never anything but Patrick. I don’t really think of myself as Irish, or as a lawyer, or even as an “intellectual.” If I have any identification with any identifiable group, it is poor working people. I am my father’s son, and he was a poor working man who died without a cent and my brothers and sisters and I chipped in to pay for the funeral. He is the symbol for me of whats wrong with this society, the symbol for all the people like him, who had been told that if they are good at their job and work hard, they will achieve the American Dream. He fought in the war, he came home and went to work, got married, had six children, stayed married for almost 60 years till he died, raised us all to be productive people and to do better than he did. He worked harder than any human being I have ever seen, he worked 2 and 3 jobs to make a bare living. He never complained, he went to work sick, he went to work and gave all, every day of his life, for people who spit on him. He was honest to a degree thats insane. At the end he had nothing but $1,300 a month from SS and the money us kids sent.

I have a little of the problem thats the theme of Good Will Hunting. I grew up poor, started working at 13, worked every summer of my life, my friends were the other poor kids. I was so clueless, I didn’t know I was poor, that there was this invisible class divide that separated me and my friends from those kids who had gone to the private school before high school and never invited us to their parties. I only picked up on it much later.

And all my friends, they, well, they went into construction and meth consumption and beer, they drifted and went to jail, but I was some kind of freakish genius and I went to college and could not understand why they could not. And I drifted aimlessly upward, with no plan, no ambition, winding up with a law degree, a lawyer, and there’s a guilt, because I know I am no better than them, they had talents and they had as much right to opportunity as I did. But I felt I was betraying my father, even as I made him proud, and I felt I was betraying all my friends, as I left them behind, had no connection left with them, it was so so so awkward, to look up an old friend, I in my preppy lawyer resort wear, they in their nascar T-shirts, I felt the same, I did not feel I was better than them, but they thought I had changed. Awkward, painful.

My best friend, Gentry, last I heard he was still a bartender somewhere in Pheonix. He went out there about when I graduated undergrad, he wanted to go to Arizona State and study anthropology and become an archeologist. 15 years later he was still bartending, and conversations, we still kept in touch on the telephone, became hard, he talked about pain in the ass restaurant managers who wouldn’t give him a day off to go to the drag races, I was hung up in a world of billable hours and who is gonna make partner.

That was 12 years ago, there is a story to why we lost touch, or more, why he cut off relations. I don’t know if he is even alive. I search on the internet every now and then.

@Promnight: @ManchuCandidate: The main reason I left South Carolina–apart from the obvious political issues–was to get far enough away from my family’s influence that I could KNOW that anything and everything I accomplished was on my own merit and not because of who my great-grandfathers were.
JNOV, I don’t recall being asked to write on racial identity for you, but if you ever want to know what it’s like to live among, and come from, the American “aristocracy,” let me know. [My most shameful secret? I’m related to Dubya through both GHWB and Babs. Please don’t shun me–we can’t help our family backgrounds].

@Mistress Cynica:
You’re related to Franklin Pierce?

@Ewalda: Do you want to come have lunch with me, Cynica, and Benedick next week in SF? Drop me a gmail if you’re free.

@SanFranLefty: Like he’ll want to be seen in public with me now…

@Mistress Cynica: All I know about the South Carolina aristocracy I know from The Lord’s of Discipline, and other such soap operas by Conroy. Tell me more! Did you “come out?”

@Promnight: BTW, south jersey is a truly strange place, people are not really aware that Atlantic City is south of Philly as much as east, Cape May is at the same latitude as Baltimore, the Mason-Dixon line splits Cape May county in half. It has some southern traditions, that live, like old black shoeshine dudes in the lobbies of professional buildings who call everyone “sir,” and roadside barbecue stands, just like in Georgia. And in Atlantic City, every spring, the black community holds debutante cotillions. Its bizarre.

@Promnight: Oh yes, darling. I was presented in SC and at the National Cotillion in DC, where Strom Thurmond (close family friend) sponsored me. I caused quite the scandal at my SC debut, because I wasn’t wearing a bra with my dress. This led fellow debutantes to refuse to wear their insanely uncomfortable strapless push-up bras. I felt like quite the feminist.
Re Lords of Discipline: my father went to the Citadel, and Pat Conroy’s mother’s beach hose was next door to ours.

@Promnight: Paint it red, and there’s a lot of similarities with my story. I’m here in this chair in my warm house with Mrs RML, the dogs, etc not from falling upward, however, but as a result of my plan set in motion when I was in the eighth or ninth grade.

@Mistress Cynica: Most people aren’t aware of what a unique and strange place South Carolina is, its the only place I have ever been called a “Damn yankee” to my face, for example. The way the local newspapers report on the progress of the hazing of the freshman at the Citadel is so charming, and scary. Most people think Mississipi and Alabama are the deep south, they don’t realize that South Carolina is the most unreconstructed of the confederate states.

When I was younger and poorer and all my vacations were camping vacations, I discovered Hunting Island, and went there several times. Sea turtles. Gullah. Red headed Irish confederates selling shrimp and cursing the damn yankees they were serving.

The social scene I got from Conroy.

@redmanlaw: I am still conflicted about those close childhood friends, who followed such a different path. They are my past. The disconnect, its like a disconnect with my own younger self, like I have no past, sprang into being upon graduation. I feel no “home,” nowhere I feel like I am back among friends and can relax. Fucking life. I miss my friends, I miss the young me.

@Promnight: I miss the young me too, almost all my dearest friends gathered in San Francisco. We had such simple pleasures then, hanging out in dingy Western Addition apartments, hoofing it everywhere, the occasional excursion to Pt. Reyes throwing ourselves at the dunes while tripping on LSD and eating great cheese and spring sweet peas, camping near Bohemian Grove hoping to get a clear line on the powerful douchebags that busily ruined our futures…ah, such good times.

@JNOV: I’ll write you my story one of these days. Lots of mental illness, alcoholism, suicide, and Irish drinking songs involved. Not the happiest of ethnic stories. More a fucking cliche.

@Promnight: I know what you mean. One night Mrs RML and I were out for a beer and burg at the neighborhood dive (The Green Onion, where part of “North Country” was shot) when I ran into a guy from my tribe who I was on a fence building crew with when I was a college drop out. Dude had just gotten sprung from jail in Oklahoma on a drug bust (evidentiary problem, I’m guessing). He was there selling a half-pound of weed to another guy. I heard recently that he went to the hole for assault with a deadly weapon.

Another time just a few years ago a high school friend was working the counter at the convenience store where I bought some gas. It was deeply embarrassing for the both of us

@JNOV: Ditto SFL for my story, basically.

Irish and German, lots of alcohol, sea chanteys, long years with bony chickens on hardscrabble clay, trying to raise a few vegetables and scrawny beef cattle. Enthusiasm for racism, church, high-school football and rodeo were the only things that kept my ancestors alive, it sometimes seems.

I knew my great-great-grandmother on my maternal side. She came over from Germany and lived through the Chicago Fire. On my paternal side, it’s hard to get any answers about anyone beyond my grandparents’ parents. Never bothered to tap the Moroni database, but my brother thinks he’s discovered some medieval shield that somehow represents our paternal fambly. Like, yay! We have a coat of arms!

Fuck that, I am firmly in the camp that believes your family is the one you choose.

@JNOV: my story involves both Jewish (Russian Jews who posed as Germans on their way to avoid the Bolsheviks, including taking my German last name, and then bailed out to get out of the SS’s way) and black blood (half from upstate Florida, the other half fresh off the Ellis Island boat in the 1920s from the Caribbean). My maternal grandmother was the youngest of 13. There are so many stories there it’s hard to begin.

@Promnight: I often feel the same way. Los Angeles is my home city, but I don’t feel like I’m home there, because the old friends there aren’t really those kind of friends, if they ever were.

Take a light-skinned kid born to two NYC parents, raise him in L.A. with friends of all colors, then place him in the snow-white Denver ‘burbs at 11 years old to get a decent public education. I’m still working through a hodgepodge of racial/class authenticity bullshit a decade later….because after Denver, it was college in Iowa, and by then, my parents had both returned to L.A., and I realized that in connecting with childhood friends again post-graduation that I’d grown up suburban and they’d come up hood.

Not “hood” in the literal, urban sense, but when I was listening to 90s alt-rock and learning to play guitar, they were cranking everything Death Row, buying turntables, and turning their boom-boxes into PAs with a mic. There’s a cultural gap there.

Those same friends are mostly living at home with their folks still and don’t have logical careers or solid job prospects. I finally admitted I’d caught the journalism bug from my folks, got the hell out of town less than two years after graduating, and almost hate going back because there is much more than just a part of me that doesn’t have anything to relate to them in the way I did when I was 9 or 10.

@Prommie, Pedonator: I don’t miss my youth. For various reasons I didn’t take full advantage of it. I’m getting out and having fun now while I can before me and my buddies are having wheel chair races.

@redmanlaw: …and because of my youthful excesses (shit, not that I’ve ever overcome a tendency to excess) I’m probably due for the wheel chair real soon.

Did you say wheel chair races? Woohoo!

@All: Thank you for your thoughtful responses. I am on my way out the door to work, but I’ll log on this evening and give each response the attention is deserves. The whole concept of identity fascinates me. It’s a very personal thing, and I respect that. Also, geographical identity interests me greatly, so if you don’t want to write about your lineage but you’d like to write about what it’s like to grow up in X (Cynica touched on this), that’s great, too. Love you all! See you later this evening.

@Promnight: OMG, our summer place was on Fripp Island, the next island over from Hunting. We drove over to St Helena to buy tomatoes from the road stands and shrimp off the boats. I still love the smell of the marshes.

@ManchuCandidate: Hey, no worries about the time frame. I’m just happy to read that you’re in the process of writing it. I believe that we make are our own lives. God I love you, Manchu, and I hate to disagree with you, but I think this statement smacks of rugged individualism, which, in my point of view, is a myth. There is no such thing as a self-made man, and when people give me compliments about getting through college and grad school as a single parent, I make sure to tell them about all of the people who helped me along the way. I didn’t do it alone, and there should be about twenty names in addition to mine on the sheepskins. And the tax-payers of NJ subsidized my state school — I used to go nuts on Republican classmates who would bitch about taxes while they were paying a pittance for their education. I’d be like, “Then write a check to the state of NJ for about $75K, cuz that’s what you owe it for your education.”

@Ewalda: Me! Me! Me! I wanna know about it!

@Promnight: So, do I have your permission to cut and paste this comment to my blog? How’s Acknowledge My Hippo going?

@Promnight: My mom was the 1st runner up, or whatever the hell you call it, at her cotillion in AC back in the 60s. I think a small part of her wishes that I’d been in one.

@SanFranLefty: Thanks, my love. :-*

@Pedonator: your family is the one you choose. I am beginning to believe this, live this.

@Mistress Cynica: Please, yes, I do want to know!

@Signal to Noise: You and I could be related. I have Jewish roots and Gullah roots and other African roots and Eastern Band of Cherokee roots, and (this is now disputed) Lakota OR Blackfeet roots — friggin’ old people, their memories and oral history! Anway, French, German and Welsh roots. I’m the friggin’ UN. And I’ve been dissed by both white and black people because of my light bright and damn near white appearance.

And YES to all of you who have a hard time relating to your old friends. I have trouble relating to my cousins, and I have lost touch with my childhood friends. I’ve connected with some friends I met in my early 20s through FB, but even at that point of my life, I was changing.