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The penultimate last word

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I See What You Did There

January 16th, 2012 by Bruce
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So Guv’nah Brownback (R-Koch) has floated the idea of restoring some funding to the state arts commission. Naturally there are strings: the restored budget is less than a third of what was cut last year, and the proposal makes no attempt to approach the money needed to qualify for NEA grants. It also combines the arts agency with the film commission, an agency whose work is by nature temporary and project-based.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too, at least not without baking the cake first. Like, with heat, man. You know? Okay, my point is this: is it so implausible that a flat $200,000 budget was the plan all along? Here’s an idea that seems like a reasonable compromise, and the man who floated it, a shrewd negotiator. The effect, though, is that not only is the bar for measuring compromise now lower, but as a bonus, the public discourse about the virtues of public arts support has shifted rightward. Rather than celebrating the obvious economic, educational and long-term benefits of a functional arts life on a state level, supporters have to use the words “essential” and “non-essential.” If you’re a person who nickels-and-dimes all public expenditures, this is a juicy plum indeed: long after you’ve replaced one fool with another, you can still ask people which they’d prefer: a jarful of piss, or a jarful of peanut butter. As if the person holding the position of politician — or artist — were more important than the institution. (This point is articulated beautifully here.)

Unsure which side of the line dividing advocacy from paranoia this lands me.

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I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me that Restricts Me from Being the Master

January 12th, 2012 by Bruce
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Good news for haters: a policy clarification recoded into the Popul Vuh has eliminated the twin burdens of self-examination and empathy that once robbed us of our First-Amendment rights. Upshot being, until the Hero Twins return, it’s open season, no matter what your religious, racial or economic flavor preference is.

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We are the $99

November 17th, 2011 by Bruce
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Apologies to Sharon Lee and LIHI for the inconvenience and embarrassment this tenant dispute has caused. Direct action does that sometimes. It’s no surprise she would call SeaSol anarchists — twice in eight paragraphs! — or try to impugn them as trolls from the right, even if three minutes on the Internet puts that charge to rest. She’s hurt, she has interests to protect, and calling them racists and anarchists is easier than actually resolving the original dispute, which could happen for around 1/20 of one percent of her annual salary.

Kudos too to the Examiner for choosing sides in so many of the important issues in our community. After braving the great Utopia-vs.-Groupon battle, it’s a wonder they have any energy left. As their fig-leaf disclaimer indicates, they reserve the right to decline to publish abusive articles. But if you’re not going to exercise that right, you could at least do your readers the favor of reading up on both sides of an issue before handing the mic to just one of them. That’s how a newspaper would do it. Those folks have really taken to heart their mission of out-Weeklying the Weekly.

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Max and Marcus: a Fractured Fairy Tale

July 20th, 2011 by Bruce
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Max doesn’t like lima beans. But Max lives in Limabean County, where the lima bean farmers, the menu at the local diner, and the annual Lima Days festival make it hard for him to express his true nature. So, to fit in, he chokes down the mealy little booger-beans as best he can. This doesn’t make Max a lima bean lover. It makes him a guy who alters his behavior to gain acceptance. His behavior doesn’t change his basic orientation as someone who doesn’t like lima beans.

All this pretending depresses Max. So he seeks out a man named Marcus, who runs an operation that promises to help people learn to love lima beans. (The farmers love his work; also, he accepts Medicaid.) They school Max in plant biology, and in the glory of the Green Giant’s wondrous bounty, and tell him that while savoring a delectable (yet imaginary) pinto bean is tempting, it is sinful and wrong. They feed him pinto and ipecac salad. Lo and behold, Max feels even worse than he did before he came to see Marcus. And he never does learn to like lima beans. But because he continues to eat them, especially in Marcus’ presence, Marcus claims Max as a convert and crows about his success.

Max feels defeated and continues to live his life miserably as a grimly self-identifying lima bean eater, forgoing the pleasures of his beloved pinto bean. He dies withered and alone — and canonized.

The moral of the story: Don’t pray away what’s okay.

Hat tips to mi hermano David Virden, and to Edward Everett Horton for narrating the original Rocky and Bullwinkle FFT.

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A Man of Wealth and Taste

June 14th, 2011 by Bruce
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Here in Blogtopia, there’s nothing wrong with writing something just to pay off a nice alliterative headline. It should be different in the majors though. I’m not expecting a missionary discussion in Newsweek, but I do expect them to distinguish slippery parody from actual doctrine. We’ve survived a number of Mormon Moments already; by now we should be well inured to any predicted glory that might come from this one — or the next.

Formal complaints aside, there is a moment to savor here, though not the one Newsweek is talking about: Mitt Romney is at a point when past screwups are temporarily forgotten, and he has yet to re-yoke himself to the plow. Until the capitulation begins, he’s the most principled national figure the Republicans have right now — a bar set so low I guaran-goddam-tee you Obama loses no sleep at all. All it takes to appear rational among Republican presidential aspirants is to tell the camera that Sharia law will not be applied by U.S. courts. As Chris Rock says: what do you want, a cookie?

Also, sir, the devil is in the details. At Mormon.org, this tax-exempt group articulates its core values, many of which are hard to not share: strong families across past, present and future generations, education, freedom of choice and good citizenship. Setting aside the elevation of proselytism, you have to wonder about the fine print, though — that is, how you get from the glory of the immortal spirit to Bruce McConkie and his unique brand of self-esteem, or from “unselfishness, honesty and loyalty” to a concerted effort to deny millions of people their civil rights. In the nineteenth century, it took that tribe twenty years, give or take, to go from one end of the rifle to the other. If they had an Internet, they’d have been on both ends simultaneously.

Among religions, doctrinal nuttiness only differs in the language and the iconography, which makes Romney’s private practices and rituals irrelevant. He might as well identify himself as model minority and accuse Pawlenty of exercising white privilege. But honestly, even the Mormons’ ethnic cleansing at the hands of the very gangsters who ultimately started the Civil War* matters far less than the actual executive decisions of an actual 21st-century governor. As a citizen, what moves me is the extent to which an individual adheres to or diverges from political party doctrine. Measured thusly, Romney deserves credit for drawing the ire of those who would keep everyone on the same script, and taking mavericky stances on human-generated climate change or building a functioning statewide healthcare system.

* The Wiki does an excellent job of recreating Missouri’s 1830s political climate, and provides a lesson in how to breed a generation of thugs and victims: The governor, Lilburn Boggs, “passively saw community leaders and officials sign demands for Mormon withdrawal, and next force a gunbarrel contract to abandon the county before spring planting…anti-Mormon goals were reached in a few simple stages. Executive paralysis permitted terrorism, which forced Mormons to self-defense, which was immediately labeled as an “insurrection,” and was put down by the activated militia of the county. Once Latter-day Saints were disarmed, mounted squads visited Mormon settlements with threats and enough beatings and destruction of homes to force flight.”

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