Author Archives: TK

America Redux

This Used to Be America Special Holiday Encore
0riginally posted October 15, 2007

Preachin’ democracy…

It’s still preachin’. With all that entails. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending so much time listening to country, mountain, and rural gospel lately. They ain’t afraid of no preachin’….

Anyway, when the phrase “This used to be America”* came to my lips the other day (in one of those listening-to-the-news-too-much rants my cat is getting used to) I sat down to write what I hoped might be some classic agitprop… I don’t think I actually got there… and I wasn’t actually going to let this out of the work folder but, I dunno, I listened to it this morning and thought, shoot, I’m feeling this. I’m feeling it right now.

When the general once in charge of the US war on — excuse me, in — Iraq calls that catastrophic misadventure a “nightmare without end” — I figure there’s some wiggle room for a little Monday morning jeremiad from an aging, disillusioned US businessman (that would be, you know, me.)

This used to be America, you know.

But we could still be who we know we should be…
This Used to Be America

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lyrics
This Used to Be America

This used to be America
This used to be the land of the free
This used to be the United States
but nothin’s like it used to be

we put ourselves in the hands of fools
threw our birthrights away
put the bottom line at the top of our world
let the god of greed hold sway

it takes 200,000 bullets
to kill one enemy
that what the DoD numbers say**
if you don’t count peripheral casualties

Americans don’t torture
We don’t kill recklessly
thats what the man in the white house says
that’s how we want it to be
but it’s gettin’ pretty hard to believe

blowback’s a bitch
but how could we know?
though our experts kept telling us so
we fed the tiger we got by the tail
and now we just can’t bear to let him go

This used to be America
This used to be the land of the free
but I swear it’s not too late
for the United states
we can still be who we know
we should be

* When I googled the phrase — which I figured had certainly been in use before — I found it had been the working title for a book by…

** DOD – Department of Defense; this figure of 200,000 bullets for every enemy death in Afghanistan and Iraq is based on US Department of Defense estimates of enemy soldiers killed and the amount of ordnance used in training and combat. Yes… one FIFTH OF A MILLION BULLETS for every enemy soldier killed. Of course, this does not count “peripheral casualties” — for which estimates range from about 25,000- 30,000 (more than the number of enemy killed — this is the US government’s estimate) to as many as a 100,000. Of course, that does not include those who died unnecessarly from malnutrition, privation, and other war-related causes which some well-grounded studies have suggested range from 500,000 to one million extra deaths.

Wallowing again…

Not Enough of Nothin’

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Not Enough of Nothin'

New song alert!

Paradigms shift.

Just as Californians get used to walking on constantly shifting tectonic plates, scientists — the savvy ones, anyhow — become accustomed to revising not only the fine points of their understanding but, from time to time, throwing out the old way of looking at things and adopting an entirely new perspective.

Not Enough of Nothin’

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It doesn’t happen overnight, mind you. The gatekeepers of scientific knowledge are cautious and the Scientific Method — the practices and precepts which have evolved over centuries that attempt to keep the accepted understanding grounded in verifiable observation, with conclusions that are derived from and verified by repeatable, carefully measured testing and experimentation — the Scientific Method is designed to err on the side of caution.
It’s a discipline and a dynamic which helps assure that science will tend to give us the best answers available at any given time, balancing untethered imagination and unfettered thinking with careful observation bounded by logic and an adherence to accepted procedure and principle.

Unfortunately, just as there are those who confuse scientific caution with rigidity or even fear of the unknown, there are those whose tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty is so diminished that they must continually attempt to shoehorn their experience into the rigid confines of binary classification.

These are the people for whom there is no gray area… no in-between… no nuance or gradation –little tolerance for complexity or ambiguity. Something either is one way or it is the other.

These are, of course, the people who are drawn to the extremes, clustering like so many iron filings around the poles of a magnet, slaves to their attraction to the absolute and the unambiguous.

This approach is, of course, a highly unscientific one, seemingly destined to keep true believers and absolutists at the fringes of knowledge and reasoned thought — yet the adherents to this type of intellectual monomania often claim that their beliefs are obvious and inescapable and that only those who are either crazy or willfully, perversely disingenuous could argue against them. Ask them to justify a position and, after some sputtering, they often stammer or blurt out, “Well, it should be obvious to any intelligent person…”

These folks enshrine personal predilection — even superstition — as principle. They attempt to institutionalize idiosyncratic belief as universal a priori.

If you’re one of ’em — this song’s for you…

lyrics
Not Enough of Nothin’

[Yes… I really did mis-sing the very first line of the song. The correct lyrics are below.]

Not enough of nothing
and nothing more to say
my heads filled up with everything
that we didn’t do today

Not really nowhere
not that it feels that way
not really never
but certainly not today

Everything that must be will be
and everything that won’t be won’t
If you think you want to tell me the ending
do me a favor — don’t

not enough of maybe
too much yes and no
not enough of in between
not enough I don’t know

Too much is certain
too much is bound to be wrong
too many times you’ve bought your own lies
you’d think you’d realize by now

Superstition is where you find it…

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Bold & Rational Men

The search for cause and effect has not always been carried out with a rigorous methodology carefully crafted to return reliable results.

Sometimes, folks make cognitive leaps that are breathtaking in their intuitive scope but are still just plain wack.

Many supposedly scientific westerners have elaborate personal systems of superstition which they keep separate from both their secular science and whatever formal religion they may choose to practice.

The supposedly hard-headed Chinese Communist ruling oligarchy picked the suposedly supremely lucky western calendar date of August 8, 2008 (8-8-8) to kick off the olympics. (8 is a lucky number in Chinese culture for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the it sounds like the word for prosper — not to mention that the characters for a double 8 resemble the popular shuang xi “double joy” design.)

Bold & Rational Men

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previous versions
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Friday, August 10, 2007

Now, today’s date really had little or nothing to do with my picking this song for today’s post; I’ll admit it. If anything, I was thinking about an ongoing dialog I’ve been tentatively participating in regarding unfair prejudice against the religious.

Sometimes how one comes in on a contentious dialog depends on who has already staked out what position — and in what fashion — even if one’s own beliefs are all but immutable.

Normally I find myself lining up with those who profess to exalt rationalism and a scientific approach.

But all too often in some sectors these days, one finds those who claim adherence to scientific principles making irrational or unsupportable, often absolutist claims, flying far from the surly bonds of logic and fact.

Maybe, like beat dogs, some of us who’ve been subjected to one too many proselytic haranguement simply go nuts at the mention of religion; folks whose abreaction to repeated attempts to convert them to some religion or another have metastasized into a generalized scorn for anyone who dares entertain the idea that there might be something beyond this universe or something which transcends or perhaps informs our physical reality.

Even as science peels back layer after layer of how this universe works — revealing increasingly that the more we know, the more profound and strange the next questions become — some of these individuals cling to the notion that they know with absolute certainty that there is nothing beyond what we now see and think we know.

previous versions
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Friday, August 10, 2007

lyrics
Bold & Rational Men
Bold and Rational Men

Come now y’ bold and rational men
and march y’ straight ahead
y’ fear not the fire of the dragon
nor the carrious teeth of death

And come now, lad
fear not the gods
you’ve often said we’re all alone
d’n’cha see your where your path must lie
straight into the unknowable
good speed now
you’re on your own

But wait now put your hand on the earth
and see where your life flows from
this good dark earth
is the mother of us all
y’know you are her son

and come and gaze into the sky
see how dark and deep
you are the prodigal lost in time
lost in a dream kept sleep