Alternative Pastimes to Sticking Pins in One's Self

It's a Thursday morning and so I am sitting in the bookshop with my nose buried in this laptop.

Yesterday night I began to watch the Republican convention's second day (not including the first day which essentially did not take place because of Tropical Storm Isaac), but I then decided that my time would be much better spent reading a romance novel.

THE PROBLEM is that there was a great deal of hypocrisy, criticizing the President for problems of the Republican congressmen and voters themselves. Later on, according to the reports that I've read, Paul Ryan also said a good deal of things which simply weren't true; so it seems that I really didn't miss much worth hearing.

For instance, when I think of exorbitant spending I think of the Bush-era military sending planes to Afghanistan with pallets full of dollar bills which amount to billions of dollars — which then disappear; and invading Iraq in the absence of any threat to the US from that quarter. Whereas the criticisms of government spending under the Obama presidency are, in fact, criticizing worthwhile and necessary projects like social security, health care funding, and keeping the American-based car manufacturing industry working. Why are the Republicans complaining about this now when this would so clearly have been better applied and undeniably effective during the Bush presidency (they are, after all, still in the majority in the House of Representatives, and profit from a divided Democratic congress)?

I came across a handy graph which showed — and I can't believe this is true — that the tax cuts which were introduced under George W. Bush are in fact a greater contributor of public debt than all of our wars in the past decade. It is the Republican Party who are refusing to allow these cuts to be even partially repealed. I know that debt is calculated two ways — private debt and government debt — so I haven't sorted out yet what the graph precisely means, but this seems pretty egregious.

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THERE was also lamentation that Obama was cutting defence spending — a policy which was in fact approved earlier that night by Rand Paul, who said something like, "not every dollar spent on the military is necessary or well spent" — by John McCain.

If, in fact, protective body armour for soldiers were being withheld, as they were under the Bush administration — if, in fact, health care benefits were being denied to soldiers and their immediate dependents, as they were under the Bush administration and I think still are — if soldiers were being fired instead of being allowed to come home from a gruelling decade-long war whilst still being permitted to redeploy elsewhere if they wish — then these criticisms might have a basis.

But the track record of the Republican administration was terrible and lousy on this point, and what the Democratic administration is I think obviously cutting, is the extraordinarily enormous funds which flow to dubious private contractors and murdering, torturing and in the end still unreliable 'allies,' thereby enriching conscienceless, sleazy, do-nothing and morally as well as actually gutless civilians like the stockholders of Halliburton.

What I imagine is that there is a lot of defence-related research in Arizona, or headquarters of security firms, whom McCain is representing with his specious bunkum.

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EARLIER in the evening Mitch McConnell livened things up by portraying a laughable picture of "Western Europe," where of course I happen to live. Through a series of events which he didn't quite explain, innovation has apparently died out here, and we have elections about whether people should have to work, and we incur debts which we cannot pay. (That last point, of course, is true. What about the US's trillion-dollar debt, though, which was not caused by enormous social spending?)

Besides, Obama plays too much golf, he noted in a generally rather petty speech where he said things like "left-wing fever swamps" and referred to Obama's iPod playlist, which I thought was divulged four years ago and is no longer really with the times.

McCain also sounded a little disconnected, since the unfortunate Iranian revolution and his reference to Neda Soltan are no longer really up to date with the situation even in Iran in isolation. I wondered how much some politicians are really aware of what is going on aside from what is channelled to them by somewhat calcified intelligence interests and thinktanks. His idea that the United States could have effected the success of that revolution, without precipitating a very bloody war and causing the US to be blamed for any problem in Iran into the next millennium, was so absolutely foreign to reality that one imagined that he had specifically gone to a thinktank full of some form of happy hallucinogenic. What was undeniably and straight-out loony was that he said, "People don't want less of America; they want more."

That is the kind of stupid advice which gets people killed. Besides, I like America in many respects, but I have no intention of being in any way subject to its economic and military hegemony, even living in a friendly state; and it's ridiculous cheek to suggest that I am in need of the stars and stripes when in fact I have a perfectly decent government of my own.

But by referring to the wellbeing of persons outside of the United States and by encouraging an interest in their security and happiness, and strikingly by not talking all that militaristically, he did sound like the great altruist of the crowd.

In a minor niggle, however, he complained about the way in which the Obama administration has supposedly leaked secret information about the Navy Seals' (in my view kind of justified) assassination of Osama bin Laden to Kathryn Bigelow and other filmmakers. He did not mention the book which one of those Navy Seals is releasing on September 4th, which was not submitted to the Defence Department beforehand for checking to see if it reveals information that endangers others even though this is the ordinary thing to do, and which goes into the assassination in apparently great detail. (The Associated Press has seen and partially described the book.)

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Rand Paul took up the 'small government' cudgel and thought that James Madison would agree with him that 'Obamacare' is unconstitutional. He referred to small businesses run by immigrants and specifically Vietnamese, so there was that. "In America, as opposed to the Old Country, success was based on merit," he stated, in the kind of — to employ the vernacular — half-assed invocation of history which makes the (Islamic) history minor in me a bit unhappy. It is hard, I think, to argue that settlers who worked from sun-up to sunset to clear ground, sow crops, and reap them were not worthy, and yet there was little protection and no success for them if, through no fault of their own, the weather was adverse or machinery broke without the possibility of replacement or if their neighbours (claim jumpers, for instance) preyed on them. This is where a little critical reading even of children's literature — the Little House on the Prairie, for instance — would be helpful.

As interests turned to railway and bridge construction, industrial-scale mining, enormous canneries and logging operations, etc., I've learned through western novels that in fact there were monopolies and that there was corruption; and it was not necessarily a testament to the fineness of one's character if (by hook or by crook) one secured the capital and continued investments necessary to succeeding as a business. There were people who did succeed in industry and technological innovation who were not, in fact, very nice people — Henry Ford, for instance.

One merely hopes that, nowadays, the human rights and equal legal and police protection are better secured for the weak, and that the education and health care system give people the chance to do something else if they like or to be able to continue farming or mining or whatever else it is they do.

He also nodded to that thread of libertarianism which has coincided with liberalism in the past decade by saying, "we must never trade our liberty for any fleeting promise of security." This statement was well received by the audience.Then he endorsed Mitt Romney instead of his father.

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THE VIDEO which celebrated Georges W. and H.W. Bush — the former of whom was pointedly not invited to the convention,  — was a curiosity. Barbara Bush, who was interviewed separately together with Laura, was evidently the sharpest individual there. G.H.W.'s contentions that his son exemplifies integrity and that "there was never a taint of scandal around his presidency" merely inspired befuddlement. It raised profound semantic questions regarding the word "scandal." Laura Bush exuded passive aggression — she mentioned the incident where the family dog attacked a journalist with more I felt of a reminiscent air than for any other reason — and stressed how very supportive and gratitude-inspiring the people at the convention to which neither she nor her husband were invited were. The other odd thing was that G.H.W. gave the most enthusiastic and sincere endorsement of Mitt Romney of any Republican I've heard: "He's a good man." (In a surprisingly vigorous tone.)


But another amusing thing was that G.W. recounted an anecdote about Vladimir Putin, when he first visited the Oval Office at the White House. The sun was pouring in through the window and the Office was all sparkly and gold, and when Putin strode in, he said, "My God." Firstly, I thought that Putin doesn't speak English but rather German; secondly, there are so many possible layers of satire in this pronouncement. Thirdly, I think it must be satirical because it seems uncharacteristic for Putin, and fourthly because he must have seen much more impressive things than the Oval Office in the land of palaces, Russian Orthodox churches, emperors, Abramoviches, yachts which are also aircraft carriers, cooking pots with diamonds embedded in their handles, etc. Lastly, I think it is gauche to insinuate that the steely president of a large and (unequally) wealthy, influential and old country is like a provincial schoolgirl gawking at her first luxury hotel.
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I also enjoyed the partner act of Florida's and Georgia's attorneys-general, who were complaining about the Affordable [Health] Care Act and its putative unconstitutionality. (The Supreme Court approved the Act not due to the main argument of the defending attorneys, but due to the relatively minor argument that it is a tax. Of course 'tax' is a dirty word for much of the right, and maybe that repulsion is what Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to provoke when he supposedly betrayed the Republicans by breaking the tie to rule in favour of 'Obamacare' in favour of that particular point.) "Do you want health insurance premiums?" they asked. "Nooo!" replied a crowd of individuals who seem to have forgotten that — unless I am greatly mistaken about the nature of privatized health care — most of them already pay them. The irony was strong later when one of them decried the use of Medicare funds 'to hide the true cost of Obamacare.' Since, as far as I am aware, Bush's administration ransacked Social Security to fund the Iraq War.

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This entire thing started at 7 p.m. and I gave up at 8:34 p.m. Which is, I think, still a fair length of time in which to be afflicted.