Glibbertysmidgeon

I want to go and see An Inconvenient Truth, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.

Okay, what I really want is to HAVE SEEN it.
I want to know what is in the movie; I want to be able to discuss it intelligently with my friends.. but I’m afraid to actually sit through it. I know I’ll walk out crying, with one more horrible, heavy truth lying cold on my heart.

I’ve considered buying a ticket- just to show my support, and then going home to ask a friend for the half-page synopsis. If I could only believe that my $10.00 contribution to the success of the film might still, somehow, save us all from Global Warming.

In recent months, I’ve begun reverting to the old ways- devolving into the Ostritch Girl I was raised up to be. When I was a little girl, I hated when my Dad watched the news.

I didn’t want to know about the wars going on in other countries or the people who lost their homes in the big storm. I was not interested in police shootouts or drug raids.

I couldn’t fix my Dad’s depression or my grandmother’s frailty; I couldn’t find Dad a steady job or provide a place where we all could live and never have to move. My own problems had already shown me how small and powerless I was.

I just wanted to read my Black Stallion books and imagine that everything could be solved with a child’s patience and a long, bareback ride.

I understand why someone would rather watch American Idol than listen to the truth about what the U.S. is doing to innocent people at Guantanamo Bay.
I understand why it’s more appealing to mow the lawn than to have a serious discussion about the proper balance between national security and individual liberties.
I understand that it was bad enough to watch the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and our government’s disastrous inabilty to respond- but how are we all supposed to digest the additional insult of the 2 billion in tax dollars that have been blown on waste and fraud in the rebuilding effort?

And the bad news just keeps coming.

• Trans fats may cause diabetes.
• Bird flu has been transmitted from human to human here in the U.S.
• Tuna is no longer safe for pregant women.
• I’m STILL the only person in my family who has health insurance.
• The suicide rate in New Orleans has tripled.
• There are many, many reasons to believe our elections are being cheated.
• The phone and cable companies are trying to kill my blog and all it’s little friends.
• Every day we find that another of our elected officials is actually a criminal.
• The President has issued 100′s of “signing statements” indicating in each one that he finds himself to be above legally enacted U.S. laws.
• The East Coast is flooding.
• Oil prices keep going up.
• People keep dying in Iraq.

…and the hurricane season is here, and the levees are not repaired.

It’s enough to make me want to stick my head in the sand.
Or into a children’s book.

I was reading about five small towns in Vermont who voted to approve resolutions to impeach President Bush because of his illegal wiretapping. About halfway down the page I saw this:

OUTSIDE POLITICAL MAINSTREAM
The idea of impeaching Bush resides firmly outside the political mainstream. Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold’s call this week to censure Bush — a step short of an impeachment — found scant support on Capitol Hill, even among fellow Democrats.

Yahoo News

I had to wonder why the author felt the need to stick that in.
He could just as easily have mentioned that former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman has called for the President’s impeachment. Holzman served on the committee who voted to impeach president Nixon. The article could have mentioned that the Center for Constitutional Rights has written Articles of Impeachment for President Bush, or quoted Barron’s call for impeachment,

“AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers . . .
Certainly, there was an emergency need after the Sept. 11 attacks to sweep up as much information as possible about the chances of another terrorist attack. But a 72-hour emergency or a 15-day emergency doesn’t last four years . . .

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

Some ancillary responsibility, however, must be attached to those members of the House and Senate who were informed, inadequately, about the wiretapping and did nothing to regulate it. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, told Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 that he was “unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.” But the senator was so respectful of the administration’s injunction of secrecy that he wrote it out in longhand rather than give it to someone to type. Only last week, after the cat was out of the bag, did he do what he should have done in 2003 — make his misgivings public and demand more information.

Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”

Wrong. If we don’t discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy — in the mirror.

Barron’s

Maybe it’s true that most Americans don’t care if their President breaks the law, but I do. And I’m tired of being told I’m outside the mainstream.

What does it mean to be in the mainstream anyway? Why is being part of the mainstream better than being outside of it?

In Old Salem, it was once mainstream to burn ‘witches’. Only a radical would say, “We shouldn’t burn any witches”. I would have been outside the mainstream in Old Salem, because I don’t belive in witches, and I’m strongly opposed to burning people.

There was a time when the mainstream of America believed that slavery was right and good, and that the underground railroad was a radical organization. Again, I would have been outside the mainstream.

These news outlets act as if being one of the sheep is something admirable, and that thinking for yourself- being outside the ‘mainstream’- is somehow wrong.

Of course there are many instances when the mainstream is right- people shouldn’t kill one another or steal from one another, etc. However, as a concerned member of a Democracy, I consider it my responsiblity and my civic duty to examine and question the conventional wisdom of my society. It is my duty to raise alarm if I see any sign of witch burning, slavery, torture, or a president who purposely disobeys the law of the land.

I guess I wasn’t meant for the mainstream.

My friend Tara linked to an article about the political spin that has been applied by both parties to the new Star Wars movie. In her entry, Tara was scoffing about this recent trend in politics to read too much into our fictional characters.

Reading the article, the thing I found chilling is the ending.

…a Universal Pictures marketing executive had given a lecture to his marketing class about “King Kong,” which is coming out later this year. “Is there a political overtone to it?” Mr. Sealey said. “I suspect he’s got to think that through today. The political sensitivities are so great that you have to take that calculus into consideration. Is somebody going to read into ‘King Kong’ that it’s pro-Iraq, or it’s going to get PETA upset?”

New York Times

What value is any form of storytelling if it refuses to address the most interesting and challenging issues of its time? If we can’t explore our divisions even in fiction, how will we ever resolve them?

I am really frightened by the corporate dumbing down of our music, movies, news, and literature.

This morning I was watching CNN while getting ready for work. They staged the following poll:

Which breakfast food has more fat?

1. A Sausage McMuffin
2. A Ham Egg and Cheese Bagel
3. A McGriddles Sandwich

These options were displayed onscreen, beside a picture of the golden arches. While the male anchor was reading the options aloud, Soledad O’Brien was muttering “MMMM” in the background.

I admit, I’ve become accustomed to FOX News reporting advertising as news,

“…and just WAIT until you hear what happened tonight on American Idol!”

… but some small part of me had hoped that CNN would reach for a higher standard.