Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

Donald O. Hebb

Collect them all!

[Cross-posted.]

I FOR ONE find the non-sustainable (i.e. doomed) nature of our social/economic system troubling.

I also share Slavoj Žižek’s concern about the West adopting some Chinese authoritarian version of capitalism. Though being a United States of American, (I’m not a patriot, I was just born here,) Your Montag has the luxury of harboring this concern while already living under an authoritarian capitalism.

That said, Žižek graciously provides a sort of Stump Lane “mission statement,” if you will:

…what can the left do? What can you effectively do? … It’s fashionable to make fun of Fukuyama, End of History, but even the majority of today’s left is effectively, if I may make an adverb, Fukuyamaists. Basically, isn’t it that most of us leftists silently believe capitalism is here to stay, parliamentary democracy is what we have, so the problem is simply how to make it work better? Our ultimate horizon is, again, in the same way as we were talking about socialism with a human face, global capitalist democracy with a human face. And for me, the key question is, is this enough?

…the left, around thirty years ago, simply stopped [asking] certain questions. I remember when I was young, we were still debating: will capitalism last? Will the state go on? Now, we accept all this. Maybe … the time is coming to start asking these fundamental, tough questions again, but, of course, fully learning the lesson of the past.
[Democracy Now!: World Renowned Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the Iraq War, the Bush Presidency, the War on Terror & More]

EXACTLY HOW awesome is the (proposed) summer gas tax holiday going to be?

Here is Your Montag’s calculated savings for the commute to and from work alone:

18.4¢/gallon * 5 gallons/week * 15 weeks = $13.80

Who knows how much I could “save” if I add in additional weekend driving/errand running!

I’d save even more switching to a 10,000lb SUV, tripling my commute, and burning 25 gallons/week. My savings would fipple to $70.00 (almost) over the Holiday! You know how much money that is? That would buy 20 gallons (almost) of gas at today’s prices!

Wait, what?

Heeey. You’re going to have to do better than that to pander to me, politicians! How about a fifteen week holiday from having to make that commute at all? Hell, I’d save more than my $13.80 in gas just taking a single day week off from driving.

So what do you say, paid summer vacation for everybody?

McCAIN HAD some ‘splaining to do yesterday after he said we send troops to the Middle East after oil. But not to fear, with a little backpedaling he had US all believing he was really talking about that other Iraq war, you know, the one over oil:

[Emphasis added to highlight that true thing.] At issue Friday was a comment at a morning town hall meeting in Denver, when he said his energy policy would eliminate U.S. dependence on Middle East oil and would “prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

He sought to clarify his comments after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn’t mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

“No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,” McCain told reporters.

One reason was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he said.

“But also we didn’t want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it’s more important than any other part of the world,” he said.
[LA Times: '91 war, not Iraq war, was over oil, McCain clarifies]

So yeah, he said that true thing, though it was couched in an astonishing amount of complete horse shit. What’s more, Your Montag is left somewhat confused about the dissonance between this professed hatred of foreign oil, and the candidate’s deep heartfelt love of the invasion and continued violent military occupation of Iraq.*

But this isn’t about my state of confusion. That, really, is neither here nor there. This is about something-or-other, which I am very sure is very, very judicious and serious. I know this because it involves saying serious, adult things like:

“The Congressional Record is very clear: I said we went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction.”

Thanks for clearing up the record, Senator. You’re infallible judgment and the courage of your convictions serve you well.

The constant whining about people taking your “hundred years” statement* out of context isn’t very presidential, though:

“It’s a direct falsification, and I’m sorry that political campaigns have to deteriorate in this fashion, because there’s legitimate differences between myself” and the Democratic presidential candidates on Iraq, McCain said.

Boo-hoo, boo-hoo! Al Gore invented the internet.

* Military presence to last up to a hundred years, if it is a peaceful presence where our men and women aren’t getting killed. No word yet on how long he is committed to staying in a violent, tenuous, failed-state situation where our men and women are being picked off daily. Only that we must win, and we are winning. After that, it’s smooth sailing for a fucking century. Lunatic.

Elvis is Dead & Cult of Personality (live):

Apropos of nothing, here is the video version of Cult of Personality for which embedding has been disabled.