Yes, I know “The Tea Party” is a beloved term in USA Politics for a Republican Political group — but do you know what? I think you need to remember the rest of the world’s associations with the phrase you have called yourselves and maybe rebrand accordingly.
During the first two days of the holiday of Passover, my family was invited to a lunch at a friend’s home where we have been numerous times — the family positively loves Chaim. We have been going there so long that we have gone from being the ones who are invited to being the parents of the actual person who everyone wants to see. After everyone eventually got settled around the table, there was a latecomer to the meal, someone whom we had seen before, and though he did not seem to recognize us we immediately recognized him.
I was originally going to title this article — “Against Gullibility” — until I saw this image of Sarah Palin going down on a Big Gulp yesterday at the CPAC convention, and she wrote the new headline for me. I couldn’t think of a better image to estimate just how low the political dialogue has dropped in the conservative coin of the realm. Ms. Palin is sucking the very life out of us all.
In America, we have been brewing a Cultural Holy War since 1969 and I have mindfully tried to stick myself, not in the middle of the argument between Conservatives and Liberals, but between the two diametrically opposing ends to shadow the mean sun. As a child of the Midwest and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln undergraduate, I comprehend the conservative core. As a graduate of Columbia University in The City of New York, I understand the liberal mentality. As I have written many times, this Boles Blog is dedicated to preserving common ground where everyone has a safe opportunity to be heard and that we do our best to honor a “liberal mindset with a conservative morality.”
Meanwhile, in North Korea — while the whole world is watching the Vatican — the next round of Nuclear Bomb testing takes place. North Korea threw themselves back into the arena as one of the most undesirable rogue governments today by conducting a third round of nuclear tests. They met with universal condemnation, even from their biggest ally, China.
BEIJING — China said Tuesday that it firmly opposed North Korea’s testing of an atomic device and called for stability and a halt to nuclear proliferation in northeast Asia.
“The Chinese government calls on all parties to respond calmly, solve the problem of denuclearization of the peninsula through dialogue and consultation in the framework of the six-party talks,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Now that women have finally, and officially, been approved for combat roles in the USA, the Winnowing of Modern Man is now complete — and the dissolution of that manly myth is long overdue. The harsh and prosecutorial role of men in the history of the world has been to control and temper the overwhelming power of the female form using religion, laws and politics as cudgels for behavior correction. The forever stain on humankind is the trans-vaginal wand, “clean” women, and forced separation during menses because a woman is considered too filthy to share a bed with her husband as she bleeds.
On January 20, 2009, I wrote in this blog about the “Rise of the Obama Zombies” that dealt with the silly photographs of new Obama Staff members who were made to look, for some reason, like the undead in the pages of the NYTimes:
There is a delicate line between Art and Politics that must never be crushed: Mocking politicos for aesthetic profit. The New York Times, for some reason, decided to publish 50 crushing images of those working for the Obama Administration and, for some reason, the Obama campaign agreed to this public humiliation of their employees. The published images cruelly, and purposefully, make these good people look like Zombies. Let’s call them “The Obama Undead” — with their blank faces and ghoulish eyes — and we are left to feel terrible for them because they have been manipulated and mocked for paper profit. We know their uncomfortable skins. Only the glassy look in their eyes, and the familiar “thousand-yard stare,” gives away the fact that, at one time, they were human, and not the joke of the day.
Well, the NYTimes is at it again, and again, for some reason, the Obama administration is playing right along and allowing its staff members to be memorialized again as the undead in the official newspaper of record:
Four years ago, on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, this magazine devoted nearly an entire issue to a photo essay by Nadav Kander, “Obama’s People.” Here, we revisit those top advisers and aides, four years later.
The Susan G. Komen debacle has proved to be a perfect example of why politics and Public Health do not get along together. Planned Parenthood is a perpetual bogeyman for the Right Wing — but what most conservatives fail to recognize is that Planned Parenthood is beloved by the majority of the silent Middle Class because Planned Parenthood provide a necessary and urgently needed pathway to proper healthcare.
For nearly two years, I looked with awe and admiration at the Empire State Building as I walked from Penn Station to my former office on 36th street. What a beautiful building, I thought to myself, and one that so many people call home for the duration of their work day. It is this very same home that people pass by and stare at from a distance, taking photos — countless photos, in most cases — and paying different amounts of money for tours around and on top of the building. The building top has been used as a destination in a number of movies, one of the most famous being Sleepless in Seattle, in which Tom Hanks meets Meg Ryan and they end up falling in love.
When you take the significance we have come to put on this building and how iconic it is in the New York City skyline, it is hard to not think of another set of buildings that were at one point also quite significant in the New York Skyline that were obliterated thanks to the heinous acts of 11 evil men who perpetrated An American tragedy. It has now been nearly ten years to the day that our beautiful Twin Towers were destroyed, and yet the rebuilt Towers will not be complete until at least the last quarter of 2013 – that’s over two years from now.
Not too long ago, we addressed the question of whether art could be quantified. What I would like to consider is if all we need to do to consider something art is to merely apply the label art to it. Having already seen the curious art of Caleb Larsen, I thought I had seen it all when it came to art that didn’t really seem like art to me. I was ill prepared for the shock I would receive when I came across a web site created by Nate Hill called White Power Milk.
Traditions are what we now call “memes” and the danger in the covenant of a tradition merely for “tradition’s sake” is the unfortunate blind adherence to a policy or an ideal that is made valid merely by its relational occurrences.
Christine O’Donnell is the Pro-Witch, Anti-Masturbation, Pro Teabagger, Republican Senate candidate in Delaware. I have no idea how or why the GOP ever allowed her to con her way into such an important precipice moment — because fallow anger doesn’t ever make for good leadership.
Over the weekend, filmmaker Michael Moore wrote a piece keeping the peace over the Ground Zero Mosque. However, the most fascinating part of Michael’s argument was found pinned at the end of his article — as if an afterthought — where he tossed in a quote from German Playwright and Grand Thinker, Bertolt Brecht:
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.
I read an insult online the other day. Someone called another person “overeducated” — and the angry howling in agreement from the malingering crowd that followed that contextual rasping — make me realize there is a concentrated, and vocal, segment of this country that loathes learning and defiles any sense of being “book smart” or thoughtfully, formally, trained.
