In light of all the recent revelations about government agencies spying on American citizens — and more importantly, all the government’s prevarications and half-truths about the level of detail and the purposes to which that information is being put — I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a reasonably surveillance-proof browser on my computer.
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When I was in the fourth grade, we studied Alabama history from a textbook that would probably raise a few eyebrows, were it to reappear today.
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As I do just about every week, I stopped off on the way home from work last Friday to check a couple of books out of the Fayetteville Public Library. I usually read quite a bit, and I try to keep the beast supplied with a plenitude of reasonably nutritious fare — otherwise I start browsing things like the back of my cereal box or the ingredients list on my Twinkies, and there are some things we really weren’t meant to know.
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When I hear politicians and pundits talking about the way Big Government is sucking the life out of this country, I can’t help but feel a smidgin of guilt: my family is one of those that has been robbing the taxpayer blind for the past fifty years.
We can start with my parents, who, as members of the United States Air Force, were living off the taxpayers when they met. They courted and were married (by a Justice of the Peace, no less; yet another piglet sucking at the taxpayer teat) and in the fullness of time my brother, sister and I all came along — clutched firmly in the arms of Big Government, as my mother gave birth to each of us in Air Force hospitals built, staffed and run at taxpayer expense.
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When I was a child in Montgomery, Alabama, during the very early sixties, I can remember certain areas around town that spent much of the year buried under a green and hairy shroud that covered telephone poles, buildings, billboards, trees, parked cars, slow-moving pedestrians: the dreaded kudzu.
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I’ve recently been browsing through various online resources for artists — how-to’s, advice about materials, online portfolios, etc. — and I’ve noticed something that disturbs me: When did “Learn How to Draw” come to mean “Learn How to Draw Natalie Portman in Star Wars Makeup”?
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I often read novels by Latin-American authors in the original Spanish.
I know, I know: at least part of the reason for doing it is just to be able to make statements like that — we all carve out these nuggets of self-esteem where we can find them — but the fact remains that some stars really do shine brighter in the universes that gave them birth.
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I’ve always considered myself something of a political animal, but I think this time I’ve wandered into the wrong zoo.
I admit that there’s a tendency, at my age, to find all kinds of unfavorable comparisons between life today and in my youth: the movies are not as exciting, the music is not as original, the tomatoes are not as tomato-ey — and the politicians I see today all seem to have come right out of the same factory somewhere on the outskirts of Shanghai.
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The foxes are at it again.
It’s hard to believe something that doesn’t come from the fifth planet of Arcturus could make such a strange assortment of noises. Rattling, choking, yipping, barking, whining, screeching — It’s like my family at dinner when I was fifteen.
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“Um, excuse me: did you know your zipper was undone?”
In a recent post in this blog I made some comments critical of the Obama administration’s policies toward official transparency and truthfulness in government, comments which have been interpreted as negative toward the administration as a whole. Yes, my observations were critical, but as we move into the silliness and bombast of this year’s general election, I think it’s very important to remember just what “critical” really means.
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