Montecito as Metaphor

bye, bye free market ideology

Perhaps there is a God. Maybe he’s angry with the rich people.

I used to be a screenwriter, so the nightmarish fires overnight in Montecito, CA seem heavy with metaphor. Montecito is one of the richest neighborhoods in America, but the fact that it’s gone up in flames is not going to be too upsetting to the poverty-stricken masses further down the 101 in South Los Angeles. No wildfire risk down there. Probably the one advantage they have in life.

One shot of a burned out Range Rover seems particularly apt. We’ve all been so obsessed by wealth, its acquisition and display, that we’ve forgotten that there are far more important things in life, like children, health, community, friendship, family, good conversation, and a good cheap bottle of wine over dinner. Life goes on, but the Range Rover is a steaming, sodden heap of burned up junk, just like the tattered remains of free market ideology.

And good riddance to it too.

Palin = Baked Alaska

me very smart

With her celebrity dwindling by the hour, Sarah Palin must be auditioning for a talk show.. There really is no other explanation for why Alaska’s Number One lightweight would be prancing around the media. Or is the media prancing around her. One media outlet called it “The Sarah Show”. I know the average GOP Governor is a serious non-entity, but still that seems just a tad unfair. A lot of these guys might even be called competent on a good day. Of course the reason that it was her show is that without her ‘celebrity’ the event would have been as much fun as a country club fundraiser for John McCain.

Palin’s pronouncements at the GOP Governor’s Conference had all the newsworthiness of the Conference hotel lunch menu but that didn’t stop her every vacuous word being splashed on every news outlet. Parsing her statements is a like panning for gold on the town beach. There ain’t nothing there, but in the interregnum before Obama’s inauguration, this is what I suppose passes for news. One only wishes that there was at least a little irony left in the world.

Tim Pawlenty, the put upon Governor of Minnesota called Palin’s speech “interesting”. The media seemed to agree – albeit in a slightly different way – by jamming into the conference to get close to last week’s political celebrity. What they got was no-thing, except empty headlines.

The media’s ability to understand a story is dwindling to the point of absurdity. She’s history. She’s yesterday’s news. What she thinks does not matter. Enough already.

More Than The Summum Of Its Parts

Ten Commandments

Talk about a plan. The US Constitution is probably one of the world’s biggest blueprints. A whole – thoroughly undemocratic – apparatus of government has been built to protect it. But the Supreme Court has its work cut out now the Summum have come to town. Who? One may ask. You know, The Summum, and their Seven Aphorisms. They want to put up a monument to the Seven Aphorisms in a park in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, next to the monument to the Ten Commandments. Duhh.

Summum

No way, you might say. But the United States Constitution clearly states that there is to be no established religion in the United States, and the Free Exercise clause suggests that anyone who wants to practice any religion can.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

So where does the Pleasant Grove City decision to deny the Summum the right to put their monument up in the same park as the Ten Commandments fit in to the “Establishment Clause” of the Constitution? Answer. It doesn’t. You can’t favor one religion over another, regardless of whether it has the power of Christianity or the obscurity of Summum. Either both monuments go up in the park or neither do.

Seems pretty simple, except that, surprise, surprise the Christian community don’t see it that way. They want the court to be ‘strict’ when it comes to ‘liberal activism’, bad a tad more lenient when it comes to their harebrained notions of justice, which stomp on the very fabric of the Constitution. Craven and hypocritical are two words that come to mind. There are others but why bother.

Palin – Her Fifteen Minutes Are Almost Up

Sarah Palin got a taste of the big time and she clearly liked it very, very much. One can only imagine how painful it was to step off the campaign plane into the frigid gloom of Wasilla, AK. For all her talk of small town values, it seems to be the last place she wants to be. And you can understand her reticence. Sorting through her Valentino and Versace as an eagle-eyed GOP lawyer holds a clipboard behind her. Returning to an Alaska where oil prices (and therefore her popularity) are sinking. It’s no coincidence she’s doing interviews with just about everyone with a camera or microphone to talk about her future.

As if she has one.