Wherein our hero learns how useful the school library can be…

Click on the image to go directly to Episode 14, or click Here to go to the main page.

Oh look…the Baby Benz is all grown up now….

As with the SLK online owner’s manual we’ve shown you before, Mercedes-Benz has now launched the interactive manuals for the Mercedes-Benz C-Class (w204) compact executive car and the C-Class Estate station wagon (s204). -BenzInsider.com

Mercedes Benzwill equip their executive compact sedan, the Mercedes Benz C-Class 2012, with Nokia Terminal Mode technology. -Ninga Media

The ‘C’ comes in three flavors, only two of which are imported here to the States: the Sport and Luxury versions.   So I note that Daimler is pushing the ‘C’ class Luxury now as its “Executive Compact Sedan”, and the first thought that crosses my mind is that little word “Executive” is good for an additional five or six grand on the sticker price.

But this is good. When the W204 first came out people were displeased at the reduced level of wood trim and other small refinements compared to the ‘E’.   Initially there were no memory seats and other little things that raise the level of elegance and in their defense people said that the ‘C’ was never meant to be that anyway.   But others like myself were thinking Daimler also didn’t want to take customers away from the ‘E’ which is their bread and butter “Executive” sedan.   The smaller ‘C’ sold for less and if people could get ‘E’ class elegance in a less expensive car (and…seriously… we’re talking a Mercedes-Benz here…none of them are cheap!) they’d go get a ‘C’ instead.

But you would also want a ‘C’ if you’re like me, single, childless, and not needing a larger car.   I’ve looked at the new ‘E’…it is just magnificent.   I could afford one (barely).   But it’s too much car for me.   I just don’t need something that big.   And the fuel economy hit is more then I can morally justify in a car that is 99 percent rolling down the road with just me in it.     That gasoline is just being wasted and I am still, deep down inside, a waste not want not little Baptist boy.   Okay…who drives a Mercedes-Benz.   But still.

Small car = cheap basic transportation car is not such a simple calculation anymore.   Rising gasoline costs and fleet fuel efficiency mandates require that car companies sell smaller, more fuel efficient cars.   And German companies to their credit, are way more interested in being “green” then either American or Japanese car companies.   So Daimler needs to aim for at least ‘E’ class elegance in the Mercedes ‘C’.   There is no reason why a compact sedan cannot also be a sumptuous one, other then the stereotype of the compact car as inevitably being the basic transportation bare bones economy model.   In an age of rising fuel costs, that has to change.   The small car can be sumptuous too.

Now then…er…about that “Executive” thing…

Eddie Izzard…darn him.   I watched Dressed To Kill and now I just can’t read anything with the word “Executive” in it nowadays without thinking of this bit…

“I’m much more in the executive transvestite area.”

Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite.   Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite.   Economy compact sedan…Executive compact sedan.   Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite…     I am really not in the market for trading in the car I have now…I am still thoroughly happy with Traveler…I think it will eventually become one of those quarter to half million mile Mercedes you see every now and then in the pages of enthusiast magazines.   Really, that’s how I feel about it.   My instinct is to hold on to a car until it simply can’t be driven anymore and that’s one reason why I was attracted to the Mercedes brand back when I was a little teenage geek.   Right now I feel like I can just spend the money on servicing and pampering my car and it will last forever.   And Daimler will give you a special over quarter million kilometer grill badge when your Mercedes odometer clicks over that much.   How many other car companies Want you to be proud you held on to the car that long?   But I go to my dealer for routine service and I still wander around the showroom floor while Traveler is back in the shop…and I just know I will have to work at keeping a straight face when the sales agents pitch this executive compact sedan stuff at me.   Yes yes, I’m much more in the executive compact sedan area…

Now that I’m offically a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists my bi-weekly cartoon chores for Baltimore OUTLoud will be taking on some additional tasks.   I need to be more punctual about updating the cartoon page here for one thing.   OUTLoud will be carrying my cartoons on their page soon, and I can now create a small space of my own on the AAEC web site.   Since I don’t do this as my primary occupation, I am an “associate” member, not a “regular” one.   The difference is regular members get to vote in the board elections and post their cartoons in the main cartoon space.   I don’t begrudge them that…those folks are trying to earn a living in an economy that is very bad for cartoonists of any sort, let alone editorial cartoonists.

I’ve no illusions now about ever earning a living by my artwork alone.   I’m just not that competitive a soul for one thing.   But also, my cartoons can get brutal.   My aim isn’t merely to provoke…I have always believed that political cartoons are best when the artist takes a passionate stand for (or against, but mostly for) something.   But that’s not a selling point to newspaper editors in today’s climate…

More over at The Cartoon Page.

Looking at my server logs I see the recent release of the trailer to the coming Atlas Shrugged movie (part 1…and I’m not the only one guessing that the John Galt speech will probably amount to nearly the total running time of part 3…) has brought more then a few readers to my little corner of the net.   More specifically this post.   Cool.

I think the movie has at least a fighting chance of not being completely horrible that The Fountainhead never did, largely because the Atlas Shrugged movie has an advantage The Fountainhead didn’t; that Ayn Rand is dead and so she can’t fuck with the producers. But it still has the deadly problem of bringing Ayn Rand characters to life and seldom outside of the pornography industry have characters been drawn that are so deathly one-dimensional.   Rand’s characters are little more then slapped together hand puppets she waves around in her morality plays.   They’re not there to tell you anything about life and existence and what it is to be human, they’re there to let Rand create a world of her own where she could take revenge on everyone and everything in the real world she hated.   But this is something people who have never actually read Atlas Shrugged need to see for themselves.

I am all about giving Atlas Shrugged its moment on the silver screen.   Especially the part that takes place in Galt’s Gulch.   If nothing else, that scene alone will convince a lot of people who might be otherwise bamboozled by it, that Rand’s claim to intellectual fame is pure hokum.   I walked a reference back to one blog’s link to my post and found a link to this which is an even more priceless take-down of Galt’s Gulch then I could have ever done.   But you would expect a farm boy to see the fundamental stupidity of it even more clearly then a kid from the suburbs like me…

The most egregious example of this comes in that pile of pap that Glenn Beck shucks like the Bible’s smarter, prettier sister: Atlas Shrugged. I have desire to go into a list of why that book is a pile of shit, at least not right now. But there is a moment in it that so completely sums up everything that is wrong with the Tea Party/Randite/Libertarian worldview that it is breathtaking in its elegant stupidity. It is when Dagny Taggart finally gets to Galt’s Gulch, and it is a breathtaking panorama of loveliness with fertile fields and little houses, and people fishing and etc. It’s para-fucking-dise. And John Galt himself leads Dagny around showing her all the wonderful things they’ve done. And there are oil pipes in the mountains, and fields full of…stuff (She’s not much for details, our Ayn.) And it’s the most hilarious moment in the book, because you realize, at that moment, that Ayn Rand has no clue how the world works.

See, I grew up on a farm. And I’m familiar with the sheer, bloody amount of work it takes to run a farm. Notice, I am not saying build a farm. Building a farm from scratch is an almost impossible undertaking. (Which is why *gasp* the pioneers did it all together in groups. No payment expected, just help out when its their turn. Buncha commies.)

Certainly, a few years after this project got started, they would still be on the frontier edge of starvation, desperately going hungry in the winter so they wouldn’t have to touch their seed corn for the next year, anxiously scanning the skies for clouds. Living in one room cabins. Of course, Rand handwaves this by essentially giving them cold fusion, but even so, it Doesn’t. Work. Like. That.

It is at that moment that you realize Rand probably never did a day of real work in her life.

And when you hear the Tea Partiers, or Glenn Beck naively parroting her back as if her words were found in the desert, cut into the living rock by the invisible hand of Adam Smith himself, it is worth remembering that a lot of them haven’t done an honest day’s work in their life either.

You need to read this whole thing.   I had this image of this blogger, who grew up on a farm, reading this…

“…Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor.   I mean one – I tooled it by hand – no mass production was necessary.   But that tractor has cut an eight hour workday down to four hours on” – the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside – “the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett” – his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of the canyon, then to a band of violent green – “in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan” – his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves – “in the orchards of Richard Halley.”

…and breaking into fits of hysterical laughter.   An Eight Hour Workday?   An Eight Hour Workday???

Right there is Rand, and her cheerleaders on the lunatic right in a nutshell.   Many of those right wing billionaires massively funding faux grassroots political movements like the Tea Party and poisoning the national dialogue with a variety of pseudo think tanks inherited their wealth.   Below them are rank after rank of winger nutcases who have never had to work a day in their lives and never bothered to explore the world outside of their gated communities.   They have not clue one how to earn a living.   Theirs was essentially given to them and I suppose one of the reason the rest of the human world frightens them so much is they know we can survive just fine without them while they wouldn’t last a season without their trusts and hedge fund portfolios.   They love Rand for her righteous assurance that only selfishness and greed are truly moral, that the true evil is to care for your neighbor and that somewhere in the Colorado Rockies is a beautiful fairy tale land wherein we who work for our living are the ones who cannot live without the likes of them.

There’s a lot of comment and some righteous snark going around the net over the Atlas Shrugged trailer.   Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution writes, “Hank Rearden’s line about only wanting to earn money comes across as either a parody  of Gordon Gecko  or as something worthy of Gecko’s parody.”   Since Gordon Gecko is a fictional character I can’t really make the comeback that Gecko got his greed is good lines from Rand and that he is the embodiment of her ideas, but it’s a fair guess that the writer who put those words in his mouth either had Rand in mind or some Wall Street asshole disciple of hers.   Some of the thread comments are delightful like “Dagny drives a Camry?”   But I particularly liked, “Anyway, since the passing of Leni Riefenstahl I can’t imagine anyone being able to give Atlas Shrugged the cinematic treatment Rand no-doubt believed it deserved.”

Yeah…   If I could wave a magic wand and travel back in time to when both women were still alive, I’d get them both to agree to make the movie of Atlas Shrugged somehow without Rand being aware of who the director really was and Riefenstahl not being aware of whose book she was making a movie of.   Then with the finished product absolutely delighting them both I’d then pull back the curtain and introduce them to each other, hand them each a knife, close the door and take bets on which one gets out alive.   Bet I could make back both the production costs and the time-travel costs selling DVDs of the fight.

Goodbye Valentine’s Day 2011.   It’s time for both of us to move on.   Let’s always be friends.   Keep in touch will you?   No…really…

Well it looks like we’ve come to the end of our fourth annual Valentine’s Day Poster Contest.   And once more this year’s crop of disturbingly sincere losers worked even harder then last year’s to achieve that ultimate glory…which must make all our previous year’s losers feel even more pathetically inadequate.   But that losing is a prize that never stops giving is what makes every Valentine’s Day so special.   It’s like the finest wine…that feeling of losing out on the big prize only gets better and better as the years go by.

So lets all give this years worthy losers a pat on the back, a brief but sincere look of understanding, and some helpful advice to get out more and meet people!

Coming next: The Big Winner!     You should probably have somewhere better to be then here with me…

Yes…I know…I failed to show up Friday.   And Saturday too.   I’m sorry.   I had to be somewhere else.   I really wanted to get together with you but, you know, things happen.   I was busy.   This isn’t a good time.   I’ll give you a call when I have time.

Happy Valentine’s Day Eve!   It’s the big night before…when the message of that empty mailbox finally starts getting through.   What…not even a card?   Cheer up.   Here are another three worthy entries to remind you that Valentine’s Day isn’t just about getting a last minute card with the same boilerplate love poem several thousand other people got too.   It’s about holding in your hands proof that it’s the thought that counts.   You should probably put that letter opener down now.   No…seriously…

We’ll dash the hopes of three more worthy entries later today.   And then…Tomorrow Is The Big Day!

Once again right off the bat we have a selection of very worthy entries which would have absolutely won the Big Prize if only someone else hadn’t come completely out of nowhere to walk away with it, leaving them alone in the dust to wonder for the rest of their lives how they could have been so terribly wrong.   Let’s all give these worthy losers a very brief but sincere look of understanding and then quickly change the subject.

More oh so sincere hopes and dreams will find the floor suddenly cut from beneath their feet, only to thrash their way to the bottom of the briny deep tomorrow…but we’ll keep the bad news from them for a while longer, letting them toss and turn all night long clutching at that slender chance that maybe, just maybe, just…maybe…it will all work out after all.   It has to work out for me sometime doesn’t it?   I can’t crash and burn Every time can I?   But oh yes…oh yes you can…

Has it been a year already?   Another bright-eyed and bushy tailed spring, ready and eager to take on the world with bright cheerful blossoms full of color and delight, fading…fading…into dogged summer, hanging on long after the blooms are just a playful memory, hanging on…hanging on…hanging on…then one final burst of hopeful autumn color, only to end up in the dead of winter buried in ice and snow, with nothing but brief barren daylight and bitter eternal cold to look forward to?   Why…yes…yes it is!

It’s the time of year when we pay tribute to that which is most deeply human within us.   The heart?   Well…Not Exactly.   That almost infinite ability of the human heart to bleed?   Hahahaha…no.   But close.     No, no…we come together every time this year to celebrate the knife in the heart.

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To: bruce
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Nothing says love like ten percent off!   Eighty dollar roses for a mere twenty bucks!   Valentine’s Day Lap Dances!   It can only mean one thing…it’s time once again for our annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!   A celebration of the spirit of Valentine’s Day, that traditionally begins with the following announcement:

We’re terribly sorry, but the deadline for entries has already passed.   I’m afraid the deadline had already passed when I announced the start of this year’s contest.   I know you must feel terrible about this.   Don’t blame yourself.   It isn’t you, it’s me.   Please try to find it within yourself to forgive me.

Now that that’s out of the way, let us pause for a moment and reflect on our past.   Because after all, endlessly digging up and reburying the past is part of what makes Valentine’s Day so very special!   Here are some of our worthy losers from days gone by.   They came oh so close to the big prize, only to walk away confused as to what went so terribly wrong.   All those endless nights they have spent afterward tossing and turning, wondering what they could have done differently, was its own very special Valentine’s Day prize that they are all still enjoying to this very day!

These contestants gave it their all, only to have their personal best cast aside as if they never even existed.   Then they all received our very special   consolation prize handshake, followed by helpful advice to get out more often and meet people.

But our winners were truly one with the spirit of Valentine’s Day.   This one, from our Very First poster contest is still my personal favorite:

But let us not forget our other winners, without whom there would not have been so many losers, so lost, so dazed and bewildered.   This is one of our year two winners (Yes…there was a tie!)

And finally…our year three winner who gave us all words to live by…

This year’s crop of oh so painfully earnest hopefuls will have to work extra hard to achieve glory.   They are going to have to give it everything they’ve got to give…only to spend the rest of their lives blaming themselves for not giving it even more when they had the chance.   They will spend long sleepless nights minutely re-examining everything they did, trying to pin point exactly where they went wrong, then dreaming hopeless dreams of getting a second chance to do it all differently and make everything right again.   If that scene in The Yearling where Jody shoots Flag is your favorite part of the movie then you have certainly come to the right place!

Tomorrow we begin our annual celebration of the knife in the heart.   Love is in the bag!   Let the twisting begin!

VII

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
  He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
  And went with half my life about my ways.

- A. E. Housman, from "Additional Poems"

The problem is you can’t fit that on a candy heart…

In our continuing series of posts plumbing the very heart and soul of Valentine’s Day…

Because I liked you better
  Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
  To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
  We parted, stiff and dry;
'Good-bye,' said you, `forget me.'
  'I will, no fear', said I.

If here, where clover whitens
  The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
  Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
  The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
  Was one that kept his word.

Thank you A. E. Housman for capturing it all so exquisitely well in this, and so many other fine poems…

Clearly, this poor lost fuckless soul is not one with the spirit of Valentine’s Day…

Male Rights Activist Calls for Valentine’s Day Boycott

Any guy who gives flowers on Feb. 14 is a blooming idiot.

So says Marc Rudov, a relationship expert in Los Gatos, Calif., who is on a campaign to get American men to boycott Valentine’s Day.

According to Rudov, who has authored books such as “Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze or Jumper Cables,” believes Valentine’s Day should be canceled permanently because it promotes unequality of the sexes.

No, no…   That sense that you have been cast forever into the status of abject inferiority is all just part of the light-hearted carefree Fun!   Smile…You Are Not Worthy!

Need some jumper cables there guy?   Well…you could go buy yourself some flowers and chocolate and send yourself a Valentine’s Day card from that imaginary girl friend whose engine you crank every night at bedtime.   Or…

…you could enter our Forth Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest!   That is…if you can manage to slip your worthy entry in before the deadline passes.   So Hurry…the deadline is February 5!   You might just make it.   It’s a slim, almost totally hopeless chance…one in a million.   No…one in a zilllion.   One in a Bazillion.   You’d be crazy to even think of trying.   But…isn’t that one slim chance of success in the face of certain doom worth the risk?   You might just beat the odds after all.   Maybe.   Just maybe.   If you don’t try you’ll wonder for the rest of your life if you might have won The Big Prize after all.   So do it!   Go for it man!   Crank that engine!   Remember…deadline is February 5th.   If you give it your all you might just make it.

Coming soon, to your local Going Home Clinic…

This was a part of my childhood.   Not a huge one, but an important one…

I never became a member…even at that tender age I wasn’t much of a joiner…but I watched what Walt Disney put on my TV screen regularly.   Mostly it was for this…

And this…

His vision of the future was a big part of my kidhood dreams.   I wanted to be there, to grow up into that world where a great big beautiful tomorrow was shining at the end of every day.   Somewhere along the line I stopped dreaming it.   Somewhere past adolescence, somewhere after the country as a whole, tired of the war in Vietnam, tired of the race riots, fatigued by so much inter generational conflict, lost interest in the frontier of space, so terribly soon after we’d just put our footsteps on the moon.

Though I never stopped dreaming about it, I stopped believing in Disney’s great big beautiful tomorrow.   I put it down to fantasy…a beautiful story I was told as a kid that I wanted to believe in, but would never happen.   The world just didn’t work that way.   But I think there was something else that was missing from that dream.   Something that, had I seen it, might have made me hold onto it for a little longer…maybe even leave childhood behind with a vow to work a little harder to make it real.

That something, was me.   I was missing from that future.   And so were a lot of other kids just like me.

Disney Channel’s Strict ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy

In the original ‘The Flintstones’ series, the only characters of color to appear were natives of Africa who participated in a cave scout jamboree. Worse yet, far off into the distant future, on ‘The Jetsons,’ the universe seemed completely dominated by white people as well.

These were just signs of the times and while toon tones began changing in the 1970s, it’s almost blasphemous nowadays to have a television show that doesn’t include diversity, often to a point where it almost just seems forced.

So at four decades post-Stonewall and more than a decade into the age of ‘After Ellen,’ it wouldn’t be unnatural for one to wonder just where The Walt Disney Company draws the line at diversity. In all fairness, the company has teetered on the issue, having both progressive human resources policies for same-sex couples (which incited the infamous and rather seemingly innocuous Southern Baptist boycott) as well as just recently relenting on allowing same-sex commitment ceremonies at the theme park resorts under public pressure.

So where exactly does Disney draw the line when it comes to acceptance of gays in ‘everyday life’?

Well you already know the answer.   Yes, Disney has been very progressive when compared to other media and entertainment companies.   Behind the stage.   On it…well we’re all still in the closet.   And if we’re invisible on stage, we’re also invisible in the audience.   To each other.   To ourselves.

That’s a shame.   Disney wholesomeness isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and in fact it’s only mine provisionally.   I like it to be there, but a steady diet of it would suffocate me.   And it would have when I was a teenager too.   But that Disney-esq sensibility about life is more me then not. I like my visits to Key West, they relax and de-stress me nicely.   But my visits to Walt Disney World rekindle something inside of me that I had thought long dead.   That, it’s a small world after all attitude.   That idealized Main Street USA.   That Tomorrowland, where we would all live someday in a world where science and the pursuit of knowledge weren’t just good things, but a great adventure.   Sniff at it if you like, but there are worse visions to have become attached to as a kid, to keep close to your heart as an adult, to hand down now to the kids among us.

I should have been a part of that vision when I was a kid.   All of us gay kids should have.   We were there in the audience, but invisible…even to ourselves.   So instead of Disney’s future, we got told we were mentally ill.   Instead of Disney wholesomeness we were taught that our desires were a sickness best kept hidden away from decent people, and especially children.   Our friends got the happily ever after.   We got the gutter.   The great big beautiful tomorrow we could all look forward too would be a better place because we would not be in it.   You can’t tell me that didn’t make a difference in the adults we all eventually became.

One of these kids will later come out of the closet…

I like to think that if Disney was alive today (yeah…he’d be 110 now…But if…), we Would be a part of that vision of the future.   Walt Disney was a pioneer, who revered the old days and idealized them in his Disneyland.   But he also never let the past keep him from moving forward.   The caretakers of his vision today alas, aren’t the visionaries he was.   But this world doesn’t get very many of those…

So according to [Disney Channel Worldwide President of Entertainment, Gary Marsh], if a character hasn’t had a crush on someone, it’s okay for the viewer to assume they character is implicitly gay and that should simply be enough. At least until the character develops an attraction for the opposite sex anyway.

Perhaps the correct answer is “we just aren’t ready yet.”

“A man should never neglect his family for business.”
-Walt Disney

Gay kids need to be brought into the Disney “family” audience too because they are part of the family too and there are worse examples out there to set for them then Disney.   “Someday” should come sooner rather then later.

“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
-Walt Disney

This is another edition of what Atrios said…   Actually, Rotwang…

It is very difficult to get someone committed against their will, unless they have committed violent acts. After all, I’m still at large. In states with big public sectors, aid for the mentally ill — assuming they accept assistance — can be very spotty. There are agencies with phone numbers, but try calling and getting some service. (I have.) In Arizona, forget it.

The icing on the cake is that in some places almost everyone has access to firearms. Efforts to deal with guns or magazines or bullets are doomed, like Prohibition or ‘The War on Drugs.’ There are just too many around, and too many people who want them. Better coverage of mental illness would be worthwhile, but it wouldn’t stop homicidal people from reflecting back the hostilities of extremists with prominent platforms. We know who the extremists are.

P.S. I would concede that some kind of gun control would make it more difficult for incompetent, crazy people like Nutboy to get guns. As crime control, however, forget it.

P.P.S. An attack of this intensity on a Congress person is an exceedingly rare event, so in that sense it’s futile to diddle with ‘how could this have been prevented.’

Glenn Greenwald Tweets somewhat sarcastically, “Remember the 1960s, when 1000s of people were involuntarily locked up in insane asylums and there were no assassinations? http://is.gd/kAbza”

I remember part of the impetus for getting people out of the asylums was far too many were committed who didn’t really need hospitalization, and the ones who did weren’t getting it as long as they were being held safely out of public view.   In far too many cases they were more dumping grounds then hospitals.

It’s tempting to engage in a little sarcasm myself when I hear my fellow liberals start yapping about gun control now.   Hey fellas…I’ve got a Swell idea on how to lower the temperature of the rhetoric in this country…let’s start making noises about gun control…!

Yes…this will certainly lower the temperature of the dialogue in this country.   But then there’s this…

Joe Wilson ‘You Lie’ Slogan Etched Onto Line Of Assault Rifle Components

Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-S.C.) health care-era “you lie” interruption of President Obama is now reportedly being commemorated with a place on a new, limited edition line of assault rifle components.

The Columbia Free Times reports that the words are being engraved on a series of lower receivers manufactured for popular AR-15 assault rifles. Lower receivers are one of the primary pieces of the firearms.

“Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new ‘You Lie’ AR-15 lower receiver,” the weapon manufacturer’s site writes on the product description. “Only 999 of these will be produced, get yours before they are gone!”

I believe the 2nd amendment guarantees the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms.   I believe that freedom is part and parcel of democracy itself.   And I despair.   Never mind the lunatics who are selling the above back handed incitement to kill a president (I sincerely hope the Secret Service is watching where those rifles are going!).   Never mind the NRA’s grotesquely dogmatic stances on gun regulation and crime.   The biggest reason we can’t have a rational discussion about gun control in this country is the gun control crowd was very successful back in the 70s in convincing people that their ultimate aim was to eliminate private gun ownership in this country.   People quite correctly concluded that even the smallest most perfectly rational regulations on gun sales and ownership was just a first step toward total confiscation.   That wasn’t paranoia…it was often stated quite openly by gun control groups.

That seems to have changed on the democratic side of the isle.   Good.   But it isn’t enough to get us to where we need to be regarding guns.   There’s a lot of things I think we could do, including bans on high capacity clips for instance.   But the first step has to be acknowledging Americans, if they are peaceful and law abiding, do in fact have a basic right to own their own guns, which is to say, the means to defend themselves.

How denying that somehow became a staple of democratic politics completely baffles me sometimes.   I understand and share the liberal democratic impulse to hate war, revere life, nurture love and defend liberty, to work for justice and toward the peaceful society where we are all equals in the eyes of the law.   I am completely disgusted by the the republican lock them up and throw away the key approach to crime.   That we incarcerate a higher percentage of our own citizens then any other industrialized nation should be a matter of shame to all of us.   But if democrats represent the interests of the common everyday working people as opposed to the rich and powerful, then they really need to remind themselves from time to time that the lot of the common people is not greatly improved by rendering them defenseless.

I am not going to stand here and argue that had someone in Gifford’s crowd been armed some or all of the killings may not have happened. I’m certainly not going to argue that a state that can’t at least Try to keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people isn’t asking for trouble. The argument I often hear that an armed society is a peaceful one seems grotesque on its face.   You need your gun when the peace has broken down, not when its alive and well.   So the first thing is to nurture the peace.

I was bullied horribly during part of my grade school years, the middle school ones, and it left me with a perfect understanding of how it is that your personal safety and security is ultimately on you and you alone.   You need to prepare yourself for the worst.     But having a fire alarm in your house is a pathetic excuse for playing with matches and gasoline.   What…I had a smoke detector…why is my house on fire…?? The bromide is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.   But turn that around.   Guns don’t make a peaceful society either.   People do.   And one way you Don’t make a peaceful society is this:

Or this…

Or this…

And this…

And this…

That last is from an ad that was televised in West Virginia as part of the campaign to enact an anti-same-sex marriage amendment in that state.   It’s a family in the crosshairs of an unseen homosexual sniper.   More specifically, the unseen homosexual sniper is targeting their children.   This is what gets people killed.   This is what makes a society violent.   This is creating the climate of hate that can set off a mentally unstable individual.     But also the perfectly, murderously sane gay basher.   Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been on the receiving end of this hate incited violence now for decades.   What’s changed is now the right is doing it more broadly, and more openly, and with even less compunction.   What we’ve been seeing in this country in recent years, your gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing for decades.   A climate of hate, meticulously, relentlessly cultivated for political and social ends.

There’s your problem.   Not guns.   Hate.   Last Saturday it was a crazy man.   Tomorrow it might be the chillingly sane.   Timothy McVeigh.   Eric Rudolph.   Scott Roeder.   One political party has been ginning up hate as a way to win elections for decades now.     The problem is when the inevitable violence results the other party responds by calling for more gun control, as if that’s even possible in a nation that hates itself as much as this one is starting to.

I understand that first amendment freedoms are sacred to a democracy.   If we can’t talk to each other we can’t govern ourselves.   Speech, even ugly disagreeable speech, is a right government cannot be allowed to trample on without opening the door to tyranny.   Our ability to speak truth to power depends on that freedom.   My hope is the killings in Arizona can finally, finally, enable us to also speak truth to hate without fear that we could sabotage freedom of speech in the process.   If we don’t confront hate we will loose that too.   Hate will silence the democratic dialogue if we let it, and then we Will loose our precious democracy.

All the gun control in the world won’t matter if we hate each other enough.   And if we love and care about each other as neighbors, as fellow Americans, regardless of race, creed or religion, then guns cannot do us any great harm.   Just there in the background, like the fireman’s hose if you need it, but the point is not to.   How much crime could be eliminated if we actually cared about each other as fellow Americans enough to make our schools strong, and the economy work for everyone?   How many gun accidents could be avoided if we cared about each other enough that we held our neighbor’s safety, and their children’s, as if it were our own?   Yes actually, guns do kill people.   When people hate each other enough.   If you’re worrying about the availability of guns in this country you are worrying about the wrong thing.