Nothing new here folks. Read any lit or scholarship about the heyday of the British Empire — say 1870’s through 1925 or so. All same there: hegemonic churches controlling the lower classes, draconian punitive legal system, labour savagely repressed, vicious institutionalised homophobia and misogyny, propery and real wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, real wages low, poverty epidemic, medical care available only to the privileged few, etc etc. What drives me mad is that we’ve been here before and we know what it was like and it was Nasty. It was depressing and Nasty and scary and lots of people died and/or lived lives of misery, want, and fear. My grandparents lived through the end of the period; the chain of oral tradition is still unbroken.
We know — as surely as we know that hegemonic totalitarian State communism failed — that punitive conformist Church-cultist social-darwinist laissez-faire Edwardian imperial capitalism failed. We’ve tried it and it failed, OK?
Oh criminy. I thought one thing that distinguished the primates was superior learning behaviour.

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 6 2004 19:20 utc | 4

The Magdalene Sisters
My grandmother (on my mothers side) suffered because of the Church also.
She got post-natal depression after the birth of her last child (1935) and was shipped off to an institution, my mother was three. Her sister moved in with my grandfather to look after the young family……… and I guess whatever else.
My grandmother was a very proud woman………. she recovered but refused to come out of the institution and stayed there as an unpaid worker/carer/patient until she died in the mid 70’s.
Fuck those Parish Priests and Bishops. (And yes; the Brits funded them during the 600 year occupation to keep the sheep catholics in line).
Her local church was built 2 years after the great Famine………. Cobh Cathedral……… probably where many a prayer was said by immigrants before they left for America.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 6 2004 20:37 utc | 6

The Magdalene Laundries
Joni’s song lyrics: The Magdalene Laundries of the “Turbulent Indigo” album.

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 6 2004 20:47 utc | 8

This afternoon in the skies over Manhattan three small planes towed banners reading:
WHAT YOU FEAR OVERTAKES YOU
SLOPPY THINKING GETS WORSE OVER TIME
YOU LIVE THE SURPRISE RESULTS OF OLD PLANS
Brought tears to my eyes. Have no idea who was responsible, but have to give credit and thanks to someone for reaching beyond the media and getting the message out there.
While I recognize that there is not yet sufficient hard evidence to support it, I am not yet convinced that this election was not stolen.

Posted by: conchita | Nov 6 2004 22:21 utc | 10

Cloned Poster, hardly. But perhaps I missed something there?

Posted by: conchita | Nov 6 2004 23:04 utc | 12

More like old plans dating back to Vietnam, the hated counterculture, and through the Reagan and Bush, the Poppy administration, CP.

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 7 2004 0:52 utc | 14

Yes, we’ve been here and done this before with horrible results. This is one of the repetitive thought cycles that has been driving me crazy lately. I remember in my idealistic youth thinking — after we had finally left Viet Nam — “we’ll never do anything so stupid again.”

Posted by: maxcrat | Nov 7 2004 1:09 utc | 16

speaking of the morality of whores and thieves…
I took my kids to see a production of The Threepenny Opera tonight by a company that also does work from Lorca, among others, on a regular basis.
Wished all the denizens of the Moon could have been there too.
The audience was with them.
On another note, before the election I wrote a paper about The Handmaids Tale and talked about issues of concern vis a vis Diebold, the Constitution Restoration Act, “faith-based” programs…and the professor excoriated me for being a “drama queen,” gave me the worst grade I’ve ever received for a paper, and told me that my concerns were totally without merit. Although the question was: “What elements do you see in today’s society that reflect The Handmaids Tale,” I went too far afield in my answer by noting what I thought were those concerns. The class itself is, for me, a part of the b.s. that I am forced to go through because of the one credit I left undone long ago and am now having to make up for with twenty credits…long story…but maybe I’ve become dumber since I attended this same university ten years ago.
Of course, this is also a university that was very influential during the Reagan administration vis a vis Russian policy and when I disagreed that Reagan had single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union, that was also not acceptable.
Daniel Pipes has been here for speeches too, and we have Horowitz’s campus police operation going too.
If you’re on campus now, compared to ten years ago, the difference is startling, as far as the presence of student soldiers who have four hours notice for call-up, the increase in very, very conservative positions among students, and their willingness to accept what they are told by the govt.
I read not too long ago that this generation has never known anything but conservative propaganda, since they were born during Reagan, lived to hear Clinton say “the era of big government is over,” and now hear that social security is for chumps.
I think anyone who is hoping for a progressive revival is engaging in wishful thinking. Of course, I could be wrong, because I often am wrong.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 7 2004 4:33 utc | 18

Funny how over at kos, people are so afraid to call the selection fraud. well, These people are sure calling it fraud!

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 7 2004 12:25 utc | 20

Uncle Scam- I do not believe the only purpose of education is to make money. That’s why I don’t have much of it…
…and that’s why I’m returning to get a masters that is “functional” rather than purely intellectual.
The class is no big deal, ultimately. It’s part of the extortion money I’m paying for not following the rules. I tried to argue with more than one dean that the two foreign languages I studied could be substituted for the one (math) that I didn’t. But I lost the argument. At this point, it honestly doesn’t matter WHAT courses I take, as long as they’re not in my previous major, but instead matters only that I take something, because I switched colleges. I’m just serving some time for not following the rules, even tho, when I was a student earlier, I received all kinds of awards for my scholarship. But that was then, this is now.
The paper moment was interesting because I cited The New Yorker, Harpers, Vanity Fair, Reason, Congressional Bills, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and The Washington Post…not exactly non-mainstream sources…I didn’t say that we should all buy gold and head for the hills…I did say that I would tend to think the power elite would stop such fanaticism, but I also said that there are examples of societies falling to such extremists.
I was never a “conspiracy theorist” until the 2000 election, but my insistence that Bush conspired with Jeb to steal that one got me labeled as such. Now it seems I’ve joined the ranks of the dispossessed.
I no longer care to know, even, if this election was stolen. The Democratic Party doesn’t care, so why should I?
The open willingness to even consider a corrupt heart in the body politic is directly and inversely proportionate to your investment and incorporation into its structures, seems to me.
Maybe I’m joining the ranks of Pat’s libertarians because I no longer think that government offers any solutions, nor do I think it is valid or meaninful for my life.
It will be interesting to watch events unfold over the next four years. I expect to see lots of sexual scandal because of the religious bent, and also lots of financial scandal, because of the corporate bent. I do not expect any of these things to have any consequence for those in power because there is no check or balance available in any of the three branches of govt.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 7 2004 14:55 utc | 22

actually, I’m returning to my older position and I don’t give a fuck anymore. I was a bit sarcastic about the libertarian comment.
I’m not a libertarian. I’m not an anarchist. I do believe that govt offers solutions, but I am in a minority in my nation and so it doesn’t matter what I think, so why should I waste my time and energy?
the conservatives have set up the banquet table for themselves and they are about to gorge on the stupidity of the majority of Americans who think it is more important to deny others things they themselves are not forced to participate in, rather than to vote from their economic self-interest.
I was at a school event for one of my kids two days after the election when I heard a dad and his (about ten year old) son talking. The son was gleeful about abolishing social security.
the son went on to talk about the great military hardware that could, and this is as exact a quote as I can do, “kill people without even having to do anything.” His dad listened and occasionally remarked about this technology versus the other when killing people.
the boy said “people.” Killing people. nothing wrong with gleeful delight in killing people, undifferentiated.
his mother sat beside him and saw that I was staring at her son as though he were the spawn of satan.
Those people are not people I claim as part of my own.
I feel like I live in this country as an accident of birth. Hopefully I will be able to chose something different in a year or so by getting a job somewhere else.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 7 2004 16:02 utc | 24

yes

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 7 2004 17:24 utc | 26

I don’t give a fuck anymore
Oh brother.
This talk of ‘leaving’ is also revolting. I understand the compulsion to resign when defeat is perceived. But such maudlin retreat is so, well, ‘liberal.’
“Anyone of our generation who feels and understands the historical moment in which he exists in this world, not as mere words, but as a battle, cannot renounce the study and the practice of the mechanism through which things (and conditions) and the masses interact” (Walter Benjamin, Letters, 300).
Even with the absence of any immediate political goals, action is not made irrelevant.

Posted by: slothrop | Nov 7 2004 17:41 utc | 28

@ fauxreal: It’s soon yet. I think good things happened and there is some focus. Think of what Michael Moore accomplished. Let’s pay attention and back each other up. Kerry won just as Gore did. The media, the “voting”; let’s concentrate. It will be worth it.

Posted by: beq | Nov 7 2004 21:33 utc | 30

more on the vote

Posted by: annie | Nov 8 2004 2:34 utc | 32

Fauxreal I understand how you feel…totally…
I couldn’t identify with about half of my nation and their views of our wars in 90-ies, too…
I am going back now for vacation and am not sure what I am to find there in terms of what people think and feel about it years later…I do not really hope to find big changes all tho they may realized how wrong it was in terms of us not being able to fight USA and win…but I may not find many changes in terms of “our right” to use what ever force we find necessary…etc.
On the other hand Bush pissed of Greeks by recognizing EX YU republic of Macedonia simply as Macedonia and it looks like he did promise not to let Kosovo become independent so they may even find him very useful for our tasks…that’s all that matters I suppose…Not that they are not aware of who is Bushco and what their mission is all about…But they tried to fight an Empire and found it’s hard…Can’t blame them…

Posted by: vbo | Nov 8 2004 5:43 utc | 34

Ugh. I wish someone would create a website putting all these hypocritic bastards in the public eye (kind of like the “chickenhawks” database), so that a true measure of “christian values” is out there for all to see. I thing “Hypocrisy Now” would be a catchy site name.
Here’s a nice one about Roberta Combs (president of the Christian Coalition), helping her daughter in a nasty divorce – breaking a prenup, trying to entrap the father in a sex sting, and attempting to get him to waive all visitation rights.
http://us.altnews.com.au/nuke/article.php?sid=6840
This from a woman who is willing to speak on pro-family values for a modest fee of $12,500-17,500 per engagement.
http://www.nashspeakers.com/cgi-bin/speakers/display.pl?speaker=530
Nauseating

Posted by: ego | Nov 8 2004 21:14 utc | 36

beq,
Thanks for a good belly laugh at the Japanese title of your painting, I needed that.
b,
thanks for recommending Fafnir. I’d seen it once before, but this time I was crying and laughing. Thanks for the nutrition.

Posted by: Citizen | Nov 9 2004 7:01 utc | 38

@ Citizen: Liked the title? Then you will really enjoy the tag; it says “Full Moon”. 😉

Posted by: beq | Nov 9 2004 11:50 utc | 40