pjthompson | Entries tagged with corruption

Random quote of the day:

“There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I am an American, which is a complex thing. I know how some of us act in the world, and sometimes that makes me cringe in shame. I want to tell the world, “We’re not all like that.” But that’s a complex thing, too, because sometimes, in some moments, there is something in the American psyche which makes many of us go from 1 to 60 on the boorish scale in less than a second. Where does that American rage and boorishness come from? It’s entitlement, of course. I think it’s mostly a white middle to upper class thing. But sometimes even that’s a complex thing, an exercise in finger-pointing that no one, it seems, is completely immune to.

Some of us try hard not to be like that. I’m fortunate that I came from the lower classes, didn’t grow up thinking the world and everything in it was mine by right. Doesn’t mean I don’t snap sometimes and go into boorish mode. I’m human. And I’m American. And I’m white. But I’m always deeply ashamed and apologetic afterwards, so I try really hard not to go there—so I can live more comfortably with myself if nothing else.

I’ve been thinking about my last trip to England, in 2004. I’d been aware for some time how badly some of us acted overseas. So much so that if anyone asked if I was American, I would sometimes lie and say I was Canadian. It’s possible some rare Canadians act boorishly overseas, but I think it’s got to be much, much rarer than with Americans.

On that 2004 trip, there were three of us middle-aged ladies traveling together, and inevitably, inevitably whenever we overheard someone whining or complaining or acting childish in general, that person had an American accent. We decided we would go out of our way to be the polar opposite in every dealing we had with locals. This was about a year after the bombing of Baghdad and Bush’s invasion of Iraq, so Americans were even more unpopular at the time. Most people were decent to us, especially when we poured on the charm offensive, or when we voiced our own deep opposition to what Bush had done, but some were barely polite.

As I pondered all this, it occurred to me that Donald Trump is the Ugly American Made Flesh. He is the ultimate of loud-mouthed, ill-informed, corrupt entitlement boors. He is all American sins made manifest, a tulpa created from the worst instincts of the worst aspects of the American psyche, a thought-form embodying the American shadow. We made this tulpa—even those of us who would rather pretend to be Canadian. We allowed him to be elected, even those of us who voted for someone else. The 2016 election was the very embodiment of American arrogance and rage. How could we expect to have better candidates when we were all pulling so hard against each other? When we were all sunk so deep in our own arrogance that screamed, “My way or no way at all”?

Donald Trump isn’t just the worst president in American history, he is a reckoning for the American psyche, a lesson I believe we have failed to learn. Oh yes, he may (or may not) be on the ropes now, and good people are working hard to block him and bring him down, but have we truly learned anything from the last terrible years? I can’t say that I see it. Greed and arrogance and entitlement and “my way or no way” still abound. Americans have never been particularly good at self-knowledge, deep examination of our own souls, or acknowledging and working with the shadow. We’re still in denial. I fear we have learned nothing.

The ugly American lives on.

1. Let me Thread you a story…(1-18)
2. We're just a little town. Don't go in much for big and showy, but we had us a fella once who liked to write his name everywhere in town.
3. Wasn't a building or a fence or a bench or a sidewalk safe from his red spray can. "Huge, Huge, Huge" it said everywhere.
4. Natty Knowles spent all his time scrubbing it off things & the town shelled out so much money for it they finally confronted Freddy Huge.
5. Said they were going to make him pay all the expenses. At first, Freddy tried to blame one of the Syrian refugee families in town.
6. But everyone knew Ahmed Shah was a hard-working man who just wanted to raise his family in a safe, peaceful place.
7. And his wife, Halimah, was busy raising their two boys, Idris and Harun, 4 and 3, respectively.
8. Besides, she was eight months pregnant at the time with their daughter, Bilqis, and everyone knew she couldn’t be doing it.
9. Besides, Minnie Halverson, head of the Beale Street Neighborhood Watch was on stakeout one night and saw what happened.
10. Freddy would never dirty his own hands with anything like real work, but his Russian accountant, Ivan Drago, was up for the job.
11. Minnie literally caught him red-handed as the spray paint leaked back over his fingers some.
12. Faced with this evidence and a huge bill from the city, Freddy and Ivan declared bankruptcy.
13. They snuck out of town one night and folks hear tell they set up shop in New Jersey where waste management is a…big industry.
14. Sad to say they left the shareholders at Huge Waste Management holding the bag, and people lost badly needed jobs.
15. Like I’ve said before, we take care of our own in this town. Mayor Begay formed a city waste management firm.
16. The shareholders were happy to buy into that, folks kept their jobs, and we saw no more red spray paint around town.
17. Meanwhile, Freddy and his Russian contact are growing wealthy. Hear tell they’ve opened a university for the waste management business.
18. Naturally, it’s called Huge Waste University.

This tale can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.

You can read the entire Portalville saga (so far) at https://pjthompson.dreamwidth.org/1672524.html

Random quote of the day:

“I am far from denying the destructive and disintegrating forces of passion. I will go so far as to agree that apart from the reproductive function, men have hitherto used love, on the whole, as an instrument of self-corruption and intoxication. But what do these excesses prove? Because fire consumes and electricity can kill are we to stop using them?”

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Evolution of Chastity” (tr. René Hague)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.”

—Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club: A Memoir

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“It’s said that ‘power corrupts,’ but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”

—David Brin, The Postman

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“There is not one human creature in power who will not be modest enough to confess that he proceeds wholly upon a principle of corruption.”

—Jonathan Swift, letter to Lord Bolingbroke, April 5, 1729

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”

—George Bernard Shaw, quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw by Stephen Winsten

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I hope to return to real blogging soon, but it’s been hella busy. In the meantime, here’s another one of those numbered thingies:

1. Listening to the graduate students around here make excuses to their professors as to why they haven’t completed their coursework, it strikes me that not much has changed since elementary school. They’ve just found more sophisticated, elaborate, and convoluted ways of saying, “The dog ate my homework.”

2. I’m on chapter eleven of the read-through of Venus in Transit. I should be much further along as I hadn’t intended to do any restructuring or heavy editing, but you know how it goes. A couple (or more) scenes that just had to be rewritten, language desperately needed de-clunkifying, things had to be looked up and pondered… There’s still plenty more that needs fixing, no worries, but it’s amazing to me how many of the smaller threads of plot and characterization got left untied. I’ll definitely deal with those in the next draft.

3. I’ve acquired a sudden re-fascination with cunning folk, witchery, and folk medicine, et al. lately. I’ve been reading books and scouring JSTOR for articles. (I love JSTOR. Thank goodness for institutional subscriptions.) If research interest is an indicator of which novel my right brain next wants to write, things are looking good for my proto-novel, Time in a Bottle, the idea based in part on my novella, “Sealed with a Curse.” That novella involved an 18th century cunning man, infidelity, wastrelism, and a witch’s bottle. The novel version carries forward to the 21st century descendants of some of the folks involved in that affair. And maybe time travel. Or maybe not.

4. I’m wondering if a subscription to Netflix would be worth it to me since I rarely am in the mood to watch a movie at home more than once or twice a month? I used to devour movies at a massive rate, but I lost the love somewhere along the way. The $8.99 one would definitely be sufficient, but I’m not sure I’d get my money’s worth even then.

5. Come the Singularity, I suspect I will not be allowed on the lifeboat. I suspect I will be okay with that. Utopian visions rarely turn out well for humanity at large. I have zero confidence that techo-utopians will be any better at it than every other millennial movement that has wrecked humanity in the past. I am not a Luddite. I really do enjoy living in the bright, shiny techno-age—but sweeping mass social engineering never works. That’s the lesson of history. That’s the lesson of any close study of human nature. Power corrupts, even utopian techno power—and besides, these yahoos aren’t even trying to be egalitarian. This is all about ego and rich mostly whitefolk trying to escape the filthy masses.

Random quote of the day:

“All things can corrupt a perverted mind:
everything’s harmless in its proper place."

—Ovid, Trista, Book II
(tr. A. S. Kline)

( Illustrated version. )

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

No Sense of Decency

These are the men who tied women to stakes
and burned them because they had cats
and lived on the margins of society, but
did little cures for poor people with herbs.
They said they did God's work; they said
the riffraff could not be allowed to corrupt
their society.

These are the men who put sheets over
their heads because they were cowards
and didn't wish to be seen when they
lynched young men and women who stood
up to them and demanded equality. They
said they did God's work, in the name
of the pure, white race; they said
the riffraff could not be allowed to corrupt
their society.

These are the men who yelled "Communist!"
and blacklisted the lives of anyone who
didn't think as they did; who held the
nation hostage until a brave man finally
turned on them and said, "Have you no sense
of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left
no sense of decency?" Where are you now,
Joseph Welch? We need you now, we need
you. They have no sense of decency,
no shame. They are making riffraff
of us all.

March 18, 2010

Last night on NPR they featured two of the guys who get a lot of voice work on negative political ads--Dennis Steele and Scott Sanders. They said they're hired guns--they leave their politics at the door and just do an acting job. Then the host had them read some adapted nursery rhymes as if they were attack ads. It was hiLARious! These guys clearly didn't take any of this seriously and were having a good time. My favorite:

"London bridge is falling down--falling down, falling down. And who is responsible for this critical lack of funding of our infrastructure? My fair lady! Take the key and lock her up!"

(Trust me, it's much funnier if you hear it read in one of those voices.

You can listen to it here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6444183

Then this morning they played The Impossible Dream in connection with a story about perennial candidates, those guys and gals who are always running for elective office even though they haven't got a prayer. That sent me on a memory cruise back to growing up. My mother loved that musical and she used to play the cast album all the time. I can still sing all those songs word-for-word. I serenaded my cat. She looked at me like I had two heads. If she's sitting on my lap when I start to sing, she commonly meows a complaint or, if close enough, sticks her head over my mouth.

Everyone's a critic.

Then on the way to work I was thinking about the perennial candidates and their impossible dreams versus the guys who can hire voiceover artists to make slick, cynical ads. I had a real Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment there, I can tell you. Because the little guys have got it right, and the slick ad producers have got it so wrong.

I think everyone in America should be forced to watch Mr. Smith before they go into vote. Sure, it's corny, but it's right. Power corrupts, and the ones in power forget that they are legislators appointed by the people, for the people. They have completely forgotten or ignored what is for the good of the country, concentrating instead on to-the-death grudge matches that mean nothing more than bragging about who's got the biggest . . . majority.

Throw the rascals out.

ETA: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, not Mr. Deeds. Don't know why I can't keep that title straight, but I am embarrassed. In public. What else is new?

Random quote of the day:

"Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper, not eternal bronze: let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. No one will rush out and print it as it stands."

—Jacques Barzun

"Most people are just as happy as they make up their minds to be."

—commonly attributed to Abraham Lincoln

(Although there's no proof he actually said it.) (Yes, I'm one of those geeks who verifies quotes.) (Beware of Charles De Lint, btw.) (I like De Lint, he just doesn't always get the quotes quite right.) (Yeah, I know, I know, it's the spirit of the thing that counts...)

Enough with John Karr already, 'kay?

I live near LAX. Our house is less than a half-mile from the north runway and the airspace over our house is often used as a holding pattern for news helicopters covering events at the airport. Around 9 Sunday night, the air was suddenly filled with the thick, loud tom-tom of helicopters hovering low. I don't know how the news media manage it, but even the rotars of their helicopters sound frantic and febrile when after an Event. I was trying to watch that John Cameron "Exodus" show on the History Channel and wasn't in the mood for the interruption and the news media—I just didn't care what was going on because I've been through this too many times, have really had it with the infotainment industry—so I stubbornly kept turning the TV up and trying hard to ignore the roommate when she popped in every five minutes saying, "I wonder what's going on???" Finally, at the next commercial break, I switched to Channel 9 News and found out what was going on: the plane carrying attention-freak John Karr had landed. "Turn on Channel 9!" I yelled to my roommate, and switched back to the History Channel.

After about an hour the worst of it died down, but there were still some holdouts for the 11 o'clock news. The last helicopter didn't leave until about 11:15 or so.

Me personally? Don't give a hairy rat's posterior about John Karr and a ten-year-old murder case, as awful as the death of that little girl was. And I don't think Karr's the guy. He's getting his rocks off too much over the attention. I think he "confessed" for that attention-seeking or because he'd rather spend jail time in the U.S. than in Thailand.

And speaking of rats of the day: Remember our horrific experience with the dead possum? Yesterday morning it was a dead rat and closer than the garage—and I ain't sayin' no more than that because you may have just eaten or something. Suffice it to say, the roommate and I are wondering what kind of bugacious karma we're living through—and why???

Quotes of the day:

"The voices of authority are chiefly four: delays, corruption, roughness and facility."

—Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

(All day yesterday after I pulled this from the quote file, I kept hearing Eric Cartman's voice yelling, "Authori-TAI!")

"Everything that is created must end. All, all round us must perish."

—Michelangelo

(Which explains why he was known as "Chuckles.")

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Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with corruption

Tainted

The Ugliest American

Down Portalville Way - Huge

Excesses

Remembering

Corruptible

Infinite corruption

As power to fools

Numbered thingy

Clam up

No sense of decency

Scorned and covered with scars

Dead rats and John Karr

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July 2025

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