Cross posted from Docudharma.

Mijo.  Pronounced mee-hoe.

Mijo - Conjoined Spanish slang of affection.  Mi hijo, "my son."

18 years ago today I was sitting in the Infant ICU at West Paces Ferry Hospital in Atlanta cradling a 7 pound, twelve and a half ounce bundle of pure wonder.  [Written Friday, 8/15/08.]

Cross posted from Docudharma.

I find myself, on some level, torn between my highly strained faith in American democracy and a perception that it no longer exists.  I applaud and encourage political activism and cherish the activists that I know, but for all their heroism, commitment and hard work, I see us sliding steadily backwards.  This has been my observation for the past 40 years.  We progressives have faced unremitting defeat at the hands of the ultra-conservative ‘system’, which clearly serves our super-wealthy overlords – not us.  

Cross posted from Docudharma.

Like many of you, I came to blogging as a way of fighting back.  Before I found this avenue through which I could channel my dissent, I felt powerless to do anything about the outrages being visited upon our nation and virtually all the rest of the world by our own intractable and illegitimate government.  

People often question what good it does to rant into the ether.  We hear it all the time right here.  ‘Preaching to the choir dude.’  But time has proven that we in the blogosphere are a force to be reckoned with.  The pols and the pundits would be ignoring us otherwise...just like they used to.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

Mahatma Gandhi

Cross posted from Docudharma.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:  Link to an important diary on Electronic Voting Machine Hearing TODAY! from TheOpinionGuy.

On the day before leaving for Netroots Nation, I voted for Jim Martin for U.S. Senate in the July 15 General Primary Election here in Georgia.  

At the polling place I was the only voter but there were a dozen or so poll workers.  After voting (on one of those damned Diebold machines) I asked if I'd get a receipt.  In lieu of one I was given a cute little sticker with a graphic of a Georgia Peach with 'I’m a Georgia Voter' printed on it.  I laughed and said that makes me feel better...there were some chuckles.  

I said I wanted a receipt for my vote.  This is what they gave me.

Cross posted from Docudharma.

If you haven’t seen them you might want to check out Parts I and II.  NN08 – Part I – Old Friends/New Friends has lots of pictures of kossacks and Netroots Nation, but I particularly recommend NN08 – Part II – Where’s our goddam impeachment Nancy?

Cross posted from Docudharma.

The fact that we welcomed Nancy Pelosi to Netroots Nation, purportedly a gathering of leftists and progressives, has to make you wonder.  For the most part we sat there with our thumbs up our asses, drooling like idiots and lapping up the ‘respect’ we were shown by the mere presence of this illustrious traitor to everything I thought we stood for.

Cross posted from Docudharma.

NN08 was everything I hoped it would be and considerably more.  I saw many old friends from last year, met face-to-face many old friends whom I had not met before and made many new ones as well.  There is something totally amazing about meeting an online friend in meat space for the first time.  In the Paradise restaurant on 6th Street in Austin on the first night of the conference I witnessed it happen five times back-to-back one right after another.  It was pure magic.

Cross posted from Docudharma

Contemplating the upcoming trip to Austin has me thinking about the Native Americans and how I have always drawn such inspiration from them.  They make frequent appearances in my art both for their beauty and for their symbolic power.  They mean many things to me but to boil it down I would say they represent the natural human, living in harmony with the environment, and, more regrettably, man’s inhumanity to man.

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

NOTE:  All but the last two videos in this diary are YouTube finds.  The final two are compilations of my own (please forgive the poor quality – I’m still learning), and the last one features some prominent kossacks from last year’s Yearly Kos in Chicago.

It is all too easy to idealize an age, especially if sufficient time has passed to blunt the pain and obscure the harsh realities of the day.  It is too tempting to look back in longing for a past that never really existed.  We all seem to have a tendency to do this - ah the good old days we say.

"Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."

Franklin Pierce Adams

"Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was."

Will Rogers

"The good old days. I was there. Where was they?"

Moms Mabley

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

The likely outcome of the Bush-led Republican raid on America astonishes me.  As America’s national nightmare approaches the eight-year mark, the Bush administration is apparently going to escape unpunished.  They are going to skate scot-free.  They have brazenly committed major crimes against the people of the United States, not to mention the terrible things they have done to much of the rest of the world...and these bastards are going to skate scot-free.  

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

For 40 years I have been told be patient, work within the system, elect more Democrats.  In all that time I have seen few victories and most of those merely symbolic (ooh, they increased the minimum rage by 15 cents an hour), and these anemic victories have been overwhelmed by the horrendous losses the American people have suffered time and time again.  There has been a steady erosion of our Constitutional rights, economic inequality has increased, the working poor and the middleclass have been robbed at every turn by the filthy rich and our government has become more corrupt, more warlike and more evil.  We now openly torture our prisoners and publicly argue that it is our right to do so.

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

This is not a criticism - it’s a plea.

We are at a time unlike any other in the 250,000-year history of our species.  What we do now will determine the fate of our kind.  We may soon know whether or not we deserve the name we have given ourselves, homo sapiens sapiens – wise or knowing human.

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason."

Octavio Paz

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

My father was a soldier and a drill instructor who trained briefly with a Japanese jujitsu master during WWII in preparation for teaching hand-to-hand combat to Army GIs.  He taught my two brothers and me some basic techniques so that we might have an edge in dealing with schoolyard bullies – and the training stood me in good stead.  I used what he taught me on more than one occasion to inject a little homegrown justice into an unpleasant situation.  Those experiences left me with two lasting gifts, an antipathy for bullies and a love for the martial arts.

I began formal training in Judo at age eleven on the Army base at Ft. Benning, Georgia where I trained for a year.  I continued my training in Paris and for a brief time competed on the French National Judo Team as a brown belt (sankyu).  

‘Support the Troops.’  I have come to have mixed feelings about that phrase.  I have been both amused and appalled by the Democrats’ terror at being accused of not supporting the troops.  How did our politics become so simplistic and artificial?  How did it become all about appearances, and never mind the substance?  

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

(Cross posted from Docudharma)
 
I came of age in the time of Nixon and Vietnam.  I learned then that our government was not to be trusted, that they lie to us whenever it’s convenient and that there is nothing pure about their motives.  I also learned to suspect that elements of our government played an active role in the assassination of John Kennedy and possibly others.  I’m not saying they did, just that I’ve pondered that possibility for most of my life and not without reason.  I still have to wonder.  The possibility that our government is that fucking evil shouldn’t seem like such a stretch to anybody these days.

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

In looking back at the Bush debacle, one thing stands out.  It would never have happened, at least not so blatantly and egregiously, had there been a healthy opposition party in America.  Up until 2000 there was at least the illusion of the Democrats as a party in opposition to the Republicans, however ineffective.  And the Republicans, though always venal, have never been so nakedly predatory, never so in-your-face ‘I’m going to take your shit and you’re going to like it’, never so openly disdainful of the Constitution and the law.  Somewhere along the line, the notion of the Democrats as the voice of sanity counter-balancing Republican lunacy has become just so much political vaporware.  What happened?