Picture Paragraphs

They’re gonna tear down the grand old opry
They’re gonna tear down the sound that goes around our song
They’re gonna tear down the grand ole opry
Another good thing, is done gone on, done gone on

Well there were campers
And there were busses
Parked all around, where there used to be a door
But that place
Called the grand ole opry
It just ain’t there
Just ain’t there no more

They’re gonna tear down the grand old opry
They’re gonna tear down the sound that goes around our song
They’re gonna tear down the grand ole opry
Another good thing, is done gone on, done gone on

Right across from the wax museum they used to line up around the block
From east Tennessee and back down home again
All of a sudden there’s nothing to do where there once was an awful lot
Broad Street will never be the same

I’ve been in love with the grand ole opry
And I guess I have now for a good many years
When I hear the grand ole opry
It makes me sad that it’s gonna disappear, gonna disappear

from the something awful forums:

First, let’s start with the core information of an article. it’s about the prospects of VAT for the US:

After Obama adviser Paul Volcker recently raised the prospect of a value-added tax, or VAT, the Senate voted 85-13 last week for a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution that calls the such a tax “a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America’s economic recovery.”

For days, White House spokesmen have said the president has not proposed and is not considering a VAT.

“I think I directly answered this the other day by saying that it wasn’t something that the president had under consideration,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters shortly before Obama spoke with CNBC.

After the interview, White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki said nothing has changed and the White House is “not considering” a VAT.

Many European countries impose a VAT, which taxes the value that is added at each stage of production of certain commodities. It could apply, for instance, to raw products delivered to a mill, the mill’s production work and so on up the line to the retailer.

In the CNBC interview, Obama said he was waiting for recommendations from a bipartisan fiscal advisory commission on ways to tackle the deficit and other problems.

When asked if he could see a potential VAT in this nation, the president said: “I know that there’s been a lot of talk around town lately about the value-added tax. That is something that has worked for some countries. It’s something that would be novel for the United States.”

“And before, you know, I start saying ‘this makes sense or that makes sense,’ I want to get a better picture of what our options are,” Obama said.

He said his first priority “is to figure out how can we reduce wasteful spending so that, you know, we have a baseline of the core services that we need and the government should provide. And then we decide how do we pay for that.”

Volcker has said taxes might have to be raised to slow the deficit’s growth. He said a value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it had been in the past.

Hmm… let’s see what we have here. The white house has consistently said that VAT is not an option. In an interview, Obama said that he wanted to explore his options before he committed to anything, a typical answer that is completely inoffensive in all ways. After the interview, the white house said the VAT still isn’t an option. The senate is overwhelmingly against it, making it nigh impossible to ever pass.

However, some republicans have been saying that obama, despite all external signs and communications from the white house, secretly wants VAT. let’s add that at the end of the article here:

Since then, some GOP lawmakers and conservative commentators have said the Obama administration is edging toward a VAT.

Perfect, perfect. Now what can we use as the lede? Well, he did say that he wanted to explore options, which means that VAT might still be on the table if all of his communications before and after that statement were deliberate lies. Ok, well, that’s clearly the most important part of this piece. Let’s put that on the top of the article.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.

Before deciding what revenue options are best for dealing with the deficit and the economy, Obama said in an interview with CNBC, “I want to get a better picture of what our options are.”

Yes, that truly is the best way to summarize the things that have actually happened. now we need a snappy, attention grabbing headline.

Great! It has absolutely no merit and has nothing to do with the things that actually happened but hey, whatever, it’ll get some readers!

There is a trap that many of us fall into when imagining struggles against power. We imagine that we must be the lone hero, standing up against the indomitable might of our oppressors. We imagine ourselves taking heroic stands – like David against goliath, like Rosa Parks against racism. Or we imagine ourselves becoming powerful, inspirational singular leaders – like Martin Luther King Jr., like Malcolm X.

But what these imagined images fail to make note of is the power around those people. Google recently did an icon image for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it directly expresses what I’m talking about.

I particularly like this image because it emphasizes one often overlooked aspect of the Civil Rights movement – that it involved a whole lot of people!

Let’s look at the Montgomery bus boycotts, a story which most people are familiar with. Most people will tell you something like this: Rosa Parks was on the bus one day when she all of a sudden decided that she wasn’t going to move to the back of the bus, sparking the community of Montgomery to come to her aid. Thus began the boycott that would eventually lead to the desegregation of the bus system.

Few people are able to go into deeper detail. But we don’t need much to realize that the boycott was actually an incredibly complex undertaking. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted over a year – 381 days, to be exact. In 1950, over 900,000 Black people lived in Montgomery. But these 900,000 Black people were not boycotting their jobs. They were not boycotting their grocery stores, and they were not boycotting their lives. This means that, for over a year, 900,000 Blacks in Montgomery had to find alternate ways to get to work, to get home, to get to the grocery store, and to generally get around the city.

Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1st; by December 3rd, the vast majority of Montgomery’s Black population was boycotting. It is absurd to imagine that this occurred in a vacuum. It is ludicrous to imagine that after Rosa Park’s arrest, a previously disparate community suddenly came together out of nowhere in order to support her. No. Based on the speed with which the community reacted and the clarity of the community’s action, we can be fairly sure of several things. The first is that there was already a network throughout Montgomery, through which information and discussion could travel quickly and efficiently. Second, is that the members of these networks were of generally the same mindset; there were little to no people saying, “Well, I don’t know, I don’t think our segregated bus system is all that bad.” Finally, we know that this network was able to spring into action. There was no hemming and hawing about what kind of action would be best, which would be the most efficient.

So much of the time, discussions criticizing society end in the lament, “But what can I do?” We see only Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King as the movers in the civil rights movement; we think that we must make ourselves like them before we can even start to make a difference. And, because we can never make ourselves into a hero of such mythic proportions, we think that, until someone that powerful does show up, we can only wait around, doing nothing, being
ineffectual.

We as activists must realize that change was never brought about by a single person. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has become lionized, certainly. Yet, when we recognize that the Civil Rights movement was won not by a single person, but by a whole network of people, a whole movement of people, working towards a common goal, we can begin to imagine the next steps of our own movements.

The idea that the wealthy get less service from the government than the poor is one of the most dangerous but also the most pervasive ideas in our culture.

I am an atheist. Unlike many American atheists, I am not a “born-again” atheist. I did not find atheism after a childhood of religious oppression, or anything like that. I was simply raised without organized religion. My parents, growing up in China, were atheist, as well as college-educated. If there was Chinese religion in their families, it must have been dropped in college, and they certainly didn’t have much interaction with the Abrahamic religions.

I find that this has made me a much less vitriolic atheist than most American atheists. And, truth be told, there is something bothersome about this new-wave atheism, this born-again atheism, this Dawkins-and-Hutchins atheism. Here are some of the reasons why:

- They are so proud of themselves when they discover that religion has been used to manipulate people, that they think they have found all societal manipulation. They stop questioning economic manipulation, cultural manipulation, and other forms of manipulation. In short, they stop thinking critically on these issues.
- Conflating provoking people with being insightful.
- Certainty: I happen to think that being certain you have the one and right answer is a problematic position to have, no matter what the subject. Of course this doesn’t mean that you should change your opinion every time it’s challenged. But it is important to try to understand where someone else is coming from – a position of empathy. Starting with the assumption that someone is stupid leads nowhere, accomplishes nothing, and absolutely shuts off dialog.

but i do know that the common liberal/democrat reaction of laughing/mockery is completely wrong.

i am concerned with the tea party because of it’s incredibly fascist undertones, coupled with the class struggle which all of america is going through right now. while the hateful language of the tea party is more than a little cause of worry, the problems that gave rise to those feelings are the same problems that have liberals calling for financial reform, the same class exploitation that drives us towards marxist analysis.

dismissing the tea party is dismissing the concerns and legitimacy of poor whites. we must not let ourselves buy into stereotypes of poverty, forgetting that poverty and class exploitation is more than urban, more than black.

in any case, conservative thought and the tea party in particular fascinates me, because i don’t understand it. there is a completely coherent worldview in there. it’s also diametrically opposed to my own. the fact that there are two such different interpretations of reality itself is fascinating.

this post sparked by a rather in-depth article in the philly citypaper.

My teacher said that the 60s were the “last gasp of cultural criticism” before we were overwhelmed by the tidal wave of capitalist consumerism. But, I don’t know that we were suddenly overwhelmed by materialism; market capitalism was strengthened, not weakened, by the cultural critiques and studies of the 60s.

Without an understanding of what makes people tick, advertising would never have gotten so effective at getting into our brains or justifying it’s own existence. Neal Stewart, the mastermind behind PBR Beer’s resurgence, has cited Naomi Klein’s No Logo as a treasure trove of marketing ideas. If you’ve never read No Logo, here’s the little blurb from amazon.com:

In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. The global companies claim to support diversity, but their version of “corporate multiculturalism” is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to “censor” the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster’s policies, given that they’re both divisions of Viacom?

There is something in here about the dialectic of capitalism; that resistance and consumption is either an arms race or a dialectic (whichever metaphor you prefer). there is also something in here about the way we imagine ourselves and our roles versus what actually happens in real life. but i am too lazy and rushed to tease it all out. what are your thoughts?

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/the-marketing-of-no-marketing.html

I recently read a 1959 essay by Frantz Fanon, called “This is the Voice of Algeria.” For those of you not familiar with Algerian history, Algeria was colonized by France in the early-mid 1800s, a rule which lasted until approximately the mid 1900s. Fanon, in his essay, discusses the use of radio in Algeria.

In Algeria, before 1945, the radio as a technical news instrument became widely distributed in the dominant society. It then, as we have seen, became both a means of resistance in the case of isolated Europeans and a means of cultural pressure on the dominated society. Among European farmers, the radio was broadly regarded as a link with the civilized world, as an effective instrument of resistance to the corrosive influence of an inert native society, of a society without a future, backward and devoid of value.

For the Algerian, however, the situation was totally different. We have seen that the more well-to-do families hesitated to buy a radio set. Yet no explicit, organized and motivated resistance was to be observed, but rather a dull absence of interest in that piece of French presence. In rural areas and in regions remote from the colonization centres, the situation was clearer. There no one was faced with the problem, or rather, the problem was so remote from the everyday concerns of the native that it was quite clear to an inquirer that it would be outrageous to ask an Algerian why he did not own a radio.

Fanon goes on to write:

[What accounted for the indifference and resistance of the native Algerian to French radio?] The explanation seems rather to be that Radio-Alger is regarded by the Algerian as the spokesman of the colonial world. Before the war the Algerian, with his own brand of humour, had defined Radio-Alger as ‘Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen.’

One of the things which I find most interesting about this situation is the key identification of radio as distinctly French. Frenchmen and European colonizers, then, quickly accept the radio into their lives – they see it as “a link with the civilized world.” The native Algerians also recognize the radio as distinctly French, and for this reason have no interest in the radio, and are to a degree resistant to its’ affect on their lives. Understanding the radio as French, and understanding they want no French influence in their lives, they do not buy a radio – they uninvite this influence from their homes.

What strikes me about this whole situation is the way in which American culture is entirely different. We don’t just have radios – we also have television, movies, and music – all of which can be lumped together under ‘entertainment.’ As Chomsky writes, “Entertainment is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages.” The vast majority of Americans easily and openly invite entertainment into their lives – we own televisions, visit the movies, and buy (or download) music. Unlike the native Algerians, we have completely and thoroughly bought into the ideology of the upper class – the ‘haves.’

What entertainment we do consume, we are much less likely to think critically about. I remember hanging out with one of my friends, who’s a pretty solid lefty, if not as radical as I’d like. Still, he’s the type of person to reliably make fun of Fox News, conservative politics, follow Colbert, etc. I also remember watching 300 with him, and hearing something to the effect of “I don’t remember why people got so up in arms about this movie, it’s just entertainment.” Like, word?

Ultimately, I don’t think Grandma’s adage about television rotting your brain has much merit. Its’ effects are far more pernicious and subtle than that. Television – as well as music and movies – is a broadcaster of cultural value systems. Why do people want large houses, big cars, and stick-thin wives? Because they want the ‘good life,’ a vision of life learned through the television, imagined by corporations. As an advertising-driven medium, you will rarely see material critical of corporations, and you will never see material critical of capitalism.

I don’t really have an end to this blog post. This is really just foundational thought before the big stuff, I feel. It’s even a bit obvious, if you think about it. But it’s always good to start on firm ground before doing anything nuts, yeah?

The biggest thing that I will say is this: Be mindful of what you ingest. Some of us take steps like, “I don’t eat beef or pork anymore,” “I’m watching my diet.” But you also have to realize that your diet is not only what you eat, it’s also what you watch, it’s what you listen to – all of that is digested. You may be vegan, but then the music that you listen to is full of beef and the tv shows that you watch are full of pork. So you have to be mindful of what you digest on every level.