The Bush fear fogger

God bless George Bush! No one uses the fog of fear any better than our 43rd president. Last night's performance in front of the American people was the fear fogger at his most frightening. Of course, when your approval rating is hovering around 20 percent, fear is just about all you have left in your arsenal.

"Ultimately our country could experience a long and painful recession," if the bailout package is not passed, he said."This rescue effort is not aimed at preserving any individual company or industry—it is aimed at preserving America's overall economy," Bush said.

Maybe a recession is what American need to fully grasp the utterly bankrupt condition that our worst president since Hoover has left the country in after his two terms of war manipulation, and fear-mongering--clean the pipes like a strong dose of horseradish does.

Bush, like a slimy time share salesman urges us to act quickly, or we'll miss a great opportunity.

On the other hand, we have this, from Ron Paul.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

Chuck Baldwin, presidential candidate of the Constitution Party has this to say about the fleecing of the American taxpayer.

"That deer in the headlights look on the faces of Obama/Biden/McCain/Palin when discussing this crisis should tell Americans everything they need to know about these candidates. Not one of them is letting on they know what’s really happening, much less how to fix it!

In the last three years, the Federal Reserve has created over $4 trillion in new money out of absolutely nothing. As these huge new piles of phony money flood the banking system, the phony money already in circulation becomes worth even less, which leads to higher prices. We accept the vague term ‘inflation’ to describe this giant rip off, as if some immutable force of nature is the cause of our shrinking paychecks. But, make no mistake –This meltdown will ultimately spell disaster for every American.

The roller coaster ride began in earnest with the $60 billion Bear Stearns bailout, followed quickly by the $300 billion bailout of government’s big mortgage/banker buddies last month. September started with the massive Freddie/Fannie bailout that will end up costing taxpayers somewhere between $500 billion to $1 trillion. On Monday, the fed brokered the Bank of America buyout of Merrill Lynch. Then just the other night, the fed announced the $85 billion bailout of AIG insurance, an enormous global entity with over $1.1 trillion in assets.

So far, the only solution being talked about is more of the same failed monetary policies that got us into this mess in the first place – more fake money, more debt, more usury. It is time to demand a return to sound money. None of the other “Big Box” candidates is even talking about the most obvious place to begin the road to recovery, which is a return to the constitutional principal of sound money."

H.G. Wells said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let's hope Americans turn off the bread and circuses, educate themselves about what's going on, and work for truth.

Americans know little or nothing about fiat monetary system

Fiat dollars allow us to live beyond our means, but only for so long. History shows that when the destruction of monetary value becomes rampant, nearly everyone suffers and the economic and political structure becomes unstable. Spendthrift politicians may love a system that generates more and more money for their special interest projects, but the rest of us have good reason to be concerned about our monetary system and the future value of our dollars.
--Ron Paul (9/12/2003)

You can read the entire article from LewRockwell.com, published five years ago. Still very pertinent today.

Also, you can hear an interview here, with Dr. Paul, from KLAA, AM-830 from Los Angeles.

Bailout: Just another political betrayal, brought to you by the two-party system

Apparently only seven percent of Americans favor the Wall Street bailout, at least according to yesterday's post at Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty blog. A Rasmussen poll pegged support at that level, the biblical number of perfection, by the way.

Dr. Paul on the formation of his recent alliance mentions the diverse crowds he attacted to his campaign, and this seems to indicate who might be part of his longer term strategy of building a broad-based coalition for change.

Interestingly, there's one group that refuses to budge from their position, smugly claiming they're divinely right.

Ironically the most difficult group to recruit has been the evangelicals who supported McCain and his pro-war positions. They have been convinced that they are obligated to initiate preventive war in the Middle East for theological reasons. Fortunately, this is a minority of the Christian community, but our doors remain open to all despite this type of challenge. The point is, new devotees to the freedom philosophy are more likely to come from the left than from those conservatives who have been convinced that God has instructed us to militarize the Middle East.

David Bardallis has a really good article about our two-party shell game over at LewRockwell.com where he clearly articulates the poverty inherent in continuing to vote for the evil of two lessers.

Surrounded by the crass and the mediocre

Why would the death of an obscure (to most) writer matter so much to those that read him, or better, knew him on some personal level? Possibly because he saw the world like few others, and uniquely captured events and people in his writing. There are fewer and fewer like him.

We live in a world where technology has put just about everything at our fingertips, and at the same time, made it far too easy for us to turn off the parts of our brains that ought to be functioning at the highest of levels. Like the din of a crowded convention center, the incessant noise of all things internet requires that we figuratively shout to be noticed—by appealing to the superficial or pushing other people’s buttons—with hate, the latest flavor of the month, pop culture icons, or relying on shock value—none of them building on a sense of community, compassion for others, or finding value in intelligent dialogue.

David Foster Wallace was someone that I could turn to as a reader that still enjoys books that make me think, consider, and ponder.

I knew his nonfiction, rather than his fiction, and found that when he wrote about tennis, and his adventures as a regionally ranked player, as a teen, in many ways, it mirrored some of my own experiences as a baseball player. This was one personal connection and quality that helped me identify with this writer, who I never got to meet in person.

Reading Wallace made me aware that he was someone that was operating on various levels, as well as a much higher plane than I was. It was obvious that he was exceptionally gifted, even though at the time, I didn’t know he had graduated from Amherst, summa cum laude, with a dual major in philosophy and English. I later found out that he had a mathematical mind, which was obvious reading “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” about his teenage experiences playing tennis in the wind tunnel known as the Midwest. This was one of the essays/arguments in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

Despite his obvious intellectual gifts, and propensity to footnote, I personally found his style readable, and rarely tedious, like I find, say, Faulkner, or other literary heavyweights. Maybe that’s a lousy comparison, as Foster would have considered himself post-modern as a writer. My point is that most (not necessarily all) of his nonfiction is accessible, and I think readers would find enjoyable, albeit not the typical dumbed-down, non-intellectual visual junk food fodder that today’s readers seem to clamor for, and the shelves of the corporate bookstores are chock full of.

From the back cover of the book jacket of ASFTINDA, the NY Times Book Review blurb captures DFW’s genius well:

David Foster Wallace is a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent, one unafraid to tackle subjects large or small, ever willing to experiment, he lays his artistic self on the line with his incendiary use of language, at times seeming to rip the mundane and unusual from their moorings, then setting them down anew, freshly described.

Life goes on, and most of us, yours truly included, spends more time than we (I ) care to consider with the day-to-day mundane, firmly attached to the moorings of a world that seems to be spinning madly out of control. Even worse in my opinion, a world where writers like DFW have been devalued and pushed to the fringes.

Save your false sense of the historical, and thoughts about how our nation has always had an anti-intellectual streak, or that the “good ole’ days” weren’t so good. I’m not waxing nostalgic in my thoughts on Mr. Wallace, I’m clearly offering my own tribute to the things that were good, valuable, and even necessary about him as a writer, and according to many of the things that have been written by those who knew him, like here, as a person.

If you think that we’re living in some sort of golden age, here in the first decade of the 21st century, I’d have to say that you’re sadly mistaken and need of some intellectual stimulation. I’d suggest Wallace’s two books of essays, ASFTINDA, and ">Consider The Lobster: And Other Essays as worthwhile starting points.

American writer, David Foster Wallace, dead at 46

[update-9.17.08, 4:41 am: Once again, up before the sun. I wanted to update last night, but my internet connection was on the fritz. I found a comment at MetaFilter by Sleepy Pete I liked, especially this part.

And that is what makes it hardest to accept, Mr. Wallace, that you wrote those stories and went through hell like those that you wrote about and still made it through with their fucked up lives however they could... and you couldn't. For that I can't be pissed off at you. For this I can't be angry. I can only try to wonder what I can do for everyone I've known in that situation and try to make it better... try to make the world a place where footnotes are life and acceptance is the only way to live.

Then there's this by Ziegler. What makes haters like Ziegler keep on spewing hate? I obviously have an answer to my own rhetorical question. I hope to reread "Host" and add some of my own thoughts. I do have this for the time being; Mr. Ziegler, your take on Mr. Wallace isn't unique at all. Also, you don't know genius, because it bit you in the ass and you were too stupid to recognize it!--JB]

[update-9.16.08, 4:27 am: Up early doing some work (before my paying gig); found this article on DFW from the Baltimore Sun. The writer, Childs Walker, captures David in a way that others haven't, using sports, and his own special way of writing about it (tennis). In fact, I've been rereading "ASFTINDA" and chapter 6 on "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry...", one of my favorite chapters in the book, and one that has given me, a non-tennis player, an understanding of the sport I didn't have. I now even watch tennis, just because of that chapter.

It's early, and I'm starting to ramble, but I hope Walker's article helps others "see" David again the way we saw him prior to the news Saturday night.-JB]

[update-9.15.08, 5:23 pm: I'm going to continue to add updates to the original post as I see fit; I don't really feel like writing about any other issues, at least for a few days.

I found Bruce Weber's article in the NY Times (may require free registration) worthwhile, particularly as it had a quote from James Wallace, David's father, about his son, and some of his recent "struggles." It also had reactions from other writers who knew Wallace, including Jonathan Franzen; “He was a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer,” said Franzen.

Mr. Wallace (David's dad) is quoted as saying Sunday "that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst."

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

For me, Weber's article helps provide additional context to this tragedy.--JB]

[update-9.14.08, 7:13 am: Still having trouble getting my head around the death of DFW. Didn't know him in a personal way, but readers will understand how certain writers make you feel that special connection, which is what DFW did for me. I've found a few sites worth checking out if you were a fan, or just curious why others were. An interesting thread here, and this post at Cosmopolis is very good, as the writer apparently knew Wallace.--JB]

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I just got a text message from my son that David Foster Wallace committed suicide.

Wallace was one of a handful of writers that rarely failed to excite, and inspire. I wrote a fairly extensive post at Write in Maine about both Wallace and fellow writer, Jonathan Franzen, both gifted writers, equally adept writing either fiction, or non-fiction.

For me, it was Wallace's non-fiction that I was most familiar with, from two books of essays, Consider the Lobster, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which happens to sit on the headboard of my bed, and its essays are regularly reread. Only a handful of other writers are in that category with me: Neil Postman being one, and another, Wendell Berry.

Wallace has an essay in Consider the Lobster, about the author's travels as a member of the McCain press contingent during his 2000 "Straight Talk Express" tour, as McCain is stumping for the Republican presidential nomination. Wallace captures the meaningless of political campaigns like few other writers I've read. He also writes about the Maine Lobster Festival, in Rockland.

There's little else for me to write on this subject other than to say it saddens and troubles me.