Another Angry Image Of The Day

This image came across my Twitter feed over the weekend.

Picture from here.

The man, carrying a rifle and who has his hand on his handgun, was part of a rally held at Stone Mountain, Georgia to support the Confederate flag. As I understand the story, the man in the white t-shirt burned a Confederate battle flag to protest the rally. Until the hand went to handgun, both men were engaging in provocative political speech that the First Amendment is designed to protect.

This image troubles leaves me with dozens of questions, but I'll ask just three.

First, is the police officer preternaturally calm or would his reaction have been different if an African American had had his hand on the gun?

Second, has the nation really come to the point that any political speech must be loud and any speech which violates one's sensibilities must be responded to with the threat of violence?

Most importantly, if the answer to the second question is "yes," what can citizens do to protect free speech rights?

Election Day Wisdom: What To Do If Voters Do Something Stupid

Actually, it's any day wisdom that applies to any situation when one must deal with stupid people who demonstrate the need to illustrate their stupidity. Election day, more than most days, has the potential to make me want to scream, "How can people be so stupid and still breathe?" Almost of all of those people who will challenge what little Christian charity I possess will be online today.

The wisdom necessary to deal with stupid people can be expressed humorously with a little irony as shown in this classic:

Duty Calls

This expression makes the same point.

Borrowed From Flights of (Almost) Fancy

Of course one can always turn to sacred wisdom:

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: [James 1:19]

 Stay calm; go vote.

Quotation Of The Day: Political Anger Explained Edition

From this Matt K Lewis post at the Daily Caller:

Today, the level of a given person’s conservatism is directly tied to how angry they are (that — and a willingness to call Obama a socialist.) Thus, a pro-abortion lesbian who is really pissed off at Barack Obama will be deemed more conservative than, say, a devout traditional mother who is a philosophical heir to Edmund Burke (this isn’t a value judgment, as much as it’s an observation of how things have changed.)

Life Imitates Art: A Real I'm Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going To Take It Any More

In 1976 the film Network featured this famous rant.

In 2011, we get this real-life equivalent from Dylan Ratigen on MSNBC.  From his August 9 program. (I don't know how I missed this yesterday.)

"Mirror, Mirror" in America

For the young or non-Trek literate readers, "Mirror Mirror" is a classic episode of the original Star Trek series.  The plot featured an alternate universe with a tyrannical Empire instead of a benevolent Federation, a bearded Spock, and a Tantalus Field that the Department of Homeland Security is probably trying to develop at this very moment.  As with all Star Trek episodes, good triumphed and everyone had a laugh on the bridge.  I'm not so sure the episode Americans are experiencing now will have such a happy ending.

First, a tweet by Peter Daou points to this article that confirms that 400 Americans have more wealth than the 155 million poorest Americans. For the purposes of comparison, Irene, South Dakota, would have more economic power than the states of California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, the nine US states with the largest populations.

Second, the US military is actively torturing an American citizen who has been convicted of nothing.  I naively believed that the US believed that one was innocent until proven guilty.  I also thought Obama condemned torture, but I guess that was when it didn't apply to Bradley Manning who is alleged to have turned over documents to Wikileaks.  To make matters worse, the White House has apparently decided to fire P.J. Crowley who was perceptive enough to call the government's treatment of Manning "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid."  I guess that the prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment and the protection of free speech can be selectively applied.

Third, via The Madville Times, I discover that South Dakota's budget is twice as large as it was in 1996 but it spends half as much on tax relief for the the elderly poor.

One of the running jokes about the original Star Trek series was that characters who appeared in a red uniform would die by the end of the episode.  Somehow, it seems as if a large portion of America just got beamed down wearing a red shirt.

Angry Politics

I am by nature an angry man.  I consider the Incredible Hulk an acceptable role model.  I use anger as a crutch to get through the day; it’s the only way I can motivate myself.  I’ve had only one dentist use “laughing gas”; the buzz made me angry.  Lately, I've been drawn to Justified, the television program whose protagonist claims "I guess I never thought of myself as an angry man."   His ex-wife, however, asserts he is " ...the angriest man I've ever known."  I suppose it’s for these reasons, and numerous others, that my wife worries that I carry around an unhealthy amount of anger.

Even though I'm drawn to anger the way the way a mechanic with a foot fetish is drawn to pedal pumping, this Peggy Noonan editorial frightened me.  Noonan writes, “. . . I am struck now by how, when I worry aloud about this and say to a conservative or a liberal, a Republican or a Democrat, that I fear something bad is going to happen, no one disagrees. No one says, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.” They say—again, left right and center: “I’m afraid of that too.”

I’m a little young to actually remember the Sixties; I was only 10 years old during the Summer of Love, and my recall of the news reports Martin Luther King riots, the Chicago Democratic Convention Riots, or Kent State are so blurry that they resemble dreams more than actual memories.  I remember the Operation Rescue protests, the Rodney King riots, Clinton hatred, and Bush hatred more clearly, but none of that ferment seemed as widespread as this current rage. Like Noonan, I think some of this current fury is something new.

It would be nice to blame only one side; the Tea Party people or talk radio blowhards for instance have done their fair share of harm.  The problems, however,  run deeper.  No leader seems to have enough respect to convince everyone to "play nice."  In short, there are no adults, and the young run around believing that their opinions carry the weight of facts "that can't be wrong."  Everyone seems to have forgotten that most people err out of ignorance not malice.

In The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett has Kasper Gutman say, "Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice."  Although Gutman is a rogue, he deserves to be listened to.  To be judicious is to be "characterized by good or discriminating judgment."  Judicious's  synonyms include "reasonable," "sober," "sagacious," or "enlightened," qualities all American leaders need to exhibit in this acrimonious era.  Gutman would surely agree that anger is something that can never be practiced judiciously.