View from the Loft

8 incidents in 4 1/2 months

Please read Sara Robinson's post on the domestic terrorist acts that have occurred since Obama's inauguration: eight episodes in four and a half months:

For the record: This is not business as usual. True, there have always been occasional events, usually dismissed by the corporate media as "isolated incidents," the work of "lone wolf shooters" acting for reasons all their own. But you have to go back a long, long way in American history before you come to a place where you find incidents like this happening an average of once every two weeks. And the chattering classes are finally beginning to realize what those of us who've been faithfully watching the right wing for years have been telling them for a long while now: there's nothing isolated about any of this.

In fact, this is exactly how full-scale terrorism begins.

What she's most worried about is "where this kind of thing historically leads," and she lists five areas of special concern.

Just. Go. Read.

ADDENDUM: Also see her "The Far Right's First 100 Days: Shifting Into Overdrive."

You want surreal? I got surreal

I was tooling around  on the internets the other day and came across some real weirdness.

Y'all know Brewer and Shipley's "One Toke Over the Line," right?

Well, I was watching one video where they talked about their song having been on the Lawrence Welk show. "No way!" I thought.

But I searched for it, and good golly Miss Molly, there it was. And here it is. "A modern spiritual," as Lawrence put it.

Michael Pollan's new rule

Check out the "real food" advocate's new rule on my food blog.

Umpteenth in the series, "Why I hate organized religion"

I have no words.

I will simply quote Shawn Pogatchnik of the AP:

A fiercely debated, long-delayed investigation into Ireland's Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades _ and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.

Nine years in the making, Wednesday's 2,600-page report sides almost completely with the horrific reports of abuse from former students sent to more than 250 church-run, mostly residential institutions.

It concluded that church officials always shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest to protect their own reputations and, according to documents uncovered in the Vatican, knew that many pedophiles were serial attackers.

The commission said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.

"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from," the final report of Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.

More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families _ a category that often included unmarried mothers _ were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last church-run facilities shut in the 1990s.

The report, unveiled by High Court Justice Sean Ryan, found that molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

Magdalene laundries, anyone?

 

Naturally,

most leaders of religious orders have rejected the allegations as exaggerations and lies, and testified to the commission that any abuses were the responsibility of often long-dead individuals.

The report proposed 21 ways the government could recognize past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial, providing counseling and education to victims and improving Ireland's current child protection services.

But its findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions _ in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document.

And yet Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor thinks that, while pedophile, sadistic, and enslaving  priests and nuns are fully human by virtue of their belief in god, nonbelievers are "not fully human":

 

I have news for the Cardinal: belief in a deity is not a hallmark of human-ness. Belief in a deity and the corresponding knee-jerk respect for those who represent said deity often lead to blindness, the kind of blindness that allows thousands of children to be abused and exploited, simply because believers can't bring themselves to see the truth, simply because the purveyors of religion are seen as being above the common run of flaw, error, and downright crime that plague all of humanity.

Soy products: how does your brand rate?

Cornucopia Institute has released a ratings scorecard of various soy brands. Check out my food blog post if you eat/drink a lot of soy.

Remember drive-ins?

Just when I had hopped aboard the nostalgia train (see my previous post), Jim ran across a CNN story on drive-ins. Having written about the golden age of the American auto, it only seemed natural to do a brief post on drive-ins.

I'm sure many people of my generation remember going to the drive-in as kids. In our case, Mom would put us into our pajamas before we piled into the car, bringing our own snacks with us. The drive-in had a playground, where many other pajama-clad kids would be playing before dark and the start of the movie. (It had a concession stand, too, but bringing your own goodies was cheaper.) These were rare outings for us, but we cherished them.

Of course, adolescence transformed the drive-in movie into something quite different: a venue that accommodated the urges brought on by the flood of hormones inundating our young bodies and brains. Sure, the open window--it had to be open so the speaker could be mounted there--let in mosquitoes by the hundreds, but who noticed? (In today's remaining drive-ins, the sound usually comes through the car's FM radio instead of a speaker.) Not for nothing was the drive-in often referred to as the "passion pit." I wonder how many teen-aged couples could have actually recounted the movie's plot.

Drive-ins are few and far between these days. According to Wikipedia, the peak period of the drive-in theater occurred in the late 50s and early 60s, when there were about 4,000 drive-ins in the U.S. I don't know how many of those 4,000 drive-ins remain today, but there can't be many. Lots of factors contributed to the decline of the drive-in, beginning with the climbing value of real estate that made it expensive for drive-ins to operate profitably. Add to this video rentals and VCRs, which made it possible to see a movie in absolute privacy (greater privacy having been a prime lure for drive-in attendees), and the end was inevitable.

For my fellow Michiganders, check out this page for news on Michigan drive-ins, both alive and dead. (Sadly, the Miracle Twin drive-in off I-69 not far from us has been recently closed, the property put up for sale.)

And here's one I remember fondly, the old Gratiot Drive-In, which opened in 1948 and was torn down in 1984. The front of the building was a wall of water! Do take a look at the many photos of this one-time landmark.

The drive-in has pretty much gone the way of cars with fins. We're on the brink of some major changes in lifestyle, I believe, due to environmental constraints, vanishing natural resources and the competition for them, and other realities of the twenty-first century. Never again will we experience the automobile as the icon it was during its golden age in America, one around which an entire subculture grew up, one that inspired drive-in restaurants , drive-in movies, drive-in party stores, and even drive-in churches. Around the corner is something that will be very different, but meanwhile, it's fun to look back.

Those were the days ...

Those of us whose families depend on the auto companies for our livelihood have been feeling pretty glum lately, what with the Chrysler bankruptcy and the imminent GM bankruptcy. The perky, upbeat TV commercial featured in the video below seems to have come from a different universe. In reality, it harks back to a different era, the heady days when the automobile seemed like an unadulterated good that gave us freedom and unbounded mobility. 

Back then there was no foreign competition, no worry about Peak Oil, no knowledge of environmental damage and climate change wrought by muscle cars and giant Cadillacs. I'm old enough to remember not the 1952 version of "See the USA in Your Chevrolet," but later versions performed by Dinah Shore. The 50s and 60s were an era of car worship, when the automobile culture was enthusiastically embraced, promoted, sung about, romanticized, made a symbol of both youthful exuberance (and sometimes rebellion) and middle-class arrival (a car in every garage--and later, two cars in every garage ... and then, even more).

The car was a symbol of freedom: get in your Chevy and see the USA! Go out West to the Rockies and experience the wonders of this great nation. Patriotism and personal freedom were one and the same. It was something of a master stroke to link car ownership with American patriotism--and individualism. No mass transit for us! For Americans, it was all about personal transportation.

Those days are coming to an end, and with it, the end of the American auto companies as we knew them. My husband, Jim, made his first good money as an auto mechanic and now works as a research scientist for GM. Back in the day, he was a gearhead through and through. Our first date was at the stock car races that were once held in Mt. Clemens, MI, where his friend was racing. From him I learned what drag racing was, and what those strange phrases meant in songs by the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean ("and one more thing, I got the pink slip, Daddy").

Well, the car culture wasn't necessarily a good thing--just ask Jim Kunstler. It robbed America of viable city life when freeways bisected neighorhoods and whole cities; it poisoned us with lead; it destroyed mass transit; it wreaked environmental havoc; and it helped create the cultural desert that is the American suburb.

But for all that, most of us who grew up during the golden era of the muscle car can't help but feel a certain nostalgia.

Here's Dinah Shore, invoking the freedom and expansiveness promised by America's car culture. May it rest in peace.

[via Automatic Earth]