The Flylooper's Open Salon Blog

The Bullies in the NRA Boardroom

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:12:02 -0500

When I was in high school there was a small group of tough guy bullies who more or less palled around with each other, much to the eternal suffering of those of us who were their victims. I was a late transfer to the high school from which I ultimately graduated and as such, I was continually tested as to whether or not I would be a victim or left alone. About a half dozen big guys made it a point to bump into me in the hallways between classes or taking an extra “shot” at me in tackling drills with the football team, for which I was ridiculously trying out. All the while I kept my mouth shut, too embarrassed to admit fear, even to my parents, and too unwilling to pick a fight, mostly for fear indeed of getting the living daylights kicked out of me.

And then it happened, almost as if a critical mass had been achieved. One Friday, a big, redheaded German kid, a varsity wrestler, told me to do some innocuous thing in front of some others while off-campus for lunch one day, and I realized that to do it would mean a major loss of face and, although I didn't reason it out, a continued year of being pushed around at school. And so I refused and in doing so initiated an all-out fist fight with this guy. The fight was on, complete with a cabal of kids yelling “Fight! Fight!” and drawing attention from anyone with earshot.

For a few seconds, we sparred a little...a jab here, a swing there. Suddenly, I gave it all I had and swung hard with a left cross and caught my tormenter squarely on the nose. His eyes began to water and blood gushed from his nose. Fight over. His parting words – in front of the others - were an order to be behind the local supermarket on Saturday, where we would continue and he, presumably, would take care of matter appropriately by breaking every bone in my body.

By the time I got to my class after lunch, the word had evidently gone out that I had decked this kid and I was now officially “one who was not to be taken lightly.” I downplayed the whole thing and inside, I was quaking in my boots, knowing that I had to do this all over again the next day. Backing out was simply not an option.

On Saturday morning I had a piano lesson (!) but it would not furnish me with a convenient excuse not to show up, since our fight date was for noontime. And so, I did indeed show up for the rematch but much to my surprise and shock, it was the wrestler who didn't show up. Lesson learned.

For the rest of my teen years I neither started an altercation nor backed away from any threat to my physical self. But also, the rest of my high school year was peaceful.

The Bullies in the Boardroom

In the last few days, since the Massacre of Innocents in Newtown, I came to learn that Grover Norquist, the king of political threats to the careers of dozens of members of Congress, happens to sit on the board of the National Rifle Association. That knowledge alone brought a kind of wry grin to my face when I read it, but after hearing Wayne LaPierre, who is the face, the mouthpiece, and political enforcer of the NRA, pontificate about how America needs to put an armed policeman in every school in the nation as his idea of a response to the massacre, I went ballistic, to make a cheap pun. The solution, he tells us, is to make schools an armed camp. “The solution to bad guys having guns,” he says, “is for good guys to have them.” Welcome to Dodge City, my fellow Americans.

Well, then, what about parks? What about theaters? Should the kid who sold me my popcorn have a shoulder holstered 9 mm magnum in plain sight, “just in case?” What about going to a baseball game? (The prospect gives renewed meaning to “kill the ump!”) People, he suggested, should be armed wherever people gather. What total insanity. What a mockery of civilized behavior in the 21^st century.

Wayne LaPierre is a bully. The same kind of bully that I faced down more than 50 years ago. And he's also a racist. (This is the man who declared that Obama's reelection was more detrimental to America than all the wars we've every fought.) His schtick is to threaten congresspeople with massive campaigns against them if they won't do the NRA's bidding. Norquist, his boardroom partner, uses exactly the same kind of tactics: Sign my pledge to not raise taxes of any kind or I'll put massive resources against you if you don't, Mr. Congressman. In both cases, members of Congress, never much for leading, have acquiesced for years to these two unelected dictators.

I can only imagine what these two must do on Fridays after work .They must enjoy a couple of cold ones laughing like hyenas at Congress, whose conservative members, like sheep in the shearing pen have yet to bolt from the flock. How utterly appropriate that two radically conservative men employing the tactics of fear both with members of Congress and with the public, one with a radical goal of making the federal government moot, and the other with making sure that any person bent on the personal destruction of people can easily obtain anything that fires a bullet, from single-shot .22's to to the latest 100-round assault rifle.

The Massacre of the Innocents at Sandy Hook School may have finally jolted mainstream America to at lease semi-consciousness. We all saw the potential of our own kids to have been victims in the next Sandy Hook, or the next Columbine, or the next Clackamas Shopping Mall. We all felt our hearts ripped by the news of murder of these tender, young children who will never taste the wonders of the world. We saw their heartbroken parents, the sickened faces of police, firemen and other first responders. And also, we saw a community coming together in mutual grief.

Are the Times A-changin'?

It may be from their sadness, from the funerals of their children, that the long needed national conversation about controlling the ease with which massively destructive firearms are obtained and used, has finally begun. It may be that we can begin to come to our senses about all things related to firearms, from the relevancy of the 2^nd Amendment to the possibility of not only outlawing semi-automatic guns, but multi-round magazines, clips, and drums, armor-piercing ammunition and even bulletproof vests, all of which are quite legal to buy in any quantity, at and time, anywhere.

It is time to stand to the bullying Wayne LaPierres of this world. He truly is the bad guy, shilling for arms makers, collecting a million dollar salary in the process and who has an incredibly bully pulpit, given the numbers of members of the National Rifle Association (about 1-1/4% of the American population) can muster.

We see that Mr. Norquist will shortly lose his war in allowing the federal government to collect revenue sufficient for its needs. It is now LaPierre's time for national repudiation of his hate and advocacy for making this country into something it was never envisioned to be. It is time to take reasoned action to reduce more Massacres of Innocents.

When these things come to pass, to be real, I, for one, would pay handsomely to have a beer on a Friday afternoon with both of them.

###

Who Are We?

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:12:53 -0500

The writer as a 7-year old, and his grandfather in 1950, Pope Valley, CA.

The writer is shouldering his own .22 Winchester rifle.

When the news came to me I was happily engaged in my favorite lousy weather activity, which is tying trout flies for next season. I have my fly tying bench set up against a window which looks out on 20 acres planted to fescue grass for seed. Even in the worst weather, it's peaceful and wonderful to look out on as I go along tying up feathers to fishing hooks.

My son came into my den and asked if I had heard the news. “What news?” I asked.

“There's been a shooting in Connecticut. Some whacko just killed a bunch of kids in a school. They're saying something like 28 people were shot to death.”

I sat at my bench, stunned. All I could manage was an audible Oh my God! and I just turned my gaze out the window, staring at the green field with the rain falling gently on it and wondering what had happened. I didn't want to go to the television, which was carrying the thing everywhere on the dial. I just want to be by myself and think. Just three days ago, right here in Clackamas, a few miles north of here, another deranged shooter walked into a popular shopping mall and shot two people to death with an assault rifle. Surely, I thought, this was one of those “copy cat” events the authorities always talk about. Finally, I got up and turned on the radio and got details as they were being reported, while at the some time going to the New York Times website for whatever they had on it.

And so in the space of a week, 30 good people's lives were snuffed out by two crazed men on opposite sides of America. Among them were 18 children, not one of whom was older than 10 years of age. I was nearly physically sick. And I was in tears; something which is very rare for me.

The rest of the day I thought about this event, and the one here in Oregon, and the one in Aurora, Colorado, and the one in Springfield, Oregon (another where the teenaged shooter killed his parents and two schoolmates) not too many years ago. Weirdly perhaps, I also thought of the recent election season and all the hatred and discontent that it raised from the muck that is present day America.

I despair. I am getting to the point of losing hope that civility in this country will ever return. Our lack of it shows up in our popular music, in our art, in our movies and our theatre. I am coming to the conclusion that we Americans have been coarsened by endless war, endlessly being lied to by our leaders, and endless episodes of killings which have no apparent reason to occur. People call the murderers “whackos.” That's the best any ordinary person can muster up in the way of trying to make sense of these massacres. It is too much for plainfolk like me to make sense of, because there is no sense to it.

Somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand Americans lose their lives by gunshot every year - about the same number as those killed in automobile accidents. I used to believe that restricting ownership of guns was a way to curb these kinds of events but I don't think so any more. There are just too many guns out there: some 300 million in circulation, more than there are citizens of the United States. There are guns out there ranging from small caliber, single shot rifles to the latest assault weapon; from 5 shot revolvers to 16 shot, semi-automatic pistols. We are the most heavily armed society in human history and what do we get for all those 300 million weapons? We get 40 thousand dead Americans. And we get “whackos” who seem to find some kind of special pleasure in taking as many with them as they can before turning their guns on themselves.

We will all cry our tears. Many of us will sign this or that petition to ask our leaders to enact legislation to at least try to get a restriction on the types of weapons legally sold in this country. We will go to vigils, write in our blogs, ruminate, talk about it, and in the end, all will return to business as usual. Our elected representatives, ever cowards themselves, will wring their hands, speechify their regrets and they will do nothing. They will do nothing because they value their jobs more than they do reason and courage and honesty. They are sellouts, most of them. In this instance, and in every other issue in which ordinary people are most affected, the people we elect to do our business evidently have other agendas to attend to.

I wonder who we are sometimes. Actually I wonder a lot of the time. The entire American culture has changed in every way in my nearly 70 years. We love our freedom but it comes at a terrible cost, I think. We don't like restrictions. From speed limits to being able to get a new AR-15 at the local gun show; from 35 foot RV's which guzzle hydrocarbons to setting aside land and protecting wildlife for future generations to love – at some level we chafe at having to do something which benefits someone else, whether it's allowing a background check before buying a gun or paying for Obamacare.

The Rubber Is Meeting the Road: Boca Raton and Beyond

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 12:09:01 -0400

Suddenly, out of the blue, the political percentage number on everyone's lips has dropped from “99%” to “47%.” In a stunning admission to his well heeled backers at a $50,000 per plate fund raiser in Boca Raton (which, coincidentally, translates from the Spanish as “rat mouth”) Mitt Romney has dismissed 47% of the American population as hangers-on, totally government dependent, self-proclaimed victims who pay no income tax and yet expect even more “entitlements”from the federal government.

When this not-so-revelatory news from Mother Jones magazine writer David Corn popped up on the tube yesterday, I couldn't do much more than shake my head in absolute bemusement. How is it, I wondered, that a candidate for the highest elected office in the land could be so completely out of touch with half of the people over whom he hopes to preside? How could Romney be so unembarrassingly forthcoming about his views on the subject of wealth, poverty and taxation, even at a fund raising love-in amongst his own class where the chance for his comments to get into a news cycle were at least 50-50?

One of two things applies in this latest Romneyism that half of the electorate are freeloading off of his and his wealthy backers' tax remittances: Either this man is truly so isolated from reality after an entire life of privilege, beginning with his first breath, that he is cut off from the fallout of the largest financial collapse in U.S. history, or Romney just has no idea of what it takes to win an election other than raw ambition. Perhaps both. Time and time again this man has demonstrated that, as conservative writer David Brooks has said, Mittens is just not a thinker. He doesn't have the interest and brain power to really understand his country. He simply wants the job, and nothing else.

Of course the firefighters in his campaign had him call a hasty press conference in which he explained that he was speaking “off the cuff” but really, the damage was ineffably done. The great irony is that the candidate who has most wanted not to offend any Republican and who has consistently sought to stake out positions literally across the GOP/Indie voter continuum has, by opening his own mouth in “off the cuff” statements, revealed himself to the American public as an isolated member of a small class of American über-wealthy plutocrats. You can rest assured knowing that the President, in the upcoming presidential debates will attempt to make Mitt speak “off the cuff.” Something more than butterflies on one hand or disgust for po' folks on the other, must issue from Romney's mouth if he is to be viable at all. So far, it isn't happening. What we've been seeing is a man who looks just plain uncomfortable in a pair of Levis.

Romney's candidacy has been marked by a series of gaffs which flesh out his picture to the people who will vote for or against him. If, as he said, he is concentrating on the 5-10% of the so-called independent voters who will turn this election, he may well be casting off a considerable number of voters who, though attracted to him by his stated “severely” social conservatism, but who are caught up in the web of the current depression, accepting government relief for their families, looking for jobs, and in danger of losing what remains of their net wealth. In other words, do you vote for a candidate who may be nominally against Roe v. Wade but who calls you a freeloader?

The net of the thing is that he will probably drop further in the polls. In fact, betting against Romney may currently be a good one. What seemed like an even chance by my bookie friend, “Marvelous Marv,” has now switched to 3 to 5 on his winning the election.

The net fallout to Romney and his never-ending gaffs is cumulative, and the polls are beginning to show a shift. Nate Silver's “538” forecast has President Obama with a 78% chance of being reelected and winning 305 electoral votes of the 270 needed to win the election. Though Obama has been plagued by one crisis after the other, Americans are coming to understand that his steadiness and unflappability are precisely what is needed in these times. Obama has actually edged out Romney on the economy, something that a few months ago seemed impossible. The upcoming debates will be critical to Romney far more than the incumbent president.

If Romney loses the election, it is a fair bet (according to Marvelous Marv) that the Democrats will hold the senate and possibly, though a long shot, for the House to come back to them, too.

Does it get more interesting than this?

###

R2 = D2?: How to Blow a Presidential Election in One Hour

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:08:56 -0400

Unless I am missing something really important in this political calculus, Mitt Romney just handed over the presidential election to the incumbent, one Barack H. Obama this morning at 9 AM EDT when he officially announced the choice of Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to be his running mate. The announcement itself, made in front of an oudated and decommisioned WWII battleship was nothing less than prophetic.

Is there a rule which says that Republican presidential candidates must play Russian Roulette with the vice-presidency? First, we have George W. Bush appointing Dick “Boom-Boom” Cheney and getting, in the bargain, a finger-waving Svengali who took the country into two $2 billion-a-week, unwinnable wars and, on the eve of the worst economic meltdown in 4 generations, told the country that “deficits don't matter.” By the end of the Bush II presidency, the country was so fed up with those two, I swear the people would have elected my Uncle Charlie if he was on the ballot. (Unfortunately, Uncle Charlie died 30 years ago.)

As if to underscore lousy choices in running mates, in 2008 John “Maverick” McCain anointed a total idiot in the person of “Sister” Sarah Palin to be his running mate, hoping that a combination of a cute derriere and down home “you betchas” and "hockey moms" would transfigure McCain's image from “old man” to “youthful hipster.” He got far less than he bargained for in Sister Sarah and got hammered.

And now [drum roll] the Mittster gives us Paul Ryan! I mean, if ever there was someone would would alienate about a third of likely GOP voters, it is Paul Ryan. This is a guy who would take down every federal social program in existence and more importantly, leave the most likely voters of them all - seniors – hanging from a Republican gibbet. And while Ryan has yet to spell out how he would wring $5.8 trillion from federal spending, he's made it plain that social programs will take the first major hit, while he calls for more massive tax cuts for the already rich and tax increases for the already poor. In choosing Ryan , Romney has placed every GOP voting bloc at risk, including the 6-10% of the electorate who call themselves independents. The GOP base is simply not large enough to elect him.

Moreover, Ryan (unlike the Mittster, who has evidently had an epiphany on his position since being governor) has been uniformly against abortion rights for women and even more strangely, has elevated even birth control, an issue settled decades ago, to the level of a campaign issue. In short, for “R^{2” (}Romney and Ryan) woman don't get to control their wombs. That should help with the women's vote enormously. For Democrats, that is. R2 = D2: Romney and Ryan will each be defeated is now a fairly good bet.

At this juncture, it's hard to conceive that this 2012 Republican offering in the way of executive leadership can actually get elected. We will likely be hearing from that retired lady who was on Social Security and admonished McCain, “Don't cut my Medicare!”

The truth is that Americans have always been pretty much centrists. And that's the way it will be in November. The GOP has left the Democrats much ground to stake out as their own, and they will take full advantage.

In choosing Ryan, Romney has once again stepped on his shoestrings. So much for intelligent picks.

###

The Unspoken Victim in Colorado: Truth

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 12:07:03 -0400

It just seems like the same old tape gets replayed every year or two. We are given some horrible event involving a firearm and a lunatic and which winds up with innocents forfeiting their lives for the “price of freedom” to buy, own and use virtually any kind of gun one chooses to possess.

I have been reading the articles: all the comments of “multi-round drum magazines” which the shooter in Colorado could have had; his use of bulletproof clothing; how much worse it could have been; how he purchased several guns in a short period of time and hundreds of rounds of ammunition over the internet - all entirely legally. It's getting so that these events are occurring so frequently I can tick them off on my fingers, they are still so fresh in my memory: Thurston High School, Columbine High School, Gabby Giffords, Reagan, the Kennedys, James Brady, John Lennon, Dr George Tiller...on and on and on.

In America, reason in these matters is invariably trumped by demagoguery, the blurring of issues, the outright lies which, repeated over and over again, become as truth to millions of my countrymen. It is the same with universal healthcare; with global climate change; with bankers who gamble with their depositors' savings; with poisoned tap water which catches fire from gas seeping up from hydro-fracked wells. The truth or falsity of virtually every important issue we face in 21^st century America is impossibly deadlocked by those most vested in the business of it; by who wins and who loses in the great game of America: money. When you have money, you have power in this country. And when you have power you can determine political outcomes.

And so we can reliably presume that in the board rooms and marketing departments of companies like Colt Industries, Sturm-Ruger, Glock, Winchester Repeating Arms, and Remington Arms they are working overtime to once more bring to the public the entirely specious argument that people kill people. Not their guns. Not their ammunition. Mr. LaPierre and his like can be reliably depended upon to produce some statement absolving guns from being in any way whatsoever a cause of these and other killings. And they will be featured on cable channels and broadcast media everywhere.

And we can also presume that senators and congressmen are deftly fashioning public statements deploring violence on one hand, and on the other steering clear of the obvious for fear of upsetting their constituents who have been bamboozled in the last 20 years from being a clear minority to a majority who think stricter controls on firearms are uncalled for, thanks to relentless advertising by organizations like the National Rifle Association and their corporate benefactors.

Indeed, the two men running for the presidency have been deafeningly silent on this whole issue, even in the face of this most recent tragedy in Colorado. It is the same phenomenon as the argument over whether or not humanity is fouling its own nest. Once, a majority of us signed on to the pronouncements of the scientific community that global warming is at least partially caused by human activity. Thanks to the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, Shell, the coal industry and their like, that majority has evaporated.

The fact of it all is that our leaders have become the lead. What we have is 535 members of Congress with their wetted fingers in the air, testing whether what position on an issue will gain or lose them votes. No one in Washington DC is willing to say the right thing if it involves jeopardizing their job. In politics, as in war, truth is the first victim and retention of power is the first goal. In Washington there are no more Profiles in Courage. The concept of the citizen-politician is as outmoded as rotary dial telephones. Once you are elected to an office in Washington, you stay in Washington. And, generally, you get quite rich.

So here we are, once more, mourning the loss of 12 young citizens who did absolutely nothing to cause the loss of their chance at life. The candles will be lit, the columns of pundits and photos of grieving mothers published, public officials will display their sadness and outrage, and a few people will march for a few days demanding something be done. But it will be for naught. Like the tides, emotions will ebb and we will return to trying to just survive. America seems, to this writer, to be unable or unwilling to face the unvarnished truth – on the issue of gun control or anything else.

We will continue sacrificing our children, our leaders, our wives and husbands, even the guy who runs the night shift at the local 7-11, for the “freedom to keep and bear arms.” Maybe some future generation of Americans will get it right but right now, truthfully, I despair.

###