The Highest Office

Good morning Padawan.

By the time you read this, it will be old news. In fact it was practically old news by the time it happened. Yesterday something pretty amazing happened. Something that was a foregone conclusion by the time it happened. But something that had taken far longer to happen than it rightfully should have.* For the first time in history a woman was nominated to run for the President of the United States.**
It didn't happen here. Canada has already had a woman as Prime Minister, but we have yet to have a woman lead a party to victory, so we ourselves have some ground to cover. But the US is not only our (get ready for a few cliches) the big dog in the yard and our closest ally, but also totally fascinating - and fascinated with itself, so its hard to ignore. For all its myriad failures, it does get a lot of things right... or it least it has been - we shall see what happens in November.
Come November we will be witness to one of two things - either a woman will be President of the US for the first time, and that is pretty exciting; or the most objectionable candidate ever*** will be in office and while I don't want to be one of the historical cycle of sirens of the end-times who think the Golden Years are behind us, if Donald Trump becomes President, things are sure going to get interesting and while its likely to be entertaining, it isn't likely to be the sort of entertainment the world wants.
I really want to believe in this moment in our better angels. I want a world for you where you can reflect back on the day your Dad told you that this amazing moment in history had just happened and how it meant nothing to you at the time, and that though you hardly recall what it was like before you are so blessed to live in a true Golden Era where the bounds of equality are more inclusive than any generation before, where you, as a woman know no limits to what you may achieve. Where the men at your elbows are friends and colleagues and equals and no-one bears a false imprimatur of value based upon birthright of any measure.

Anyway... when you read this in whatever future manifests, the day I just spoke of - that was yesterday for me.

Love Dada.

*Note that Hillary Clinton losing the Democratic nomination in '08 should not be considered a social failure. Everything that was lost in women's causes was gained and more by people of colour.

**I acknowledge that other women have been in contention in the past as Vice-Presidential candidates, running for nomination without achieving it and running as nominees of parties that are politically irrelevant in terms of their ability to launch a campaign with any (let alone realistic) chance of success. Being didactic about this diminishes the impact of the actual achievement, I don't want to delve any further into it at this point.

***Yup, even more so than Nixon - his pinnacle of vilification came after he was elected.

You can't handle the truth!

I don't really have a lot to say about this one.

Maggie G (not going to bother misspelling her name five times in this post.) is spot on the money. By the time I got over the initial shock of the September 11th attack - which for me was by mid-afternoon that day - I was saying similar things. MANY people were saying similar things. The fucking tragedy is that the nation didn't listen and has since gone on to blow the living shot out of (significantly) two largely muslim countries.

An important thought that regularly gets ignored by those who stand by the flag is that being culpable in a passive way is not the same thing as 'those people in the WTC deserved to die.'

Any doctor will tell you that the best way to deal with illness is to prevent it in the first place rather than to excise the offending organs once they're diseased.

Case given das boot, with good reason.

Fucking America!

I can't believe that a culture has developed that is so ludicrously litigous as the glorious US of A.

The American dream has been perverted into a swinehole hallucination where someone ELSE does the work, then the sick, the poor, the dirty, the downtrodden masses clambor for a crack in the armour to appear - a place where the guard has been dropped long enough that the slightest indication of a potential 'i'-dotting ot 't'-crossing error results in someone else trying to scavenge a piece of the pie. Drives me fucking nuts.

It may be the case in the Jackson trial... much to my additional disgust.

It appears to be the situation in the case of the Wendy's finger.

But luckily there is an occassional outbreak of sanity. I feel for the family of Billy Tyne. It is a terrible thing to have to lose someone you love. We all have to do it. But few of us have it made into a movie - in this case The Perfect Storm. But it was a very respectful film, I thought. It recognised the very real dangers of being a fisherman on the Atlantic coast of North America, and paid homage to the men who live, love and die doing the job.

But Billy Tyne's family just didn't see it that way.

Ridiculous.

Did you see the film? Was Billy Tyne a bad person in the film? Nope. Driven? Yep. Did he make mistakes? Yep. Did he die? Yep. What happened in real life? Was he a bad person? Apparently not. Driven. Dunno, who cares. Did he make mistakes? I'm betting. Did he die? It appears as though. What went on on the Andrea Gail? I don't know. Wolfgang Peterson doesn't know. Sebastian Junger (the book's author) doesn't know. Billy Tyne's family doesn't know. It is ALL fiction.
The film itself is a huge fiction, and thinking otherwise is absolute folly - particularly if you know anything more than just what appears in the film! Just by reading the book I know that practically all of the events in the film are based upon things that DO happen in sword fishing - but all in one trip? Never. (Much like Planes Trains and Automobiles.) It's just far more interesting than the interminable hours of doing nothing or working without rest on a boat are. Can you imagine Jack Bauer went to bed for 9 hours sleep on '24' - what kind of Andy Warholian nightmare TV-show is that? "Tonight, on '24' - Jack's arm falls asleep, so he rolls over." For sweeps they'd probably have to have him get up and relieve his bladder. But I digress.

Anyhow, to short-cut to the point, the court made the right decision. Anything else would have been absurd.

But here is my question...

Why Florida? What sense is that?

Clearly it was a Florida law that was being exploited. But did the Andrea Gail set sail from Florida? Nope. That'd be Massechusettes. Was the film made in Florida? Nope. Hmmmm. Okay, the logic is starting to fall short. Uhhh. Does Mrs. Tyne and family now live in Florida? They had fucking better, and even then it pretty fucking stupid.

A related web-site to today's ranting.