Honesty is the Lonliest Number...

"So sit right back and you'll hear a tale...a tale of a perhaps fateful slip...it happened in that Southern land...the one with the 2000 voting misslips...the one with the 2000 voting misslips...the man who misspoke that day was a venture capitalist man...his personal assistant who wasn't with him on that fateful day was a running dog lackey Randfan...a running dog lackey Randfan...and so it was in Florida on that awful fateful day...that the skipper of the Republican ship spoke in a blue blood way...spoke in a blue blood way...he told the blue bloods assembled there that all was not yet lost...despite the fact that the 47% were lazy give me government handouts mob dross...lazy give me government handouts mob dross...when the political weather started getting rough...the Blue Blood skipper and his running dog mate thought they had perhaps lost...so the Blue Blood and his running mate claimed that his inelegant tongue had gotten crossed...claimed his inelegant tongue had gotten crossed...if not for the wickedness of the east coast liberal media establishment..."

From the "Tuneful Tale of the Political Adventures of Blue Blood Venture Capitalist and the Randfan Too"

I have to say I found it refreshing to hear and see a politician, in this case Mitt Romney, say what most of us with the powers of empirical observation have long known, politicians like Romney, himself a member of the blue blood class (at least in his own mind), regard themselves as servants of the wealthy "productive" class and, like the Ebenezer Scrooge's of the past, regard themselves as better than the "unproductive" masses who they believe are addicted to handouts and proficient at playing the victim card. Shades of the European assertion that indigenous peoples were unproductive so it was acceptable to steal their land despite the notion common among so many Europeans drugged up on Enlightenment myths that property was the holiest of holies! Of course, what these self-righteous neo-Social Darwinist members of America's blue blood class don't and probably never will get is the irony that those criticising the 47% for taking handouts, having a sense of entitlement to government funds, and for playing the victim, have their hands out as often as they can for government subsidies and handouts and play the victim card everyday by claiming that they are the victims of a socialist welfare plot that is attempting to undermine the very essence of blue blooded American entrepreneurism. Bah humbug

I quote my response to a question on the Rainmakers "Government Cheese" on Youtube: "Yup, direct distribution of government cheese was begun in 1982 when Ronnie himself was president. Apparently Reagan thought it was better to have the masses eat cheese rather than cake. Romney, on the other hand, apparently wants the lazy give me government handout mob to eat tins of dog food and cat food (shades of another era in American history when the media reported that retirees were eating dog fan and cat food because their social security was not keeping up with inflation) purchased at a store in which Bain invested."

News Alert, 5 October 2012
Romney now says that what he said about the 47% was totally wrong. So much for inelegant mispeak. Doubleplusgood

Reference David Corn, "Full Video of Private Romney Fundraiser", 18 September 2012, Mother Jones

Onward Skank Christian Soldiers...

So that good old right wing evangelical Christian activist Ralph Reed says, "There is bigotry against Mormons. It’s on the left". Boy, these scum Christian flim flam men and plagiarists never fade away unlike old generals do they?

Ralph Reed, the man dismissed from the student newspaper at the University of Georgia for plagiarism. Ralph Reed, one of the "three amigos" who emerged from the college Republicans becoming major players in the Republican Party beginning in the Reagan era of the 1980s along with the disgraced and partisan super lobbyist Jack Abramoff and no new taxes uberlobbyist and Republican activist Grover Norquist. Ralph Reed, hired by the conservative charismatic Christian televangelist, media mogul and Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson to run the day to day operations of the Christian Coalition in 1989 until he resigned amidst a financial scandal that shook the organisation. Ralph Reed, the guy who helped Abramoff cynically fleece the Choushatta Indians out of millions of dollars to do something they knew they could not do, get them a casino on their reservation, this at the same time that Reed was hypocritically preaching about the ungodliness of gambling to the conservative Christian flock he was fleecing money from in order to support his lobbying efforts on behalf on no new taxes on Indian casinos and a casino for the Choushatta. Ralph Reed, the man who now appears to have resurrected himself out of this muck, the muck of his, Abramoff's, and Norquist's thuggish lust for mammon and power, the muck of his own creation. Ralph Reed, the man who just like those slimy Elmer Gantry televangelists caught with their fingers in the till or their body parts in the beds of those they probably shouldn't be with, just won't seem to go away with his tail between his legs despite his less than stellar past moral record. But then he is a charismatic Christian a group notorious for its serial born again redemptions and resurrections.

Not only has Reed resurrected himself out of his dark matter past to once again sit at the right hand of mammon and a savage partisanship that almost amounts to war--Reed claims to be fighting a guerrilla war against evil godless Democrats--but he also seems to have recently pulled yet another Sgt Schultz. He knows nothing about good old evangelical and fundamentalist Christian anti-Mormonism. But he does, in what has become a cliché, know something about bad old left ant-Mormonism. But then the skank Reed's mission in life seems to be to demonise the left and liberalism who he and other similarly ahistorical illiterates bizarrely equate with socialism, communism, and nazism in much the same way that Mormons wrongly equate criticism of Mormonism with anti-Mormonism. All of this, of course, is yet another example of good old time orwellian foucauldian categorising "evil".

When you have people, like Reed, who claim to be Christians while simultaneously pursing cynical Machiavellian political strategies, who believe in the distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" rape, who believe contraception is a sin, who believe that the poor are poor because of their sins, who demand abstinence only sex education despite its repeated failures, who think they are the chosen people of god and the nation they live in is the chosen of god, you know we are doomed. Emory you should be ashamed.

On another related issue I always get a laugh when groups like Christian Republicans on Facebook urge a return to good old Christian America and good old American Christian values. I have to laugh the laugh of recognition because such a partial understanding of American history is so common among so many in this country particularly on the Republican Dixiecrat side of the political ledger.

When looking at the history of the US it is clear that officially the US has had since its inception disestablishment, i.e., no state religion, no theocracy. Before that, of course, there were, on the official level, theocracies in New England, and theocracies on the official level in the South. However, on the popular or unofficial level not only in New England and in the South and particularly in the Middle Colonies, Colonial America and later the United States has been religiously diverse at least since the seventeenth century. Jews have been in what became the US since 1654. Santeria has been in what became the US for some time thanks to good old Christians enslaving of Africans who were brought to the Colonies and the US to do the labouring dirty work particularly of America's Southern plantation elite.

Unofficially, of course, some varieties of Christianity did come to dominate America, thanks to the tyranny of the majority (ethnocentric religion does like to foist its morality on everyone else), in the wake of the American Revolution and the American Constitution, the constitution which established disestablishment. And there was religious, read Protestant, establishment in some American states like Massachusetts until 1833. But there have always been Christian countercultures in the American Colonies and the United States, Christian countercultures like the pacifist Quakers, the pacifist Mennonites, and Enlightenment Deists like Thomas Jefferson who famously eliminated anything supernatural from the gospels in his so-called Jefferson Bible including miracles and virgin births.

Eventually, of course, and thanks, in part, to American humanists like Robert Ingersol, the US courts became what they should have been in the first place, legal systems free of majoritarian Protestant religious tyranny. And to that I say, Hallelujah and Amen.

References:
Moyers and Company, "The Resurrection of Ralph Reed", 31 August 2012, PBS
Jim Galloway, "Ralph Reed: There's Bigotry Against Mormons. It's on the Left", 30 August 2012, Political Insider, Atlanta Journal Constitution
Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (the Jefferson Bible)

Conservatives Are Doing it For Themselves...Not...

I woke up this morning thinking that we should indeed shrink the federal government. So here's my solution. Let's get rid of all those middle class federal government handouts. We'll keep wealthfare and aid to the poor. Let's cut farm subsidies. Let's get rid of middle class tax loopholes like those for middle class homeowners. Let's get rid of FEMA for the middle class. Let's get rid of federal student aid for the middle class. Let's raise the price of gas/petrol for the middle class to $8 dollars a gallon, hey after all we need to take into account the environmental and health damages petrol and its various and sundry uses cause. Let's get rid of social security for the middle class. Lets get rid of medicare and medicaid for the middle class. Let's make the middle class pay tolls for driving on federal roads. Let's add a $200 dollar tax to those in the middle class who enter federal parks. Let's double federal tax interest and penalties on the middle class. Come on you middle class anti-federalists stop putting your hands out for money from the feds and just say NO. You too can build your own DIY.

The Giant Galactic Cock That Threatened the Russian Universe

The art piece of the day is the "Giant Galactic Space Dick" of Saint Petersburg, Russia to your left. This 213-feet-tall, 89-feet-wide phallus which was put on on the Liteyny Drawbridge in St. Petersburg in 2010 by the Russian art activist group Voina, the group out of which Pussy Riot arose. The giant cock, by the way, points in the direction of Russia's biggest dicks of all (all puns intended), the internal and external security agents of the FSB and the building they inhabit, the FSB Building in Peter's. The FSB, of course, is the Russian successor to the KGB. Not surprisingly both Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and its Christian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, both of whom are making an example of Pussy Riot presumably in order to nip criticism of the neo-Tsarist Russian state they have created or recreated in the bud, were once agents of that biggest of Soviet dicks, the KGB.

Speaking of Pussy Riot and freedom of expression what does it mean when a Bahrani human rights activist Nabeel Rajab gets three years for protesting against Bahrani authoritarianism on Twitter while Russia's Pussy Riot gets two for their non-violent protest against Putin in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the cathedral that was once destroyed by Stalin in 1931 to symbolise that the Soviet state would no longer be the theocracy the Tsarist state was only to be resurrected in the 1990s by Yeltsin and others enveloped as they were in a haze of nostalgia for a time in which church, state, and subjects apparently knew their divinely ordained place, something Putin and Kirill are now teaching those who don't know their place in the new old neo-Tsarist Russia they have created. Durkheim lives. But back to Rajab and Pussy Riot, does the differential sentences mean that Islamic theocracy is one year harsher in its treatment of dissidents expressing their freedom of speech than Christian theocracies? Does it mean that neither Bahrain or neo-Tsarist Russia have experienced the Enlightenment?

Speaking of the Enlightenment does that notion of that Tea Party evangelical Christian idiot running for the Senate from Missouri, Todd Akin, about how the bodies of women who are legitimately raped-this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rape, by the way, is not novel to Akin and has been common in some circles within the Republican party since the 1980s-excretes some sort of magic chemical during rape that inhibits pregnancy, indicate that many Americans haven't yet experienced the Enlightenment or learned much from the Scientific Revolution?

And why are there so many dicks anyway? I have already mentioned dicks in Russia and Bahrain but there are, of course, dicks in every time and in everyplace. Currently we have dicks in Great Britain where governmental officials threaten the Ecuador embassy with invasion if they don't give up that celebrity activist Julian Assange and where a nation in the midst of cuts to government services is spending thousands of pounds a day to surround the Ecuadorian embassy with cops whose sole mission seems to be to arrest Assange who they apparently consider the essence of all evil in the known universe, should he come out. We got dicks in South Africa where police killed 44 striking workers who confronted them with primitive weapons in what seems to some eerily reminiscent of apartheid era South Africa. We got dicks in India who spread rumours of sectarian violence causing thousands to flee preemptively. We got dicks in the United States where neoliberal Randfan Christians want to punish the poor for their sins, religious and secular, and reward and celebrate the one percent for their apparent inherent godliness or naturalness in a return to the days of Ebenezer Scrooge, the days of that old time gospel of wealth, and the days when good old social Darwinism ruled the one percent roost. And we got dicks, boy do we have dicks, right here in river city who want to close historic pools and historic bath houses while giving money and services to private businesses who, our politicians promise, will finally bring salvation to our economic problems. Of course, these dicks have been making these promises almost every year since the 1950s.

Still don't get the picture? Look above or just look around you at the spectre of dicks which haunts the universe in which we all live. The patriarchal and paternalistic mentality that helps give rise to dickism exists almost everywhere and has been taken to new heights in the "civilised" modern West. There really is more to fear than fear itself.

Further Viewing and Reading
"Why Russian Art Group Voina ‘Dicked’ a St. Petersburg Bridge", 16 June 2010, Animal

Buffy Blog: "Family"

Last week in "No Place Like Home" we saw how important the theme of the family of blood is in season five of Buffy. This week it is the beloved family of friends that is at the heart of the aptly named and Joss Whedon penned and directed “Family”.

Buffy, of course, has relied on her family of friends, Willow, Xander, Giles, and others including Angel, Oz, Anya, and Riley, since the beginning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she came to Sunnydale and as she has moved from high school and into college for everything from research to friendship to survival. Season five of Buffy, thus far, has also placed a great deal of emphasis on several themes that have been at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer since it began including growing up and the obligations that come with growing up (a theme channeled through Buffy’s Slayer obligations in the earlier seasons of the show) to family, to the family of friends, and to the community of Sunnydale and beyond.

Last week in “No Place Like Home” Buffy asked her sister Dawn who she was after the Buffster discovered that she really wasn’t her sister in a drawback the curtains spell. In “The I in Team/Goodbye Iowa” we saw Tara sabotage a spell she and Willow were doing to find demon evil in Sunnydale after Adam, the Big Bad of season four, escapes from the Initiative, a spell Willow refers to in “Family”. In “Restless” we learned that Willow thought she knew Tara because she knew Tara’s name. In “Family” we learn that though Willow knew Tara’s name, she, the Scoobies, and we viewers really did not fully know Tara.

“Family” is the Tara episode that devoted viewers have been waiting for since Tara first appeared in the Buffyverse in season four's "Hush". “Family” begins where “No Place Like Home” ends and gives us a glimpse into a day and a half in the life of the Scooby Gang.

“Family” begins with a relatively happy moment, something that seems increasingly rare in Buffy the Vampire Slayer since season three. Ah the trails and travails of leaving high school and being forced to grow up. Willow and Tara are lying in bed while Miss Kitty Fantastico, who we first met in “The Yoko Factor/Primeval" in season four, plays on the floor. Tara tells Willow a bed time story about a kitty saved from a pound full of dogs, ferrets, dolphins, and half-camel’s by some nice people, Willow and Tara one presumes, a tale that ends happily with Willow and Tara adopting Kitty Fantastico and snuggling in bed.

The happy tale of Willow and Tara that begins “Family”, however, is a short one. Soon in act one Tara tells Willow, again, that she doesn’t feel that she really fits into the Scooby Gang, feelings that become even more intense when no one laughs at Tara’s joke when the gang is moving Buffy out of her dorm room back to 1630 Revello. As for the Scoobies, they just don’t get Tara except perhaps Giles who understands that a witch who has a birthday coming up might be interested in something that can be purchased in his Magic Box.

When Tara and Willow arrive at the Magic Box at the end of act one things go from bad to worse. Tara’s brother Donny is at the Magic Box looking for her and he doesn't seem particularly taken with the magic for sale in the Magic Box. As act two begins Tara’s father, Tara calls him “sir”, arrives shortly after she does. We know there is something off about the relationship between Tara and her family of blood almost as soon as Tara opens her mouth. When she sees her brother Donny and later he father the stutter she had at the Wicca group meeting in “Hush”, a stutter that we know from ”Hush” and “New Moon Rising” is linked to self-doubts, a stutter that has been absent largely since she and Willow have been an item, suddenly reappears. Nor does Tara introduce her father, who is decidedly icy toward Tara and toward her “friends”, to Willow. Is she afraid of what he might think of her “lifestyle”? "Family" continues to link witchcraft and lesbianism at least in part.

Over the course of act one and act two we learn that Tara’s father, Tara’s brother Donny, and Tara’s cousin Beth have come to take Tara home because Tara, like her mother before her, is, or so they claim, a demon. It was, according to Tara’s family, on her mother’s twentieth birthday that the witch and magic demon came out in her mother and they expect the demon to appear in Tara since it is now her twentieth birthday. When Tara’s “family” threatens to tell her friends about the demon she is and she is about to become Tara does a spell on the Scoobies at the Magic Box. The Scoobies are at there doing research on the new dyed hair Cordelia demon chick on steroids in town, the abomination.

It is with Tara’s spell that the Tara storyline intersects with the other major narrative thread in “Family”, the Buffy, Dawn, and the abomination story line. “Family”, as I mentioned earlier, begins on the same night that Buffy first encounters the abomination and learns that Dawn is not her sister but is instead a key. In the teaser Buffy tells Giles that she has learned that Dawn is not her sister and both agree to keep the secret from the other Scoobies in order to keep Dawn, who has been sent to Buffy to protect, safe.

It is also in the teaser that the abomination resurrects out of the pile of rubble we saw fall on her last week in “No Place Like Home”. The abomination is upset and soon she begins to plot against the blonde, short, and rude strong for a human who broke her shoe who she blames for what happened to her the night before in "No Place Like Home". The abomination captures a demon, a kind of monster of this week, in the same hospital locker room that Ben comes into in the hospital after he learns from an intern that yet another “crazy” has been admitted to the hospital. Did the abomination take the crazy’s life consciousness in the hospital or near by? The abomination forces, so to speak, the gross, diseased, predatory demon with a black tongue between its teeth, to get together a gang of other Lei-Ach demons and go after the person who she learns from the demon is the Slayer.

It is just before the gang of Lei-Ach demons arrive at the Magic Box to kill the Slayer and her friends that Tara does her spell to keep the Scoobies from seeing the demon who she thinks she is. As so often is the case in Buffy, however, the spell Tara does has unintended and dangerous consequences. The Scoobies, once the Lei-Ach demons attack are unable to see the demons who have come to kill them.

When the Lei-Ach demons attack the Scoobies do the best that they can in the face of an enemy they can’t see. Giles tells Dawn to hide under a table. Xander and Giles fight what they can’t see. Willow hits what she cannot see with a chair before she is thrown into a bookcase. Anya tries to hit the one who is attacking Xander over the head with an item she has grabbed from the Magic Box collection to use as a weapon but Willow gets there with her chair ahead of her. Buffy puts the listening skills she has been practicing into action but with limited success. Spike, who has heard from Harmony that Lei-Ach’s have been sent to kill the Slayer, ever the voyeur, comes to watch the most recent Slayerfest but can’t help but get in on a little fight the Lei-Ach action for the sake of Buffy though Buffy doesn’t notice because she can’t see Spike's demon self. Despite this, of course, Spike wants to be thanked. Eventually Tara’s arrives and saves the day by reversing her spell.

With the battle over and the Scoobies surprised and concerned about the spell that Tara has done that almost got them killed, the Maclay’s demand that Tara come home with them because like her mother she has become a demon. Willow goes to Tara who is sitting on the floor near the sales counter of the Magic Box and asks her if that is what she wants, to go home. Teary-eyed Tara says no. Buffy, then Dawn, then Giles, then Xander, and then the other Scoobies—but not Spike (note how initially Spike is physically separated from the Scoobies and then walks away from them)—refuse to let the Maclay’s take Tara because, as Buffy says, “we’re family”.

It is sensitive Spike, who realises what is really going on beneath the we have come to take Tara home for your own good and the good of the world rhetoric that underlies the words of Tara’s father, brother, and cousin. It is that good old time religious patriarchalism. Spike recognizes that what Tara’s father, Tara’s brother Donny, and Tara’s cousin Beth, really want is someone to take care of the house and to take care of them, well "sir" and Donny anyway, things Tara’s cousin Beth told Tara she was a selfish bitch for not wanting to do toward the end of act three. Spike ever the one to enjoy making very public points hits Tara and is gripped with a wrenching pain in his head proving that Tara is no demon. Cousin Beth seems to have a eureka moment wondering if she too is the victim of a patriarchal family myth that the women in the Maclay family are evil women witch demons just before the Maclay’s leave without Tara in misogynistic tow.

“Family” ends as it began, with a happy moment. In the final scene of the episode the Scoobies gather at the Bronze for Tara’s birthday. All of them, including Tara and Dawn seem to be having a good time. Tara now seems to be full fledged part of the Scooby Gang as Anya talks to her about her jokes trying to understand her in the process, Giles gives her a crystal ball, Dawn gives her a broom, and Willow and Tara dance into the air to a tune with a chorus in which the singer, Melanie Doane, sings, “I can’t take my eyes off of you”, over and over again. Love very much in bloom in the Buffyverse. Yeah. End credits run.

There are a number of important character developments in “Family”. Tara is practicing spells so she can keep up with Willow. Buffy moves out of her dorm room at UC, Sunnydale to return home to 1630 Revello Drive so she can take care of mom and Dawn. Buffy has, thanks to learning that Dawn needs protection, become, as Riley points out to her, far too overprotective of her sister. She doesn’t allow Dawn to visit Melinda across the street because she is too short. Buffy lets off a bit on the keep Dawn close rein at the end of the episode allowing Dawn to come to the Bronze with the Gang to celebrate Tara’s birthday. Anya is reveling in the joys of Magic Box profits and she and Xander are sugar-kissing lovey doveys. Riley is walking on the dark side visiting, as he is, Willie’s, which has a new bartender, on a regular basis. Dawn has a friend named Melinda and thinks only losers drink alcohol. Ironically the Giles, Xander, Buffy, and Riley are drinking alcohol as she says this oblivious to the fact that they are drinking. Spike is still dreaming about Buffy, this time while he is having sex with Harmony, still has his Buffy like mannequin head, and still has that hate her, love her attitude toward our Slayer. There are those themes of responsibility and family obligations again.

“When he bailed on us”. When Buffy and Joyce are discussing Dawn and how to protect her from the abomination in the teaser Giles suggests sending Dawn to her father. Buffy says that won’t work because he is in Spain with his secretary living the cliché. Buffy remembers that when her father bailed on Dawn and her little sis cried for weeks but now knows that her memories of Dawn crying when their father left are false. So much for fatherly family obligations.

“My name is a holy name”. We learn more about the abomination in “Family”. This Cordelia on steroids thinks she is great and beautiful and that all eyes turn towards her when she enters a room. The abomination tells the Lei-Ach demon she captures that her name is holy. The abomination hopes no one of her status finds out that she fought a “common” vampire Slayer. The lady, methinks, thinks she has class.

“Good Birthday?” Birthdays, as we know from “Surprise/Innocence”, “Helpless”, and “A New Man”, all Buffy birthday episodes, have a tendency to turn out bad in the Buffyverse. Tara’s birthday almost, almost, does too but not quite. When Willow asks Tara at the end of “Family” whether she had a “Good Birthday” she replies “Best Birthday”. Since Buffy is a Joss Whedon show and Whedon shows tend to bring the pain after far too brief momentary moments of happiness, it will be interesting to see what will is going to happen next week.

“We’re family”. Buffy tells Giles when he wonders if they should send Dawn away for protection, note that they talk about Dawn and not the key, that she believes the monks sent Dawn to her so she could protect her and that she wants to protect her. Just as Buffy refuses to let Dawn be sent away Willow and the Scoobies refuse to allow Tara, once she has decided that she doesn’t want to return home and that she wants to remain in Sunnydale in school and with Willow and the Scoobies, to be taken forcibly by her blood family. Families of blood and families of the beloved community and responsibility toward both continue to be at the heart of season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and of Buffy in general.

“I don't go out with vampires”. Sandy, the vampire who sits down next to Riley in Willie’s and who invites him to someplace more private, is the vampire Vamp Willow sired in “Doppelgangland”, another Whedon penned and directed episode.

The Chorus. Some commentators and fans have found “Family” too preachy and too metaphor too close to the surface for its own good. It is ranked as the 50th favourite Buffy episode on the Buffy Phenomenon website. In its attack on conservative evangelical Christianity “Family” is, of course, a companion piece to that other Buffy episode which attacked conservative Christianity, in that instance conservative Catholic Christianity, in “Where the Wild Things Are”. “Where the Wild Things” too doesn’t get a lot of love from fan scholars perhaps because of its metaphor too close to the surface quality. Such readings, by the way, call out for more analysis of why readers respond in this way to particular films or television shows. Perhaps if academics, particularly those with tenured positions, got off their crystal ball textualist pot and did some empirical surveys and interviews perhaps we might find out someday.

But enough whinging and back to “Family”, it is true that in “Family” the metaphor is pretty close to the surface. But then it often is in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Joss Whedon has said. It is true that “Family” does quite clearly attack the misogyny and homophobic attitudes of conservative Christianity. But then conservative Christianity is generally patriarchal and homophobic and I am not a big fan of either patriarchalism or homophobia so I don’t see this as a bad thing. And it is true that “Family” celebrates not only the the family of friends who have your back when you need them, the beloved community of friends that Tara finally becomes a part of at the end of “Family”, the Scooby Gang, but it celebrates Willow’s and Tara’s relationship at its end as Willow and Tara happily dance themselves into the air of the Bronze. But again I don’t see that as a bad thing and I am certainly not averse to an occasional happy ending. I love “Family” and I was deeply moved by its message of gender equality, true love, and the beloved community of friends. Viva Joss. Hey, bet this says something about me doesn’t it?

Music. I like the song “Cemented Shoes” by My Vitriol, a British band whose song plays in the Bronze at the beginning of Tara’s birthday party.

The Real Reason Romney Won't Release His Tax Returns?

You have to love those Dixiecrats err Republicans who are trying to suppress the Democratic vote in order to win the election for Romney. Mike Turzai the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, of course, recently admitted that this is exactly what voter ID laws are meant to do in his state. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania", Turzai said at the recent Pennsylvania Republican State Committee meeting, "done". The applause for Turzai's statement by the Republican audience at the conference shows so well how the party of free soil and free labour, the party that sent in the military to ensure that blacks could vote in the South during Reconstruction, has become a party of voter suppression a la the Dixiecrats during the Jim Crow era from 1877 to the second Reconstruction all in the name of winning elections. And such cynicism and hunger for power should be frightening to anyone who believes that voting is a right to all Americans legally able to vote.

It is not only Turzai's statement which makes it clear to anyone with an empirical rather than ideological mind that voter suppression is what Republican ID voter fraud laws are really about. Republicans have offered little in the way of evidence to support the need for the voter ID laws they have passed and want to pass all across the United States. Some in fact become mute when asked to offer evidence of voter fraud and of individuals masquerading as someone else when they go to their voting places to vote.

Speaking of evidence, evidence, if very, very limited and sketchy evidence, came to light last year in an article in Forbes magazine, hardly a paragon of liberalism, that suggests that at least one person may have violated the voting laws though not in masquerade as someone else, Mitt Romney. Romney may have voted in Massachusetts in 2010 while living in his mansion, the same mansion that he wants to put a 3600 square foot basement in presumably good Mormon fashion, to prepare for the coming apocalypse and second coming of Jesus, in the very upscale La Jolla, California when he claimed to be living in the basement (what is it with Romney and basements?) of his son's house in Belmont, Massachusetts. Apparently Romney is not only one of the one percent, he is also one of the 0.7% of voters who engage in voter fraud. And it is for this reason that Romney, some in the media speculate, refuses to release his tax returns.

Perhaps then Republicans are on the wrong track. Perhaps instead of passing laws to restrict the ability of America's minorities and elderly to vote they should be passing laws restricting the ability of Rich Republicans to vote in Massachusetts while living in California. Needless to say, I don't expect reality to impact the position of right wing wingnut dittoheads on this issue. For most humans it is ideology rather than reality that creates reality. And that is why humans, particularly in modern societies in the West, often ignore the realities right in front of their eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and hands.

And now for something somewhat different. Why can't the United States do something like Denmark where voters are placed on a national register (for voting, national health, official residence) and create an electronic voting system that links voters to their birth records, social security numbers, and residence and once they are in the national voting system they can't ever be purged from it? Are we simply too incompetent to create such a system or is there no political will for such an obvious common sense voting system.

And now for something somewhat completely different different. Affluent La Jolla had a covenant which prohibited Jews from living in that seaside city until the 1960s. Apparently, the lure of a University of California campus, today's University of California San Diego, however, proved more alluring even then anti-Semitism in the 1960s, so La Jolla's prohibition against Jews living amongst America's "best" went the way of the dinosaurs and the city got UCSD as a replacement gift in its stead. Aw, isn't that sweet?

Sources
MS Bellows, "Mitt Romney's Tax Returns: The 'Voter Fraud' Theory'", 17 August 2012, the Guardian
Fred Karger, "Did Mitt Romney Live In His Son's Unfinished Basement Last Year?",15 June 2011, Forbes
Sue Garson, "The End of the Covenant", 2003, San Diego Jewish Journal

Buffy Blog: "No Place Like Home"

Season five of Buffy began with a mystery for viewers, the mystery of who is this Dawn who claims to be Buffy’s sister and why do all the Scoobies believe she is the Slayer’s sister and why does Joyce, Buffy’s mother, believe she is her younger daughter?

In the Doug Petrie penned and David Solomon directed “No Place Like Home” Buffy and we viewers finally learn who Dawn is. Some supernatural thing or some supernatural someone, Buffy comes to believe, is making her mother ill, making Joyce have the headaches she began to have in “The Real Me”. It is a nightwatchman who Buffy first meets in the teaser to the episode at one of Sunnydale’s empty factories—Sunnydale has apparently experienced the scourge of deindustrialization the rest of the Western industrial world has—who puts this idea into our Slayer’s head.

In act four Buffy goes to the hospital to get a prescription for the ill Joyce. There she helps Ben (Charlie Weber), who she met in “Out of My Mind”, with a crazy man on a gurney, a crazy man who Buffy eventually recognizes as the nightwatchman she met earlier, a madman who tells Buffy that they will get to you through your family. In order to find out what supernatural force may be making her mother ill Buffy performs a spell Anya has suggested she do, a “pull the curtain back spell”, a spell to see other spells.

When Buffy pulls the curtain back she discovers in a scene full of otherworldly overexposed images a la “Restless”, otherworldly music, and otherworldly sound representing the trance-like state Buffy enters while doing the spell, that Dawn is not supposed to be in her house or her home. Dawn’s image disappears and reappears in family photographs. Dawn’s bedroom alternates between her bedroom and a storage room. Dawn literally appears and disappears and reappears as Buffy talks to her. Fearing that Dawn may be harming Joyce Buffy pushes “little sis” back into the wall of Dawn’s bedroom telling Dawn to stay away from my (my emphasis) mother.

Just then the phone rings. It is Giles. He tells the Slayer that the Dagon Sphere she brought to him to investigate in act one of “No Place Like Home” is a “protective device used to ward off” an evil “which cannot be named”. Giles warns the Buffster that, “Anything that goes unnamed is usually an object of deep worship, or great fear. Maybe both”, and that she could face a level of raw power she has never known before if she finds this unnameable evil.

Despite Giles’s warning, however, off Buffy goes to the factory where she was given the Dagon Sphere by the now crazy nightwatchman. It is at the deserted factory that Buffy finds one of the same monks who, two months before the events of “No Place Like Home” take place, as we saw in the teaser, was part of a group of monks who performed a ritual to protect something they called the key, a key represented by a glow, and who has apparently escaped the force who attacked him and the other monks and who is now looking for protection, presumably from the Slayer, now that his Dagon Sphere, which was his protection device, has been taken by the Slayer, and the same force that we heard smashing the wooden door in the teaser begins to smash the industrial size steel door behind which the monk is looking at a map of Sunnydale presumably trying to find where the Slayer lives.

When Buffy arrives at the factory at the end of act three and in act four she finds the monk. He has been captured and tortured by this force. This force (Clare Kramer), this, as the script describes her, real hottie with blonde tendrilled hair that falls down to her shoulders, who is dressed in red business dress and killer pumps, and who knows she is a star, wants the monk to tell her where her key is. When the monk refuses to tell the force where her key is the force tortures him and goes hysterical, rather like the nightwatchman Buffy met in the hospital, until she sticks her fingers into the head of an older nightwatchman who the force has tied to a column in the factory feeding on his conscious life, represented by an ectoplasmic light, returning her to “sanity” (end of act one and act two).

In act four Buffy fights this force. This force, however, is strong, much stronger than the Buffster. After being tossed around the empty warehouse as though she is a Barbie doll and after ducking punches thrown by the force which tears out chunks of concrete from one of the columns which line the factory floor, Buffy grabs the monk and jumps out the second storey window protecting the monk as they fall. Safe, thanks in part to a temper tantrum thrown by the force who stomps on the factory floor after she breaks her heel chasing after Buffy causing parts of the floorboards to crack apart in a straight line bringing down parts of the factory ceiling on her head, the monk tells Buffy that it was he and two other monks who sent the key to her in human form so she could protect it, her, from the “abomination” she has just fought. This key, this Dawn, the monk tells Buffy after she objects to the monks making Dawn her sister and manipulating the memories of her family and that of the Scoobies, doesn’t know she is the key and really believes she is Buffy’s sister. Dawn is, as the monk tells her, a helpless innocent who needs the Slayer’s help.

In the final scene of “No Place Like Home” Buffy returns home and apologises to Dawn for what she said and what she did before she left for the factory. The Slayer has decided, at least for the moment, to protect, as she has so often done previously in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the helpless and innocent, in this case the helpless and innocent key, who believes she is Buffy’s sister and Joyce’s youngest daughter. In Buffy there apparently really is no place like home, Buffy’s play on Dorothy’s mantra in The Wizard of Oz (1939), the place where they have to take you in, as Riley said in “Pangs”, when you go there even when you are energy that has been made into a fourteen year old girl.

This being Buffy there are, of course, other things going on beyond the appearance of the monster of the week and the apparent Big Bad of season five, the abomination who cannot be named—a takeoff on the Hebraic god who is so holy he cannot be named—the abomination the script refers to as Glory—a suitably Judeo-Christian name that draws on Hebraic and Judaic notions of god’s presence and praise for the divine. Joyce’s headaches, it turns out, are more than the product of bickering daughters and turn out to be something other than supernatural. Riley is feeling a bit like a Zeppo, a bit like the Xander of season three and four, someone without superpowers anymore thanks to the operation he had last week that left him weak and kitteny, someone who Buffy now worries is going to get hurt in Slayer battle and some other one who Buffy doesn’t want to protect anymore than she wants to protect that other Scooby without superpowers, Xander, during battle. Giles has finally opened the Magic Box to customers and after a period where it seems like no customers will appear, voila he seems to have a potentially profitable business. Anya is now working for Giles who needs the help at the suddenly busy Magic Box and is being taught the finer points of insincere customer service by Xander. Spike, Buffy calls him William, is still pining after Buffy standing outside her house smoking by a tree while presumably watching Buffy inside creepily replicating Angel’s perverse voyeurism at the Summers home in “Passions” if in a somewhat more tragic way. Spike is still hiding his feelings for Buffy behind his “out for a walk, bitch” tough exterior front.

Home, family, and growing up are central themes of “No Place Like Home”. Buffy is increasingly, thanks to Joyce’s illness, becoming someone who takes care of Dawn and someone who is feeling the angst of being an older sister who is supposed to be grown up—Joyce even says that Buffy is so grown up at one point in the episode—while Dawn gets to be Joyce’s fourteen year old “little pumpkin belly” and book club partner (shades of season three's "Dead Man's Party"). Buffy is also playing mother for Joyce getting medicine for her and expressing concern that some supernatural force may be coming at her through her family making Joyce ill. The older nightwatchman pleads to the abomination for his life by mentioning that he has a family.

"Shiny". The Dagon Sphere, Dawn, and the abomination sucking the life consciousness out of the older nightwatchman seem to have a similar quality of light.

“I could crap a better existence than this”. The abomination is not particularly impressed with the humans and the human society and culture she finds in Sunnydale, she calls the monk she is torturing a monkey (pun intended?), suggesting she is not from the Buffyverse world or Buffyverse dimension.

Forgive me monkey”. There is some sexually charged religious imagery in the scene in act two where the abomination tortures the monk trying to obtain information about the location of the key. As the abomination kneels before the monk she has tied to a chair in Reservoir Dog fashion as the script describes it she grabs the robe that ties together the monk’s cassock as though it was a male sexual organ. In the script she “crushes his [the monk’s] nuts" just after this. Reservoir Dogs is the 1992 Quentin Tarantino genre film about a heist gone bad.

What's in a Name? Dagon is, was, apparently a Philistine deity.