Month: April 2004

THE GAS TAX

Well, you proved my point. No one agrees. Except, wait, who’s this … arguing for a gas tax hike and an income tax drop as a great way to reform taxation? Drum roll, please … Greg Mankiw, Bush’s economic adviser. Two arguments count against it: no tax is good. I agree. But if we’re not going to cut spending and we have a war to fight, the question is which taxes do we use? A gas tax for the war would be a great idea: it would mean a real general sacrifice, it would help wean us off the oil that is one reason we’re mired in the politics of the Middle East, and it would cut down on those ghastly, unsightly, fuel-wasting armored tanks that now pass for cars throughout America. Yes, I mean SUVs. Then there’s the cultural argument. This is America, goddammit. Here’s a typical email:

I am baffled by your bafflement. I urge you to reread your entry about Alistair Cooke and your sojourn from Miami to L.A.. to Seattle to Boston, and points between. Can you imagine trying to do the same via Amtrak?
Mass transit is precisely that — mass. America is not the land of the mass; it is the land of the individual, the entrepeneur, the explorer. It is the land that does not want to wait for the governmentally-scheduled transport. It is where Henry Ford invented the assembly line to produce cars and transformed the global economy. It is the land where the car allowed for the creation of the suburb, the ranch house, the white picket fence. It is the land of manifest destiny; we drove to California, where we had Fun, Fun, Fun once her daddy took the T-Bird away. [Indeed, Rumsfeld might agree that the East Coast is Old America and the West Coast is New America, less tethered to our Euro-roots.] Before the Interstate, it was the land that got its kicks on Route 66, all the way from Chicago to L.A. It is a culture in which generations of teenagers have received their driver’s licenses as rites of passage — to adventure and romance, away from the watchful eyes of the parental units.
Still don’t get it? Rent Cameron Crowe’s “Singles.” Or “American Graffiti.” Or “Animal House” (“ROAD TRIP!”). Or “Swingers” (We’re going to VEGAS, BABY!”). Or even, from the opposite perspective, “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
There’s a reason why it’s funny when Rush Limbaugh says that the engine of freedom runs on oil; it’s true! If cars had existed in the 1770s, it would have been gasoline we threw in Boston Harbor.

Okay, I give up.

THE WHITE HOUSE VS BLOCH: The Bush appointed head of the Office of Special Counsel, Scott Bloch, recently declared that gay federal employees can be fired for being gay. That’s where the religious right stands. But it isn’t what Bloch promised in his Senate hearings, and it isn’t, apparently, White House policy. At least, that’s according to the Federal Times. Hmm. Who really represents the administration?

AIR AMERICA AND NADER: For a column, I forced myself to listen to liberal talk radio this week. (Subscribers will get the column over the weekend. The rest of you freeloaders can wait.) It was mainly dreary. But I did enjoy Randi Rhodes losing it with Ralph Nader. You can listen to the exchange at the Daily Kos.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

“The killers were not mistaken in their target: today’s Madrid represents precisely the negation of the radical inhumanity of the obtuse, exclusive tribal spirit of fundamentalism, religious or political, which hates mixture, diversity and tolerance and, above all, liberty. This is the first European battle in a savage war that began exactly two years ago with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and whose inroads will probably fill with blood and horror a good part of this new century. It is a war to the death, of course, and owing to the present fantastic development of the technology of destruction and the fanatic, suicidal zeal that inspires the international movement of terror, it is perhaps a trial even more difficult than those represented by fascism and communism for the culture of liberty.” – Mario Vargas Llosa, getting it right, in the Guardian. (Hat tip: Virginia.)

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “For more than 40 years, the homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan that has had as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family. The institution of marriage, along with an often weakened and impotent Church, is all that stands in the way of its achievement of every coveted aspiration. Those goals include universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, discrediting of Scriptures that condemn homosexuality, muzzling of the clergy and Christian media, granting of special privileges and rights in the law, overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia, indoctrinating children and future generations through public education, and securing all the legal benefits of marriage for any two or more people who claim to have homosexual tendencies. These objectives that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago have largely been achieved or are now within reach.” – James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, in his newsletter.

WONKETTE UNPLUGGED: A fun interview with the newest, funnest blogger on the block.

POSEUR ALERT

“But how to paint or sketch such a genius at substitution? One must, one can only catch him, portray him in flight, live, even as he slips away from us. In these sketches we shall catch glimpses of the book’s young hero rushing past from East to West, — in appearance both familiar and mythical: here he is for a start sporting the cap of Jackie Derrida Koogan, as Kid, I translate: lamb-child, the sacrificed, the Jewish baby destined to the renowned Circumcision scene. They steal his foreskin for the wedding with God, in those days he was too young to sign, he could only bleed. This is the origin of the immense theme that runs through his work, behind the words signature, countersignature, breast [sein], seing (contract signed but not countersigned), saint –cutting, stitching — indecisions — Let us continue.” – from the prefatory author’s note in “Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint,” by Helene Cixous, published by Columbia University Press. (Hat tip: American Digest.)