The best tennis player ever

The late (and sorely missed) Mitch Hedberg said that he never met a tennis player who could beat a wall, the best player ever.

Here’s an anonymous poster named “Lizard” over at 4&20, saying something very important:

one thing’s clear, this is going to be one long summer.

this is Obama’s big chance, and Holder’s responsibility, to stand up to the 4th largest corporation in the world, and finally hold these blood suckers (sorry vampires) accountable for the negligent homicide and ecological plague their arrogance and greed has unleashed on the gulf.

but it’s hard when “the media” obsesses over the mood of the prez, analyzing his every gesture, and making his “ass-kick comment” the major feature of attention.

meanwhile, for those who can filter the bullshit, the story is out there: there was an on-deck showdown between trans-ocean and bp, and the greedy, shortsighted decision to replace the heavy drilling mud with salt water, combined with sloppy oversight of the blowout device (which had a broken seal that affected it’s ability to warn of changing pressure) caused this disaster to happen.

but that’s just the way the media rolls. same thing with Israel’s most recent murderous assault. i mean, imagine if this footage, got wide spread mainstream air time. and imagine if it was more widely known that the IDF had to admit it released edited video with doctored audio, inserting someone shouting “go back to Auschwitz”.

but no, it’s much more important for our slobbering propaganda blowhards to facilitate Ari Fleischer’s take out of Helen Thomas, because somehow her words are deemed more obscene than idf soldiers executing Turkish peace activists, journalists, and an American citizen in international waters.

watch the footage. Afterall, it’s your money that allows these atrocities to happen.

I’ve come to know Lizard a little but. He’s passionate, insightful, and seems well-read for his young age. Maybe he graduated in liberal arts; maybe he was a poor student in primary schools, as his mind is not tracked. And he thinks that in order to reach people it is important to say things in a nice way.

The thread that led to his comments was about the elections results. (They don’t matter at all.) And somehow it got sidetracked, and at some point the Israeli flotilla raid was injected.

Voting ≠ democracy. Israel ≠ a force for good. Palestinians ≠ evil. But this is a mindset that Lizard is dealing with, and understanding mindset is what matters.

The Republican mindset validates in the Israeli atrocity as a football fan watching a game. And they will try to pin the BP oil spill (now known in the media as the “Gulf” oil spill) on the Democrats. That’s easily understood. It doesn’t take much thought to be a Republican, as ignorance is far easier to grasp than denial.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have to somehow internalize all of this with the odd fact that there is a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic congress. Republicans “cause” bad things to happen, while bad things “happen to” Democrats.

The flotilla raid, therefore, is assigned in the mind of the Democrat to a sphere called “Neverland.” It happened, and is easily understood. It simply does not penetrate consciousness.

And the “BP” (not “Gulf”) spill … Ken Salazar doing a heckuva job … Obama feigning ass-kicking anger … all of that provides some refuge for the Democratic consciousness. Obama’s supposed anger reinforces the notion that there was “change” in November of 2008. If Bush were president and all of this had happened, as it would have, Democrats would be livid.

Neverland is a place of benign neglect. There are important issues all about – EFCA, single payer, Israeli barbarism, expanded wars and income and estate tax reform. These are the issues of our times. And yet when Democrats take power, the issues are no more addressed than with Republicans. They are merely acknowledged. There is a vague sense that they exist and that something positive should be done, and some effort among progressives to bring them to the surface. And then nothing.

Democrats are Hedberg’s tennis partner, that wall. His best shots coming bouncing back … the wall wins every time.

We will never beat the wall. The best thing to do is to stop playing the wall’s game.

9 thoughts on “The best tennis player ever”

    1. Why Swede … Wulfgar could learn a thing or two from you. That is an insult, but offered up in good taste and without venom. Very well done! The image will stick with me all day.

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  3. well shucks mark, thank you for this sort of complimentary post, but i would be curious to know what you mean when you say that my mind is not tracked.

    this mindset you say i’m struggling with is something we share. where we differ is tone. you seem to think my tone is too nice and my engagement at 4&20 is pointless. i disagree. i think the disgruntlement on the left exists, is fertile, but lacks coherent articulation, and a civil tone, when possible, will lead people to see and understand the scamming role of the national democratic party.

    swede: yes, i have a penis, so no, i am not a “bitter bull dyke trapped in a iron lung.”

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    1. Sorry if you thought it was “sort of” complimentary. I meant no disrespect at all.

      “Tracked:” Most of our attitudes are formed when we are very young, and grade school is where we learn what later becomes our political ideology. Most of it is lies, but the teachers do not even know this, as they (by this time) were reared in the same system. When I say that you were not tracked, I mean that you must have been hiding behind the door when the indoctrination was going on. It’s a good thing to be a bad student when you are young. Real education does not begin until you enter what we call “college”, and then only if you are so fortunate as to be exposed to liberal arts, and even then if you are so fortunate as to have professors who insist on independent thought, aka “liberals.”

      Here’s where we differ: You are not dealing with mere differences of opinion where presentation of factual information will prevail. As you might notice with the flotilla raid, it is immoral, illegal and barbaric, and yet it is accepted as good and normal. This is because attitudes about Israel are imbued on them when they were very young. They were not reasoned into such abhorrent views, and cannot be reasoned out. They have to be shaken in their boots, and usually even that doesn’t work.

      In real life, by the way, I’m a pussycat.

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      1. thanks for the clarification, mark. i really do think some folks can be persuaded to critically examine their conditioning, but maybe that’s because underneath my cynical veneer there’s a romantic hiding out.

        my conditioning occurred in midwest suburbia, and for over a decade i’ve been coming to terms with how deeply i’ve been lied to by figures of authority.

        my higher education (literature/creative writing) is not responsible for my personal awakening. more than anything, the events of 9-11, for me, exposed the depths of the deception we’re being fed as a nation.

        it’s not easy to face the lies. i don’t blame people for staying stuck in their ideologies. i would like to help people wake up to what’s really happening, because in another decade i don’t think there will be much we can do.

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        1. Literature and creative writing? I like it. Tends to free the mind a bit. Our scientists and engineers and the like tend to be apolitical – there is no shielding them. They really have to be good at what they do.

          But history, business, economics are heavily laden with ideology.

          Anyway, glad you are aboard. I don’t expect or care or even ask that you agree with me about anything. It’s enough to know you are awake.

          Are the times that we live in different than times before? Only in the environmental sense – the carbon era cannot go on, and the changes we bring about in our habitat cannot easily be undone. But people are as they have always been. All of us.

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