I have to remind myself from time to time that things don’t really change except for the better over the long haul. For instance, in an interview I was reading this morning of Gilbert Achbar and Noam Chomsky by Stephen Shalom, they made the point that antisemitism in the United States, so prevalent up until the 1950’s, is virtually non-existent. Barack Obama is a pseudo-liberal and de facto right winger, but he is also a half-black president. That would have been unthinkable fifty years ago.

Yes, we have many problems, but we have always had many problems. Each generation has to deal with a complicated world, and what I have come to realize is the problem of the sociopath in public life. Sociopaths are always with us, and they generally manage to work themselves into positions of power, usually within the business world, but often enough too in politics and the military. The dumb ones go into crime. The solution to that problem is not to do away with them, as we cannot do that, but rather to contain them. In the wake of the Great Depression, by means of high marginal tax rates and progressive welfare policies, we did just that. But lessons don’t last forever, generations pass, and we have to re-learn them. It is painful, it takes time. We are a long way from out of this.

Sociopaths in power aside, our first and biggest problem is the Democratic Party, and what Harry Truman referred to as “Trojan Horse Democrats”. Listening to talk radio, as I so often do, I see there is an attitude out there that simply says that President Obama needs to get with the program, to bypass his advisers or replace them, to come out of his shell, to be himself. They don’t get it. This is him. He is a DLC Democrat, or a corporatist. He said what he had to say to get elected, but he did not mean a word of it. He lied. He had corporate and corporate media support throughout the campaign, and that is why. They allowed him a long leash to say progressive things knowing full well he would not implement anything.

Hillary Clinton would behave in exactly the same way. That’s why the two of them were considered the “viable” candidates, and why they were allowed to fight it out. The outcome didn’t matter to the power brokers. The game was rigged.

Both Clinton(s) and Obama are very smart people who intuitively understand the system. There’s no back room dealing necessary, though the campaigns they ran were plainly and painfully dishonest, manipulative and propagandistic. They are Trojan Horses. As Harry Truman reminded us below, we can always count on Republicans to be themselves and to self-destruct. Let them be. What we need are Democrats who are real progressives and liberals, who mean what they say, who fight for what they believe in.

Such Democrats exist. They are not many in number. In realistically assessing our position, progressives need to do an honest tally of how many are on their side in Congress. Eighty House members? Twenty senators? Fifteen? Not enough to filibuster, unfortunately. That’s why Democrats don’t use the filibuster. There are more than sixty votes available to push forward the right wing agenda. All that is going on right now is perception management, to make the right wing agenda look like a liberal agenda. That was done with health care, war, and Wall Street. Bill Clinton was good, and Obama apparently sucks.

That works in our favor. Massachusetts figured it out. Unfortunately, they were offered a Trojan Horse Democratic candidate in Coakely, a recipient of AHIP and PhRMA money, and so opted for the only reasonable alternative. I would have done the same.

Our two political options at this time, politically, are real Democrats and third party candidates. It is hard to know who the real Democrats are, as so many of them lie about their positions when running for office. So it’s a matter of character judgment. For instance, Montana’s Max Baucus is obviously a man of low worth, and Jon Tester apparently so too. In Colorado, it is Michael Bennett who is the Trojan Horse. He will be replaced by Gale Norton this year.

Fair enough. Vote them out. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping them in. In fact, Trojan Horses impede progress. The “lesser evil” is in truth the greater evil.

But politics and organization are two different things. Too much energy goes in to politics, and not enough in organization. Far more than good Democrats, right now we need community organizers. If we get back to basics,and build from the ground up, and watch out for lying Trojan Horse Democrats, over the long run, things will improve, as they have in the past.

By the way, I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned this, but Democrats are the problem. They don’t give us real alternatives, and absorb all of our organizational energy in the process. Have I said that before?

Anyway, here’s Harry Truman, and good day to you.

I’ve seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn’t believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are — when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people — then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again.

We are getting a lot of suggestions to the effect that we ought to water down our platform and abandon parts of our program. These, my friends, are Trojan horse suggestions. I have been in politics for over 30 years, and I know what I am talking about, and I believe I know something about the business. One thing I am sure of: never, never throw away a winning program. This is so elementary that I suspect the people handing out this advice are not really well-wishers of the Democratic Party.

More than that, I don’t believe they have the best interests of the American people at heart. There is something more important involved in our program than simply the success of a political party.

The rights and the welfare of millions of Americans are involved in the pledges made in the Democratic platform…. And those rights and interests must not be betrayed.

These are some of the principles for which the Democratic Party stands…. We stand for better education, better health, greater opportunities for all. We stand for fair play and decency, for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the cherished principle that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty.

Taken together, these principles are the articles of the liberal faith. I am sure that the liberal faith is the political faith of the great majority of Americans. It sometimes happens that circumstances of time and place combine to deny its expression. But the faith is there, and the reactionaries can never hope to have any but temporary advantage in this country.

For those who come here to hear their favorite themes repeated, you picked the right day.

Harry Reid committed a “gaffe,” that is, he slipped and said something in public that was actually true. Such behavior usually creates a flurry of criticism.

It is true that Barack Obama is more white than black. If he had thicker lips, a flatter nose, darker skin, and had gotten his degree from Grambling; if he spoke in a dialect; if his family were not beautiful in a tasteful white kind of way, he’d likely be on a city council somewhere. Maybe even a community organizer.

It is also true that Harry Reid will be forgiven for this gaffe, and that had a Republican said the same thing, the Republican would not be forgiven and might have to leave office and go to work in a high-paid position in the drug or defense industry or banking. Such a dark fate awaited Reid save for his party selection.

Is this a double standard? Absolutely. At this point, I doff my cap two our only two allowable parties, and offer my sincere appreciation for the mere double standard. The normal triple and quadruple standards are set aside for this moment of candor. In the matter of race relations, they literally reek of an integrity that they show in no other area.

It is really in poor taste to burn a black guy in effigy, but these Afghans, they got no sense of decency. It’s as if they cannot tell the difference between Bush bombs, which had “Bring it on” written on them, and Obama bombs, which have “Hope and Change”.

Go figure.

It is very difficult in a fake democracy to understand events as they unfold. “News” is reported to us by Orwell’s trained circus dogs. (Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.)

On 9/11 I was utterly amazed that such a gigantic and nefarious plot could pulled off, but also had a sense of dissonance that our intelligence community, which could not prevent it, knew almost instantly who did it and where it originated.

So the scenario repeated with the underpants bomber. Intelligence officials knew about him, had been warned about him. His behavior was unusual – paying cash for a one-way ticket, no luggage … if only he could ignite his underwear as I can mine, we would have had a midair explosion. And instantly we know who he is, where his bomb was made, and who supervised his activities.

It might be that it is easier to track backward through events than to project forward. So it might seem logical that our news media, fed by the government, is relaying the truth to us about the Nigerian underwear situation.

That could well be. The news media might be serving a legitimate news function. The question is, why would they start now?

The Bush Administration, like that of Clinton before it, wanted to attack Iraq. Before 9/11, it just wasn’t plausible. After 9/11, anything was plausible. Some have taken the high correlation between post 9/11 activities and pre-9/11 desires, and intuited that 9/11 was a staged event. The problem with that scenario is that the government after 9/11 pointed us at Afghanistan, and only later did they attack Iraq, almost as if it were an afterthought. So I think it logical to conclude that they merely took advantage of public rage brought about by an event not of their making. One must never underestimate the potential for stupidity in high places.

Stupidity, yes, but also high intelligence. It’s a volatile cocktail. We are being shepherded by intelligent forces, though within those forces exists great hubris. I see in the underpants bombing three possibilities (or more – I am no more omniscient than anyone who reads this):

1) A fake scenario where a young man, whose father claimed was recently radicalized, was manipulated into the appearance of attempting to blow up an aircraft, not understanding that he had no chance of success. This staged event was then used as fodder to incite public opinion to allow our government to attack yet another country, this time, Yemen.

2) “Al Qaeda” operatives, being highly stupid themselves, wanted to give further credibility to the forces within our government who like attacking Arab countries. They like irritating the great beast.

3) Our government lies in wait, wanting to pounce, and only needing an event of any kind to justify predetermined activities.

It’s very hard to know, and we won’t know for weeks, months, years – if ever. What I conclude from these events is a little more abstract:

1) There have been no substantive changes in our ruling coalitions, even after the great groundswell of November, 2008. The same forces that propelled the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq are still there, and they are still ambitious;

2) News is not really news. It serves some other purpose, and there is a high correlation between the ambitions of the ruling coalition who sit behind our elected officials and the news that we are fed.

Therefore, the coalition has power over both elected officials and the news media. Picture a triangle of powerful forces – private wealth, government, and the news media. Most of us want to place the government atop that triangle, with power over the other two. Rotate the triangle so that private wealth sits atop both government and the media. To me, events make more sense if we remove the possibility of democratic governance from the picture.

If they are focusing our attention on Yemen, something is going on in Yemen unrelated to a plane that took off from Amsterdam on Christmas Day.

That’s the best that I can do without any real information at hand.

So a guy gets on a plane and tries to set his underwear on fire. Pretty scary, eh? Maybe 300 people would have died, but that’s child’s play for us. America pilots make that many corpses and text message at the same time. But the reaction is interesting, a stark contrast between self-image and reality.

Here’s how people in other countries see us:

Run your lives! Here’s a famous image – U.S. fighter jets hit a South Vietnamese village, and the resulting picture captured for all posterity the terror that we inflicted on others that day.

I don’t have to remind anyone that the reason the little girl is naked is because of napalm -it makes people tear off their clothing. When Dow first invented it, people were able to jump into lakes and rivers to get it off them. So the Dow boys came up with a new formula that adhered to the skin even after immersed in water. Good old American ingenuity.

That’s not how we see ourselves, of course.

Soldiers that return from our foreign adventures often tell tales of horror – that’s a lot of why the Vietnam war became so unpopular – returning soldiers. I would imagine that the military is pretty tight about that stuff these days – they do control the images we see. The picture of the little Vietnamese girl above would never be seen today- not in a newspaper or magazine, and certainly not TV. That was one of the lessons of the Vietnam War, first applied in Gulf War I – control what we see, control what we think. Here we are fighting two brutal wars with thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths, and people are hardly aware of it.

Images have power. Remember Abu Ghraib?

Pretty gruesome, but here is something important to realize about thought control in a society like ours: if it ain’t in pictures, it ain’t in people’s minds. Abu Ghraib, so far as I can tell, is the only imagery that has harmed the valiant war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Colombia, Yemen, and Pakistan. And Iran. Sudan … I lose track. When we are not actually fighting these wars, we are supplying the weapons.

Remember when the Israelis attacked Gaza a couple of years ago?

American bombs. The little girl is known as “collateral damage”.

Now forget for a minute about the dead kid. It’s the building behind … that is what is known as a “military target”, sometimes called a “terrorist hideout”. Usually when they blow up a building like that, they have a real target in mind. In this case, it was the little boy. He is what they call an “Al Qaeda operative”, possibly “second in command.”

This is more like it:

Yeah baby! These colors don’t run.

What’s that? A bomb on a plane? Good God -Obama, do something! Now we’re afraid to fly again! Xray underpants, keep anyone with dark skins off our planes!

Guess we ain’t so tough after all.

Ah, December 31, a day for reflection. My problem is that I don’t reflect much. I never have in the past, and won’t start now. And I don’t do resolutions – those times in my life when I have made substantial changes, like quitting religion or smoking or starting exercise … had nothing to do with year ending or beginning. Quitting smoking, in fact, was a birthday present to myself, best one ever.

But I was thinking this AM as we drove relatives to the airport that during 2009 I really took enjoyment at one phenomenon and learned one thing.

The phenomenon is “medical marijuana.” I’m happy for the people who now have access to it for pain and nausea relief. But I’m laughing at all of the law ‘n order types who are quietly seething about it. You can hear the sphincters tighten every time a legal sale is made. A few of them may turn inside out, so great is the tightening. I love it!

Are more people smoking pot now than before? Who knows, who cares. Some sick people are comforted. Will medical marijuana laws lead to legalization? One can only hope. A lot of blacks and Latinos will be set free at last. The whole point of marijuana laws is repression of the underclasses.

In the mean time, libertarians and free-market types – take cheer. Commerce is percolating, Mary Jane is taking on new product forms, and sales are brisk. Markets are doing their magic.

I’m not a midnight toker myself. God knows I’m mellow enough as it is.

And then, the thing that I learned: While I still believe that the presidential election was stolen in 2004, I finally came to understand that it doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter in 2000 either. Obama has taught me that party politics are pointless, even counterproductive. Yes, Republicans care about being in power, as do Democrats. But it’s only about the perks of power, who gets to load up on friends in high places, which industries are favored. There’s nothing in it for us ordinary folks.

Just think of the presidential election it as the quadrennial football game between Harvard and Princeton. It is very important to some folks, but otherwise meaningless.

When Americans get scared, as will happen now that there was apparently a snake bomb on a plane (some dude tried to pull a Vincennes on us), several things happen.

1) Non-white people who choose to fly generally have seats open next to them, and so can fly in more comfort than the rest of us. (If they want to scare us off, they just make eye contact. However, they must be cautious, as that could cause patriots to go all “Let’s roll!” on them.)

2) White Americans go native and get all defensive and say things like “Why do they hate us?!” (They really don’t know – be patient with them.)

3) People die. They pull a Vincennes on us, we pull shock and awe on them. After a bunch of Saudis attacked us back then, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and Denmark. This time it looks like we are going after Yemen, but Hugo’s number could be up too. And if I was Peruvian, I wouldn’t exactly be all comfortable. The whole world is vulnerable right now.

The Empire will strike back. War has been declared. Enemy to be decided soon.

Every now and then I come face-to-face with a contradiction. Usually, I look at it and do something else. Contradictions are difficult things, in that they force us to confront errors in our thinking. Since none of us ever admits to error except Sarge in Beetle Bailey (“I thought I was wrong about something once. Turns out I wasn’t.”), we have these protracted debates where we continually butt the same heads with the same points. It’s time for some new sauce.

I am writing here not to set others straight. I am more interested in straightening out my own mind.

I came to butt heads with Carol at Missoulapolis over a problem that liberals of old were loathe to admit, and that modern liberals simply don’t care about: The underclass. It’s mostly black. There doesn’t seem to be much progress. There seems to be mobility in the other minorities – Chinese and Vietnamese and Koreans come here and make new lives and commerce percolates among them. The blacks don’t much change, generation generation, except on TV where they are erudite, brilliant, insightful, and often own chains of laundries.

At Carol’s blog, I tried to address the problem as best I was able at that time, as I was hesitant to say what I just said above. It’s a touchy area, as racist attitudes which exist in all of us often surface and have to be quashed again. But I let go with a private thought:

I believe in the basic equality of people – not the lovey-dovey stuff that liberals preach, but rather in our basic equality of abilities. We’re pretty much of the same basic package. There are exceptional people on the far edges of the Bell Curve, but the curve itself is only as steep as it is because of our early-life experiences, in my opinion.

Our brain is comprised of switches that get turned on at various times during our development. The early years are critical. In a loving supporting and stern environment, children develop their talents and become mature and functioning adults.

But too many home environments are harsh places where kids learn early on defensive survival skills. The ones they need to survive in our world don’t develop. It passes on generation to generation, and goes all the way back to the days of slavery. Instead these kids develop street skills, and get subsumed into the underground economy you talked about.

As I said, I have no answer for this. I only want to make the point that we white guys who discuss this stuff, in their environment, would be them. It takes smarts to survive there too. We’re not that special. We’re just more fortunate.

Truthfully, the thing that was swirling in my head as I wrote this was the TV series I am watching, The Wire, and an interview I listened to with one of its creators, David Simon. That was mixing up with a movie that Denzel Washington directed in 2002, Antwone Fisher. I am all about popular culture.

The Wire is about street life in Baltimore, and that portion of the population that we have no use for, the black street people. “The Wire” itself is a wiretap where other people are employed in trying to convict the street people of crimes so they can imprison them. The weapon of choice for imprisonment are our onerous drug laws. They are enforced against minorities, and that’s about it.

The Wire shows the futility of the ongoing battle. Drugs are not interdicted, addicts are not cured, and for every one imprisoned, at least one other takes his place. The cops are cynical, trying to “juke” the numbers of arrests to get a promotion and better pay.

It’s all pointless. Shut out of the white economy, blacks have their own – the drug culture. Black kids go through school, some finish, but their real education is on the street. They look at white society and realize there is no place for them. They take their place on “the corners”, replacing their parents.Their kids will replace them.

The movie Antwone Fisher attacks the problem from another angle – a young man raised by a brutal aunt who knows nothing of kindness. He enters the military as damaged goods, and doesn’t play well. He is on his way out, but instead is interdicted by a kind counselor who leads him, by means of subtle prodding, to confront his past. It’s a little maudlin, as Antwone finds his real family, and they are right out of Little House on the Prairie. But in the process of moving from brutal aunt to kind family, Antwone learns about “slave behavior,” and that is the message in the movie.

Slaves were subject to abuse by masters, and had no way to pay it back. So they paid it downward, and abuse within families created a whole society so dysfunctional that they could in no way survive in white society. Families were broken, hope was a joke, cruelty was part of everyday existence. Then we set them free.

Patterns repeat from generation to generation. Parents that abuse their kids raise kids who abuse their kids. The dysfunction wrought by slavery is still apparent all around us. And rather than attack the problem head-on, our answer has been to make certain drugs that blacks are likely to use, like coke and heroin, illegal. We then attach monstrous jail sentences to their use as a means of putting them away and out of sight. Pot laws are another manifestation of this phenomenon. It’s about control of the underclasses.

I remember the words of John Taylor Gatto, the New York City school teacher who quit in utter frustration shortly after winning Teacher of the Year award. I can’t cite him other than a vague memory. He talked about New York police routinely swooping down through the neighborhoods and arresting the fathers for drug violations. That’s business as usual. They are juking the numbers. It’s a game, nothing more.

So what’s the solution? Other than taking all of the money we throw at drug enforcement and use it instead for rehab and job training and education, which is David Simon’s solution, I don’t have one.

What’s the contradiction? It’s the two faces of government – the iron fist, and the nurturing hand.

That contradiction surfaces in every debate I have -the government that kills millions in the Middle East and sends my mother her Social Security check. Right wingers are generally so fearful of that government that they insist that the Social Security check is a trap, and yet say that imprisonment of minorities for illusory offenses is a legitimate function.

In answer to my comment to Carol at Missouapolis, she went right to the lazy whites she encounters at the Post Office and the problems of people getting something for nothing. That’s indeed a problem. But the problem of the blacks goes so much deeper.

We’re all wrong about something. I’m trying to do my part here, and embrace my own internal contradictions. It’s part of a general revulsion I am having against Democrats. Major changes are rumbling deep inside. I’m about to go rogue. As if …

More later. I’m grappling and ask anyone reading this to carry forward with this.

I’m getting an oppressive sense of encirclement with the Democrats now in power. There’s a famous scene at the end of Orwell’s Animal House where the farm animals look in the window of the farm house and realize that the humans and the pigs were actually the same:

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it was already impossible to say which was which.

Our republic is a fragile thing – that is, the powerful forces that govern are well-kept, but the democratic freedoms we enjoy are fragile. The only thing that keeps power in check is public awareness. The American public is actually the first enemy of the concentrated centers of private wealth that rule behind the scenes of elected government. And while we may be crude and uneducated, susceptible to superstition and easy to manipulate by means of fear, there is power out here. It’s just not focused.

When Barack Obama first assumed power, he made an unusual gesture, one that set me back a bit. He appointed Mike Lux “progressive liaison.” That was a clear message – progressives would be on the outside looking in. Lux only lasted a couple of months, and there is no liaison now, no pretense. The administration has dropped any progressive cloaking, and is aggressively pursuing Bush policies in every area, from monstrous deficits to aggressive war to subsidizing of favored industries. Citizens are still held in indefinite detention, secret prisons still exist, torture goes on as before. It has just gone underground again, as before 9/11.

Perhaps he will become a focal point of resistance, but political prisoner Don Siegelman, former governor or Alabama, will go back to jail for the crime of dissing Karl Rove. In the meantime, Ted Stevens walked.

It’s a dangerous time, more so than under Bush and the Republicans, as so many people who might oppose Bush policies have gone into the house with the pigs and humans to wait tables and serve drinks. Liberals are a malleable bunch, oblivious to much of what goes on under their noses. Take the health care bill: it is a crushing defeat at the hands of AHIP and PhRMA, and yet they are embracing it.

I have said to the point of obnoxious annoyance that “Democrats are the problem,” and people thought I was being hyperbolic or demonic. Those words say exactly what I mean. They are not clever. In a forced two-party state where both parties have essentially the same financiers, it is the job of the ‘soft’ party to absorb discontent and render it impotent. Obama has been harsher than Clinton in 1992 in slamming the door on us. He’s taken no quarter.

And that’s where my feeling of encirclement comes from. The pigs and the humans, they are all looking like pigs at this point.

It’s interesting to watch activities on capitol hill right now. The Democrats are lockstep behind their leader, and whatever resistance there is will be crushed. The House “Progressive Caucus” is a cruel joke, so impotent that Nancy Pelosi laughed when she heard that they would vote against a health care bill that did not have a public option. There’s no resistance there of any note.

But there’s some quibbling among Republicans. It’s not a threat to power, but is nonetheless interesting to watch. In the recent pro forma committee hearings to publicly approve Ben Bernancke for another term as head of the Fed, only one Democrat objected, and probably at great cost. But seven Republicans did.

Before we take refuge in that party, however, remember that this is minority behavior. These were genuine and honest votes, but also an exhibition of the freedom that senators have when they are out of power. They can freely speak their minds. Were the tables turned, were the Republicans in power, immense pressure would be brought to bear on these men, and their votes would have turned.

So we will see, in the coming years, who are honest men and women, and who are swine. Montana’s Tester and Baucus have already shown their little docked tails. Colorado’s Udall is an interesting man, and his family has a long and noble history of independence, but he’s shown no inclination to buck Obama. New Colorado Senator Michael Bennett was, like every appointed replacement senator after the election except Roland Burris, carefully vetted to be sure that he had no progressive leanings. He’s a dock-tailed tool.

Is this depressing? Not really. It’s kind of exciting. It’s a time for people to bolt, hopefully into activism, though many will simply go back to sleep. It was eight years of Clinton that produced the Nader surge, and I will never forget the ugly seething contempt for Nader that liberal Democrats exhibited. I never feel that kind of hatred from Republicans. It was intense. It could be that only four years of Obama will produce a new surge of resistance and threaten his presidency. There’s always hope.

Who will lead? I do not know. It will not be Nader. He doesn’t even like running. He just does it because no one else will. That’s kind of sad – not that he runs. He’s a courageous man. It’s that no one else will.

In the meantime, I’m quoting someone – I don’t remember who and don’t feel like looking it up. No linky-think today. It goes like this:

We must embrace pessimism of the intellect, and optimism of the spirit.

The most dangerous times for our fragile liberties are times like these, when ordinarily vigilant people are lured to sleep by the soft lullaby of Democrats, who rock us to sleep while holding a gun behind their back. Some say that Democrats act merely as a ratchet – that they exist to prevent backsliding after a Republican Administration. There’s something to that. But keep in mind, this awful health care bill that is going to pass and be signed could not have happened under Republican rule. There would have been too much resistance.

And remember that before the 2005 Bush attempt, the last serious attempt to destroy Social Security was set to be from … Bill Clinton. Only the chubby little tart Monica saved us.

Democrats are the problem.

In 1993 the musician Prince, in a flash of brilliance, decided to change his name to an unpronounceable symbol:

It didn’t really catch on, and worse than that, meant that newspapers and industry publications couldn’t write about him much, as his name was a symbol.

This reminds me of the inadequacies of our language. English is a really good language for a lot of things, and so flexible, but often people have to grab things from other languages to express a fine point. So for instance, from the Germans we get words like schadenfreude, meaning the joy we take at the misfortune of others, or zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. From the French we get a whole array of expressions – je ne sais quoi – that certain indescribable something, agent provocateur, one who entices another person to commit an illegal act or who deliberately stirs up rebellion to allow police to put it down (see how many words it takes?); and coup de grâce, or mercy blow – the kill shot. From the Italians, we learn how to order coffee.

Each of these expressions is used because they convey just a little bit more meaning than the English definition. My wife’s je ne sais quoi – well, you’d have to know her. I cannot describe it well.

I was looking for a word last week after a debate with Big Swede and Craig Moore – one that describes the indestructible wall of certainty that surrounds their stupidité profonde. In addition, I was looking for a word that describes Black Flag’s unwavering certainty in his philosophy of free markets in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

The best I could do was “absurd,” “bizarre,” “silly” and “ridiculous.” They don’t really carry it.

Then I had an idea – I don’t know enough French or German to grab the right phase from their language, but I do have access to a whole array of symbols via Microsoft Word. One of them will do – it will be the symbol I use to describe the indescribable. I will inject it at that point in a conversation where information can no longer be exchanged, when the language has lost power, and all we have left are blank stares. Here it is:

¥

I invite others to use it on me as well – I cannot not grasp things that I cannot possibly grasp. And, I invite others to offer their own words or symbols – we might breach a wall, and open up new lines of communication.