The Rake Magazine

Month: November 2005

  • Intelligent Design Stops at the Kansas Border

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    Hey, Toto, I bet we can fool those Kansas rubes with a story about scarecrows and wizards. Auntie Em will never suspect we were just out behind the barn smoking a fatty.

    It seems the Kansas Board of Education voted today to make Intelligent Design part of the curriculum in Kansas biology classes. Thank God, most of you are saying, we’re not in Kansas.

    I just have a couple of questions. If God really was the intelligent designer, why did he skip Kansas when it came to handing out the intelligence? And, figures made public this week show that American kids are falling even further behind our international competitors when it comes to math and science proficiency. Do you think there’s any reason for that?

  • Unseen Hands

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    What Iowa looked like before genetically engineered corn

    I’ve been hanging out lately with a young economist who’s been making a study of the history of economic thought. The conversation is a bit one sided, because, while I’ve heard of economic philosophers such as Keynes, Mill, Smith, et al., he’s actually read them.

    Sunday night, the conversation turned to the government’s role in economic policy. He told me that, despite all the political bloviation to the contrary, all serious economists past and present, believe the government has a role (and even duty) to influence the market–not just to keep it safe to operate.

    Two stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal make that point today. (Sorry, you’ll have to subscribe to read them, just like I do.) One story made note of the well documented fact that many American drug companies have stopped making vaccines and antibiotics because they can make so much more money making Lipitor and Viagra. So, just when we really need vaccines and antibiotics, there ain’t none. The story, of course, (this is the WSJ, afterall) makes the point that the drug pushers can’t make any money because the government essentially sets the price, for vaccines especially, and it lets people sue the companies for alleged side effects.

    Seems to me these are both easy fixes: indemnify the companies against any good faith mistakes, and since drug companies are, or at least should be in part, in business for the public good, license them sort of like we license broadcasters. In effect, we’ll let you make huge profits on your drugs, but in return, you have to do something for us, and make drugs we need, but the public weal demands be widely available and cheap. (Ok, I was kidding about regulating broadcasters, but you get the point.)

    The second story was that of a farmer in Spain who had spent years developing a special organic variety of corn, only to have it polluted by strains of genetically engineered seed pollen blowing into his field from his neighbors. It is a growing problem, affecting even such American industrial giants as Anheuser Busch, who want to keep their beer making ingredients pure.

    What an apt metaphor for the unregulated spread of all things capitalism.

  • Canadians are coming for your children

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    As soon as I get done kissing you, I’m going to scare some Minnesotans

    You read it in the Strib first. Katherine Kersten tells us today, “A proposal to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman in Minnesota’s Constitution is one of the biggest issues our state will face in the next legislative session.” Never mind education, tax policy, transit, bird flu, foreign terrorism threats, or energy costs, don’t forget it’s the gay married terrorists that are out to kill your way of life.

    I shouldn’t be surprised at anything Katherine Kersten says, but today I have to admit she’s topped herself. As if we didn’t have to worry about all the dangerous Mexicans who want to come here to pick our fruit and clean our houses, now an even more insidious invasion is being fomented in Canada. Nope, health care for all wasn’t bad enough. And they don’t even want to stop at good strong beer. And, if the fact that many of them speak French doesn’t make you afraid, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

    Those goddam Canucks don’t legally descriminate against gay people. They’re going to hell and they want to take your children with them. And who does Kersten hold up at the defender of Canadian (and your) virtue? The Catholic Church. Yup, that Catholic Church–you know the one that’s been hiding pedophile priests for the past several centuries.

    Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary is coming to the Twin Cities this week to tell us all about it. He’s one of the bishops who has threatened Canadian Members of Parliament with denial of communion in retaliation for their votes on gay rights to marriage. As Kersten further quotes him, “Canadians who believe in the historic definition of marriage, who believe that children need a mother and father, are now the legal equivalent of racists.”

    Now that’s not exactly true. But exact truth won’t work, if your object is to scare people and inflame your voting base. What is true is that people who would deny rights to gays are the legal equivalent of people who would deny rights to people of a different skin color. Remember when it was illegal for a white to marry a black? I do.

    If you don’t, have a look at our own 14th Amendment. Minnesota can pass all the anti-gay legislation Kersten and her ilk can scare us into, and some activist judge who can read the U.S. Constitution will just have to strike it down. And won’t the “base” have fun with that? Politics of divisiveness, welcome to Minnesota. You’re welcome here.

    Can we at least ask that the Strib move this preposterous idiot to the Pandering to the Churchgoers page on Saturday, or, at the very least, bury her next to the bitchy gays Claude Peck and Rick Nelson in the Sunday Signature section? Her column’s very presence on the news pages denegrates the efforts of the good reporters and columnists who toil there.

  • Home Is Where You Hang Your Hat

    Our friend Deborah Caulfield Rybak reports today that Garrison Keillor is apparently not interested in renewing his show’s handsome permanent lease at the Fitzgerald Theater. As DCR notes, the reasons are not entirely clear, and both Keillor and MPR chief Bill Kling expertly deflected questions about what might have really gone down. (Kling: Keillor makes his own decisions. Keillor: We gotta keep moving, keep the circulation in our toes.) True enough, a radio program creates its cognitive setting out of thin air, and it can originate from Nanook of the North’s igloo, if that’s where the gods of radio wish to do their work.

    Keillor’s remark that he’d love to take the show to jolly old England for a year strikes me as brilliant–at the international level, Keillor long ago surpassed Bob Dylan and the City of Chicago as Minnesota’s most noteworthy asset. (Oh, near Chicago!–bang bang!) Also, if you love the English language, and especially the printed word, as much as Keillor does, you often wonder just what it would take to pick up and move your whole sordid freak show over the pond to the Old Sod. I’d do it in a heartbeat, just to be able to read the Guardian and Private Eye and the Tattler and Q magazine everyday. Still, Keillor’s life shows several interesting patterns that might be motivating factors . For example, I think he tends to run away rather than fight, and he’s vulnerable to the gripe that there is no honor for a prophet in his own hometown.

    It may also be true that his show deserves a more frenetic, glitzy setting like the Pantages or the Orpheum in downtown Minneapolis. (Though maybe not quite ready for Rochester and Morris.) Funny how satisfaction is never permanent, restlessness is the human condition, and Keillor seems to have the old itch to shake the dust off his shoes again. That, or negotiations with MPR have broken down, and this is the nuclear option.

  • Some Final Thoughts On A Fairy Tale

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    Again and again we put our sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed them back into their death, each moving slowly into the dark, disappearing as our hearts visited and savored, hurt and yearned.

    —Jack Gilbert, from “Kunstkammer”

    There are other things besides monkeying around with words that are necessary, require commitment and discipline and all the cooperative powers of the heart and mind, and that are worth doing precisely because they involve risks whose rewards are a form of salvation and intimate, connected immortality, a lasting connection with living memory.

    It’s all a question of who, precisely, you want to be known and remembered by, and how.

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  • Good and Hard

    H.L. Mencken once said “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

    That quote was recalled to me today by a good friend. We were talking about something else at the time, but I couldn’t help thinking this might be a good time for the Democrats to just adopt it as their mantra, shut up, and let the current cabal do its worst.

    Alito, at least according to what I’ve been reading, may not be as bad as the Dems think, that bit about spousal notification notwithstanding. I figure sometimes people will often make different votes when they know they are losing than when they know they might sway the decision. I can’t figure any other rationale for that one, other than he’s just messing with us. Or, he’s really still into that old wife is chattel thing.

    But, without rehashing all the things the Bushies have done to screw up the country, maybe the Senate Dems should let them just have Alito’s up or down vote, put him on the bench, because there’s no good way to stop him, and let him, Thomas and Scalia start chipping away at all the rights that have been won since 1964.

    All those moderate suburban Republicans who voted for Bush, when they knew in their hearts they were making a pact with the Christian right wing devils, will wonder what happened when the government starts giving it to them–good and hard.

    The lesson should start to sink in before November 2006.

  • Automatic For The People

    Chris Elliott, one of our favorite comedians, has published his first novel. It’s called “The Shroud of the Thwacker,” and it seems to be an historical novel about a Victorian-era serial killer named Jack the Jolly Thwacker. According to the Times today, it a spoof of sensational period mysteries. But part of the novel was accidentally nonfictional fiction, er, fictionalized nonfiction… uh, let’s try that again. Elliott unwittingly appropriated a character from another work of fiction. “Boilerplate” was supposedly one of the world’s first working robots invented in 1893 by a man named Archibald Campion, as described at a website called “Mechanical Marvels of the Nineteenth Century.” Elliott took it to be a period hoax when he made Boilerplate a character in his story. As it turns out, Boilerplate and his entire invented history are a contemporary creation of Oregon artist Paul Guinan. That put Elliot in a ticklish spot, legally speaking, but he came to an “understanding” with Guinan. As quoted in the Times, Elliott seems genuinely embarrassed by the unintended spoof within a spoof. Still, I have my doubts. He may not be the unredeemable prank that his prototype Andy Kaufman was, but I wouldn’t put it beyond Elliott to have prearranged the plagiarism. His ad hoc profit-sharing arrangement with Guinan is notable for one glaring error in concealment–no lawyers were involved.