Saturday, May 01, 2010

May Day Celebration

Happy May Day, folks! I want to say - I rather wish the teabaggers were right, and Obama was a secret socialist, planning to establish a reign of terror of single payer health care, strong regulation of financial institutions and corporations, end of undue deference to religious organizations, strengthened unions, better safety and environmental regulations - and oh, so much more. One can dream, no? The dirty fucking hippy in me wishes he might get us out of a war or two, end the worst offenses against human rights stemming from those wars (treat prisoners as either prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva convention, or as criminals, protected by the American constitution and international law), maybe even reduce the war on drugs, and stop destabilizing our neighbors and filling our prisons in a vain attempt to keep hippies and football players from enjoying their weed... Not likely. The only comfort - and it's thin comfort indeed - is that the right seems determined to marginalize itself completely - Arizona's immigration law seems designed to keep any non-whites from voting Republican - they might have already succeeded in losing Florida to the Democrats by alienating the Cuban vote... though divisive, xenophobic, racist, authoritarian politics are always dangerous...

Enough of that. Let's celebrate the day with some music - the anger of the downtrodden (at least in the film version of the play): Lotte Lenya singing "Pirate Jenny" from Red Pabst's Threepenny Opera movie.

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