Smoking and Thinking

Random High Thoughts:

1. Ever since the week of Shirley and the Teabaggers, The NAACP and Fox News, I've been thinking about Crackers in terms of American Demographics. Teabaggers may be giving Crackers everywhere a bad name. I wonder if there is regional variation among crackers and if Crackers are more eastern south than western south. More agrarian, perhaps, than an oil field focused on drilling the resources from the earth. Or if a linguistic marker can identify Crackers. For example, what did the family call Brazil Nuts? If the Tea Party were Black, what nouns would identify White People? Dave Chappelle would know. So would the Wayans. I consider them authorities on Race in America. Chris Hedges, too. Alternate Brain linked to Hedge's article Why the Feds Fear Thinkers like Howard Zinn. Probably just "Whitey" though.

1A. I don't think I'm a Cracker. I think I'm Dip or Salsa. It may be the female equivalent. Is a Rich Cracker a Biscuit? Or is a Biscuit a Fat Cracker?
1B. I wonder if I'm Cracker on my mother's side. She's a mix of Abolitionist and Bootlegger from North Carolina.
1C. Willy Jeff Clinton may very well be a Cracker.

2. I'm wondering about gender identification now that gay marriage has penetrated traditional ideas of sexuality and marriage in the mainstream. What about gender and sexual self identification. What happens in American Society if you self identify as Bisexual on Match dot com? Funny - Willy Jeff Clinton makes me think of sex. I wonder why that "is."


3. The mainstream is weird. Educationally, this is our first public education experience now that Buster is in college. Recreationally, too, I think. Buster's summers have been spent in an Organic, Granola-fied setting with the Quakers in Vermont. I suspect that highschool kids going co-ed skinny dipping in the lake on an Organic farm in the Green Mountains isn't Mainstream. It's fun, though, and that's what Buster's been doing except for the summer on a 30 day hike in the Wind River Wilderness. Notably, I haven't been on vacation unless you count visiting my family. But when we were a family, we went to Kathmandu and skimmed over the Himalayas to a place in Nepal called Royal Chitwan Preserve. We looked for tigers on elephant back in the grassland.

4. Hurricane Katrina exposed some dramatic socioeconomic inequities. When I think of race in America, I think of how people with money evacuated a few days before the storm. Others were left to drown. My brother took a picture of a dog eating a dead body. He was in a helicopter over New Orleans right after the storm hit, and he stayed up there with another photographer for days and days and days. He was the first photographer that moved a picture of a dead body over the wire. He got a standing ovation from his peers for that. To me, that was more meaningful than the Pulitzer, although it's nice he got one.

Now, he's been on the Deepwater story for weeks and weeks. I wonder what he has to say about dispersants.