Greetings from Norhill Heights, Houston

Please stay in your seats, ladies and gentlemen. I think there’s going to be an encore.

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This is not where my head’s at. There are some much more long winded ways of saying that, but that’s really all it is.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t stopped a level of sharing online appropriate to the 21st century, though. For mostly photos (including dog pictures!) and some brief commentary, there’s Tumblr and you can find me right over here. The nature of Tumblr makes me say less, which is what I want. For the really short stuff, of course, there’s Twitter, which I like because it’s like Facebook, but without the overwhelming dumbness or the feeling of the AOL People Connection of the future.

I may be back here. And maybe not. Thanks for paying attention, though.

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Over on Tumblr.

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I’m sorry, am I being negative? Yesterday was a glorious day here in Houston, sunshine and lovely weather, and after some errands I took a quick motorcycle ride and just soaked it in. MWK and I were de-decorating his house and putting Christmas back in boxes, and while drinking a glass of water or something I looked at Twitter, saw something about a shooting, and went and read the news.

This has depressed and angered me since it happened; depressed because it seems that no matter what happens, the power of brute force always seems to prevail; logic and reason and debate and democratic processes are wonderful but if something can be shot in the face because someone doesn’t like her viewpoints, it all comes to little. Especially for the person shot in the face. Angered because the assholes win a victory, again.

I wouldn’t be so simplistic as to say that the overheated political rhetoric of the last year or so “caused” yesterday’s attempted assassination. Causality is tricky. But if you shake a box of marbled with a little hole in the bottom, one of them is likely to fall out. You won’t know which one, you don’t quite what direction it will go, but it’s likely to happen. And even if you don’t seriously want that marble to come flying out, you’re an idiot if you don’t expect it.

In a better world, the box-shakers – Sarah Palin and her bullseye posters, Glenn Beck and his… well, everything, all of that crowd would pause a moment. Not because it’s their fault that a member of Congress was shot, and bystanders are dead, but because the gravity of the moment demands that everyone stop and look at their part in shaping the political climate of this country, and be responsible for it.

Responsibility being out of fashion these days, instead we have Sarah Palin aide Rebecca Mansour insisting that those crosshair graphics never really meant guns. They were, like, surveyor symbols or something. (Because when I hear “reload” and “target” the first thing I think of of surveyors!

Now, we can all Google away and find the endless other armament references from Palin and company, and confirm what we know in our guts: Mansour is just the repellent mouthpiece of her repellent, irresponsible boss. Fine; politics has been full of people more amoral and ethically challenged than Palin for years.

A healthy political culture flushes them out and sends them home to obscurity. What’s troubling is that transparent lies like those we’re hearing now will be enough for some people to go on cheering the people who did indeed contribute to the climate that sets a nut with a gun loose on a Tucson streetcorner.

And that is an existential threat to a democratic society. And that’s what makes me truly depressed.

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