Today Michael Gerson hosts a pity party for his old boss, George Bush, in his column in the Washington Post. Apparently everyone has been unfair to Bush, who has "a deeper decency" then we all give him credit for.
Boo frickin' hoo.
Hey Mr. Gerson, has Bush done anything to stop the torture his administration authorized? Is Guantanimo Bay still open? How dare you say a man who would allow innocent people (most of the people picked up in sweeps and sent to Gitmo) be denied rights affirmed in the Geneva Conventions and by U.S. law, and then describe the man who should be ultimately responsible as decent by any measure.
Tell that to the child who lost his mother to an errant bomb in an unnecessary war. Or tell the child whose father was tortured at Abu Ghraib that Bush took some unfair hits from the press and has a low approval rating. I expect (and hope) that kid would hit you with the sole of his shoe.
Gerson sites Bush's AIDS initiative. I'll give Bush credit for his increased aid, though it should be noted that the elimination of any kind of birth control and the abstinence only bent blunted what could have been a truly great achievement. I'll give Bush credit for his willingness to work with the G-8 on fighting malaria, too.
Gerson says that my image is Bush is so skewed that I cannot accept his portrait of this deeply decent man. He writes, "That is, perhaps, understandable. But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W. Bush."
Fine. But Gerson's also been on Bush's payroll. Perhaps he can't understand that a short list of compassionate acts does not erase a much longer list of incompetent, callous, and even cruel ones. Perhaps there is some threshold of charity that blots out war crimes, but I'm not sure what that would look like, and Bush's record doesn't come close.
Mr. Gerson, rumor has it that Nero played his lyre and sang songs while Rome burned, but one historian claims that wasn't true. He says Nero may have started the fire, but then he did a great job rebuilding the city. When the people got angry about the tax increases needed for all the rebuilding, Nero found some Christians to use as scapegoats, and had them thrown to the dogs, crucified, or burned. But his urban renewal plans were nice, and after the fire he let some of the homeless live in his palaces, so, I guess by your standard, he had "a deeper decency". If only he'd had a fan like you to rewrite history for him.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
God is still in control.
I just received a friendly and innocuous email from a college buddy titled "TOP 10 PREDICTIONS NO MATTER WHO WINS THE ELECTION". It contained a list of Christian truisms about how Jesus still loves us and God is still in control. I don't disagree, but since I'm not sure of my friend's politics, I didn't know how to respond. Is this how McCain supporters are comforting themselves? If so, that's fine. They can also take comfort in the fact that their candidate gave a gracious, dignified concession speech and earned back some of the respect many of us on the other side had lost for him over the course of the campaign. John McCain is a good guy. Sarah Palin asked to speak last night and the McCain staff (wisely) told her she couldn't, but in the spirit of national reconciliation I'll assume she would have apologized for some of the things she said, like implying that a lot of us aren't real Americans, and some of the things she did not say, like calling out and reproaching some of the people who shouted out abominable remarks during some of her speeches. I'll just assume she's a good gal, too, in spite of everything I've ever seen or heard from her.
But maybe my friend is an Obama fan, in which case there are some things I'd like to add to his list.
11. There will still be idiots on both sides of the political spectrum, and in every religious group.
12. There will still be Christians who believe greed is a virtue.
13. There will still be Christians who believe problems between nations are best solved with guns and bombs.
14. There will still be Christians who believe poor people are poor because they are lesser people.
15. There will still be Christians who espouse "American Exceptionalism", the entirely un-Christian idea that American lives are worth more than the lives of people in other countries.
Those statements could have been added regardless of who won the election. But now we can add a "prediction" that is entirely dependent on the results of yesterday's vote.
16. These kinds of Christians will still exists, but on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue they are packing their bags, and a very different kind of Christian will soon be moving in.
Can I get an Amen?
But maybe my friend is an Obama fan, in which case there are some things I'd like to add to his list.
11. There will still be idiots on both sides of the political spectrum, and in every religious group.
12. There will still be Christians who believe greed is a virtue.
13. There will still be Christians who believe problems between nations are best solved with guns and bombs.
14. There will still be Christians who believe poor people are poor because they are lesser people.
15. There will still be Christians who espouse "American Exceptionalism", the entirely un-Christian idea that American lives are worth more than the lives of people in other countries.
Those statements could have been added regardless of who won the election. But now we can add a "prediction" that is entirely dependent on the results of yesterday's vote.
16. These kinds of Christians will still exists, but on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue they are packing their bags, and a very different kind of Christian will soon be moving in.
Can I get an Amen?
Wolf Blitzer and Princess Leia
Last night my brother, Joe, called me and interrupted Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's election coverage (sacrilege?) and convinced me to flip over to CNN to check out their hologram machine. On the one hand, it's another tacky ploy to make 24 news coverage more interesting through gimmicky gadgetry. On the other hand, it obviously worked. As though the night weren't historic enough, we entered the age of the interview by hologram. Or maybe we just returned to it, since it began in 1977 in a galaxy far, far away.
Tapping Out
Well, there are still some races left to call, so we can't declare a winner in the online pool Joel put together, but as of 2:53pm Noah is currently winning in our house with 11 correctly guessed swing states and contested governors' races. Paige and I each have 10. I really want to stay up to see how the last senatorial races play out and see if Noah correctly guessed the final electoral college vote, but since the presidential election was decided so early I didn't maintain my caffeine intake levels, and now I'm crashing. The politics junkie couldn't make it until all was decided. Embarrassed, I'm off to bed.
Obama still better be the winner when I wake up tomorrow.
Obama still better be the winner when I wake up tomorrow.
So this is what we're in for?
Bill Kristol is almost always wrong, but I respect him more than I respect Micheal Gerson, former Bush employee and steadfast Bush boot-licker over at the Washington Post. Maybe I should start a list of people who deserve less respect than Bill Kristol. Think of it as the Razzie of political punditry.
Today Michael Gerson tries to write an op-ed saying we should all support the new President-elect because it's important to have a president we all see as legitimate. He wants us to put partisanship aside. I know he wants to be a part of the historic moment, and probably also wants to jump from the sinking ship (too late!) but the piece is a mess of hypocrisy and faulty reasoning.
At one point he writes: "Liberals have perfected this machinery of disdain over the past few years."
But in the same post Gerson criticizes partisanship and describes theories about criminality and deception from the Bush administration "lunatic". This is Gerson's attempt at magnanimity and bi-partisanship in the name of country.
As the kids would say: Epic Fail.
Sometimes calling a liar a liar is not partisan. Calling a criminal a criminal is not necessarily bitter or ideological. And treating deception and criminality with disdain is entirely appropriate.
Would Gerson disagree? Depends on the party participating in the deception or criminality.
Today Michael Gerson tries to write an op-ed saying we should all support the new President-elect because it's important to have a president we all see as legitimate. He wants us to put partisanship aside. I know he wants to be a part of the historic moment, and probably also wants to jump from the sinking ship (too late!) but the piece is a mess of hypocrisy and faulty reasoning.
At one point he writes: "Liberals have perfected this machinery of disdain over the past few years."
But in the same post Gerson criticizes partisanship and describes theories about criminality and deception from the Bush administration "lunatic". This is Gerson's attempt at magnanimity and bi-partisanship in the name of country.
As the kids would say: Epic Fail.
Sometimes calling a liar a liar is not partisan. Calling a criminal a criminal is not necessarily bitter or ideological. And treating deception and criminality with disdain is entirely appropriate.
Would Gerson disagree? Depends on the party participating in the deception or criminality.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Post-racial? What does that mean?
I am so proud of my country, my party, and my new President-elect.
The election coverage? Not so much.
I understand what these talking heads are trying to say when they describe Barack Obama as "Post-Racial". I don't think it's a partisan term, in that it could also be applied to Governor Bobby Jindal (R) of Louisiana. But would they apply that term to any white candidate? If the term "Post-Racial" only applies to minority candidates or office holders, does it really mean what they think it means? Or does it mean a candidate who doesn't run on his/her race but gets tons of attention for it from talking heads with too much time to fill bloviating?
Sure, President-elect Obama's race makes this election even more historic, but can't we also admit that the race issue was probably a push, with racists and those wanting to vote based on reverse racism/ racial guilt probably canceling each other out? Let's face it; when you take race out of it you have a brilliant, exciting, young, incredibly talented candidate running a nearly perfect campaign at a time when people are desperate for change and rejecting the party in power. Of course we elected Barack Obama. The very fact that it's been close has been disheartening, not because it was a sign of racism, but because it showed that so many vote based on party branding rather than issues. Sure, some folks vote based on principles, but many of those are essentially identity politics, too. Take abortion as an example. If that's your single issue, are you voting for the Republican Party because they have delivered you anything except slightly higher rates of abortion whenever they hold the White House? Or, on the flip side, are you voting based on Universal Health Care? How much have the Democrats produced while running with that as a stated goal? No, even these single issue voters are voting for the party that stands with them, not the party that has done something substantive for them. This relates directly to the race issue. Most overt racists were in one party or the other and wouldn't switch because of race, and my guess is that the number of racists, either overt or subconscious, who made their choice based on the color of Obama's skin probably crossed that line and passed an equal number of folks coming the other way for the opposite reason.
Race does not explain this election. Not by a long shot.
On February 17th of 2007, I wrote this at my blog on the Barack Obama website: "I made a screen shot of Senator Obama's page which showed me as one of his friends. When he's finishing his second term my son will be 12, and I'll be able to show him the picture and say, 'Yes, President Obama and I go waaaay back.' I desperately hope that my son won't be able to remember or even imagine the state of moral decay of the presidency before President Obama took office. I fear that it will take all of the president's energy to undo the damage that has been done by this administration, but I think Senator Obama (I mean, my pal Barack) has the character and intelligence to pull it off."
Well, more than a year and a half later, despite the talking heads spending much of tonight talking about (my pal) Barack's ethnicity, I still think this election was won due to his intelligence and character. I still think it's going to take eight years to clean up Bush's mess, and I still believe President Obama can do it.
This election isn't about a post-racial candidate. It's the story of a majority of post-racial voters who, without feigning some idiotic affected racial blindness, cast our ballots for the best person for the job.
I'm sure there are a lot of post-racial voters on the Republican side of this election, too. But if they looked beyond race and party branding and chose McCain, they unfortunately chose someone who couldn't look beyond his party base this time around, and greatly diminished himself over the course of this campaign. He sided with a party whose most honest strategists openly admit it benefits from lower voter turn-out and heightened fear within the electorate. McCain has been a great man in the past, but he gambled on the Republican base vs. the middle.
Americans chose to vote.
Americans chose to be brave.
That's why Barack Obama is President-elect.
And that's why, to paraphrase our new First Lady, I'm prouder of my country tonight than I've ever been before.
The election coverage? Not so much.
I understand what these talking heads are trying to say when they describe Barack Obama as "Post-Racial". I don't think it's a partisan term, in that it could also be applied to Governor Bobby Jindal (R) of Louisiana. But would they apply that term to any white candidate? If the term "Post-Racial" only applies to minority candidates or office holders, does it really mean what they think it means? Or does it mean a candidate who doesn't run on his/her race but gets tons of attention for it from talking heads with too much time to fill bloviating?
Sure, President-elect Obama's race makes this election even more historic, but can't we also admit that the race issue was probably a push, with racists and those wanting to vote based on reverse racism/ racial guilt probably canceling each other out? Let's face it; when you take race out of it you have a brilliant, exciting, young, incredibly talented candidate running a nearly perfect campaign at a time when people are desperate for change and rejecting the party in power. Of course we elected Barack Obama. The very fact that it's been close has been disheartening, not because it was a sign of racism, but because it showed that so many vote based on party branding rather than issues. Sure, some folks vote based on principles, but many of those are essentially identity politics, too. Take abortion as an example. If that's your single issue, are you voting for the Republican Party because they have delivered you anything except slightly higher rates of abortion whenever they hold the White House? Or, on the flip side, are you voting based on Universal Health Care? How much have the Democrats produced while running with that as a stated goal? No, even these single issue voters are voting for the party that stands with them, not the party that has done something substantive for them. This relates directly to the race issue. Most overt racists were in one party or the other and wouldn't switch because of race, and my guess is that the number of racists, either overt or subconscious, who made their choice based on the color of Obama's skin probably crossed that line and passed an equal number of folks coming the other way for the opposite reason.
Race does not explain this election. Not by a long shot.
On February 17th of 2007, I wrote this at my blog on the Barack Obama website: "I made a screen shot of Senator Obama's page which showed me as one of his friends. When he's finishing his second term my son will be 12, and I'll be able to show him the picture and say, 'Yes, President Obama and I go waaaay back.' I desperately hope that my son won't be able to remember or even imagine the state of moral decay of the presidency before President Obama took office. I fear that it will take all of the president's energy to undo the damage that has been done by this administration, but I think Senator Obama (I mean, my pal Barack) has the character and intelligence to pull it off."
Well, more than a year and a half later, despite the talking heads spending much of tonight talking about (my pal) Barack's ethnicity, I still think this election was won due to his intelligence and character. I still think it's going to take eight years to clean up Bush's mess, and I still believe President Obama can do it.
This election isn't about a post-racial candidate. It's the story of a majority of post-racial voters who, without feigning some idiotic affected racial blindness, cast our ballots for the best person for the job.
I'm sure there are a lot of post-racial voters on the Republican side of this election, too. But if they looked beyond race and party branding and chose McCain, they unfortunately chose someone who couldn't look beyond his party base this time around, and greatly diminished himself over the course of this campaign. He sided with a party whose most honest strategists openly admit it benefits from lower voter turn-out and heightened fear within the electorate. McCain has been a great man in the past, but he gambled on the Republican base vs. the middle.
Americans chose to vote.
Americans chose to be brave.
That's why Barack Obama is President-elect.
And that's why, to paraphrase our new First Lady, I'm prouder of my country tonight than I've ever been before.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Media Biased Towards Facts
Joel told me about this piece on media bias at MediaMatters.org. Apparently, when McCain talks about media bias, he sites a statistic by a non-partisan media watchdog site. This study considers reporting about polling showing an Obama lead as "positive" coverage favoring Obama and "negative" coverage towards McCain. Similarly, one imagines that accounts of the sizes of Obama's crowds are considered positive coverage, while reports of McCain's crowds are negative. Oh, and it gets worse; when fact checkers report on lies McCain has told, those are negative pieces about him. So, if McCain tells the most lies, has anemic crowds, and loses in polls, he is receiving coverage that is biased against him.
In that case, I am praying the coverage of McCain is going to be really negative when reporters reveal the simple fact that he's lost the only poll that matters.
So please, people, go out and vote, and encourage media bias.
In that case, I am praying the coverage of McCain is going to be really negative when reporters reveal the simple fact that he's lost the only poll that matters.
So please, people, go out and vote, and encourage media bias.
Election fatigue mixed with high anxiety and a dash of...
Last night I found myself overwhelmed by two seemingly contradictory emotions. On the one hand, I felt a tsunami of election fatigue. I've been reading every bit of election news I can get my hands on, despite obviously diminishing returns as pieces not only repeated the same facts, but even started repeating lines stolen from one another.
But while the coverage made me feel tired, my anxiety about the outcome had me hopped up like I'd been mainlining Jolt Cola. All the data points to an Obama win, but I've seen that kind of thing before. I'd get excited about celebrating, then agitated about the nature of my mourning should things go all screwy. Would I rend my clothes and put ashes on my head, old testament style? Would I try to pull out my hair? How does a bald guy do such a thing? Tweezers? Would I just end up with a bunch of unsightly scratch marks?
Tonight I felt a third, even stranger emotion: I began to prematurely miss all the interest the county has discovered for their own governance. Will we return to worrying about the failed relationships of celebrities, the next blond girl to get kidnapped, the personal beef between Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump? Luckily, Jack Shafer and Anne Applebaum assure me this will not be the case, as the press will immediately turn on President-Elect Obama and the international community will only warm up temporarily before realizing much of our foreign policy will remain unchanged. By November 6th or 7th we'll be reading angry op-eds about how Obama hasn't magically delivered on every campaign promise, enacted the entirety of the liberal agenda, ended hunger, brought about world peace, and filled my refrigerator with Mountain Dew and loaded my cupboards with Cool Ranch Doritos. (Okay, I'll be writing that last one in a couple days.) So, thanks to Anne and Jack for letting me return to simply being worn out and freaked out, comforted by the knowledge that we'll all still be nearly as politically obsessed as I am.
See, now you're worried and exhausted, too!
But while the coverage made me feel tired, my anxiety about the outcome had me hopped up like I'd been mainlining Jolt Cola. All the data points to an Obama win, but I've seen that kind of thing before. I'd get excited about celebrating, then agitated about the nature of my mourning should things go all screwy. Would I rend my clothes and put ashes on my head, old testament style? Would I try to pull out my hair? How does a bald guy do such a thing? Tweezers? Would I just end up with a bunch of unsightly scratch marks?
Tonight I felt a third, even stranger emotion: I began to prematurely miss all the interest the county has discovered for their own governance. Will we return to worrying about the failed relationships of celebrities, the next blond girl to get kidnapped, the personal beef between Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump? Luckily, Jack Shafer and Anne Applebaum assure me this will not be the case, as the press will immediately turn on President-Elect Obama and the international community will only warm up temporarily before realizing much of our foreign policy will remain unchanged. By November 6th or 7th we'll be reading angry op-eds about how Obama hasn't magically delivered on every campaign promise, enacted the entirety of the liberal agenda, ended hunger, brought about world peace, and filled my refrigerator with Mountain Dew and loaded my cupboards with Cool Ranch Doritos. (Okay, I'll be writing that last one in a couple days.) So, thanks to Anne and Jack for letting me return to simply being worn out and freaked out, comforted by the knowledge that we'll all still be nearly as politically obsessed as I am.
See, now you're worried and exhausted, too!
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Clensing the Palette with Sarah Marshall
Tonight Paige and I watched M. Nigh Shyamalan's "The Happening". I'd read the reviews, and had pretty low expectations. I had my smarmy remark all planned. Credits would roll, and I'd say, "Well, that happened." I'd say it with such a complete lack of passion that it would convey that I knew the line was unoriginal, but I didn't even care about that.
Well, the movie managed to disappoint, to the extent that I couldn't manage to say, "That happened," unless by "that" I meant a painful waste of time, strung along by some hope for the fabled M. Night Shyamalan surprise ending, which, it turns out, was an endangered species in the beginning of his career and is now officially extinct. Not only was the ending bad, but the whole movie made me wonder if he'd agreed to the basic premise on a dare. Someone said, [Spoiler Alert] "Hey, M., I'll bet you can't make a movie where the villain is a plant! And I'm not talking about some kind of mobile plant monster, but just a regular old rooted plant."
And M. said, "Well, can it be more than one rooted plant?"
"Um, I guess."
"Can it be all the plants in the world? 'Cause I think I'm onto something here!"
"Oh, crap. What have I done."
Yep, I'll bet that's how it went down. And down, and down, until it fell into a steaming pile that was this movie. And I'm not even trying to be gross, but the movie was a lot like poop. Imagine someone taking a dump in public. You'd be horrified, and you wouldn't enjoy it, but you'd have trouble looking away at first just because the whole scene would be so surreal. That's what the first few minutes of this movie were like. But when the crazy person pulls up his drawers and walks away, you wouldn't saunter over and stare at the poop for another hour and a half, would you? Well, maybe you would if you thought that, at the end of that time, the poop would do something really amazing which you couldn't possibly have expected. Only, it doesn't. So now you're the guy who stared at human feces on a sidewalk for two hours. How do you feel? That's how I felt after "The Happening."
Paige went to bed, but I couldn't just take that feeling into the dark. It's one thing to go to bed scared by images in a horror film. That's a part of the experience. But it's altogether different to go to bed angry, imagining the bodily harm you'd like to inflict on some arrogant, over-rated filmmaker. My psyche doesn't need that.
So I watched our next Netflix offering, "Forgetting Sarah Marshal". Judd Apatow, the producer, gets a lot of credit because he produced this, which seems a bit unfair to me. I'm sure the director, Nicholas Stoller, contributed more than Apatow, but I think the most credit should go to Jason Segel, who not only played the lead roll but wrote the script, played the songs, and even operated a puppet. The guy was amazing. The movie is very funny at times, but the thing that struck me the most was the fact that the characters all seemed amazingly believable. I don't actually know any Hollywood actresses or rock stars (or, for that matter, pot-head surf instructors) but the characters all broke free of cliches and, more than that, of their archetypal parts in the standard machine of a romantic comedy. I can't recommend it to my Creative Writing class (not appropriate) but that's a shame, because it's a good lesson in how to avoid two-dimensional characters, even when two-dimensional characters seem like the kinds of tools that will allow you to claw your way through a plot. Kudos, Jason Segel! And thank you for washing my mouth out with your (pretty filthy) movie, to clear away the toxic "Happening".
Well, the movie managed to disappoint, to the extent that I couldn't manage to say, "That happened," unless by "that" I meant a painful waste of time, strung along by some hope for the fabled M. Night Shyamalan surprise ending, which, it turns out, was an endangered species in the beginning of his career and is now officially extinct. Not only was the ending bad, but the whole movie made me wonder if he'd agreed to the basic premise on a dare. Someone said, [Spoiler Alert] "Hey, M., I'll bet you can't make a movie where the villain is a plant! And I'm not talking about some kind of mobile plant monster, but just a regular old rooted plant."
And M. said, "Well, can it be more than one rooted plant?"
"Um, I guess."
"Can it be all the plants in the world? 'Cause I think I'm onto something here!"
"Oh, crap. What have I done."
Yep, I'll bet that's how it went down. And down, and down, until it fell into a steaming pile that was this movie. And I'm not even trying to be gross, but the movie was a lot like poop. Imagine someone taking a dump in public. You'd be horrified, and you wouldn't enjoy it, but you'd have trouble looking away at first just because the whole scene would be so surreal. That's what the first few minutes of this movie were like. But when the crazy person pulls up his drawers and walks away, you wouldn't saunter over and stare at the poop for another hour and a half, would you? Well, maybe you would if you thought that, at the end of that time, the poop would do something really amazing which you couldn't possibly have expected. Only, it doesn't. So now you're the guy who stared at human feces on a sidewalk for two hours. How do you feel? That's how I felt after "The Happening."
Paige went to bed, but I couldn't just take that feeling into the dark. It's one thing to go to bed scared by images in a horror film. That's a part of the experience. But it's altogether different to go to bed angry, imagining the bodily harm you'd like to inflict on some arrogant, over-rated filmmaker. My psyche doesn't need that.
So I watched our next Netflix offering, "Forgetting Sarah Marshal". Judd Apatow, the producer, gets a lot of credit because he produced this, which seems a bit unfair to me. I'm sure the director, Nicholas Stoller, contributed more than Apatow, but I think the most credit should go to Jason Segel, who not only played the lead roll but wrote the script, played the songs, and even operated a puppet. The guy was amazing. The movie is very funny at times, but the thing that struck me the most was the fact that the characters all seemed amazingly believable. I don't actually know any Hollywood actresses or rock stars (or, for that matter, pot-head surf instructors) but the characters all broke free of cliches and, more than that, of their archetypal parts in the standard machine of a romantic comedy. I can't recommend it to my Creative Writing class (not appropriate) but that's a shame, because it's a good lesson in how to avoid two-dimensional characters, even when two-dimensional characters seem like the kinds of tools that will allow you to claw your way through a plot. Kudos, Jason Segel! And thank you for washing my mouth out with your (pretty filthy) movie, to clear away the toxic "Happening".
Friday, October 31, 2008
Bill Kristol says something I agree with!
And for those of you who think I've been too petty:
Tonight, on The Daily Show, Bill Kristol said something I agree with. I didn't think he could do it. I was starting to think he couldn't form a true sentence, like, "The sky is often a blue-ish color," or "objects with a lesser mass sometimes, in the right circumstances, depending on the political year, fall towards objects of a greater mass," or "Sarah Palin is basically a bad historical punchline that could, through folksy charm and voter suppression, gain the ability to make teenage rape victims bare their unwanted children." His lips refuse to wrap around real words and spit them out in the correct order.
But I was wrong! I admit it. Bill Kristol proved me wrong. Sure, he had to qualify the statement, but the basic gist is true.
He said, "There are times when it would be wise to talk derisively about people like me."
Bill has a compulsion to avoid the truth, but he's trying here, so let's give him some credit, and our assistance. Let's take out Kristol's hedging, shall we?
Strike "There are times when..."
Strike "...people like..."
What is Kristol really saying? "It would be wise to talk derisively about me."
Sure, he spent the rest of the interview saying such ridiculous things that it was difficult to believe even he would drink his own Kool-aid. He claimed that when Alaskan corporations give citizens a check, that's not the kind of socialism Sarah Palin's been talking about, but "Conservative economics, you know, helping those hard working citizens." Jon Stewart was so blown away I thought he would pull all his hair off and sport that Ben Gorman look. Then Bill Kristol criticized Jon Stewart for reading the New York Times. Bill Kristol works for the New York Times!
But there I go again, focusing on the negative. Let's encourage positive behavior when we see it. For a brief, shining moment, Bill Kristol was (at times, someone who is like people who are) 100% correct.
Tonight, on The Daily Show, Bill Kristol said something I agree with. I didn't think he could do it. I was starting to think he couldn't form a true sentence, like, "The sky is often a blue-ish color," or "objects with a lesser mass sometimes, in the right circumstances, depending on the political year, fall towards objects of a greater mass," or "Sarah Palin is basically a bad historical punchline that could, through folksy charm and voter suppression, gain the ability to make teenage rape victims bare their unwanted children." His lips refuse to wrap around real words and spit them out in the correct order.
But I was wrong! I admit it. Bill Kristol proved me wrong. Sure, he had to qualify the statement, but the basic gist is true.
He said, "There are times when it would be wise to talk derisively about people like me."
Bill has a compulsion to avoid the truth, but he's trying here, so let's give him some credit, and our assistance. Let's take out Kristol's hedging, shall we?
Strike "There are times when..."
Strike "...people like..."
What is Kristol really saying? "It would be wise to talk derisively about me."
Sure, he spent the rest of the interview saying such ridiculous things that it was difficult to believe even he would drink his own Kool-aid. He claimed that when Alaskan corporations give citizens a check, that's not the kind of socialism Sarah Palin's been talking about, but "Conservative economics, you know, helping those hard working citizens." Jon Stewart was so blown away I thought he would pull all his hair off and sport that Ben Gorman look. Then Bill Kristol criticized Jon Stewart for reading the New York Times. Bill Kristol works for the New York Times!
But there I go again, focusing on the negative. Let's encourage positive behavior when we see it. For a brief, shining moment, Bill Kristol was (at times, someone who is like people who are) 100% correct.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Fear Mongering Works... On Cowards
Folks concerned with the tenor of the political debate at the tail end of this election, as things get particularly desperate and ugly, should check out Wallis' post today, "Be Not Afraid". Good stuff.
Now, I have a question about the chiding I got for my tone: I think we can all agree it's right to warn people not to be afraid, or making judgments out of fear when it comes to electoral politics. That's scriptural (for folks concerned with that), it doesn't attack anyone, and it also seems very... safe.
But what's the difference between saying X or Y group is trying to motivate people through fear, and saying X and Y group depends on cowardice in order to succeed? And if we see fear mongering, and watch it succeed, then are we wrong or hurtful to say the group that used such a strategy is composed of cynical leaders and cowardly followers?
You see where I'm going with this. To say, "Don't be manipulated by X group, which is trying to scare you." Okay. Kosher. Socially acceptable.
But "X group is composed of cynical, manipulative leaders and cowardly followers."? Bad. Impolite. Uncivilized. Disrespectful.
I'm no fan of the term "Tough Love". I think it's become a euphemism for everything from child abuse to overly harsh punishments for criminals. But what about tougher rhetoric? Protecting the feelings of cowards and dishonest, cynical politicians doesn't really do anyone any favors. We shouldn't shut down debate with shouting or reckless name calling, but speaking truth to power is a good thing. As we watch our economy go into a tailspin, we're going to hear a lot about shared responsibility between Wall Street and Main Street. Doesn't the same go for our politics? In a democracy, the people have power. If leaders resort to fear mongering, the accountability also belongs to the fearful who allowed themselves to be manipulated.
I understand politicians can't call voters cowards, just as they can't call everyone with too much credit card debt irresponsible borrowers. But those of us who live with the consequences of cowardly voting might not be running for office, so we can, and should, call out our neighbors for being spineless.
Now, I have a question about the chiding I got for my tone: I think we can all agree it's right to warn people not to be afraid, or making judgments out of fear when it comes to electoral politics. That's scriptural (for folks concerned with that), it doesn't attack anyone, and it also seems very... safe.
But what's the difference between saying X or Y group is trying to motivate people through fear, and saying X and Y group depends on cowardice in order to succeed? And if we see fear mongering, and watch it succeed, then are we wrong or hurtful to say the group that used such a strategy is composed of cynical leaders and cowardly followers?
You see where I'm going with this. To say, "Don't be manipulated by X group, which is trying to scare you." Okay. Kosher. Socially acceptable.
But "X group is composed of cynical, manipulative leaders and cowardly followers."? Bad. Impolite. Uncivilized. Disrespectful.
I'm no fan of the term "Tough Love". I think it's become a euphemism for everything from child abuse to overly harsh punishments for criminals. But what about tougher rhetoric? Protecting the feelings of cowards and dishonest, cynical politicians doesn't really do anyone any favors. We shouldn't shut down debate with shouting or reckless name calling, but speaking truth to power is a good thing. As we watch our economy go into a tailspin, we're going to hear a lot about shared responsibility between Wall Street and Main Street. Doesn't the same go for our politics? In a democracy, the people have power. If leaders resort to fear mongering, the accountability also belongs to the fearful who allowed themselves to be manipulated.
I understand politicians can't call voters cowards, just as they can't call everyone with too much credit card debt irresponsible borrowers. But those of us who live with the consequences of cowardly voting might not be running for office, so we can, and should, call out our neighbors for being spineless.
Thank God for Helen
Well, after posting a link and a comment on Jim Wallis' God's Politics blog, I've received some (deserved) flak for my uncharitable tone. Now I have to send as many people as possible to this awesome blog by Helen, an 82 year old grandma' who has been doing her darnedest to make my angriest rant look tame by comparison. And I have to admit, I love it.
Check out "Margaret and Helen" here.
Long blog Helen Philpot!
Check out "Margaret and Helen" here.
Long blog Helen Philpot!
Still No. 1, for what it's worth.
Robert Kagan has a piece in today's Washington Post op-ed page criticizing those who talk about American decline. As someone who's caught more than 1 episode of "Jerry Springer" I've ranted often about our cultural decline, but Kagan doesn't talk about that. Mostly he focuses on our GDP and our military prowess, which are still unrivaled in the world.
Do I sense some oversimplification? While our share of the world economy has remained relatively stable, within our country that money has shifted disproportionately to the wealthy, meaning more and more people are living in conditions which do not match what one would expect of the world's wealthiest nation. And as for military power, we may be unrivaled but we are also stretched so thin that there is significant concern that we couldn't fight another land war right now, and certainly couldn't handle a two-front war, which means we are paying the most in the world for our military but don't have the power to use it (or threaten to use it) as we once did when it had a smaller price tag.
I still don't see another country knocking us off our spot quite yet, but President Obama will have his work cut out for him if he wants to make sure we stay #1. And besides, #1 doesn't mean much to the infant who can't get the care they need in a country that ranks so poorly in infant mortality, or a child who goes to schools that are not the best in the world. At some point the unequal distribution of our blessings leaves many of us saying, essentially, "I dropped out of a more prestigious college than the one you graduated from."
We may be No. 1, but we have a responsibility to make sure that isn't a hollow claim.
Do I sense some oversimplification? While our share of the world economy has remained relatively stable, within our country that money has shifted disproportionately to the wealthy, meaning more and more people are living in conditions which do not match what one would expect of the world's wealthiest nation. And as for military power, we may be unrivaled but we are also stretched so thin that there is significant concern that we couldn't fight another land war right now, and certainly couldn't handle a two-front war, which means we are paying the most in the world for our military but don't have the power to use it (or threaten to use it) as we once did when it had a smaller price tag.
I still don't see another country knocking us off our spot quite yet, but President Obama will have his work cut out for him if he wants to make sure we stay #1. And besides, #1 doesn't mean much to the infant who can't get the care they need in a country that ranks so poorly in infant mortality, or a child who goes to schools that are not the best in the world. At some point the unequal distribution of our blessings leaves many of us saying, essentially, "I dropped out of a more prestigious college than the one you graduated from."
We may be No. 1, but we have a responsibility to make sure that isn't a hollow claim.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Yea Jim Wallis!
Joel asked, "Who is the major voice in the Christian community that is rising up in opposition to what Dobson and his people say?"
The answer is Jim Wallis, of Sojourners Magazine, bloging at God's Politics (Thanks for the link, Jed!).
Check it out:
http://www.sojo.net/blog/godspolitics/?p=3283
Yeah, Jim! Thank you and bless you!
The answer is Jim Wallis, of Sojourners Magazine, bloging at God's Politics (Thanks for the link, Jed!).
Check it out:
http://www.sojo.net/blog/godspolitics/?p=3283
Yeah, Jim! Thank you and bless you!
Monday, October 27, 2008
Aaagh!
Okay, I have to quickly backtrack here and make it clear that I do not find all Republicans to be stupid, just as I know that not all Republicans think of me as a cowardly, unpatriotic baby-killer. I formally apologize for using a blanket label to include a whole lot of people I do not mean to include in my descrition.
Good, smart people I respect, like Jamie (who commented below) reside in the big tent of the G.O.P. and are also in the tent of People Ben Cares About and Respects Completely. Some of these people are those single issue voters who have a single, strongly held, entirely defensible position whih I can respect but with which I disagree. Some are very embarassed Republicans who sided with the party based on its expressed ideology, who keep considering them in elections based on those principles, don't always vote party line, and feel betrayed by this administration. Those, again, are people I can respect. In fact, maybe the people I don't respect don't really exist, but they are not caricatures of my own creation alone. When someone like Sarah Palin talks about a Joe-Sixpack character who is a real-American, who suspends his judgment of his government's actions because he is always patriotic, who dismisses people because they are educated or elite (which does not mean snooty, but genuinely better than he is), then I think I can be forgiven for believing in this caricature. I guess I don't think Republicans are stupid. I think the kinds of voters the Republican politicians focus on, reach out to, pander to, and sack-tickle are stupid. In contrast, maybe all us Dems really are a bunch of morons, but the politicians more often reach out to us drooling, numb skull liberals (and, admittedly, flatter us and pander to us) as though we are educated, reasonable people who have nuanced worldviews. And this is a big and telling difference, both between the current Democratic and Republican parties, and between the current Republican party and its intellectual progenitors. One party is vilified for being dependent on its intellectuals, but it honors them. The other party (or at least its governing philosophy) was created by intellectuals, but now depends on those who are not only ignorant, but willfully so and proud of it.
I know that the Republicans can't really run on their educational records this time around. We've got a contest between a law professor and a guy who was fourth from the bottom of his class, and between a lawyer and a woman who took five schools (or was it six?) to get her B.A. and never sought any more formal education. Still, the Republican POLITICIAN's expressed antipathy to education or nuance pre-dates this election. I respect a lot of Republicans and I don't think they're stupid. But their party keeps telling them they should be.
Good, smart people I respect, like Jamie (who commented below) reside in the big tent of the G.O.P. and are also in the tent of People Ben Cares About and Respects Completely. Some of these people are those single issue voters who have a single, strongly held, entirely defensible position whih I can respect but with which I disagree. Some are very embarassed Republicans who sided with the party based on its expressed ideology, who keep considering them in elections based on those principles, don't always vote party line, and feel betrayed by this administration. Those, again, are people I can respect. In fact, maybe the people I don't respect don't really exist, but they are not caricatures of my own creation alone. When someone like Sarah Palin talks about a Joe-Sixpack character who is a real-American, who suspends his judgment of his government's actions because he is always patriotic, who dismisses people because they are educated or elite (which does not mean snooty, but genuinely better than he is), then I think I can be forgiven for believing in this caricature. I guess I don't think Republicans are stupid. I think the kinds of voters the Republican politicians focus on, reach out to, pander to, and sack-tickle are stupid. In contrast, maybe all us Dems really are a bunch of morons, but the politicians more often reach out to us drooling, numb skull liberals (and, admittedly, flatter us and pander to us) as though we are educated, reasonable people who have nuanced worldviews. And this is a big and telling difference, both between the current Democratic and Republican parties, and between the current Republican party and its intellectual progenitors. One party is vilified for being dependent on its intellectuals, but it honors them. The other party (or at least its governing philosophy) was created by intellectuals, but now depends on those who are not only ignorant, but willfully so and proud of it.
I know that the Republicans can't really run on their educational records this time around. We've got a contest between a law professor and a guy who was fourth from the bottom of his class, and between a lawyer and a woman who took five schools (or was it six?) to get her B.A. and never sought any more formal education. Still, the Republican POLITICIAN's expressed antipathy to education or nuance pre-dates this election. I respect a lot of Republicans and I don't think they're stupid. But their party keeps telling them they should be.
Homegrown American Taliban Threatens Christian Evangelicals with Blame for Ruining America if Obama Wins
My friend Joel, in an effort to show the world just how well he knows me, sent me an article and asked for my thoughts on it. Now, one might think that only a total geek and a rabid politics junkie would enjoy receiving a writing assignment on a political topic from a friend. Well, Joel knows "total geek" and "politics junkie" pretty much sums me up.
Even more telling, Joel sent me something that he knew would make my blood boil faster and hotter than Ramen noodle broth in a microwave (which is what we lived on while we were college roommates). And boy, was he right. This piece is a doozy.
Posted on Dr. James Dobson’s “Focus On The Family” website, the piece is designed as an imaginary letter from a Christian, writing back to us from the nearly apocalyptic world of 2012, where, after the machinations of an Obama administration, the nation has gone to hell in a hand basket. Before I lay into the piece itself (which, it seems, no one who currently inhabits our particular location in the space-time continuum wants to take credit for by name), I have to ask: Joel, why in the hell are you reading this trash? Did some evil person send it on to you just to drive you crazy, too? Or do you regularly check up on the American Taliban for fun?
Okay, now to the piece, “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America”. It’s long (16 pages in a downloadable pdf), and though I’ll link to it in the name of fairness, I don’t recommend reading it unless you are a masochist who likes migraines, or a Dobson fan, which is itself a kind of socially acceptable sadism. I know I said I wished I could be more respectful to people I disagree with in a recent post, but I also said I can’t manage it, and if you were to subject yourself to this piece you would know why. The piece is particularly galling for me because I consider myself a Christian. For years I’ve admitted that with a great deal of embarrassment, not because I’m ashamed of Jesus Christ, but because I’m ashamed to be associated with many of his followers, especially those in power in my country. Lately I’ve begun to wonder about the term itself. The definitions of words are cultural constructions, and when I describe myself as a Christian I mean something so wholly different from what someone like Dobson would accept that I feel like a guy who says, "I'm a phrenologist, by which I mean that I live in Oregon”
“But that’s not what the term 'Phrenologist' means,” they say to me. “Phrenology refers to the people who study the bumps on people’s heads to learn about their personalities.”
“That’s not what it means to me,” I say. “I mean a person who lives in Oregon.”
“Well then you are ignorant of the term’s meaning, or crazy,” they say.
That's the same thing they would say when I describe myself as a Christian, if “they” were the kinds of people who treat James Dobson as an authority on theology, family dynamics, national politics, or anything more consequential than the location of his own backside, which he may or may not be able to find with both hands.
You see, when I say I’m a Christian, beyond meaning that I believe in and serve Jesus Christ, I extend that to mean:
I should reject violence and war;
I should love all of God’s children (and not just say I love them while advocating policies that do them great injustice);
that much of the Bible is allegorical and that allegory and metaphor can be just as meaningful, if not more so, than accounts of literal history;
that homosexuals are not sexual deviants who deserve to be disempowered, but an oppressed minority who deserve justice, protection from the majority, and yes, even admiration for their struggle;
that gender roles are products of the fall and thus sinful and to be done away with, rather than prescriptive definitions of who we should be as human beings;
that parents shouldn’t educate their children through violence…
I could go on and on. I have read enough of Dobson to know he would disagree with me on all these claims, but I suspect he (or at least many of his acolytes) would go further and say these beliefs make me something other than Christian. I’m tempted to say, “Fine. When somebody asks about my religious beliefs I’ll just launch into that tirade, because the label has been convenient but now requires so much explanation of what kind of person I’m not that I should just jettison the label altogether.” I used to say to myself, “Self, why should I let fundamentalists take the term away from me?” Now I wonder if, when asked, I should just say, “Well, I love Jesus and I love people, but I’m not sure what that makes me in America anymore.”
But I haven’t broken ties with the label enough to avoid feeling outraged when I read something like the garbage Joel sent me, so, baited, I’ll vent.
The piece starts out by saying it’s not real (thanks for that) but that it’s all based on the case law from liberal judges and quotes from Obama this writer has cherry picked to form his apocalyptic vision of the future. I thought about writing an equally petty piece about 2012 in a McCain administration as a form of satire, but I don’t think McCain is some diabolical agent of evil who would set out to reshape the social fabric of America in some terrible way. I disagree with him on many things, and I think that a McCain presidency would be a bad one, though probably not quite as bad as the office’s current occupant. But then, if McCain realized all my worst fears based on reports of his erratic temper, by 20012 we’d be living in a post-nuclear holocaust world which Cormac McCarthy has already described better than I ever could in his haunting book The Road, so any attempt to make light of the worst case scenario for a McCain presidency would involve making light of the end of humanity, and that’s just not my style. (Well, okay, maybe when I’m in the right mood, but not tonight.) So, rather than parody, let me just tell you about this fictional Christian’s argument, and by then end I think we’ll all agree it says a lot more about Dobson and his ilk than it does about Barack Obama.
First, the organization. The piece lays out the horrors of Obama’s America in big segments under bold headlines. These are, in order:
The Supreme Court
Same-sex marriage
Religious speech in the public square
Abortion
Pornography
Gun ownership
Education
President Obama’s response to the Supreme Court
Military policy
Health care
Taxes, the economy, and the poor
Talk radio
Christian publishers
Prosecution of former Bush administration officials
Predictably, these things all go exactly the opposite of the way Dr. Dobson would want. But take a look at the order! Either these are in ascending order of importance or descending order of importance. If the order is ascending, one would have to believe Dobson (or the writer he publicize without attribution on his site, so let’s just say Dobson) thinks protecting W from a much deserved war crimes prosecution is more important than abortion, gun rights, and gay marriage (unlikely), or they’re in descending order, in which case Dobson thinks the danger of gay marriage is more serious than the terrorist attacks he threatens in the section on “Military Policy”. In fact, either way he kind of buried his lead. Terrorist attacks, a Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, and a complete economic meltdown caused by over-taxation are in the middle, apparently less important than the ability of high schoolers to pray by their school’s flag poles, or less important than the ability of evangelical publishers to sell their books in Barnes and Noble. Yeah, because what’s on the shelves at the local big-box bookstore, or what the kids are doing around the flagpole (and trust me, I work at a high school, and they ain’t prayin’ now) demands an urgent warning sent back from the future, but FOUR terrorist attacks inside the US get tossed into the middle of the letter, almost as an aside? This time traveler is a douchebag. But wait, you say, maybe the whole piece is just a random list of grievances. Do you mean to tell me that four years in the future they don’t have a simple word processor program with Cut and Paste commands so writers can organize their thoughts? Did Obama outlaw that, too? Then that should be added to the random list. Maybe at the beginning. Or the end.
Now to the actual content. As you can guess, two dudes want to enter marital bliss, and that wrecks the country. Kids are told they can’t peer-pressure other kids into standing around listening to readings of Dobson’s sexist, bigoted interpretation of scripture, and that wrecks the country. A woman is allowed to make her own decision about whether she wants to risk her life to bring a tubal pregnancy to term so she can raise her rapist’s baby, and that wrecks the country. Adults are allowed to make their own decisions about what kinds of art they consider indecent, and that wrecks the country. Localities are allowed to take measures to make sure cops are more well-armed than crooks, and that wrecks the country. Obama says he didn’t want any of this to happen, but then he said he wasn’t a Muslim, too, so we all know what that’s worth. The U.S. pulls out of Iraq and so, AS A CONSEQUENCE OF LEAVING, NOT SHOWING UP IN THE FIRST PLACE, terrorist come into the country and people BEGIN to kill one another. (Oh, and, by the way, terrorists attack the U.S. four times.) Doctors and nurses are told they have to put the interests of their patients above the religious beliefs of one Dr. James Dobson, and so they all quit practicing medicine and it wrecks the country. Rich people have to pay the same taxes they paid in the nineties, (remember, back when all the rich people were leaving the U.S. to live in Burkina Faso and Haiti?) so they all leave (again?) and everyone left is poor, and it wrecks the country. Workers can easily join unions so they can have healthcare and safe working conditions, and of course that wrecks the country. People aren’t allowed to spew bigotry on the radio, which causes Americans to not know who to hate anymore, and the ensuing confusion wrecks the country. Christian publishers can’t get their books sold at Barnes and Noble (yep, the time traveler specifically mentions Barnes and Noble and only Barnes and Noble) and that wrecks the country. Bush administration officials are bankrupted by the court costs necessitated to defend themselves from war crimes charges, and though this doesn’t wreck the country it’s just so unbelievably tragic that we all wish we were dead.
The article then goes on to say that the people most responsible for this are the evangelical Christians who supported Obama in this election. Just to be clear, according to this time traveler if you are an evangelical Christian who votes for Obama you are responsible for four terrorist attacks, countless abortions, sodomy on every street corner, the collapse of the economy, the suffering of book publishers and radio talk show hosts, and the legal fees of that lovable Dick Cheney. Oh, wait, but not in that order. Damn you, centrist evangelicals, for taking away my ability to cut and paste that back into the order Dr. Dobson posted on his website!
Joel asked, “Who is the major voice in the Christian community that is rising up in opposition to what Dobson and his people say? Where are they?” It’s a fair question, though it’s also fair to wonder if Dobson himself is still a major voice in the Christian community. This kind of desperation shows his power is waning, at the very least. Maybe “major voices” are just letting him rant himself into oblivion. I have another theory, though. I don’t think there are any “major voices” on the left in the Christian community, not because no one will stand up, but because they have been effectively silenced and marginalized over the last twenty years. I wrote a book (a lot of research, a lot of time, and a lot of passion wasted) and was told it was good enough to publish but too liberal for a Christian publishing house and too Christian for a secular house. If the Christian right has set up it’s own parallel media world, and everybody else has said, “What, you want crazy talk? There’s a separate store for that down the street,” then it’s no surprise that some household name hasn’t stepped forward to repudiate this letter from within the ranks of Christians. Liberal Christians, apparently, can’t sell enough books to become household names.
This article specifically warns against hoping for suffering as a means to strength, but I’ve read a handful of conservatives who’ve pined for some down-time in the political wilderness to get their house in order. As a liberal, I can’t speak for those folks, but I can say I want the same thing for Christianity in America. As a Quaker, I’m a big believer in shutting up and listening for guidance from God. Maybe American Christianity needs to be saddled with this kind of lunacy just long enough that no one takes us seriously anymore, so we can stop making pronouncements about what all Christians think or how all Christians should vote long enough to figure out if that term has any meaning as a single, monolithic label. I think that should take ten or twenty years, but if Dobson is allowed to continue spewing this stuff he hastens the date when no one, including Christians, listens to “Christian Leaders” about anything more consequential than where to find the coffee and donuts between services.
So, God bless Dr. James Dobson, who willingly sacrifices his own dignity in order to embarrass all Christians into the Quaker practice of silence. Thanks.
Even more telling, Joel sent me something that he knew would make my blood boil faster and hotter than Ramen noodle broth in a microwave (which is what we lived on while we were college roommates). And boy, was he right. This piece is a doozy.
Posted on Dr. James Dobson’s “Focus On The Family” website, the piece is designed as an imaginary letter from a Christian, writing back to us from the nearly apocalyptic world of 2012, where, after the machinations of an Obama administration, the nation has gone to hell in a hand basket. Before I lay into the piece itself (which, it seems, no one who currently inhabits our particular location in the space-time continuum wants to take credit for by name), I have to ask: Joel, why in the hell are you reading this trash? Did some evil person send it on to you just to drive you crazy, too? Or do you regularly check up on the American Taliban for fun?
Okay, now to the piece, “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America”. It’s long (16 pages in a downloadable pdf), and though I’ll link to it in the name of fairness, I don’t recommend reading it unless you are a masochist who likes migraines, or a Dobson fan, which is itself a kind of socially acceptable sadism. I know I said I wished I could be more respectful to people I disagree with in a recent post, but I also said I can’t manage it, and if you were to subject yourself to this piece you would know why. The piece is particularly galling for me because I consider myself a Christian. For years I’ve admitted that with a great deal of embarrassment, not because I’m ashamed of Jesus Christ, but because I’m ashamed to be associated with many of his followers, especially those in power in my country. Lately I’ve begun to wonder about the term itself. The definitions of words are cultural constructions, and when I describe myself as a Christian I mean something so wholly different from what someone like Dobson would accept that I feel like a guy who says, "I'm a phrenologist, by which I mean that I live in Oregon”
“But that’s not what the term 'Phrenologist' means,” they say to me. “Phrenology refers to the people who study the bumps on people’s heads to learn about their personalities.”
“That’s not what it means to me,” I say. “I mean a person who lives in Oregon.”
“Well then you are ignorant of the term’s meaning, or crazy,” they say.
That's the same thing they would say when I describe myself as a Christian, if “they” were the kinds of people who treat James Dobson as an authority on theology, family dynamics, national politics, or anything more consequential than the location of his own backside, which he may or may not be able to find with both hands.
You see, when I say I’m a Christian, beyond meaning that I believe in and serve Jesus Christ, I extend that to mean:
I should reject violence and war;
I should love all of God’s children (and not just say I love them while advocating policies that do them great injustice);
that much of the Bible is allegorical and that allegory and metaphor can be just as meaningful, if not more so, than accounts of literal history;
that homosexuals are not sexual deviants who deserve to be disempowered, but an oppressed minority who deserve justice, protection from the majority, and yes, even admiration for their struggle;
that gender roles are products of the fall and thus sinful and to be done away with, rather than prescriptive definitions of who we should be as human beings;
that parents shouldn’t educate their children through violence…
I could go on and on. I have read enough of Dobson to know he would disagree with me on all these claims, but I suspect he (or at least many of his acolytes) would go further and say these beliefs make me something other than Christian. I’m tempted to say, “Fine. When somebody asks about my religious beliefs I’ll just launch into that tirade, because the label has been convenient but now requires so much explanation of what kind of person I’m not that I should just jettison the label altogether.” I used to say to myself, “Self, why should I let fundamentalists take the term away from me?” Now I wonder if, when asked, I should just say, “Well, I love Jesus and I love people, but I’m not sure what that makes me in America anymore.”
But I haven’t broken ties with the label enough to avoid feeling outraged when I read something like the garbage Joel sent me, so, baited, I’ll vent.
The piece starts out by saying it’s not real (thanks for that) but that it’s all based on the case law from liberal judges and quotes from Obama this writer has cherry picked to form his apocalyptic vision of the future. I thought about writing an equally petty piece about 2012 in a McCain administration as a form of satire, but I don’t think McCain is some diabolical agent of evil who would set out to reshape the social fabric of America in some terrible way. I disagree with him on many things, and I think that a McCain presidency would be a bad one, though probably not quite as bad as the office’s current occupant. But then, if McCain realized all my worst fears based on reports of his erratic temper, by 20012 we’d be living in a post-nuclear holocaust world which Cormac McCarthy has already described better than I ever could in his haunting book The Road, so any attempt to make light of the worst case scenario for a McCain presidency would involve making light of the end of humanity, and that’s just not my style. (Well, okay, maybe when I’m in the right mood, but not tonight.) So, rather than parody, let me just tell you about this fictional Christian’s argument, and by then end I think we’ll all agree it says a lot more about Dobson and his ilk than it does about Barack Obama.
First, the organization. The piece lays out the horrors of Obama’s America in big segments under bold headlines. These are, in order:
The Supreme Court
Same-sex marriage
Religious speech in the public square
Abortion
Pornography
Gun ownership
Education
President Obama’s response to the Supreme Court
Military policy
Health care
Taxes, the economy, and the poor
Talk radio
Christian publishers
Prosecution of former Bush administration officials
Predictably, these things all go exactly the opposite of the way Dr. Dobson would want. But take a look at the order! Either these are in ascending order of importance or descending order of importance. If the order is ascending, one would have to believe Dobson (or the writer he publicize without attribution on his site, so let’s just say Dobson) thinks protecting W from a much deserved war crimes prosecution is more important than abortion, gun rights, and gay marriage (unlikely), or they’re in descending order, in which case Dobson thinks the danger of gay marriage is more serious than the terrorist attacks he threatens in the section on “Military Policy”. In fact, either way he kind of buried his lead. Terrorist attacks, a Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, and a complete economic meltdown caused by over-taxation are in the middle, apparently less important than the ability of high schoolers to pray by their school’s flag poles, or less important than the ability of evangelical publishers to sell their books in Barnes and Noble. Yeah, because what’s on the shelves at the local big-box bookstore, or what the kids are doing around the flagpole (and trust me, I work at a high school, and they ain’t prayin’ now) demands an urgent warning sent back from the future, but FOUR terrorist attacks inside the US get tossed into the middle of the letter, almost as an aside? This time traveler is a douchebag. But wait, you say, maybe the whole piece is just a random list of grievances. Do you mean to tell me that four years in the future they don’t have a simple word processor program with Cut and Paste commands so writers can organize their thoughts? Did Obama outlaw that, too? Then that should be added to the random list. Maybe at the beginning. Or the end.
Now to the actual content. As you can guess, two dudes want to enter marital bliss, and that wrecks the country. Kids are told they can’t peer-pressure other kids into standing around listening to readings of Dobson’s sexist, bigoted interpretation of scripture, and that wrecks the country. A woman is allowed to make her own decision about whether she wants to risk her life to bring a tubal pregnancy to term so she can raise her rapist’s baby, and that wrecks the country. Adults are allowed to make their own decisions about what kinds of art they consider indecent, and that wrecks the country. Localities are allowed to take measures to make sure cops are more well-armed than crooks, and that wrecks the country. Obama says he didn’t want any of this to happen, but then he said he wasn’t a Muslim, too, so we all know what that’s worth. The U.S. pulls out of Iraq and so, AS A CONSEQUENCE OF LEAVING, NOT SHOWING UP IN THE FIRST PLACE, terrorist come into the country and people BEGIN to kill one another. (Oh, and, by the way, terrorists attack the U.S. four times.) Doctors and nurses are told they have to put the interests of their patients above the religious beliefs of one Dr. James Dobson, and so they all quit practicing medicine and it wrecks the country. Rich people have to pay the same taxes they paid in the nineties, (remember, back when all the rich people were leaving the U.S. to live in Burkina Faso and Haiti?) so they all leave (again?) and everyone left is poor, and it wrecks the country. Workers can easily join unions so they can have healthcare and safe working conditions, and of course that wrecks the country. People aren’t allowed to spew bigotry on the radio, which causes Americans to not know who to hate anymore, and the ensuing confusion wrecks the country. Christian publishers can’t get their books sold at Barnes and Noble (yep, the time traveler specifically mentions Barnes and Noble and only Barnes and Noble) and that wrecks the country. Bush administration officials are bankrupted by the court costs necessitated to defend themselves from war crimes charges, and though this doesn’t wreck the country it’s just so unbelievably tragic that we all wish we were dead.
The article then goes on to say that the people most responsible for this are the evangelical Christians who supported Obama in this election. Just to be clear, according to this time traveler if you are an evangelical Christian who votes for Obama you are responsible for four terrorist attacks, countless abortions, sodomy on every street corner, the collapse of the economy, the suffering of book publishers and radio talk show hosts, and the legal fees of that lovable Dick Cheney. Oh, wait, but not in that order. Damn you, centrist evangelicals, for taking away my ability to cut and paste that back into the order Dr. Dobson posted on his website!
Joel asked, “Who is the major voice in the Christian community that is rising up in opposition to what Dobson and his people say? Where are they?” It’s a fair question, though it’s also fair to wonder if Dobson himself is still a major voice in the Christian community. This kind of desperation shows his power is waning, at the very least. Maybe “major voices” are just letting him rant himself into oblivion. I have another theory, though. I don’t think there are any “major voices” on the left in the Christian community, not because no one will stand up, but because they have been effectively silenced and marginalized over the last twenty years. I wrote a book (a lot of research, a lot of time, and a lot of passion wasted) and was told it was good enough to publish but too liberal for a Christian publishing house and too Christian for a secular house. If the Christian right has set up it’s own parallel media world, and everybody else has said, “What, you want crazy talk? There’s a separate store for that down the street,” then it’s no surprise that some household name hasn’t stepped forward to repudiate this letter from within the ranks of Christians. Liberal Christians, apparently, can’t sell enough books to become household names.
This article specifically warns against hoping for suffering as a means to strength, but I’ve read a handful of conservatives who’ve pined for some down-time in the political wilderness to get their house in order. As a liberal, I can’t speak for those folks, but I can say I want the same thing for Christianity in America. As a Quaker, I’m a big believer in shutting up and listening for guidance from God. Maybe American Christianity needs to be saddled with this kind of lunacy just long enough that no one takes us seriously anymore, so we can stop making pronouncements about what all Christians think or how all Christians should vote long enough to figure out if that term has any meaning as a single, monolithic label. I think that should take ten or twenty years, but if Dobson is allowed to continue spewing this stuff he hastens the date when no one, including Christians, listens to “Christian Leaders” about anything more consequential than where to find the coffee and donuts between services.
So, God bless Dr. James Dobson, who willingly sacrifices his own dignity in order to embarrass all Christians into the Quaker practice of silence. Thanks.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
What's the next hot gadget?
As the economy melts down, I find myself simultaneously wondering if there will be great deals the day after Thanksgiving, and realizing there aren't any hot items I'm jonesing for. This will only magnify the current financial crisis. I think of the jerk who sold me my TV and wonder what he'll be able to do when he loses his job at the electronics chain store. He was far too rude to successfully hold a job in food service, and since he was too dense to figure out that customers should be treated with respect, I doubt he has the savvy or adaptability to make in the competitive world of aluminum-can-collecting-and-recycling. He succeeded at the electronics store job because he had a product I wanted so badly I'd suffer his rudeness, but that won't work behind the counter at Goodwill, which I expect to be the next big growth industry.
So what technology will save Christmas? Can we even remember back to those halcyon days when we realized that a flat screen TV would free up almost three whole cubic feet in our living rooms? For only around a thousand dollars? What a steal! Plus, the product would have the added bonus of the ego boost that comes from learning our favorite actors have bad skin, just like the rest of us. Of course we needed this product. To think, back then, we couldn't imagine that Cloris Leachman would be dirty dancing on "Dancing with the Stars", and we'd be able to take those images to our graves in Hi Def. That's the kind of technological breakthrough that used to make America strong.
Technological gadgets don't just entertain, of course. They also solve problems. I used to have this terrible problem. In order to listen to MP3s, talk on the phone, and maintain my daily schedule digitally, I had to fill my pockets with three different gadgets. And if I wanted to watch YouTube videos of politicians' speeches clipped and edited to make them particularly embarrassing, and if I wanted to do that while riding public transit or, say, driving, well... Forget about it. Impossible. I'd have to find an actual computer. Now that seems almost as ridiculous as the giant car phones of the early eighties. Computers. Ha. Of course, thanks to the iPhone, for a price only slightly higher than all the devices I used to carry around plus a commitment to allow AT&T to sacrifice my first-born in some pagan ritual, I can now do all those things simultaneously.
(Full disclosure: I don't have an iPhone. I'm not that cool. I only have one child, and I'm kinda' partial to him, so I'm crossing my fingers, knocking on wood, and wishing on stars in the hope that my preferred cell phone provider will offer a similar phone in exchange for a contractually obligated second-born. Of course, my wife and I can't manage one of those by this Christmas, but if my provider announces such a product by Spring '09, I'll be ready for next year. Still, I think you all get my point.)
Tonight I saw an add for the new iPod Nano which comes in a bunch of colors. That's all we have to offer this gift-buying season? That's going to pull us out of the coming global depression? Colors? I know Alan Greenspan told Congress his flawed worldview didn't prepare him for this collapse, but I'm pretty sure the error in judgment wasn't caused by economic analysis that was too monochromatic. Seriously? Just new colors?
I'm not sure what device could save this Christmas season, but I already have my eye on something for next year: Word on the street is that Sony is working on a device that will be the must-have item for 2009. The amazing, human powered, rock-and-flint trash incinerator, the "iFlint-and-Stone", will allow us to burn all the abundant packaging that came with our expensive but now outdated doohickeys, and use that heat to keep ourselves alive next winter.
So what technology will save Christmas? Can we even remember back to those halcyon days when we realized that a flat screen TV would free up almost three whole cubic feet in our living rooms? For only around a thousand dollars? What a steal! Plus, the product would have the added bonus of the ego boost that comes from learning our favorite actors have bad skin, just like the rest of us. Of course we needed this product. To think, back then, we couldn't imagine that Cloris Leachman would be dirty dancing on "Dancing with the Stars", and we'd be able to take those images to our graves in Hi Def. That's the kind of technological breakthrough that used to make America strong.
Technological gadgets don't just entertain, of course. They also solve problems. I used to have this terrible problem. In order to listen to MP3s, talk on the phone, and maintain my daily schedule digitally, I had to fill my pockets with three different gadgets. And if I wanted to watch YouTube videos of politicians' speeches clipped and edited to make them particularly embarrassing, and if I wanted to do that while riding public transit or, say, driving, well... Forget about it. Impossible. I'd have to find an actual computer. Now that seems almost as ridiculous as the giant car phones of the early eighties. Computers. Ha. Of course, thanks to the iPhone, for a price only slightly higher than all the devices I used to carry around plus a commitment to allow AT&T to sacrifice my first-born in some pagan ritual, I can now do all those things simultaneously.
(Full disclosure: I don't have an iPhone. I'm not that cool. I only have one child, and I'm kinda' partial to him, so I'm crossing my fingers, knocking on wood, and wishing on stars in the hope that my preferred cell phone provider will offer a similar phone in exchange for a contractually obligated second-born. Of course, my wife and I can't manage one of those by this Christmas, but if my provider announces such a product by Spring '09, I'll be ready for next year. Still, I think you all get my point.)
Tonight I saw an add for the new iPod Nano which comes in a bunch of colors. That's all we have to offer this gift-buying season? That's going to pull us out of the coming global depression? Colors? I know Alan Greenspan told Congress his flawed worldview didn't prepare him for this collapse, but I'm pretty sure the error in judgment wasn't caused by economic analysis that was too monochromatic. Seriously? Just new colors?
I'm not sure what device could save this Christmas season, but I already have my eye on something for next year: Word on the street is that Sony is working on a device that will be the must-have item for 2009. The amazing, human powered, rock-and-flint trash incinerator, the "iFlint-and-Stone", will allow us to burn all the abundant packaging that came with our expensive but now outdated doohickeys, and use that heat to keep ourselves alive next winter.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Thoughts after Canvassing
Today I went canvassing for Obama/Biden. Noah came with me for the first few houses, then got tired of it.
You'll note that my Obama tee hasn't arrived, so I made my own.
I knocked on 64 doors in my neighborhood. These were voters identified by the party as independents, unreliable voters, or new voters. Of those, 29 were strong Obama supporters who said they would be voting, and only 7 told me they were voting for McCain. That's heartening in itself, but I also found that here in the purple-ish, blue-ish state of Oregon, in a small town (would Palin still consider that "real America"?) the Obama supporters seemed a lot more fired up. Sure, I was wearing an Obama/Biden bumper sticker on my chest, but the difference still exceeded what you'd expect. I'm feeling hopeful.
Another observation: I talked with a union guy who was particularly excited. He made a point to show off the Obama/Biden poster he'd received from his electrical workers union. I'm always glad to meet another union member, but as a member of the teacher's union I couldn't help but think his union is better than mine. First of all, if he's representative of his fellow electrical workers (and he may be an outlier, like me) then they are more excited and supportive than we are. Teachers I know tend to be inexplicably split. Also, the house this electrical worker owns is a lot nicer than the house this teacher rents. Yep, his union is better.
Lastly, when I went back to the Independence office of the Polk County Democrats, a guy came in to share that he not only had his Obama sign stolen out of his yard, as did many other people in the community, but he got the punks' license plate number and the police caught the thieves. So, way to go Mr. Ledesma!
Tonight I'm off to a pumpkin carving party where the parents are evenly split, Democrats and Republicans. I made sure to pick up enough Obama stickers to put one on each of the kids.
You'll note that my Obama tee hasn't arrived, so I made my own.
I knocked on 64 doors in my neighborhood. These were voters identified by the party as independents, unreliable voters, or new voters. Of those, 29 were strong Obama supporters who said they would be voting, and only 7 told me they were voting for McCain. That's heartening in itself, but I also found that here in the purple-ish, blue-ish state of Oregon, in a small town (would Palin still consider that "real America"?) the Obama supporters seemed a lot more fired up. Sure, I was wearing an Obama/Biden bumper sticker on my chest, but the difference still exceeded what you'd expect. I'm feeling hopeful.
Another observation: I talked with a union guy who was particularly excited. He made a point to show off the Obama/Biden poster he'd received from his electrical workers union. I'm always glad to meet another union member, but as a member of the teacher's union I couldn't help but think his union is better than mine. First of all, if he's representative of his fellow electrical workers (and he may be an outlier, like me) then they are more excited and supportive than we are. Teachers I know tend to be inexplicably split. Also, the house this electrical worker owns is a lot nicer than the house this teacher rents. Yep, his union is better.
Lastly, when I went back to the Independence office of the Polk County Democrats, a guy came in to share that he not only had his Obama sign stolen out of his yard, as did many other people in the community, but he got the punks' license plate number and the police caught the thieves. So, way to go Mr. Ledesma!
Tonight I'm off to a pumpkin carving party where the parents are evenly split, Democrats and Republicans. I made sure to pick up enough Obama stickers to put one on each of the kids.
Democrats are wrong and Republicans are stupid?
In the New York Times Campaign Stops blog, Douglas MacKinnon has a piece where he lays out an argument for why McCain could still win. Ignoring the polling numbers, MacKinnon relies on a sad fact about Democrats, which even Obama is quoted as saying in the piece: “Don’t underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”
MacKinnon thinks the Democrats could fail again by underestimating the Republicans. That's a fear I share. But he explains it as follows:
"Republicans think Democrats are wrong, but Democrats think Republicans are stupid, and that’s why Democrats lose."
I've wrestled with this, and felt my share of liberal guilt about dismissing a large swath of the American population as stupid. But this statement is reductive. Republicans don't just think Democrats are wrong. Despite the fact that I live in a small town, because of my political views people like Sarah Palin believe I live somewhere other than the "real America". Because I believe in those words John McCain put in air-quotes as he spat them out, "Women's Health", many Republicans find my beliefs tantamount to infanticide. Because my interpretation of my Christian faith demands that I take a strong position as a pacifist, many Republicans think I'm a coward, or, at the very least, that I don't support people like my brother-in-law, who is currently serving in Iraq. People can respectfully find one another to be wrong. It's hard to respectfully call someone an unpatriotic, cowardly baby-killer.
Meanwhile, I see Joe-Sixpack Republicans who have suffered through years of stagnant wages while the plutocrats have become wealthy beyond imagining holding fast to the illusion that their hard work will make them part of that top one percent of earners. These folks decry socialism not out of some ideological sense of fairness to Paris Hilton, but out of fear left over from the Red Scare, and out of a genuine ignorance about the state of economic inequality in our country. I hear the descendants of immigrants voice the same kind of xenophobic slurs that translate to the mantra of generations of bigoted Americans: "We're the last ones who should get in." I've watched anti-abortion or fiscally conservative single issue voters pull the lever for a party that has a proven track record of increasing the number of abortions during their watch and of increasing the size of government and the federal deficit every time they occupy the oval office. I've watched people who claim to believe in enlightened self-interest vote against their own self interests over and over again. I would love to find a gentler word than "stupid", but nothing comes to mind.
I am willing to acknowledge that the Republicans, until this election, have had a more formidable political machine. If that's the measure of respect, then I respect them more than I do the Democrats. But that's George W. Bush style respect; respect earned through fear. I hope that, after four years of an Obama administration, Americans can rediscover a different definition of respect, wherein people lay out arguments based on facts and well reasoned political philosophy rather than race-baiting, fear-mongering, and reductive labels. When we still disagree, which we will, we recognize each other as informed, thoughtful, patriotic citizens who believe in each other's goodness and shared hope for our country. I want to feel that kind of respect for Republicans, and receive it from them in turn, but I'm not there yet, and the Republicans I know aren't there either.
MacKinnon thinks the Democrats could fail again by underestimating the Republicans. That's a fear I share. But he explains it as follows:
"Republicans think Democrats are wrong, but Democrats think Republicans are stupid, and that’s why Democrats lose."
I've wrestled with this, and felt my share of liberal guilt about dismissing a large swath of the American population as stupid. But this statement is reductive. Republicans don't just think Democrats are wrong. Despite the fact that I live in a small town, because of my political views people like Sarah Palin believe I live somewhere other than the "real America". Because I believe in those words John McCain put in air-quotes as he spat them out, "Women's Health", many Republicans find my beliefs tantamount to infanticide. Because my interpretation of my Christian faith demands that I take a strong position as a pacifist, many Republicans think I'm a coward, or, at the very least, that I don't support people like my brother-in-law, who is currently serving in Iraq. People can respectfully find one another to be wrong. It's hard to respectfully call someone an unpatriotic, cowardly baby-killer.
Meanwhile, I see Joe-Sixpack Republicans who have suffered through years of stagnant wages while the plutocrats have become wealthy beyond imagining holding fast to the illusion that their hard work will make them part of that top one percent of earners. These folks decry socialism not out of some ideological sense of fairness to Paris Hilton, but out of fear left over from the Red Scare, and out of a genuine ignorance about the state of economic inequality in our country. I hear the descendants of immigrants voice the same kind of xenophobic slurs that translate to the mantra of generations of bigoted Americans: "We're the last ones who should get in." I've watched anti-abortion or fiscally conservative single issue voters pull the lever for a party that has a proven track record of increasing the number of abortions during their watch and of increasing the size of government and the federal deficit every time they occupy the oval office. I've watched people who claim to believe in enlightened self-interest vote against their own self interests over and over again. I would love to find a gentler word than "stupid", but nothing comes to mind.
I am willing to acknowledge that the Republicans, until this election, have had a more formidable political machine. If that's the measure of respect, then I respect them more than I do the Democrats. But that's George W. Bush style respect; respect earned through fear. I hope that, after four years of an Obama administration, Americans can rediscover a different definition of respect, wherein people lay out arguments based on facts and well reasoned political philosophy rather than race-baiting, fear-mongering, and reductive labels. When we still disagree, which we will, we recognize each other as informed, thoughtful, patriotic citizens who believe in each other's goodness and shared hope for our country. I want to feel that kind of respect for Republicans, and receive it from them in turn, but I'm not there yet, and the Republicans I know aren't there either.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Eternal Youth
They call me
Emergency
Can I cover for another teacher?
She's stuck in traffic.
I head down to the room
Corner of the school
Most doors and windows
Lots of friendly noise
No volume control
Kids take turns shaking my hand
One guy gently places his hand in mine
Then jumps into the air.
"I like this guy!"
He shouts
Feeling instantly mutual
I talk with another guy
About how we would spend
A quadrillion quadrillian dollars.
I'd feed everybody in the world
I say.
He'd buy everybody shoes,
Finish the book he's writing
Make a movie version
And make video games
For every video game system.
He's got big plans
And writes them down
In the form of a string
Of repeated number nines.
"How much would this be?"
Well, I say, that's a million
And that's a billion
And that's a trillion
What comes next?
Quadrillion?
"Quadrillion," he says.
So you have a....
Quadrillion quadrillion
He forgets the subject
Starts talking about his favorite ice cream
And last night's college football game
And his cat.
His dreams are so large
And he will never grow old
His toddler soul
Young for
A quadrillion quadrillion years.
Emergency
Can I cover for another teacher?
She's stuck in traffic.
I head down to the room
Corner of the school
Most doors and windows
Lots of friendly noise
No volume control
Kids take turns shaking my hand
One guy gently places his hand in mine
Then jumps into the air.
"I like this guy!"
He shouts
Feeling instantly mutual
I talk with another guy
About how we would spend
A quadrillion quadrillian dollars.
I'd feed everybody in the world
I say.
He'd buy everybody shoes,
Finish the book he's writing
Make a movie version
And make video games
For every video game system.
He's got big plans
And writes them down
In the form of a string
Of repeated number nines.
"How much would this be?"
Well, I say, that's a million
And that's a billion
And that's a trillion
What comes next?
Quadrillion?
"Quadrillion," he says.
So you have a....
Quadrillion quadrillion
He forgets the subject
Starts talking about his favorite ice cream
And last night's college football game
And his cat.
His dreams are so large
And he will never grow old
His toddler soul
Young for
A quadrillion quadrillion years.
Rotting on the Vine
They asked me where poems hide.
Standing out on my back porch
(generous name for a slab of concrete
surrounded by the summer's overgrown garden
rotten tomatoes wrapped in weeds)
listening to music
through earbuds that enjoy bungee-jumping out of my ears
smoking the pipe I bought
because it looks like the one Grandpa smoked
and sometimes a fragment of a lyric sticks awkwardly
or some small frustration of the day
an irritant like sand under a contact lens
is coated like a pearl with the bile of a dog-eared thesaurus
and poems come out of the fetid earth.
Standing out on my back porch
(generous name for a slab of concrete
surrounded by the summer's overgrown garden
rotten tomatoes wrapped in weeds)
listening to music
through earbuds that enjoy bungee-jumping out of my ears
smoking the pipe I bought
because it looks like the one Grandpa smoked
and sometimes a fragment of a lyric sticks awkwardly
or some small frustration of the day
an irritant like sand under a contact lens
is coated like a pearl with the bile of a dog-eared thesaurus
and poems come out of the fetid earth.
Marriage is great.
My wife, Paige, just told me I need to go to the store to pick something up for her. She can't go because
A) She's in her pajamas.
B) She's not wearing make-up.
For the record
A) I am in my pajamas.
B) I am not wearing make-up.
But I am going to change clothes and go to the store.
In the eternal contest of who-loves-whom-more, I just want it noted that I am winning tonight.
(Sure, she bore my child and all, but I am willing to defy my own sense of logical consistency for her benefit, so... um...)
A) She's in her pajamas.
B) She's not wearing make-up.
For the record
A) I am in my pajamas.
B) I am not wearing make-up.
But I am going to change clothes and go to the store.
In the eternal contest of who-loves-whom-more, I just want it noted that I am winning tonight.
(Sure, she bore my child and all, but I am willing to defy my own sense of logical consistency for her benefit, so... um...)
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Can Satire Swing an Election?
I hope to see that this video sets a record for the number of hits of a single sketch comedy segment over the next few days.
Ferrell's Bush endorsing McCain with Tina Fey's Palin between them might be the height of satire, and I say that as an ardent admirer of good satire, a die-hard Daily Show fan, a member of the Colbert Nation, and a frequent resident of South Park, Colorado. This is what satire can do: heighten reality to draw out the facts those in power do not want us to see. Satire should focus on the powerful; it should call out the Emperor for his bad taste in new clothes (or the Empress for her $150,000 Hypocrisy Collection from fifth avenue). Like it or not, GWB is still president. He should be the focal point of satire, and here he's used to best effect. I have been developing migraines watching McCain and Palin tell us we can best bring about change in Washington by keeping the same party in power, but they've managed to keep Bush off the radar by talking about how terrible it would be to spread the wealth while simultaneously explaining how they would continue to redistribute wealth to the wealthiest Americans. It's like they've been trying to hide one glaring inconsistency that threatens to cause my head to explode by loudly shouting another. I feel like it's some kind of conspiracy just to kill ME. Well, SNL has weighed in, and all I can say is, "Thank You!" and "God Bless You All!"
Oh, and those folks who take "Bush"'s advice, picture his face, and still pull the lever for McCain... well, I have some phrases I'd like to toss your way, too, but I don't think they're fit to print.
In the name of consistency and post-partisanship, I do expect all my favorite satire shows to really take it to President Obama over the next four years. It may make me cringe, but it's the right thing to do.
And I so hope you all get the chance.
Ferrell's Bush endorsing McCain with Tina Fey's Palin between them might be the height of satire, and I say that as an ardent admirer of good satire, a die-hard Daily Show fan, a member of the Colbert Nation, and a frequent resident of South Park, Colorado. This is what satire can do: heighten reality to draw out the facts those in power do not want us to see. Satire should focus on the powerful; it should call out the Emperor for his bad taste in new clothes (or the Empress for her $150,000 Hypocrisy Collection from fifth avenue). Like it or not, GWB is still president. He should be the focal point of satire, and here he's used to best effect. I have been developing migraines watching McCain and Palin tell us we can best bring about change in Washington by keeping the same party in power, but they've managed to keep Bush off the radar by talking about how terrible it would be to spread the wealth while simultaneously explaining how they would continue to redistribute wealth to the wealthiest Americans. It's like they've been trying to hide one glaring inconsistency that threatens to cause my head to explode by loudly shouting another. I feel like it's some kind of conspiracy just to kill ME. Well, SNL has weighed in, and all I can say is, "Thank You!" and "God Bless You All!"
Oh, and those folks who take "Bush"'s advice, picture his face, and still pull the lever for McCain... well, I have some phrases I'd like to toss your way, too, but I don't think they're fit to print.
In the name of consistency and post-partisanship, I do expect all my favorite satire shows to really take it to President Obama over the next four years. It may make me cringe, but it's the right thing to do.
And I so hope you all get the chance.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Is Bill Kristol ever right?
Jon Stewart once asked, "Oh Bill Kristol, are you ever right?" I'm reluctant to believe anyone can be consistently wrong; the whole even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day theory. But William Kristol might be a clock that's just off by enough to be wrong all the time. Today, in his latest column for the NYTimes (a paper his own conservative friends consistently mock) he tries to take a populist tack, arguing that Americans are not stupid or uninformed. At first, he had me wondering if, for once, he was on to something. Considering Obama's poll numbers, for a moment I thought he might be vying for a position in the conservatives-attacking-conservatism movement we're going to hear a lot from over the next few years. Instead, he tried to make a case for Joe the (well, not really a) Plumber. Seriously, Bill, I think Jon Stewart may have you pegged.
I know the anger over Obama's clumsy "spread the wealth around" comment must have lit a fire under dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, but if Joe the Plumber really is one of the intelligent and informed electorate Kristol is talking about, then he could probably hear the fact that both candidates are talking plenty about spreading wealth around. At the last debate, Joe's debate, McCain, after deriding any spreading of wealth, and after proposing a spending freeze, talked at length about his $5000 tax credit for health coverage. That's spreading the wealth. If Americans are intelligent and informed, they know that. They also know that it won't cover the cost of most of their care now, let alone when they are old, so it amounts to spreading around the wealth, but doing so ineffectively. That's what Americans, the intelligent and educated ones, are sick of. We don't dislike the conservative's line on free market economics, even if we disagree and even when it proves intellectually bankrupt as it has these last few weeks, nearly as much as we dislike their penchant for consistent, ideologically driven mismanagement of government. Of course they think government is bad: they do their best to make it so every chance they get.
Kristol not only threw down with some Latin etymology, tracing the root of "Vulgar to "Vulgaris", but he even quoted Horace. I'm not sure if he was trying to show that conservatives are educated elites, or if he was trying to say the "common people" could appreciate this linguistics lesson, but either way it felt condescending and not particularly illuminating. Then, he put to rest any misconception that a nuanced study of history might inform his politics by writing: "Most of the recent mistakes of American public policy, and most of the contemporary delusions of American public life, haven’t come from an ignorant and excitable public. They’ve been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites."
No, they've been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites who were willing to work for George W. Bush, who is neither. But then, the term "Sophisticated" comes from the Greek sophos or sophia, meaning of "wise" or "wisdom", and I'll bet there are a lot of hacks who worked for Dubya who are now reconsidering the wisdom of that career move.
I'm not sure if Kristol was telling conservatives to stop looking down on the common people, or if he was telling us common folks that the elites aren't to be trusted as much as a plumber who isn't a plumber, but one thing is abundantly clear: We can trust the vulgar masses a lot more than we can trust Bill Kristol.
I know the anger over Obama's clumsy "spread the wealth around" comment must have lit a fire under dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, but if Joe the Plumber really is one of the intelligent and informed electorate Kristol is talking about, then he could probably hear the fact that both candidates are talking plenty about spreading wealth around. At the last debate, Joe's debate, McCain, after deriding any spreading of wealth, and after proposing a spending freeze, talked at length about his $5000 tax credit for health coverage. That's spreading the wealth. If Americans are intelligent and informed, they know that. They also know that it won't cover the cost of most of their care now, let alone when they are old, so it amounts to spreading around the wealth, but doing so ineffectively. That's what Americans, the intelligent and educated ones, are sick of. We don't dislike the conservative's line on free market economics, even if we disagree and even when it proves intellectually bankrupt as it has these last few weeks, nearly as much as we dislike their penchant for consistent, ideologically driven mismanagement of government. Of course they think government is bad: they do their best to make it so every chance they get.
Kristol not only threw down with some Latin etymology, tracing the root of "Vulgar to "Vulgaris", but he even quoted Horace. I'm not sure if he was trying to show that conservatives are educated elites, or if he was trying to say the "common people" could appreciate this linguistics lesson, but either way it felt condescending and not particularly illuminating. Then, he put to rest any misconception that a nuanced study of history might inform his politics by writing: "Most of the recent mistakes of American public policy, and most of the contemporary delusions of American public life, haven’t come from an ignorant and excitable public. They’ve been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites."
No, they've been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites who were willing to work for George W. Bush, who is neither. But then, the term "Sophisticated" comes from the Greek sophos or sophia, meaning of "wise" or "wisdom", and I'll bet there are a lot of hacks who worked for Dubya who are now reconsidering the wisdom of that career move.
I'm not sure if Kristol was telling conservatives to stop looking down on the common people, or if he was telling us common folks that the elites aren't to be trusted as much as a plumber who isn't a plumber, but one thing is abundantly clear: We can trust the vulgar masses a lot more than we can trust Bill Kristol.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Obama stole my joke!
Barack Obama stole the joke from my last post! (Okay, to be fair, I can't possibly be the first person to make that Obama-fathered-two-African-American-children-in-wedlock joke. But I'm probably in the first million, and I'll bet there will be a couple million more in the next eight years, so I'm still ahead of the curve.) Enjoy this great video, and enjoy McCain's part, also. It's first, chronologically, so I'll put it first, and I have to give him credit, because he's really funny, too. Why can't we see more of this side of both candidates? Probably because we'd be forced to choose between President Dave Chapelle and President Larry the Cable Guy.
Enjoy this tiny taste of civil interaction between these candidates because, if you're like me, by the middle of next week you'll be curled up in front of your television chewing on aspirin and praying for a quick death.
And now, soon-to-be-President Obama stealing an already tired joke from some schmuck out in Oregon:
Maybe there's hope for this country yet.
But probably not.
Enjoy this tiny taste of civil interaction between these candidates because, if you're like me, by the middle of next week you'll be curled up in front of your television chewing on aspirin and praying for a quick death.
And now, soon-to-be-President Obama stealing an already tired joke from some schmuck out in Oregon:
Maybe there's hope for this country yet.
But probably not.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Script for McCain's Next Ad Leaked!
Though this ad hasn't yet hit the airwaves, the script has been leaked by a senior member of McCain's campaign who, after begging for anonymity, admitted, "Our campaign is such an immoral, hateful, unprincipled mess that I'm voting for Obama because I'm terrified of a John McCain presidency."
Secret, leaked script:
Ominous narrator:
"How much do we really know about Barack Obama? Forget his policies, the twenty months of non-stop coverage, or one of the most impressive political campaigns in recorded history. Every Joe-Sixpack knows the only important factor in a voter's judgment is a politician's associations.
[Horror music rises in the background]
"You may have heard that Barack Obama lives in the same neighborhood as a former Chicago Citizen of the Year award winner who was a member of a radical group when Obama was in elementary school.
"Well, it gets worse!
"Obama has been carrying on a long and very public love affair with... a black woman!
[A picture of Michelle Obama flashes onto the screen, then stretches diagonally to the sound of a zither.]
"And wait, it gets worse! Barack Obama has even fathered two entirely legitamate black children. And he's not even ashamed of them. In fact, he is proud of them!
[A picture of the entire Obama family appears. Then badly drawn fangs grow in their mouths and their eyes glow bright red.]
"Unbelievable, but true!"
"Forget the fact that your retirement plan has just emptied out in the last week. So the federal government has made a succession of moronic, ideologically driven decisions for eight years straight. Who cares? In these uncertain times, shouldn't we make sure the power stays in the hands of the same people who got us into this mess? If you're sick of the way Washington has been operating, you need a 72 year old president who shares George Bush's worldview and whose best selling point is that he's supported a bankrupt governing philosophy slightly less consistently than most members of his party.
"John McCain. He's ten percent better than the nimrod you picked last time!"
[A picture of John McCain appears to the sound of trumpets. Giant, animated wings flap behind him, and one tenth of a halo hovers above his head.]
Voice of John McCain:
"I'm John McCain, and I don't approve this message because it says a couple things that are true, and we all know I gave up on truth some time ago. In fact, now I mostly curl up in a fetal ball in the small bathroom in the back of my bus, where I watch my tears drip into the toilet and swirl away along with the last of my honor and respectability..."
At this point the camera pulls back and McCain wanders away very slowly, talking to himself.
McCain has made ad buys in select markets, targeting the four o'clock daily airings of "Judge Judy", his favorite thing to watch while he eats his dinner. Please pass this on to others involved in the Obama campaign, so we can be prepared to respond to questions from people who are still, amazingly, undecided voters.
Secret, leaked script:
Ominous narrator:
"How much do we really know about Barack Obama? Forget his policies, the twenty months of non-stop coverage, or one of the most impressive political campaigns in recorded history. Every Joe-Sixpack knows the only important factor in a voter's judgment is a politician's associations.
[Horror music rises in the background]
"You may have heard that Barack Obama lives in the same neighborhood as a former Chicago Citizen of the Year award winner who was a member of a radical group when Obama was in elementary school.
"Well, it gets worse!
"Obama has been carrying on a long and very public love affair with... a black woman!
[A picture of Michelle Obama flashes onto the screen, then stretches diagonally to the sound of a zither.]
"And wait, it gets worse! Barack Obama has even fathered two entirely legitamate black children. And he's not even ashamed of them. In fact, he is proud of them!
[A picture of the entire Obama family appears. Then badly drawn fangs grow in their mouths and their eyes glow bright red.]
"Unbelievable, but true!"
"Forget the fact that your retirement plan has just emptied out in the last week. So the federal government has made a succession of moronic, ideologically driven decisions for eight years straight. Who cares? In these uncertain times, shouldn't we make sure the power stays in the hands of the same people who got us into this mess? If you're sick of the way Washington has been operating, you need a 72 year old president who shares George Bush's worldview and whose best selling point is that he's supported a bankrupt governing philosophy slightly less consistently than most members of his party.
"John McCain. He's ten percent better than the nimrod you picked last time!"
[A picture of John McCain appears to the sound of trumpets. Giant, animated wings flap behind him, and one tenth of a halo hovers above his head.]
Voice of John McCain:
"I'm John McCain, and I don't approve this message because it says a couple things that are true, and we all know I gave up on truth some time ago. In fact, now I mostly curl up in a fetal ball in the small bathroom in the back of my bus, where I watch my tears drip into the toilet and swirl away along with the last of my honor and respectability..."
At this point the camera pulls back and McCain wanders away very slowly, talking to himself.
McCain has made ad buys in select markets, targeting the four o'clock daily airings of "Judge Judy", his favorite thing to watch while he eats his dinner. Please pass this on to others involved in the Obama campaign, so we can be prepared to respond to questions from people who are still, amazingly, undecided voters.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Don't Panic?
After sending the following queries to my two best friends, I thought I'd share them with the world, not, Bill, because I think anyone in particular is reading this, but because I want my reaction noted for posterity. If we quickly devolve to hunter/gatherers, just before I get trampled by a giant herd of buffalo, I want to be able to smile and think, "I toldja' so."
Tonight, before heading off to Open House at school, I watched the tail end of the local news, all of the national news, and the beginning of the local news again. I heard/read the words "Don't Panic" at least four times. Just now, it's fully sinking in. How often does one hear that phrase on the news? How often is panic an entirely appropriate response? Could the answers to those two questions be identical?
As a person who owns a whopping zero shares of stock, I will be paying attention to how the Dow does tomorrow.
Is it wrong to fantasize about a complete collapse of the global economy? How often should one participate in such fantasies? Is it the same answer?
Tonight, before heading off to Open House at school, I watched the tail end of the local news, all of the national news, and the beginning of the local news again. I heard/read the words "Don't Panic" at least four times. Just now, it's fully sinking in. How often does one hear that phrase on the news? How often is panic an entirely appropriate response? Could the answers to those two questions be identical?
As a person who owns a whopping zero shares of stock, I will be paying attention to how the Dow does tomorrow.
Is it wrong to fantasize about a complete collapse of the global economy? How often should one participate in such fantasies? Is it the same answer?
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The Age for Bad Poetry
"I took a poetry class in college
And the most important thing I learned
Is that I'm no poet."
I've told the story
Wink and smile
So many times
Branding like the soda I drink
The car I drive
The music on my ipod
The ipod
The ipod
ipoet
But here we are.
This is the age for bad poets.
The culture spins down the drain
To the beat of arrhythmic verse
Cliché
Douchebaggery
Holds every office
Levers of power
Pulled into uneven lines.
T.S.Elliot slouches toward the poetry slam.
William Blake dreams apocalyptic visions
Of talking heads debating economic band aids
While we burn and burn
And reach up out of the flames
To tap the keys
Paperless in the heat.
Not protest tunes, but jingles.
Not novels, but fabricated memoirs.
Art produced for uncollateralized credit.
This is not the age for great poetry.
This is the time to widen our eyes
Take in the civilization's decay
Spread it amongst ourselves.
This is not poetry.
This is how the world ends.
Digital chlamydia.
And the most important thing I learned
Is that I'm no poet."
I've told the story
Wink and smile
So many times
Branding like the soda I drink
The car I drive
The music on my ipod
The ipod
The ipod
ipoet
But here we are.
This is the age for bad poets.
The culture spins down the drain
To the beat of arrhythmic verse
Cliché
Douchebaggery
Holds every office
Levers of power
Pulled into uneven lines.
T.S.Elliot slouches toward the poetry slam.
William Blake dreams apocalyptic visions
Of talking heads debating economic band aids
While we burn and burn
And reach up out of the flames
To tap the keys
Paperless in the heat.
Not protest tunes, but jingles.
Not novels, but fabricated memoirs.
Art produced for uncollateralized credit.
This is not the age for great poetry.
This is the time to widen our eyes
Take in the civilization's decay
Spread it amongst ourselves.
This is not poetry.
This is how the world ends.
Digital chlamydia.
Nice Pants
"Nice pants,"
The fourteen-year-old told me,
And I suddenly found myself
Fixed in my era
Like a mosquito in amber
My belly full of the blueprints for dinosaurs.
My age is divined by a forked branch from some mystical tree
Pointing back to an add campaign
Twenty years ago
The woman stops the car to tell the hitchhiker
"Nice pants,"
But now she's shrunk
Mutated
Diminished
To this two-bit punk kid
Proud gang member
Late to class each day
Facial muscles slack with an affected apathy
Masking a real stupidity
He'd give his soul away for a compliment
From a super model
Or the tougher kid on his street
Or a misinterpreted rap lyric
He's the most cynical advertiser's wet dream.
But I'm also standing in the cement of the global economy
Hot lava meltdown revealing nothing but gas bubbles
Borders as invisible as credit
Cultures pushed into the bedrock
By liquidity, liquidity, liquidity
And I can't help but think,
In England
"Nice pants"
Refers to underwear.
And then I'm back in America
At the tail end of one of the world's least glorious empires
All empty shell casings and disco music
Stuffed with incendiary sarcasm
Made more deadly by it's lack of cleverness
As much beauty and truth as the plaque I brush off my teeth
While I look in the mirror
Too tired to teach tomorrow
But I'll go
Wearing different pants.
The fourteen-year-old told me,
And I suddenly found myself
Fixed in my era
Like a mosquito in amber
My belly full of the blueprints for dinosaurs.
My age is divined by a forked branch from some mystical tree
Pointing back to an add campaign
Twenty years ago
The woman stops the car to tell the hitchhiker
"Nice pants,"
But now she's shrunk
Mutated
Diminished
To this two-bit punk kid
Proud gang member
Late to class each day
Facial muscles slack with an affected apathy
Masking a real stupidity
He'd give his soul away for a compliment
From a super model
Or the tougher kid on his street
Or a misinterpreted rap lyric
He's the most cynical advertiser's wet dream.
But I'm also standing in the cement of the global economy
Hot lava meltdown revealing nothing but gas bubbles
Borders as invisible as credit
Cultures pushed into the bedrock
By liquidity, liquidity, liquidity
And I can't help but think,
In England
"Nice pants"
Refers to underwear.
And then I'm back in America
At the tail end of one of the world's least glorious empires
All empty shell casings and disco music
Stuffed with incendiary sarcasm
Made more deadly by it's lack of cleverness
As much beauty and truth as the plaque I brush off my teeth
While I look in the mirror
Too tired to teach tomorrow
But I'll go
Wearing different pants.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
A Rant about Taxation
Someone on a list serve sent me the following email, asking how to respond to a Republican friend who preaches lower taxes for the wealthy. The forward got my blood boiling, so I weighed in, and I thought I’d share the original forward and my response here.
Here’s the original forward:
“TAX CUTS EXPLAINED:
Because it's the election season, let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. [Way to start out with condescension from the get-go, eh?]
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth man would pay $1.
The sixth man would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until one day the owner threw them a curved ball (or is that a curved beer!).
'Because you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.'
Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men ??[sic] the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'
They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to
drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill b y roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth man now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
The seventh man now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant the men began to compare their savings.
'I only got a dollar out of the $20,' declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, 'but he got $10!'
'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than me!'
'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man.
'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'
'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The
system exploits the poor!'
The nine men surrounded the tenth man and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something
important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our Tax System works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy and they just may not sho w up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
David R Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia
[and, because the intro wasn’t insulting enough, it ends with this flourish]
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.”
This first thing I did when I read this was to google the Ph.D. who is credited with this deceptive story. It seems there is a David R Kamerschen, Ph.D. who teaches econ at the U. of G., but, of course, he may not have written this. For his sake, and for the sake of the institution where he teaches, I sincerely hope not.
The story shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what taxes are and what they pay for.
It's true that the poor pay less, but they receive less. Taxes don't go to beer. They go to things like police and firefighters and public schools. A policeman defends all homes from, for example, theft, so the wealthy person is receiving protection for far more valuable goods than the poor person. Likewise the firefighter, who is protecting a lot more property when he/she puts out the fire in the wealthy person's home than when putting out a fire in a poor person's home. The same even goes for public schools: the education may be the same for the child of a wealthy person or a poor person (or, at least, it would be if we had a more equitable system) but the wealthy person not only receives an education for his/her child, but a more educated workforce at his or her company, a benefit which the poor person doesn't experience. Also, the values of the expensive property of the wealthy person are related to the quality of the schools, just like the crime rate. Any of you who have crummy schools and have seen a decline in the value of homes in the area know this to be true. So, an economic professor might think we get beer for our tax money, but I'm not sure what country has such a system. I expect services, and the wealthy do benefit more, so they should pay more.
People like Bill Gates Sr. have said as much when they advocate for keeping the estate tax: they know how they've benefited, and that a more equitable system, even one that costs them more in taxes, benefits them even more in services. Bill Gates Sr. wrote: "The estate tax — our nation’s only levy on accumulated wealth — is the fairest and most important tax we have.
"It puts a brake on the concentration of wealth and power, generates substantial revenue from those most able to pay and encourages billions of dollars in charitable giving each year. The estate tax is not only fair but an essential component of our nation’s economic dynamism.
"Without our society’s substantial investments in taxpayer-funded research, technology, education and infrastructure, the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans would not be so robust."
And as to the spurious argument that the ultra-wealthy will leave the U.S. for a country where high taxes and a strong government do not protect their wealth: show me the wealthy person who has decided to invest all his money in countries with low taxes and no stable banking system or protections of personal property, and I'll show you someone who may become very poor very quickly then they government falls or decides to seize his assets without cause. There's a reason a country like the U.S., which taxes the wealthy more than the poor, has the largest GDP in the world, and there's a reason why the economy slips when McCain, Bush, and the other acolytes of anti-tax activists gain power and try to do away with the very regulations that protect us all, wealthy and poor alike.
[I wrote that last bit on September 16th. This is not to say that I have some unusual powers of prognostication when it comes to the markets, but I think any economics professor worth his/her salt would concede that deregulation has shown its darker side quite vividly in the five days since.]
The next day I thought of another example as I fumed about the guy's perverted parable: Imagine that you have a hundred dollars in a bank, and somebody comes along with a hundred million and wants to open an account. The bank decides it will have to build a new, two million dollar high-tech vault to keep all that money safe. A conservative tax scheme would dictate that the most fair way to divide that cost would be for both you and the multi-millionaire to pay an even million each for that protection.
I think, when reduced to that oversimplification, it's easy for anybody to see that fair isn't always equal and equal isn't always fair.
Here’s the original forward:
“TAX CUTS EXPLAINED:
Because it's the election season, let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. [Way to start out with condescension from the get-go, eh?]
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth man would pay $1.
The sixth man would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until one day the owner threw them a curved ball (or is that a curved beer!).
'Because you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.'
Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men ??[sic] the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'
They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to
drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill b y roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth man now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
The seventh man now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant the men began to compare their savings.
'I only got a dollar out of the $20,' declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, 'but he got $10!'
'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than me!'
'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man.
'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'
'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The
system exploits the poor!'
The nine men surrounded the tenth man and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something
important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our Tax System works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy and they just may not sho w up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
David R Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia
[and, because the intro wasn’t insulting enough, it ends with this flourish]
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.”
This first thing I did when I read this was to google the Ph.D. who is credited with this deceptive story. It seems there is a David R Kamerschen, Ph.D. who teaches econ at the U. of G., but, of course, he may not have written this. For his sake, and for the sake of the institution where he teaches, I sincerely hope not.
The story shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what taxes are and what they pay for.
It's true that the poor pay less, but they receive less. Taxes don't go to beer. They go to things like police and firefighters and public schools. A policeman defends all homes from, for example, theft, so the wealthy person is receiving protection for far more valuable goods than the poor person. Likewise the firefighter, who is protecting a lot more property when he/she puts out the fire in the wealthy person's home than when putting out a fire in a poor person's home. The same even goes for public schools: the education may be the same for the child of a wealthy person or a poor person (or, at least, it would be if we had a more equitable system) but the wealthy person not only receives an education for his/her child, but a more educated workforce at his or her company, a benefit which the poor person doesn't experience. Also, the values of the expensive property of the wealthy person are related to the quality of the schools, just like the crime rate. Any of you who have crummy schools and have seen a decline in the value of homes in the area know this to be true. So, an economic professor might think we get beer for our tax money, but I'm not sure what country has such a system. I expect services, and the wealthy do benefit more, so they should pay more.
People like Bill Gates Sr. have said as much when they advocate for keeping the estate tax: they know how they've benefited, and that a more equitable system, even one that costs them more in taxes, benefits them even more in services. Bill Gates Sr. wrote: "The estate tax — our nation’s only levy on accumulated wealth — is the fairest and most important tax we have.
"It puts a brake on the concentration of wealth and power, generates substantial revenue from those most able to pay and encourages billions of dollars in charitable giving each year. The estate tax is not only fair but an essential component of our nation’s economic dynamism.
"Without our society’s substantial investments in taxpayer-funded research, technology, education and infrastructure, the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans would not be so robust."
And as to the spurious argument that the ultra-wealthy will leave the U.S. for a country where high taxes and a strong government do not protect their wealth: show me the wealthy person who has decided to invest all his money in countries with low taxes and no stable banking system or protections of personal property, and I'll show you someone who may become very poor very quickly then they government falls or decides to seize his assets without cause. There's a reason a country like the U.S., which taxes the wealthy more than the poor, has the largest GDP in the world, and there's a reason why the economy slips when McCain, Bush, and the other acolytes of anti-tax activists gain power and try to do away with the very regulations that protect us all, wealthy and poor alike.
[I wrote that last bit on September 16th. This is not to say that I have some unusual powers of prognostication when it comes to the markets, but I think any economics professor worth his/her salt would concede that deregulation has shown its darker side quite vividly in the five days since.]
The next day I thought of another example as I fumed about the guy's perverted parable: Imagine that you have a hundred dollars in a bank, and somebody comes along with a hundred million and wants to open an account. The bank decides it will have to build a new, two million dollar high-tech vault to keep all that money safe. A conservative tax scheme would dictate that the most fair way to divide that cost would be for both you and the multi-millionaire to pay an even million each for that protection.
I think, when reduced to that oversimplification, it's easy for anybody to see that fair isn't always equal and equal isn't always fair.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Two Book Recommendations
I know I haven't posted in a while, which means I'm breaking the two cardinal rules of blogging: Posts should be frequent and short. Well, I'll try to manage one of those by keeping this brief (I know. Too late.)
I would love to say I've been slaving away at my lesson plans for this next school year all summer, but that would be a lie. I've been camping a lot. And napping a lot. Everything else has fallen by the wayside. I have been trying to catch up on some reading, and I've just finished two very good books. Normally, a book recommendation is the worst kind of advice to give me. I write down the title, say I'll get to it one day, and promptly forget where I put the name. If you, dear reader, have the same proclivity, this might help. These book recommendations have time limits, because both these novels are being made into films, and after reading both, I fear the movies will be monumentally awful. They will either be overlayed with voice-over narration because anyone with any sense wants to make them into movies because of the beauty of their prose, or they will be vapid chronicles of the events in the books which really aren't the point of either novel.
Read The Lovely Bones. I am not a crier, but I teared up more than once. The writing is very good, and the picture of a family dealing with grief is so spot-on that you forget your first reaction, which is that the idea of a murder victim narrating her observations of the living is at best clever and probably lame, and instead decide it was brilliant. This isn't true, but the quality of the writing almost makes it so.
Time Limit: Read by 3/13/2009
(Peter Jackson is attached, but I'm worried this will be far more King Kong than The Lord of the Rings. At least it won't possibly be Meet The Feebles.)
Read The Road. Imagine Mad Max meets No County For Old Men (a novel also by Cormac McCarthy) but with a father and son set-up that rips your heart out over and over without ever getting schmaltzy. Not even once, and that's saying something. McCarthy could teach Hemingway a thing or two about the economy of language. It was the first time I ever felt a physical pain in my chest caused by words the writer didn't include. McCarthy plays with your ears, so you hear things the characters don't say on the page, and sometimes you're deafened by their silences, too. The text itself is scant, but the thick subtext (midtext?) makes you read the book more slowly, like a great basketball player who knows how to control the tempo on both sides of the court. When I finished I was so full of feeling it reminded me of the kind of passion I could manage as a teenager, only the book indulges (and even exhorts) an adult recognition of nuance so that I can't understand, let alone articulate, exactly which direction these feelings are pulling. When you finish it, please post a description of your emotional reaction here, so I can use your road map to navigate my own.
Time Limit: Read by 11/26/08
(The cast looks amazing. Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pierce, Viggo Mortensen. At the height of their powers, these folks might be able to convey a lot of what's going on inside these characters. But then we miss out on the prose. Plus, they'll need someone with Robert Duvall's skill and resume to play the four or five-year-old boy. Macaulay Culkin will not do.)
Okay, well, now I've managed Infrequent and Long. If you still have any free time left, read both these books.
I would love to say I've been slaving away at my lesson plans for this next school year all summer, but that would be a lie. I've been camping a lot. And napping a lot. Everything else has fallen by the wayside. I have been trying to catch up on some reading, and I've just finished two very good books. Normally, a book recommendation is the worst kind of advice to give me. I write down the title, say I'll get to it one day, and promptly forget where I put the name. If you, dear reader, have the same proclivity, this might help. These book recommendations have time limits, because both these novels are being made into films, and after reading both, I fear the movies will be monumentally awful. They will either be overlayed with voice-over narration because anyone with any sense wants to make them into movies because of the beauty of their prose, or they will be vapid chronicles of the events in the books which really aren't the point of either novel.
Read The Lovely Bones. I am not a crier, but I teared up more than once. The writing is very good, and the picture of a family dealing with grief is so spot-on that you forget your first reaction, which is that the idea of a murder victim narrating her observations of the living is at best clever and probably lame, and instead decide it was brilliant. This isn't true, but the quality of the writing almost makes it so.
Time Limit: Read by 3/13/2009
(Peter Jackson is attached, but I'm worried this will be far more King Kong than The Lord of the Rings. At least it won't possibly be Meet The Feebles.)
Read The Road. Imagine Mad Max meets No County For Old Men (a novel also by Cormac McCarthy) but with a father and son set-up that rips your heart out over and over without ever getting schmaltzy. Not even once, and that's saying something. McCarthy could teach Hemingway a thing or two about the economy of language. It was the first time I ever felt a physical pain in my chest caused by words the writer didn't include. McCarthy plays with your ears, so you hear things the characters don't say on the page, and sometimes you're deafened by their silences, too. The text itself is scant, but the thick subtext (midtext?) makes you read the book more slowly, like a great basketball player who knows how to control the tempo on both sides of the court. When I finished I was so full of feeling it reminded me of the kind of passion I could manage as a teenager, only the book indulges (and even exhorts) an adult recognition of nuance so that I can't understand, let alone articulate, exactly which direction these feelings are pulling. When you finish it, please post a description of your emotional reaction here, so I can use your road map to navigate my own.
Time Limit: Read by 11/26/08
(The cast looks amazing. Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pierce, Viggo Mortensen. At the height of their powers, these folks might be able to convey a lot of what's going on inside these characters. But then we miss out on the prose. Plus, they'll need someone with Robert Duvall's skill and resume to play the four or five-year-old boy. Macaulay Culkin will not do.)
Okay, well, now I've managed Infrequent and Long. If you still have any free time left, read both these books.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Favorite Novels to Assign for Creative Writing Class
Okay, world, I have another favor to ask:
This next year, for my Creative Writing Class, I'm going to assign some independent novel projects to students. I need some titles that I can put on my list. Here's what I'm looking for:
1. First and foremost, the book must be an example of truly exceptional writing; not just a great story and an important book in its historical context, but something so well written that students can learn from the style and quality of the prose.
2. The novel has to be appropriate for high school students (and something that won't freak their parents out). I think Nabakov's Lolita is one of the best examples of English prose ever, but I'm not going to fight that battle with the parents or the school board. Also, I really enjoy Umberto Eco, but I'm not going to assign him to a sixteen-year-old. So don't try to show off by recommending Joyce' Ulysses.
3. The novel can't be a part of any other class' curriculum. Give me lots of suggestions so I can eliminate some and still have plenty to work with.
4. Ideally, it's something I've read. Of course, I can always pick it up if it sounds like a winner.
So far, I'm thinking about
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Catch-22
Lord of the Flies
and maybe, maybe The God of Small Things (think kids could handle that one? Think their parents would agree?)
It's been a long time since I've read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I remember being deeply affected by the book, but without a copy handy I can't remember the quality of the prose. Anybody have a take on that one?
Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks, world.
This next year, for my Creative Writing Class, I'm going to assign some independent novel projects to students. I need some titles that I can put on my list. Here's what I'm looking for:
1. First and foremost, the book must be an example of truly exceptional writing; not just a great story and an important book in its historical context, but something so well written that students can learn from the style and quality of the prose.
2. The novel has to be appropriate for high school students (and something that won't freak their parents out). I think Nabakov's Lolita is one of the best examples of English prose ever, but I'm not going to fight that battle with the parents or the school board. Also, I really enjoy Umberto Eco, but I'm not going to assign him to a sixteen-year-old. So don't try to show off by recommending Joyce' Ulysses.
3. The novel can't be a part of any other class' curriculum. Give me lots of suggestions so I can eliminate some and still have plenty to work with.
4. Ideally, it's something I've read. Of course, I can always pick it up if it sounds like a winner.
So far, I'm thinking about
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Catch-22
Lord of the Flies
and maybe, maybe The God of Small Things (think kids could handle that one? Think their parents would agree?)
It's been a long time since I've read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I remember being deeply affected by the book, but without a copy handy I can't remember the quality of the prose. Anybody have a take on that one?
Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks, world.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Question for Agents, Writers and Publishers
I've hit a snag in the process of trying to get a novel published. The situation leaves me quite frustrated. What is a person to do when filled with angst and bitterness? To whom should one vent complaints in the modern era? To the internet, post haste!
Here's the deal: I've finished a book and am some twelve chapters into the sequel. As people regularly say when hitting a snag, "Everything seemed to be going so well." Here's the problem: The book is some 167,000 words long. That's long. Like average Harry Potter novel long. It doesn't set any records, but it does pose a challenge for an agent. Publishers are hesitant to risk the added cost associated with all that paper on a previously unpublished author (read: nobody), so agents are reluctant to sign them.
So cut it down, right? But here's the quandary: I can split the book in half, but it really works well as a whole, and though I envision it as part of a longer series, it could stand alone. That's important, because publishers are reluctant to take on books from a series that isn't finished yet. Hence, agents are reluctant to take them on. Now, I have no doubt I'll finish the whole thing. I love the characters, the setting, and have a clear idea of how it all ends. But I understand why a publisher would be reticent. After all, I could get hit by a bus and leave them holding the bag (to mix metaphors that, together, paint an interesting visual picture. I can just envision some stodgy old publisher standing on a curb holding what appears to be a grocery bag [but which actually contains manuscripts] while I lie in a bloody pool in the street in front of the offending public transit conveyance.) So agents won't try to sell it. So I'm sitting here. But if I split it, it becomes a finished two-parter. How many series of two books do you see at your local bookstore? That just makes its unfinished nature all the more apparent. Of course the third part is on its way, and in this case a fourth, fifth, and probably sixth would follow.
A writer friend has convinced me that the hook needs some work. He's right. Modern audiences have no patience for a slow introduction, especially from a writer they've never heard of. But I can't decide which way to punch it up until I decide whether or not to split it in half. I would really like to have an agent or publisher help me make this choice, because they are the ones who have to sell the finished product, but at this point in my writing career I have to make it on my own (or with the input of strangers online).
Maybe I've answered my own question. I suppose the solution is to cut it, but make the first half into a cohesive, shorter book that can stand alone. Sounds easy, right? Ha! It will be a huge pain in the ass, and I still may fail. Writing a good book isn't easy but I think I've accomplished it. Taking the first half and making it into a separate, sell-able book? Ugh.
Well, I'm a teacher, and I have some time this summer, so I guess I have a project now. Hopefully the final product will be even better than it was before, and I'll be glad for the delay.
So, agents, publishers, and published authors, I guess the questions is this: when and if I finish this re-write, will I be right back here complaining that no one wants to publish the book because it's too short, or part of an unfinished series, or because I am right handed or too old or too bald or simply unlucky? Or, as Miss Snark might say, it just "sux"? What will the reason be? Your prognostications (or, more seriously, your advice) would be greatly appreciated.
Here's the deal: I've finished a book and am some twelve chapters into the sequel. As people regularly say when hitting a snag, "Everything seemed to be going so well." Here's the problem: The book is some 167,000 words long. That's long. Like average Harry Potter novel long. It doesn't set any records, but it does pose a challenge for an agent. Publishers are hesitant to risk the added cost associated with all that paper on a previously unpublished author (read: nobody), so agents are reluctant to sign them.
So cut it down, right? But here's the quandary: I can split the book in half, but it really works well as a whole, and though I envision it as part of a longer series, it could stand alone. That's important, because publishers are reluctant to take on books from a series that isn't finished yet. Hence, agents are reluctant to take them on. Now, I have no doubt I'll finish the whole thing. I love the characters, the setting, and have a clear idea of how it all ends. But I understand why a publisher would be reticent. After all, I could get hit by a bus and leave them holding the bag (to mix metaphors that, together, paint an interesting visual picture. I can just envision some stodgy old publisher standing on a curb holding what appears to be a grocery bag [but which actually contains manuscripts] while I lie in a bloody pool in the street in front of the offending public transit conveyance.) So agents won't try to sell it. So I'm sitting here. But if I split it, it becomes a finished two-parter. How many series of two books do you see at your local bookstore? That just makes its unfinished nature all the more apparent. Of course the third part is on its way, and in this case a fourth, fifth, and probably sixth would follow.
A writer friend has convinced me that the hook needs some work. He's right. Modern audiences have no patience for a slow introduction, especially from a writer they've never heard of. But I can't decide which way to punch it up until I decide whether or not to split it in half. I would really like to have an agent or publisher help me make this choice, because they are the ones who have to sell the finished product, but at this point in my writing career I have to make it on my own (or with the input of strangers online).
Maybe I've answered my own question. I suppose the solution is to cut it, but make the first half into a cohesive, shorter book that can stand alone. Sounds easy, right? Ha! It will be a huge pain in the ass, and I still may fail. Writing a good book isn't easy but I think I've accomplished it. Taking the first half and making it into a separate, sell-able book? Ugh.
Well, I'm a teacher, and I have some time this summer, so I guess I have a project now. Hopefully the final product will be even better than it was before, and I'll be glad for the delay.
So, agents, publishers, and published authors, I guess the questions is this: when and if I finish this re-write, will I be right back here complaining that no one wants to publish the book because it's too short, or part of an unfinished series, or because I am right handed or too old or too bald or simply unlucky? Or, as Miss Snark might say, it just "sux"? What will the reason be? Your prognostications (or, more seriously, your advice) would be greatly appreciated.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Red Wings Beard 3: Freakin' Finally!
Well folks, the Stanley Cup has officially changed hands for another year, and my face has been liberated from the indignity of a bad beard. Here I am celebrating:
We're number one! Who? Me and the team I arbitrarily chose to root for!
In your face! Who? People who rooted for the other team I was only remotely aware of before this beard contest!
And now the obligatory credit to the divine for this inevitable end to a sporting event.
And the beard is doomed!
But before I remove the beard entirely, first... The Fu Manchu!
Awesome.
Sexy.
Okay, so I look like I'm auditioning for the Village People.
But Noah likes it.
Then, before ultimate freedom, I thought I'd try the handlebars. My mom really wanted to see just how much I'd look like my uncle, Dave.
Well, I can't do the cool handlebar mustache, obviously.
Do I look like a bald Uncle Dave?
Okay, that's enough silliness. Now, freedom!
I'm immediately struck by just how pasty I am. The beard absorbed a bit of the blinding light that reflects off my paler-than-white skin.
But it feels so good!
And now, the only faces that really matter:
If they're happy, I'm happy.
One last note; Noah, while I shaved, said I looked like Wolverine. Not a wolverine, the animal....
...but the Marvel Super Hero.
I don't really see it. I think I am now returning to my normal look, which unfortunately, is more like these Super Villains:
Lex Luthor (of Superman fame)
...and the faceless Chameleon from Spider-Man.
It seems the Red Wings have brought me back to super-villainy. So ends the saga of the beard. And now, on to my plotting of world domination!
We're number one! Who? Me and the team I arbitrarily chose to root for!
In your face! Who? People who rooted for the other team I was only remotely aware of before this beard contest!
And now the obligatory credit to the divine for this inevitable end to a sporting event.
And the beard is doomed!
But before I remove the beard entirely, first... The Fu Manchu!
Awesome.
Sexy.
Okay, so I look like I'm auditioning for the Village People.
But Noah likes it.
Then, before ultimate freedom, I thought I'd try the handlebars. My mom really wanted to see just how much I'd look like my uncle, Dave.
Well, I can't do the cool handlebar mustache, obviously.
Do I look like a bald Uncle Dave?
Okay, that's enough silliness. Now, freedom!
I'm immediately struck by just how pasty I am. The beard absorbed a bit of the blinding light that reflects off my paler-than-white skin.
But it feels so good!
And now, the only faces that really matter:
If they're happy, I'm happy.
One last note; Noah, while I shaved, said I looked like Wolverine. Not a wolverine, the animal....
...but the Marvel Super Hero.
I don't really see it. I think I am now returning to my normal look, which unfortunately, is more like these Super Villains:
Lex Luthor (of Superman fame)
...and the faceless Chameleon from Spider-Man.
It seems the Red Wings have brought me back to super-villainy. So ends the saga of the beard. And now, on to my plotting of world domination!
Monday, June 02, 2008
Red Wings Beard Part 2: Pittsburgh Penguins Postpone Emancipation from Beardistan
So close! I turned on Game 5 of the NHL playoffs to see the Red Wings down by two, and started to lose hope that I would finally get to shave tonight. Then they scored three in a row, and with less than a minute left it looked like I would soon be rid of this itchy, scraggly growth.
Paige said my last pics made me look mean, so I had her take some more while we watched, then took a celebratory shot with the Red Wings in the background.
First, here are some I took with Noah:
And one with Noah and my nephew, Colin:
And one taken BY my nephew:
(He wasn't as frightened as you might expect. In fact, he thought it was pretty funny.)
Here's one of the pictures Paige took tonight:
And here's the one I took with the Red Wings as background:
Then Pittsburgh scored and sent it to overtime.
And another overtime.
And another.
And then they scored.
I think Colin captured my feelings right now:
Paige said my last pics made me look mean, so I had her take some more while we watched, then took a celebratory shot with the Red Wings in the background.
First, here are some I took with Noah:
And one with Noah and my nephew, Colin:
And one taken BY my nephew:
(He wasn't as frightened as you might expect. In fact, he thought it was pretty funny.)
Here's one of the pictures Paige took tonight:
And here's the one I took with the Red Wings as background:
Then Pittsburgh scored and sent it to overtime.
And another overtime.
And another.
And then they scored.
I think Colin captured my feelings right now:
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