25 Random Lies About Me, issue thirteen

13. In high school I raised carrier pigeons.



Once I sent a long, eloquent letter to an ex-girlfriend who was older and had gone off to college. The letter begged her to take me back and to give the long distance relationship a try.



I didn't get an immediate reply, and shortly thereafter I headed across the country to go to a different university. Two years and three serious girlfriends later, I found a pigeon dead on my doorstep carrying my high school sweetheart's reply. She said she was willing to make it work and would stay faithful until she heard from me. I wrote her an embarrassed Dear John letter, but since the pigeon was dead I attached it to the leg of a neighborhood stray cat and just hoped for the best.



I don't know what happened to that girl, but I can prove that I've sacrificed for love, because that cat scratched the hell out of my hand and I have the scars to show for it.

Stop Podcasting Yourself: Literary Bloke

I love podcasts. It's become something of an addiction. One of my favorites is "Stop Podcasting Yourself". I highly recommend it.

On this week's show, the hosts, Graham Clark and Dave Shumka, asked listeners for suggestions for a literary figure to be a part of the League of Extraordinary Blokes. If you're not sure what a bloke is, think of Jason Statham.



Anyway, Graham and Dave started out just creating a list of blokes, then it morphed into creating a musical band composed of blokes, then blokey scientists, and now a shout-out for blokey literary figures. As someone with literary aspirations (failed, heartbreaking, soul-crushing, just-got-another-polite-rejection-letter-this-week kind of aspirations) I thought I'd share my two cents. Now, I'm not a bit blokey. I don't cheat on my wife, I rarely get a chance to drink, and I'm a pacifist, so bar fights are kind-of off limits. In fact, take Jason Statham, give him some glasses, remove his muscles, and take away his everything-that-makes-him-a-bloke, and you've got me. Basically, we share a hairstyle. But I can think of some writers who are blokey.

And alive. They have to be alive.

My first suggestion is Max Berry. He wrote Jennifer Government, a fabulously blokey book that will crack you up while it gives the middle finger to multinational corporations and the free market utopia they'd like the create. And how do I know Max Berry is a bloke? Just look at him.



My second suggestion is Salman Rushdie.



This guy is so blokey he pissed off the Ayatollah Khomeini and had to go into hiding, where he hung out with guys like Bono from U2. Meanwhile, he married a supermodel, got divorced, and is rumored to have moved on to some other Bollywood starlet. This guy has won a Booker Prize, and I'll bet he would also headbutt you if pushed to it. Super-blokey!

The most blokey writer I can think of who wouldn't qualify isn't Earnest Hemmingway. He was just a dick. Sure, he was a genius, but he was a jerk, which isn't the same thing as being a bloke. No, the most blokey ex-writer is Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.



He reportedly thought of the idea for the brilliant, absurdist five-part-trilogy when he got drunk and passed out on a hilltop. When he woke up and looked at the stars, the premise came to him. Now that's blokey! Unfortunately, he died at 49. Was his death blokey? A bar fight? Headbutting a member of the paparazzi? Sleeping with a supermodel he'd just rescued from an evil gang leader? No. He got off the treadmill at the gym and had a heart attack. Not blokey. Still, when he told the story of his moment of inspiration, he originally said it happened in Australia, then changed his story, claiming it happened in Spain "because it's easier to spell." Now that's a bloke!

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twelve

12. At the age of seventeen I was nominated for a Nobel Prize.



I really wanted to win one for literature, but, due to some combination of typographical error, mistaken identity, and a brief experiment with a new category of prizes, I almost received one for xenobiology, a fringe science speculating about the biological, anatomical, and evolutionary nature of alien life.



I didn’t win but, come to think of it, this may be why my particular bus was picked up by that flying saucer a few years later.



I’d never really put the two together before. Hmm.

Jindal's Strange Rebuttal

I know it's piling on to pick on Bobby Jindal's speech now that it's been so universally panned by critics and pundits on both sides, but I did want to make a quick point. His key anecdote was about an incident during Hurricane Katrina, when he walked into an office and found a local sheriff struggling to get help from the federal government. He swooped in and saved the day, the story goes, and this is supposed to show us that the government is inept. But here's the thing: He was a congressman at the time. Couldn't that also be a story about how government can be good? Also, how seriously should we take a critique of the government when the central narrative is one where a Republican congressman rescued a local sheriff from the inept federal agency run by... a Republican president? This could also just be a story about why no one should elect Republicans. You know, it just might be better for the Repub Party if it turned out that Jindal made the whole story up.



Oh wait. He did! Check it out!

Now Bill Kristol can be wrong somewhere else!

Let's take a little break from the 25 Random Lies About Me project (more to come) so I can return to one of my favorite subjects: the remarkable way Bill Kristol manages to always be wrong.

So Kristol got canned at the NYTimes and is now writing a less frequent column for the Washington Post. Look, I understand that papers want to find somebody to be their conservative voice, but George Will, Charles Krauthhammer, and David Brooks all do the job just fine without reading like... well, like Bill Kristol. And if people want a Neo-Con, they can read Christopher Hitchens. Bill Kristol is a Bush water carrier, and Bush has left for Texas, so he's a man without a platform.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his advice to Republicans today in the Post. He concedes that Republicans "need fresh thinking in a host of areas of domestic policy, thinking that builds on previous conservative achievements but that deals with the new economic and social realities." But he offers no ideas himself. Instead, he says they will have to be politically agile to make up for their lack of ideas. Then he offers his political strategy:

"Obstruct and delay."

"Obstruct and delay"? That's Kristol's idea for a Republican strategy?

A Republican friend of mine was telling me just the other day that Obama would lose in 2012 if the economy hasn't recovered. But we both agreed that the only way he could weather that is if the Republicans did nothing but obstruct and delay, thus earning the ire of every person who could possibly benefit from this government program or that one. And let's face it, we could all see a windfall from some government program. Obstructionism will hurt my friend, the conservative police officer just as it will hurt me, the liberal school teacher. It will hurt the assembly-line worker just as it hurts the CEO. When Republicans obstruct and delay, they take the burden off the Dems, who would have to be choosing winners and losers, and make themselves responsible for every loser. This is a political strategy bereft of both intellectual heft and political savvy.

Way to go again, Bill!

25 Random Lies About Me, issue eleven

11. Speaking of Australia, in 2004, when former Midnight Oil lead singer Peter Garret was elected to Australia’s House of Representatives...



...the other members of the band, which had officially disbanded in 2002, decided to search for another front man.



Through some mutual friends and some interesting turns of events which would take too long to describe here, they found me. I was their lead singer for just over eight months, during which time we went on a world tour and starred in a reality TV show on the Australian version of the E network, which Australians spell “NetworkE”.



My performances were mostly met with good reviews, though some critics felt that I skewed the band too heavily toward their later work, favoring songs from Earth and Sun and Moon over classics like “Beds are Burning”. Soon, it became apparent that I would either have to leave the band or end up serving in some high capacity in the Australian government...



As an American, the second option didn’t sit too well, so I came back home just in time for the birth of my son Noah, who’d been conceived right before the guys and I headed off to Tokyo. In fact, the dates are so close he might not even be mine, and may be the child of bassist Peter Gifford, who we called “Giffo”. Even my faithful wife Paige is not immune to the charms of bass players, and who can blame her?

25 Random Lies About Me, issue ten

10. Though I’m not good at building electronic things, like Phil’s time machine, I’m pretty handy with older technology, and something of a history buff. Once, I decided to test out the theory that the people of Easter Island came there in dugout boats from South America.



I created my own simple seafaring craft and set sail from the Oregon coast, intending to land in Hawaii, which is roughly equidistant.



I didn’t quite find it and sailed halfway around the world, finally arriving at a small city on the south side of Australia named, ironically, Portland.



While there I became a walk-on member of their Australian Rules Football team, and in 2006 we won the Western Border Football League Premiership.



I thought about staying, but got sick of the way people spelled things like “Centre” and “Theatre”, so I came home. The team went on to win the premiership again in 2007, which should make me happy, but somehow it just felt like a big FU from the guys, like they wanted to show that they didn’t really need my help.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue nine

9. As a child I loved Legos...



...and would build replicas of medieval castles in order to perform enactments of historical events.



My dad caught me reenacting the beheadings of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and refused to believe my explanation.



My parents took me to see a psychologist who happened to be a member of our church, and who offered to give them a discount.



It turns out that discount child psychology isn’t as great as it sounds. The man decided that only shock therapy could control my urges to cut women’s heads off.



It took me years to learn to control my facial ticks, and even now, if I shuffle my feet on carpet, I can touch people and give them small third degree burns.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue eight

8. I once saw a dust-bunny under my desk hop a few times.



Then it settled on a new patch of dust to chew on, but I could have sworn it looked over its shoulder as it did so, wary of any nearby dust-wolves.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue seven

7. While my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, Joe, she would take me to the University of Illinois library.



She liked the peacefulness and found that I could entertain myself easily there, thought I was only three years old. She didn’t pay much attention to what I was reading (it was an uncomfortable pregnancy, and as long as I was quiet she was happy), so she remains unaware, to this day, that the first book I picked up was one on speed reading.



After devouring it, I quickly made my way through almost half of the library’s ten million volumes.



Eventually, in the education section, I found a book which convinced me that speed readers often trade comprehension for speed. I became convinced that comprehension was more important just a few books down the shelf, and abandoned the project. Funny tidbit: Because of the design of the library’s stacks, I’ve read thousands of books about agriculture, and I’ve never read a single thing about the nation of Mozambique.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue six

6. My favorite foods are mushrooms, oysters, and cooked spinach.






In fact, I really only eat things those food philistines among us might describe as “slimy”.



I find this has a… dramatic effect on my digestion.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue five

5. One summer I had a brief but torrid affair with Claire Danes.



One night we had an argument while driving down 101 near one of her homes in Los Angeles (we frequently shuttled to her other home in New York, and sometimes made the tabloids when we made out in popular restaurants), and on this particular night Claire became violent, causing me to crash her BMW into a divider.



She walked away from the accident, seemingly unscathed, but it turned out she suffered from some memory loss because she couldn’t remember me at all. She went off to Yale that next fall and I returned to college. I’ve completely recovered from the heartbreak, but my shoulder still hurts when it’s about to rain.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue four

4. I have a human eyeball in a box in my attic.



It’s a souvenir from a bar fight I got into once. I tried to poke the other guy in both eyes, but he blocked using the vaunted three-stooges-defense.



It turned out my middle finger was longer than his four fingers were wide, and one of his eyes popped out onto the pool table. I grabbed his eye, along with the quarters we’d both left on the edge of the table (we were arguing about whose turn it was), shoved both in my pocket, and ran out of the bar. I kept the eye, but I think I spent the quarters on a parking meter.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue three

3. I was once abducted by aliens. I was on a greyhound bus ride from Cincinnati to Spokane. Somewhere in Montana the whole bus was picked up by a flying saucer...



...and transported into low-Earth orbit where the passengers were interviewed telepathically by small green creatures with over-sized heads. I’m not sure which passenger turned them off to our species (perhaps all of us disappointed them in some way), but they made it clear they were disgusted with us and would no longer have anything to do with our planet. Then they put the bus back down in South Dakota, lengthening our trip, which irritated the passengers more than anything.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue two

2. I have a deep-seated and perhaps slightly irrational fear of microwave ovens.



If I am in your house and you have one, and I still seem comfortable, you can be sure I lined my boxer shorts with aluminum foil that day.

Or I'm wearing these.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue one

As previously advertised, here are the 25 Random Lies About Me, presented as a serial.


1. Because I’m not good at physics, I’ve never built a time machine. My friend Phil Harrington built one on a whim one weekend in college.





After drinking too much I decided to try it out. As per the cliché, I thought I’d go back to kill Hitler.



I decided to go back to when he was a sixth grader, not because I like killing kids, but because that year he happened to be in the same school as the future great philosopher Wittgenstein, and I thought I could have a talk with him after offing the future dictator.



Unfortunately, I forgot that time machines do not also move a person through space, so I spent a cold night in Spokane in the year 1911, then came back to the present and slept it off.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue zero

You may have heard of this viral phenomenon on Facebook, the "25 Random Things About Me." If you don't Facebook (is that a verb yet?) then you might have been spared. You get a notice that a friend has tagged you (read: notified/obligated) with their own list. The note begins with a stock paragraph:

"Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you."

Like how it has all that authority at the beginning? RULES! Then it ends with that desperate plea for more information. I mean, these are coming from people who are already your friends. Who can say, "Screw you, buddy! I don't want you to know any more about me."

But here's the thing; what if there isn't any more to know? My life hasn't been entirely boring. I've lives in a handful of places and had a few rare experiences. But 25? I don't think so. And the few I have had, I've told and retold to friends so many times that my wife, Paige, has heard all the stories a million times and has to kindly remind me when I'm telling them to another friend for the third or fourth time. Plus, I'm a blabber-mouth, for Blog-sake!

Feeling obligated to accomplish a herculean task, I found a solution when my mom sent me her list. Her final entry read: "I like to read fiction." I thought, well, I like to write fiction, so that could be my first one. And then it dawned on me; after that first entry, why not write 24 examples of things which never actually happened to me.

It sounded fun (and it was) but it took forever. Coming up with 24 spontaneous stories of things I've never actually done proved to be more difficult than I intially guessed. It took me three or four sittings, and in between I found myself making little notes during work about other possible lies I could tell about my life. Then, after all that, I went to post it and discovered that, true to the post's initial paragraph, you can ONLY send it to 25 people. I mean, these are my friends and family! They already know I'm a dork. What's the point if I can't make that clear to the whole world, right?

So I think I'll post them here, as a serial. "25 Random Lies About Me." I'm not a big fan of the term "random", probably because people beat it to death my freshmen year of college, but maybe it's essential to the viral success of the lists, so I'll reluctantly acquiesce. Stay tuned (does one tune in to a blog? Stay posted? No, I'm the one who posts. Stay WiFi connected? Webbed? Interneted?)...

Writing the Perfect Query Letter

As is my habit, I've written another novel, then buckled under my overwhelming fear of failure in the face of the challenge of selling it to an agent, then a publisher. But this time, I decided to acquiesce in a new way; instead of giving up entirely, I'm asking for help creating the perfect query letter. Maybe, if I can gain enough confidence in the letter itself, I'll be motivated to repeat the process of sending it out and receiving regular, crushing rejection letters in my email inbox.

(Note to agents: I don't hold rejection against you. That would be like holding it against a reader when they struggle with an unwieldy sentence I've written. It's your job to reject the stinkers, just as it's my job to go back and agonize over that sentence until it's clear. I know I'm supposed to be thick skinned, but I'm sure you'll forgive me for not being Mr. Spock.)

Thanks to an article on Slate.com asking folks to help write Obama's Inaugural Address, I found Mixedink.com. It's a service where anybody can go on and help edit a document, basically making your document a wiki or a Googledoc open to the world. I've decided to see if anyone would work on my letter.

So, if you are interested in giving me a hand, I posted the most recent draft of my query letter. I'm not married to any of it (even the book's title), so feel free to hack away, here.

Thank you!

Required Reading

I wish I could make every American read this article about how we can't just blame Bush for everything that happened over the last eight years: Folks, the blame has to be shared by all of us, even those of us in blue states who kept voting for the other guy.

Please read this.

"What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years" by Tom Junod, from January's Esquire.

Inevitable Disappointment?

Many liberals like me have been cynically admitting that we have set ourselves up for inevitable disappointment because we've elevated our hopes in an Obama presidency to untenable heights. On the Daily Show this is a joke. For some of us, it's a reality we reluctantly acknowledge.

Well, keep that disappointment train in the station, folks, because we have some big victories to be pleased with already. Not only has Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanimo within a year (closing it in a day, as some have asked for, would have been irresponsible) and signing another prohibiting torture, but today he signed one allowing international aid to go to clinics even if they (gasp) provide full reproductive healthcare to women in the third world. Under the Bush administration, if a clinic told a woman she had options like contraception or abortion, anything other than abstinence, then they could risk losing their funding. Well, no more.

And it gets better! The Senate passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which already passed the House, so Obama will soon be signing that into law.

It will be important for us to remember, when something doesn't go our way, that we've already gained a lot in just a few days. Hell, Americans can't legally torture people anymore. As much as that should have been a point of shame for anyone with a patriotic bone in their body, this should be a point of pride.

Inevitable? Probably.
Arrived? Not yet.

MLK2 Day Tradition

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and again on April 4th (the day of his assassination) I try to make a point to listen to one of Dr. King's speeches. You can find recordings of many of them online, and they always make me prouder to be a Christian and an American. This year I decided to re-read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The King Center has a pdf version available on it's site here. Since I've ranted here about some of my disillusion with Chistendom in America, it's so refreshing to read Dr. King struggle with the same thing.

"I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, on Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular."

Can't we say the same thing about our elective wars, about the generational poverty in our country, about our disdain for the natural world? And, though churches and clergy can have legitimate discussions about their particular stance on marrying gay couples within their own churches, isn't the legalization of gay marriage an issue of justice which the moderate church should be speaking out about, rather than hiding while the right-wing tries to use the state as a tool for their religious oppression? I'm so grateful to people like Al Sharpton, for his brave stance on the issue of gay rights. But I'm deeply ashamed of the larger, silent church.

Read what Dr. King said about this kind of silent church:

"I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Walleye gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

"Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

"There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators"' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

"Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

"But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust."

I confess to feeling that outright disgust, even though I am a son and grandson of preachers myself. But Dr. King did not lose hope.

"One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."

So if he didn't lose faith, how can I call him one of my heroes and not try to emulate him?

Dr. King finished, "Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." I expect that tomorrow, during the inauguration, some will say all those stars are shining. I still think the moral arc of the universe is a bit longer than that.

But I will still celebrate tomorrow, because it will be another sign that it bends toward justice.

God bless you, Al Sharpton!

Al Sharpton spoke out against Prop 8 at he Human Rights Ecumenical Service in Atlanta on Sunday. Check this out! He said:

"There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people's bedrooms and claim that God sent you."

Furthermore, "It amazes me," he said, "when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being [relegated] into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners."

"I am tired," he went on, "of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they're preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade...We know you're not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California--when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When [accused Ponzi scammer] Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren't there you had nothing to say."

"[Social conservatives] will start with the gays but they will end with everybody else," he said. "If you give the Pat Robertsons of the world the theological right to condemn some, then you give them the right to condemn others."

Amen, Al, and thank you for giving me a bit of renewed faith in American Christianity.

A Serious Question

One of the newest conservative talking points I've heard from various right-wing pundits is that, despite their landslide electoral losses, this is still a "center-right country". At the same time, a fellow named Wakefield Tolbert has been carrying on something of an argument with @bdul muHib on the comments section of the post about homeschooling. I say "something of an argument" because it's very difficult to track what exactly Wakefield is talking about. I challenge someone to summarize his arguments for him into some concise, coherent form. Anyway, when challenged about the impenetrability of his writing he dismissed @bdul and myself by associating us with the "liberal chimpanzees" over at Slate.com. I will freely admit to being a liberal, and this isn't the first time my opinions have been wholly discounted for it, but in the context of this new talking point about this being a center-right country, I want to know what "liberal" means to conservatives, what conservatism means in the wake of the Bush presidency, and where this notion of center-right comes from.

This is a genuine question. Bill Bishop, in his excellent blog during the election titled "The Big Sort", explained very convincingly that we choose our politics as a consequence of our lifestyles, and, more and more, we are moving to live near people like us; hence the political and geographical polarization in our country. Bishop referenced some study that showed that conservatives are better at understanding where liberals are coming from than vice-versa. At first I frowned at that. We're liberals. We're touchy-feely. We like to understand other points of view. So how is it we can't understand our conservative neighbors as well as they understand us? But the more I thought about it, the more I had to admit that it's true, at least in my case. I just can't wrap my mind around the apparent contradictions I see coming from the conservative side, and I fail to see those same contradictions on my own side of the fence. So I'm asking for help.

To keep things relatively simple, let's see if we can even agree on definitions. Conservatives, going back to Buckley, figured out that they needed to distill their vision down to ten words. Those were:

Strong Defense
Free Markets
Lower Taxes
Smaller Government
Family Values

George Lakoff proposed these ten words as the progressive values:

Stronger America
Broad Prosperity
Better Future
Effective Government
Mutual Responsibility

I think those are both pretty decent summaries of the values upon which conservatives and liberals base their policy proposals, but I'm sure we could quibble about the wording, and I'd have no problem with that, because these small, nuance difference have huge consequences. Think this is just semantics? Think about the difference in opinion when you ask people what they think about estate taxes on the wealthy vs. death taxes on business owners. Or torture vs. enhanced interrogation techniques.

When I look at the list of values, I can see why liberals like me are so pissed off at Bush. He has not made America stronger in the world by any measure. Prosperity has grown only among the tiniest sliver at the top. Our future looks much bleaker than it did eight years ago. Our government has proven itself to be woefully incompetent on a number of fronts. And some Americans are paying very heavy tolls for all Bush's mistakes (too many have paid the ultimate price) while others have only been asked to do a bit more shopping. For a liberal, his record is dismal.

But how do conservatives see it? Bush, according to every military expert I've read, has stretched our military to the breaking point, all the while ratcheting up our need for military strength in the world, making us that much more vulnerable. His emphasis on free markets not only showed the dangers of deregulation, but then he abandoned those principles to bail out the banking industry. He lowered taxes on the wealthy, but did so while growing the federal deficit to such a degree that it's not really a tax cut but a differed tax increase on the next generation that will put every tax increase ever proposed by any other president to shame by comparison. He created the single largest bureaucracy in the history of the federal government in the form of Homeland Security, and oversaw that greatest expansion in the size of the federal government of any president. He appears to have stuck to his guns on issues of family values, but this has shown in stark relief that these family values are focused almost exclusively on limiting gay rights and protecting the unborn: Even Bush's greatest accomplishment in office, his increase in aid to Africa, is mitigated by the fact that he stipulated that none of the money could go to clinics which provided abortion or even contraception. For those of us who think decisions like these are best made between a woman, her doctor, and her God, Bush's insertion of his own agenda into women's health decisions in the third world means his definition of family values is very... focused. Add to this an elective war where as many as a million Americans and Iraqis have died, a million members of families lost in a war that didn't need to happen, and this definition of family values strikes us liberals as completely vacuous. But what do conservatives think?

And here's the thing; while the conservative talking heads keep saying this is a center-right country, on almost every issue I can think of, the polling data doesn't back them up. Most Americans believe a woman should have a right to make her own reproductive health choices. Most Americans think this war was wrong. Most Americans think the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina showed them to be inept. Most Americans think that the government should be doing more to help people suffering during this economic downturn (pro-Broad Prosperity) but are infuriated by the way it bailed out Wall Street (showing they're also pro-Free Markets, with limits). Most Americans want their government to provide more oversight of the financial sector.

Jon Stewart challenged a conservative guest on just this point (I think it was Mike Huckabee), arguing that the history of the United States has been one of slow but inexorable progress away from bigotry and aristocracy toward pluralism and inclusiveness. When conservatives say this is still a center-right country, are they just referencing our tendency to move toward social progress at a very slow pace? If so, then isn't conservatism just associating itself with every kind of prejudice and backward attitude we've had to struggle so hard to put behind us? What am I not seeing which will help me understand conservatism?

And what is it I don't see about liberalism which dictates that a conservative can apply that label to me and dismiss everything I have to say? What can a conservative see, that I can't, which would explain such antipathy toward liberalism?

And... Exhale.

This will sound schizophrenic, but after staying quiet about some depression for weeks, I'm currently listening to Barack Obama in a podcast of Stephonopolus' "This Week", and I'm already feeling better. I don't think Obama is some kind of messiah, and I know he will disappoint me many times over the next four years, but just having a president who can speak articulately and intelligently about his policy proposals is such a dramatic change from the last eight years of "Bring it on", "Stay the course", Heckuva'-job-ruining-the-country style of leadership, it's such a relief to know things will be better, not perfect, not ideal, but better, that my spirits are lifted.

Depression Confession

I'm writing this in church, but later I'll post it to the blog; the traditional place of confession meets the modern, the holy meets the tacky.

I've been depressed since Christmas. The pneumonia probably didn't set a great tone for the year, and the outbreak of new fighting in Gaza hardly lifts the spirits. Frankly, missing worship at my own church on Christmas Eve due to an ice storm didn't help. But some time has passed, and these explanations aren't enough to justify my depression.

So let me confess: In two areas of my life, the better I'm getting, the further I get from good enough. The calendar year has turned over, I've finished another revolution around the sun, and these artificial goalposts I've chosen are now just a bit further from my fingertips.

One of these goals is the publication of the novels I write. Why should that be so important to me? I wonder if anyone has done any research on the relationship between the ages at which we choose our arbitrary, external goals and the power they hold over us. I'd bet that part of the reason publishing has such a hold on me is precisely because I started so young, writing my first full length novel at 14. Sure, it was crappy, but the experience provided space to fabricate this elaborate fantasy of how my life would be when people were finally reading books I'd written. As I've grown the fantasy has eroded, except for the hard pit at its center; I would be happy and fulfilled. Now, both as a hobbyist and as a teacher of creative writing, I have the time and means to work on my craft. My writing improves with every revision. I'm getting better. But every set-back, every rejection, every second guess of each word in that ineffective query letter pushes that goal off just a bit further. This becomes my dream deferred.

As challenging as that might be, sitting in secret in front of my computer on a Friday night, it only punctuates a week where I wade in these deferred dreams. Just as I hone my writing craft, as a teacher I'm polishing my courses, tweaking my lessons, refining my delivery. But it seems my students are less and less motivated. I try to tell myself this is a product of my own age; the human impulse toward conservatism and despair that compels us to dismiss the next generation as lazy, immoral, in every way inferior to our own. I won't buy into that. I'm too liberal, I suppose, adhering too much to Kennedy's axiom that "We have come too far, we have sacrificed too much, to disdain the future now." I refuse to blame the kids completely, but I do think they've been inundated by a consumerist culture that tells them their futures will be provided, shrink wrapped and deeply discounted, by the local big-box store. It's my job, in part, to teach them that they will have to work harder and yearn for greater things, or they will find themselves trapped in a kind a caste misery they can't yet appreciate. But I can't seem to manage. Now, as our economy slips into the full depths of the Bush Depression, I'm so fearful for these kids. In years past I worried because they incorrectly expected that they could achieve their parents' lifestyle with only their parents' level of education. Now it's going to be so much worse for them. I don't know how to convey that to them. And if I despair because of my ambition toward a fantasy, am I fit to push them to dream?

And now the next stage of a confession: The guilt. What right do I have to feel depressed? My marriage is happy, my son is wonderful, I have a roof over my head, my belly is full... How presumptuous to even allow myself these feelings. On an intellectual level, I know one doesn't earn the right to an irrational state. Paige, who is getting her masters in counseling, assures me there's no reason to feel guilty about feeling depressed. Still, just as I developed a neurotic sense that publishing would make me feel fulfilled, I also learned that one should not complain of hunger when children are starving in Africa, and, by extension, that one shouldn't complain of depression when the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.

Of course, I'm not catholic, so I wasn't taught to keep it in the confessional booth, and my parents weren't Nostradamus, so I wasn't taught not to blog about it. So I have the guilt, but I still broadcast the confession.

And Paige is right about this, too; it does feel good to get it out.

Nine days left of the Bush administration. Maybe my depression will lift soon.

Don't blame "Religion"

I haven't blogged in a bit because I've been sick. I didn't realize how sick, but it turns out I have pneumonia. It is unpleasant.

I thought about complaining about my condition, but considering what's going on in the world, my pneumonia seems a bit paltry.

Then I received an email today from someone on one of the various Obama list-serves I got onto during the election, claiming that the situation was intractable, but simple to understand. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all want to live in Isreal and won't move away, so they will fight about it forever because, this person claimed, religion causes all the wars in the world. Moreover, without religion this person said there would be no war.

That, I felt, demanded a response.

I'm sorry, but that's just one of the most patently ridiculous things I've ever heard. Without religion there would be no war? Really? You know, Stalin was an atheist. Hitler specifically wrote that his issues with Jews did not have to do with their religion but with what he considered to be something deficient in them as detected by the rational science of his day. I'm not going to defend all world religions, or any of them, for that matter. Many are expressly violent, and many others are used as a pretext by powerful people to motivate followers to carry out violence. But people find lots of reasons to fight; scarcity of land, of water, of goods, old-fashioned human rage. It's insulting when religious people condescend to non-religious people, judging their behavior based on religious schema the non-religious person does not hold. But it's also insulting when non-religious people condescend to religious people, treating them all as ignorant yahoos or worse, responsible for all the wars in the world. So let's avoid both kinds of ignorant rhetoric, if possible.

The situation between Palestine and Israel is incredibly complex. The countries aren't religiously homogeneous. The people of both countries do not have universal feelings about their governments' actions. These Muslims, Christians, and Jews the writer mentioned already all do live in Israel, and already all do live in Palestine. This is not a clear-cut religious war. The internal political realities inside both Israel and Palestine should not be ignored by our media, who like to talk about the conflict as though it's a two-sided sports match. There are wheels within wheels here. One interesting example: I heard a tidbit that the rockets Hamas has been launching were nearing the range to hit Israel's nuclear reactor where they have been making their nukes (unofficially) for decades. To what degree is the defense of civilians a pretext to defend a military instillation against future attack should those rockets gain greater range and accuracy? We'll never know, nor will the parents of the people who die on both sides of the conflict. So if the war is so complicated the Israelis and Palestinians don't fully know why they are fighting, we shouldn't try to dismiss the whole explanation with a single word: "Religion."

We oversimplify at our own expense.