Dear Hosni Mubarak

Hosni Mubarak, the ruthless dictator of Egypt, has thrown a civil servant into jail for three years for writing a satirical poem. As Mubarak's crimes go, this is pretty low on the list. He's stayed in power since a state of emergency was declared at the death of the last dictator. That was in 1981. Mubarak has not only made the government so corrupt that people believe "A policeman is more dangerous than a criminal", but he's turned those police on his political rivals, resulting in the murders of unarmed protesters. So then this guy, Moneer Said Hanna, wrote a poem accusing Mubarak of making "people feel confused and lost". Um, I think he's made a lot of people feel injured or dead. Perhaps something was lost in the translation, but when Andy Zaltzman read a bit of the poem on The Bugle, I couldn't figure out what was insulting about it. Maybe in Arabic it was a real slam. Anyway, Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver asked for their listeners (us loyal Buglers) to write better poems insulting Hosni Mubarak, so I tried. (Warning to those with overly-sensitive sensibilities: Strings of insults, even in the form of sonnets, may contain foul language.)

Dear Hosni Mubarak

Dear Hosni Mubarak, you stupid twat,
Poets worldwide you’ve rous’d to the defense
Of Moneer Said Hanna, who, for naught
You threw in jail, so let insults commence.
The Brits might refer to you as a "git",
Or a "wanker" or a "tosser" at least.
Though their use of “cunt” shocks us Yanks a bit
For you, one with an infection of yeast.
The Brits would say “prick”, while we would say “dick”,
And add “sucker” and “gobbler” and others.
Since this three year sentence is clearly sick,
We’d accuse you of mating with mothers.
Now I won’t get to see the Sphinx or Nile.
It’s worth it to say, of shit, you’re a pile.

Man on the Moon

This is fun: a mash-up from Slate-V exploring how modern news would cover the moon landing. They're more optimistic than I am. I would expect it to devolve into either a partisan cat fight or a series of mind-numbing interviews with completely unrelated and unqualified pop stars.

Dog Poo in Motion: A Political Fable

My sister- and brother-in-law are down visiting, and, much to our cats' dismay, they've brought the dog. Tonight, when I stepped out onto the back porch to smoke my pipe, I found a medium sized, curled up dog turd off to one side. I made a point not to step on it, but otherwise ignored it while I smoked, until I realized it was moving. It turns out that a dark brown slug had decided to change course, and had curled around himself, obscuring his antennae and inadvertently masquerading as something else entirely. As I watched the slug straighten out and choose a new path, I realized there's a political moral to this story.

Large groups of people, like political parties or entire nations, are like slugs in some ways. They move slowly. They are bloated. Politically speaking, they are basically shaped like slugs, with a few people on the far right and far left but most people spread relatively evenly on a spectrum in the middle. They choose their directions slowly, ignorantly, and greedily. Once they get moving, they are basically propelled by a combination of momentum, some undetectable undulations, and slime of one kind or another. And, most importantly, when they can't decide which way to go, they begin to look like something of a mess.

I think both our country and both its major political parties are at such a point right now. I have my preference about our direction (universal health care, gay marriage, a genuine response to global warming, a more moral distribution of power and wealth), which incline me to want the Democratic party to figure out a unified direction and start heading there. Frankly, I think the Dems, especially in Congress, are so indebted to moneyed interests, so focused on being nice and bipartisan, and so fearful of hazy, vague taunts of "socialist" and "liberal", that they can't inspire. However, I also know that real debate is essential for a healthy democracy, so I'd like to see the Republican party choose a new direction, even if it's one a don't agree with, rather than circling around leadership like Governors Sanford and Palin and contributing about as much to the national debate as Jon and Kate Plus Eight. Both parties are spiraling around themselves, and, as a nation, we've curved into this fetid, unsanitary shape. We should acknowledge what the slug is teaching us: From a distance, one could be forgiven for mistaking us for a dog turd, so we'd better get moving somewhere fast.

3:30 am Review of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince

I've just returned from a midnight showing of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, and want to jot down some quick thoughts before I tap out for the night.

First off, as I mentioned today on Facebook, I understand that since the movie Independence Day Hollywood has been pushing movies earlier and earlier into the week in order to skew their reported "opening weekend" gross. I understand the pressure to bloat the figures, but I think we've officially reached the point at which this is ridiculous. A Tuesday midnight showing? Really? I may be a teacher on summer break, and therefore have little reason to complain, but even I know that Tuesday night is not the weekend. We've now reached the point at which, if Hollywood wants to extend the "weekend" any more, they will have to begin at midnight on Sunday night of the previous week, which, to me, makes it the previous weekend, therefore nullifying the benefit. So let's just stop the silliness before all movies open at midnight on Sunday nights.

Okay, with that aside, the film itself will be a huge hit. I live in a small town (around 18,000 between the two twin cities of Independence and Monmouth, Oregon) and our multi-plex had a line that wrapped around to the back of the building. They showed it on five screens, and my theater, at least, was packed to the gills. I doubt these numbers will taper off when folks can see it on a genuine weekend.

Now, I wasn't a fan of he first films in the series. I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. Sure, the early special effects were a bit blue-screeny, but that wasn't the big issue. Then a friend (Joel) pointed it out. They were too bright. One of the reasons readers, both kids and adults, enjoy spending time at Hogwarts is because it is a dark and forbidding place. The first films were overly targeted at the youngest readers, with too many goofy one-lines and far too much quidditch, but mostly it was the cheery coloring that set them off on the wrong foot.

Well, better too bright than too dark, because this has allowed the films to improve as the children age and the series progresses. Until tonight I thought Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix was the only film that finally caught the tone of the books, eschewing all the cheeriness of the first films. Watching the previews for Half Blood Prince, I was very concerned that they'd lost their taste for the darkness and were making a movie focusing entirely on the kids' developing romances. One could easily be excused for believing this would be a happy movie, judging by the previews alone.

I'm pleased to report that they got it right. Not to spoil anything too much, but the ending is not a happy one, and it matches the abruptness of the novel, which caught me off guard in the reading as well. Because everything has to be condensed so much, there were scenes that had to be shortened and others cut. This will not please the die hard fins, who seem to be more than willing to sit through a seven hour film to see all their favorite scenes included intact, but I thought they made good choices, over-all. There was a bit too much of the relationship stuff, but there was a bit too much of it in the book, too. There it served to draw out the space between the more pressing matters and illustrate just how much these main characters are still kids, unwilling and unable to sink into the despair their situation should inspire. It served the same function in the film, but, despite the lead characters' continued immaturity in some respects, they also caught that Harry is out of the accurately portrayed annoying whiny phase he went through in much of The Order of the Phoenix, and starting to grow up into a genuinely likable adult.

Before the abrupt and (frankly) anticlimactic ending, there's a fabulous and genuinely scary scene which will keep me from showing this movie to my four year old for many years. The jock sitting two seats from me, holding his girlfriend either protectively or lasciviously throughout the movie, screamed like a little girl, and I might have laughed at him (as his girlfriend did) had I not started violently (but, luckily, silently) in my seat at the same time.

Because the ending is cut so short, it cannot possibly inspire the same feelings as the novel, and shouldn't be expected to. I'm grateful that the medium can;t quite capture the novels, because that's more reason to encourage people to read the books. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, there's no disputing that these books are better than their movies. (I love the Tolkien novels, but I can make a pretty good argument that the movies are better.) Perhaps the creators of The Half Blood Prince movie could have focused more on this last portion of the film, rather than leaving us with what is essentially a "to be continued", but by the end I felt some of their better moments had earned them a little mercy.

So, when it comes to a grade, I suppose the question is, if a movie doesn't hit every note quite right but succeeds at what it's attempting to do, is it a success? This movie was designed to whet the appetite for the next pair, and though I think it's probably a B or B+, it left me expecting the last two to be straight A's.

An email to Attorney-General Holder

At the request of Move-On.org, I just sent an email to Attorney General Eric Holder. If I receive a response, I'll include it here also. I encourage everyone concerned about this issue to email him as well, at AskDOJ@usdoj.gov. My email read as follows:

Attorney-General Holder,
I understand that you are under considerable pressure to avoid airing the dirty laundry of the last eight years of abuses by appointing a special prosecutor. There are those who would have us simply say the past is past, and let bygones be bygones. Clearly, you could not allow that argument to hold sway for murderers or drug dealers or bank robbers, who would also like their past misdeeds forgotten. Those concerned that this would be political need to trust in the separation of a special prosecutor, but, more than that, the world needs to trust that we honor law more than we honor the reputations of criminals, regardless of their past positions. Please appoint a special prosecutor, and do not hamstring their investigation in regards to whom should be punished. That is a judgment to be made by that prosecutor and a grand jury. The architects of torture are not above the law, and should not be shown special treatment by the next administration. Treat members of the past administration as citizens, with all the rights pertaining there-to, but do not give them any special leeway by limiting the scope of a special prosecutor's investigation. Thank you for your commitment to the rule of law and to Justice.

-Benjamin Gorman

Selfishness and Sacrifice: An Honest Health Care Reform Debate

Congress is now up its neck in a debate about the nature of health care reform. From out here in the sticks, it looks to me like about a third of the representatives and senators are worried they'll pay a heavy price if they don't produce real health care for everybody, another third are worried they'll get clobbered if they produce anything resembling a tax increase or a cut in health care for the super-covered, and the middle third are worried about both. The most likely outcome, as I see it, is that they will all come to a consensus that the easiest position to defend is to do nothing of consequence and figure out how to blame the other side come election time. And they are probably right. And people will die early or unnecessarily as a consequence. And that is preemptively pissing me off.

Now, I've made it clear that I'm an Obama supporter, but that doesn't mean I'm some liberal version of a Rush Ditto-head. One of my beefs with Obama is that, too often, his attempt to usher in a new era of more polite politics devolves into a situation in which people get to pull the same kind of crap they always have, but they aren't called on it because they are so busy trying to be nice. And I'm not just talking about the Republicans in congress. The stimulus bill was a bunch of pork-laden crap, and there were really good reasons to oppose it, but these weren't the reasons I heard Republicans voicing. I think they were trying to figure out a way to be nice and enter into this new era of politics, so they criticized it for increasing the national debt. Now, the national debt is a real long-term problem, but no one should take a single Republican who was in office during the Bush presidency seriously on that front, since they all approved a couple wars and massive tax cuts at the same time. If the national debt is a serious concern, you whine about it during a debate about an unnecessary war, or you mention that when you're considering tax cuts for the rich. During an economic crisis, you either point to your consistent track record on the issue, or you shut the f--- up. No, the Republicans should have been shouting because the stimulus plan was misdirected. If that amount of money had been turned over directly to tax payers in the form of a progressively devised direct payment, the Republicans could have called it a tax cut. This would have been better for them, since a tax cut for the neediest Americans might open the door to a group who (let's face it) is wising up to the fact that the Republicans have not been working on their behalf for the last thirty years. Big win for them when they are looking to broaden their demographic appeal. Meanwhile, the Democrats could have touted the progressive structure of the stimulus as a sign that they took their mandate to heart, doing what the Bush gang did in spinning the bad polling about moral issues into a right wing mandate, only in reverse. They could have satisfied the far left, who they will certainly disappoint on other issues, and shown the lower-income red-staters just what a progressive tax structure might look like for them: a check. Instead, the Republicans essentially voted against Pelosi, making them look like "The Party of No", and the Democrats pushed through a stimulus plan that heavily favored the "too big to fail" CEOs, making them look like "The Party of Guys with Matching Priuses and Ferraris". Now, imagine a stimulus bill that, a year ago, had taken the form of significant checks, skewed significantly toward the lower and middle class. What do us poor folks do with that? The less responsible go out and buy TVs, tickets to Nascar, whatever. Good: that's some needed economic stimulus. The more responsible buy things like first homes or cars. That makes a significant dent in the housing crisis and helps bail out the auto manufacturers. The most responsible pay off their credit cards and put their checks in the banks, which helps to rescue the balance sheets of the banks themselves. Would it have created as many jobs as giving money to state governments to build roads? Possibly. Would that stimulus have hit the economy more quickly? Certainly. Consequently, it might have created more jobs, and better, more permanent ones, and it also would have prevented those super-massive bailouts for corporations. Now, as congress considers a second round of stimulus, the argument will not be about whether we should do this, because now folks are concerned about their jobs so they will put that money in the bank, and the banks are one of the sectors we've already rescued. Instead, the debate will be about the debt, which both sides have no real moral authority to gripe about. And that brings us back to health care.

When it comes to the health care debate, like Stimulus I, the debate will be about the wrong thing. It will be about whether or not we should have a public option, and the alternative of the status quo will be presented as revenue neutral and economically viable. And that pisses me off.

Now, I know the danger of over-simplifying an issue. We see it every time the issue of abortion comes up. One side tries to paint the other as a bunch of sluts who kill babies as birth control willy-nilly or, alternately, as a bunch of stupid religious zealots keeping women in some kind of chauvinistic sexual bondage when they aren't busy killing doctors. Both these positions might exist on the margins, but they are in such infinitesimal numbers that any popular vote to enact either side's agenda would be a loser. Imagine a ballot measure to charge any woman who had an abortion with homicide and lock her up for thirty years, even if the baby would not have survived and possibly threatened the health of the mother. Beyond the immorality, talk about a budget nightmare. No way that would pass. Or imagine the inverse; some kind of schema of mandatory abortions for some women. Would either initiative even come close to passing without people being deceived by some campaign to mask the true nature of the legislation in ridiculous rhetoric? Of course not. So any debate about abortion needs to be about the two things we're most uncomfortable confronting: the fact that we will have abortions (which we're all uncomfortable with) and we will have unwanted children (which we're also all uncomfortable with). That's a much more complex debate, but it's the one we need to engage in.

The health care debate, on the other hand, needs to be simplified to some degree, to get us away from the wrong argument, so that we can get to the real debate, which will be complex, but far less deceptive and heartless. We live in a country that, despite its economic woes, can afford to provide health coverage to every single citizen. We simply can. We have a system that is increasing in cost at an almost exponential rate, and it will eventually get to a point where we can't afford it. Health care is already one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies, greatly harms many businesses' competitiveness if not their outright success, and will eventually bankrupt the government as well. And yet, the debate is about whether we can afford universal coverage. That's simply infuriating. We can't afford not to have universal coverage... or we have to change the law so that people without coverage do not have to be served by hospital emergency rooms, and can be allowed to die.

This may sound like a kind of modest proposal, but it's not an exaggeration: as long as our system requires that people with no coverage be provided with care, we have to figure out a way to provide them with coverage and get them to pay in while they are healthy. We already have universal health services. They're just really unequally and inefficiently delivered. People without health insurance don't pay, but they cost a lot. People with the most resources pay for their own care, but do not pay enough to cover the uninsured. That's clearly not sustainable. So we need to decide, will we let the uninsured simultaneously bankrupt the system and die unnecessarily in the process? Or, will we figure out a means by which the people with more resources pay more but receive two pretty significant bangs for their buck; they get to live in a country where their businesses and government can continue to be successful, and they don't have to live in a country where people are dieing unnecessarily all around them?

Now, here's something you will not hear coming out of the mouth of any congressional representative or senator who opposes universal health care, or its little brother, the "public option", or its bastard child, the public co-op: "It is more important that the wealthiest among us maintain both their incomes and the quality of care they've become accustomed to than that the government remain financially viable and poor people live."

They may say part of it out loud. They'll say we must maintain the quality of care. Fine, but if we expand that to everybody it costs money, and if we don't people die and the government goes bankrupt.

Or they'll say we can't afford to insure everyone. Fine, then we need to stop serving everyone at more expense in emergency rooms than we would if they had individual doctors and preventative care, and simply let them die.

They may say we're classists, or socialists, or Marxists, or some new slur for people who recognize that some people make more money than others, if we try to make wealthier people pay more of the cost. Fine, then we can have a flat tax on everyone, which poor people will not be able to pay, and it won;t be financially viable and we're back where we started, or we're back to letting the poor people die. I suppose there's another option there: We could let the poor go to debtor's prisons for not paying their health care taxes, then provide them with care there, driving up the costs for everyone, and create universal health care at a much higher price that way.

Universal health care is not only the one option which prevents a lot of unnecessary death, but, if done correctly, it's also the more financially sustainable choice. Anyone who says anything else is really saying their current coverage, at their current price, is worth more than both the lives of poor people and the quality of their country as a whole. I know the hard-core, Adam Smith capitalists truly believe in the virtue of selfishness, and I commend them for their strength of their conviction, even if I don't agree. I just want someone to marry the courage of their dogmatic adherence to capitalist virtue to the courage to say so publicly and clearly, especially on an issue where the intrinsic winning-and-losing nature of capitalism, the vaunted "creative destruction", results directly in people dieing. These quiet, seemingly compassionate capitalists are a bunch of hypocrites and cowards, and that's the nicest way I can put it.

Now, this kind of bald truth might not fit well in Obama's new, more polite politics, but it has to be said if we'll move to the real debate, which will still be incredibly complicated and will require politeness and decency. See, once we get beyond the acknowledgment that we have to move to some form of universal coverage, we still need to figure out exactly who is going to sacrifice, and how much. Health insurance companies, unless we leave in a bunch of unnecessary redundancy, will have to shrink down to efficient distributors or cease to exist entirely, and that's a significant sacrifice, though it's only from a small group of people. I expect those folks to fight to the bitter end, though they have to be able to see that they're doomed eventually. Doctors will want to make sure they get to maintain their salaries, though many will be grateful they get to spend more attention on treating patients than on haggling with insurance companies. Individuals outside the health care field will want to make sure they still have the options they currently enjoy. That's reasonable, as long as they realize that some fifteen million people have zero options, so they may have to make some sacrifices, too. (Over all, I think this gripe is greatly inflated. Does anyone really think that if only one government run insurance plan existed, their personal physician would not accept it, and would only serve patients who chose to pay out of pocket? Show me that doctor, and I'll show you a cosmetic surgeon.) Individuals will also have to acknowledge that there will be forms of rationing, probably in the form of delays of non-life-threatening elective procedures, though even here I expect some compromise situation can be developed where people can choose to pay extra to have procedures expedited so that everyone receives a baseline of care and the wealthy can get better care at their own expense. Developing the system, and addressing these concerns, will be difficult and will require courage. In fact, the more courageous we are at the outset (closing down insurance companies, for example, rather than leaving them in to add a profit margin to the cost of health care) the better the entire system will be in the long run.

But the one thing that we simply cannot accept is the kind of cowardice that allows Congress to push this off into the future, toward an immoral and unsustainable end. And that, I fear, is exactly what we're going to see over the course of the next month as this false debate is used to push the issue down the agenda. And it begs the question: Why are the people in Congress working so hard to avoid pissing off some of their constituents and losing their jobs, if they really want to make someone else deal with these issues anyway?

Writing My Way Through a Short Summer

So I recently returned from a trip to London, Paris, and Madrid. I took a group of forty high school students, parents, and fellow teachers. Great fun was had by all, and much exhaustion was produced. If you'd like to read about the trip, I blogged the whole thing here at:

Central High Europe Trip

Now, after some days of decompressing, I am finally getting started with a real summer break. My plan was to put in flooring, dry-wall, and a drop ceiling in an unfinished room in our new house, but according to the guy at H&R Block it takes two to three months to get the eight grand stimulus-for-buying-a-new-house-money from the gov'ment. Without that job, I thought I'd work on school stuff, paint myself a copy of Picasso's Don Quixote for my classroom, maybe paint the walls in the living room (if Paige and I can agree on colors), and generally sit on my butt until early August, when we head out to Cincinnati to see my family. It's my mom's sixtieth birthday (man, that sounds weird. Mom can't be sixty!) and she wants to go to Dollywood. As much as I'm looking forward to the time with the family, those of you who know me can probably imagine just how well I'll fit in at the Country and Western version of Disneyland. Imagine a half-naked, foam-cheese-hat-wearing, body-paint-covered Green Bay Packers fan screaming his head off at Wimbledon, or a golf tournament at Pebble Beach, or a televised chess match. That will be me. I haven't worn an earring in five years, but I'm thinking of finding my old skull and crossbones earring and putting it back in just to heighten the effect.

Anyway, that leaves a month in the middle for my summer. So I started the painting of Don Quixote, then realized that, as much as I love the painting and the story, I really should read the book. So I started it (spoiler: it's really good) and I got an idea for another novel. Now, I know I haven't finished the trilogy (quadrilogy?) I'm two books deep in right now, but since no one is nibbling at those, and this will probably be more marketable (what the hell do I know about marketability?) I've started writing this new one, and I'm going to see how much I can crank out over the next month. It's fun because I'm writing in the voice of a woman looking back on her high school years and a) I'm not a woman, and b) she's funny, so it's really challenging to get her voice just right. I considered teasing out the first few chapters here, but I know I'll want to do lots of editing before I take that leap, and, at the very least, I should let Paige read it before I completely humiliate myself. Still, I think the project has promise. Wish me luck!

P.S.
Does one wish writer's luck? Actors are encouraged to break their legs (it's a dangerous profession). Should you wish me carpal tunnel syndrome?

Europe Trip

I haven't posted in a bit, save for the clip of the great Hardee's add, because I just got back from taking 40 parents and students to London, Paris, and Barcelona for an educational tour. I blogged the whole thing, so if you're interested, the whole site is here (now with pictures!):

Central High Europe Trip

or check it out by city:

London (here and here)

Coventry, Warwick, and Stratford (here)

Bath (here)

Paris (here and here)

Barcelona (here, here, and here)

plus some funny accumulated quotes (here and here)

and one very embarrassing typo (here).

Enjoy!

My New Favorite Ad

Okay, maybe this just reveals my juvenile sense of humor (no "maybe" about it), and maybe I'm particularly biased because the spokesman in the ad is an old friend from college (and one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, Tim Hornor, really not an a-hole at all), but I think this ad is positively brilliant and painfully funny. Enjoy:



Can I just be the first to claim this line: I think this ad campaign is going to grip the popular imagination and tighten with more force than the "Where's the beef?" ads. See what I did there? Childish AND gross!

Commemorating The Pig War

After hearing about this story on The Bugle podcast, I had to share it with the history department from the high school where I teach. Then I realized more people should hear about it. It's just too good.

History Department,

Do you history folks know about The Pig War? This was a real conflict between the US and Britain almost 150 years ago to the day (June 15th, 1859) which started with a dispute over a pig. An American shot an Irishman's pig in the San Juan Islands, both called the authorities, and next thing you know some four hundred US soldiers were facing off with some 2000 British sailors on five warships. Instead of shooting at one another, they just hurled insults at each other for days before they reached a peace agreement. Casualties of the war: 1 pig.

Best line from the war: when the American (who shot the pig) told the Irishman he should have kept the pig off his land so as to not eat his potatoes, the Irishman shot back, "It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig." Lady and gentlemen, that's just about as good as history gets, in my opinion.

Have a great summer, and don't start any international conflicts over bacon or pork chops.

-Ben

Renewed Confidence...?

I have had two events in the last couple of days which have inspired me to start sending out query letters for the series of novels I'm writing:

First, I read Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. The book is very enjoyable and well written. Also, it touches on some of the same themes as my series. It rekindles my belief that my book could be published and enjoyed just as much as I enjoyed hers, though expecting her sales is beyond my wildest dreams. Still, it made me feel better.

Second, I hung out with a colleague who has just received the advance copy of his forthcoming book (available for pre-order). I read it, and though we are writing completely different things (his is non-fiction for a different audience and purpose) I managed to stifle my jealousy and take some heart in his success.

So I shot off another four query letters to promising literary agencies. Last time I sent it to three I received one request for the first ten chapters and a request for the manuscript. Not a bad record, but the lack of success just crushed me. Well, now I'm seeking more abuse. Wish me luck!

On God and Ants

It's been an incredibly stressful weekend, at the end of a stressful week. Quite suddenly, I realized I haven't had anything to eat since lunch yesterday. I've simply forgotten. Outside of Mountain Dew and a handful of chips while I graded a stack of papers and tried to listen to the Celtics-Magic game, I've accidentally pulled off a nearly forty-hour fast. So, maybe that's what's got me thinking about theological questions, and my own religious insecurities. Maybe it's just hunger, or maybe it's the long human tradition of fasting to center one's self, which I've twisted into the post-modern accidental corn-syrup and caffeine variety. Who knows?

Regardless, I've been contemplating my... well, my loss of faith, frankly. Over the last year, perhaps the last couple, I've been going through a slow process of disillusionment, doubt, and emotional disconnect from God and all things Christian. After the years of the Bush administration, where I watched my faith used as a motivation or a pretext for a few hundred thousand acts I find abominable, and bending myself into contortions of all kinds to separate my own faith from that of every other Christian who disagreed with me on any particular day for any particular reason, I found myself drained of any emotional response to religious questions. They still served as interesting thought experiments: as dry, logical puzzles wherein the goal was to reason from interesting but unprovable tenets toward the political positions I wanted to reach in the first place. God became about as important as Sudoku, and, just as my interest in Sudoku waned, I could feel that the fad of the curious-about-God-game was running out of steam.

Kierkegaard, if I remember correctly, held that if a person could lose their faith, they never had a real faith to begin with, i.e. if someone had truly known God they would lose the ability to deny His existence. Calvin, on the other hand, would probably have felt that if a person lost their faith they had always been predestined to do so by God, which seems particularly cruel to me. Why would God make a person believe in Him, then make him do otherwise? Calvin held that all kinds of actions were outward expressions of our predestination, from our ethical behavior to our ability to make lots of money, so I would assume he would include verbal expressions of faith in those outward signs. But we know that some people claim to believe at one point in their lives, then claim not to later on. So, is God making an outward expression of a person's damnation by turning them away in this life through expressions of doubt? Is God so cruel? I'm no Calvinist, but I thought I was very much in line with Kierkegaard's view of the faith experience. I used to be damned sure I knew God, and that I'd felt real moments of connection with Him at points in my life, reaffirming all kinds of theological, cultural, political, and even aesthetic beliefs which really had nothing to do with those specific experiences. I used to be certain God connected with me, and, in retrospect, those moments calcified so many other assumptions which were unrelated. God reached down and said, "I'm here," and all I chose to hear was, "Everything you believe can stay the same." Now I realize that the God who reaffirms my beliefs isn't real. That doesn't mean I don't believe in God, but I don't believe in the one I wanted to believe in back then. So, does that mean Kierkegaard is right? Did I never have real faith to begin with, because I chose to believe in a god of veiled convenience, or did I have a real connection to a real God, and I simply dressed Him up to make Him more bearable?

As you can see, what little faith I had was undirected and tenuous. You might say, as it hung by a thread I wondered if the thread was there, which didn't really bode well for the faith hanging on the other end. I wanted to hold onto Jesus, just Jesus... or really, just abstract and distant truth derived from Jesus' teachings or about His place in the geography of Christian theology, but I wasn't sure I believed in believing anymore. At least not in any complete way. I made assertions about religious things, and continuously re-evaluated those claims. That was my faith. As such, I didn't know if I believed in maintaining it, because the claims themselves did not dictate that it required maintenance.

Then, yesterday, (perhaps 10 hours into my fast, so take any conclusions with that grain of salt) I had a truly religious moment. Now, I want to be clear. I hate the term "religion". I think it's too all-encompassing and not nearly descriptive enough. It's better than "Spirituality" when spoken by some dead-behind-the-eyes celebrity, but only by inches. What is a religious experience, after all? The rites of a given faith are certainly religious experiences. But then, so is the reading of scripture, or time spent in prayer. Solitary moments of communion with God are religious experiences, as are corporate ones. If someone tells us we have God on our side and we all head off to kill people in some distant land full of heathens, isn't that a religious experience? Everything a believer does could be described as a religious experience, and yet, so much of what they do is identical to the behavior of a non-believer that the term isn't helpful without a lot of clarification. And yet, I choose the term carefully here. I had a religious experience. That's all. Not necessarily a spiritual one. I'm still not even sure about my questions of the spirit yet. The experience certainly wasn't formalized in any way; nothing about this would be found in any Presbyterian Book of Order. But it was religious in a way that embraces my dislike of the term, that even subverts that and shows the word's usefulness. I didn't like the word because two guys could be sitting on the bus, reading the same newspaper, both not only doing the same thing but even thinking about the same things, and then the religious man allows thoughts about the divine to color his perspective on the article he's reading. In that moment, he feels something, something which cannot be proven to be God in any scientific way, but which he recognizes as distinct from his thoughts about God. Who can say what the atheist sitting next to him would make of this feeling? Who can even take some measurement and know if the atheist feels it at all? And yet, the experience for the man of faith has shifted from a intellectual exercise to one that is... different. And maybe that's as specific and articulate as I can be, but my experience was a religious one in just that way.

My bathroom has been overrun by ants. They are tiny, and from a distance they elicit a revulsion I can only assume to be genetic. However, when I looked at one very closely, I realized they are kind of endearing. They go about their work much as I do, filled with a sense of purpose which satisfies them. I don't understand it completely. They're getting food and water to stay alive. I understand that much. They follow chemical paths left by little scouts. They greet one another and pass chemical messages. I understand these things on one level, and yet I don't really relate. But then, I go through my little life getting food and water to stay alive; I call that work. My particular work as a teacher fills me with a sense of fulfillment beyond the paycheck (ha ha, teacher's paycheck), but then, perhaps walking down that chemical path convinces the ant that he is doing something good and noble as well. I interact with my friends, my students, my colleagues, my family in ways that both bring me great joy and make my life functional. Do the ants pass their chemical versions of clever jokes, bank card pin numbers, "I love you"s, and exasperated sighs? Why should I have such clear beliefs about the nature and character of God, and why should I demand of myself such strong conviction about His every characteristic, when I have such a superficial understanding of the thousands of little buggers eating the cat food in my bathroom and drinking from the bit of water I left in the glass after brushing my teeth?

These are thoughts about God. Someone who does not believe in God could ask these same questions, either about themselves or about me, and come up with the same unsatisfying lack of conclusions. But then the experience changed to one an atheist couldn't share. And here's the thing: I don't know that God was involved. It could be a manifestation of a mania. I can't deny that. If there is no God, I experienced a momentary delusion in which I felt an emotional reaction to something I could not sense with any of my five sense. In other words, if there is no God then I am not only crazy, but the least creative crazy person in the world, who experiences an imaginary friend but is too lazy to attribute any characteristics to that delusion beyond an accompanying sense of peace and joy.

But afterward, I felt, and have continued to feel, a huge sense of relief. And I know why. I had come to believe that my faith experience would, for the rest of my life, exist only in the intellect, with no emotional component, and I'd even begun to resign myself to that. I am pleased to report that I am still capable of feeling something related to God, and maybe even feeling a connection to God Himself. Somehow that feels like I've hit bottom, and am now on the up-and-up.

None of this probably makes a lick of sense to anyone in the world, and publishing something so convoluted should make me feel ashamed. And yet, this seems proper, like a birth announcement without real information about gender and height and weight and the number of fingers and toes. Hey, everybody! I've finally had a feeling! Pass the cigars.

Now let's just hope it doesn't go away when I go grab a bite to eat.

Jesse Ventura is Correct?

I could never do the math on Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Did he say one smart thing for every dumb thing? Two to one? One to two? But in this clip he fares very well, by my count. His opinions and my verdicts:

1. George Bush is the worst president in his lifetime.
Check

2. Guantanamo is our own Hanoi Hilton.
Check

3. People involved in torture should be prosecuted.
Check

4. Waterboarding doesn't yield good intelligence (or Dick Cheney carried out the Sharon Tate murders).
Check (or check)

5. Legalizing Marijuana is equivalent to ending prohibition in terms of reducing crime.
Check (and I don't even smoke pot or wear hemp, though I'd like my books published on hemp paper)

6. Al Franken should win the Minnesota senate seat and the feds shouldn't weigh in because states should make that choice.
Check

7. Dick Cheney is a coward.
Check

8. Colin Powell is a hero. Rush Limbaugh ain't.
Check and check

9. We should end the embargo on Cuba.
Check

10. Surfing is a religion.
Okay, well...

11. The Miss California flap is a waste of time.
Check

12. Marriage shouldn't even be a government issue, and government should only recognize civil unions.
Check and a big Amen!

13. Jesse Ventura is a poet.
Certainly not. Ouch.

14. If torture really worked we'd have Bin Laden.
Well, that doesn't necessarily follow...

15. Torture doesn't work.
No argument here.

Okay, so he's 13 for 15, counting the two-for-one. Not shabby. I'm still not sure I'd vote for the guy, but if we ever need a replacement for Joe Biden, Obama could do worse.

Enjoy:

When is torture justified? Never.

Roger Cohen, in today's Washington Post, muses, "Yet I have to wonder whether what he [Cheney] is saying now is the truth -- i.e., torture works."

"works"? "works"? The ethical calculus here is completely screwed up. First of all, even if Cheney could prove the torture saved lives (a doubtful proposition), he can't know that the torture will not set a precedent that enemies may use it against our soldiers in the future, or know how many terrorists were ginned-up using accounts of torture, so the simple one-to-one math is impossible. Secondly, even if Cheney calculates that torture is worth it, part of that calculation must include jail time for the breaking of the law. If it was really worth it, and Cheney really believes that, he should be willing to do the time, or at least try to make his case to a jury rather than Bob Scheiffer. If he's not willing to go to jail, then he doesn't really think it was worth it.

Even if Cheney were principled enough to turn himself in for violations of US law and for war crimes, he'd still be wrong. Torture is never justified, even if it seems to work. I wonder if Cheney wants to start an international race to the bottom of the depths of our humanity because he knows he already has a head start.

On Star Trek and Torture

I saw the new Star Trek on Thursday and loved it. I think this article short changes the movie a bit, taking it to task for a merely obligatory torture scene. In fact, I'd say any torture scene makes a political statement now; if the bad guys are torturing, the writer is saying something (Star Trek), and if the good guys are doing it (24), the writer is also making a statement. Star Trek only speaks out against torture by virtue of placing it in the arsenal of the bad guys and elevating the behavior of the good guy who resists. It's meager, but it's something. Still, when I came across this piece on an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I immediately remembered the episode which had a lot more to say about "enhanced interrogation techniques" than any fiction I've seen or read since (not counting re-readings of 1984). I recommend the piece, and a revisiting of the episode itself, if you have the time and means.

Pelosi and Torture

The Washington Post reports that a newly released memo indicates that Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002. Now, some on the right and left will say this explains the Obama administration's hesitance to prosecute the writers of those memos. That may be the case. I hope, instead, it serves as an impetus to get the ball rolling on prosecutions for all the people responsible. After all, it's a win-win for the administration; it gets to uphold the principle that torture is unacceptable by holding those responsible accountable (something I've argued for before), it could show the country that this isn't a political witch-hunt but a principled stance, and it gets to remove Pelosi. Let's face it, she's a liability to the President and the party. Ignoring her heavy-handed mismanagement of Obama's first attempt at reaching across the aisle to bail out the financial system, she's from San Francisco. If she goes, the party could find leadership from somewhere that doesn't scream lefty-pinko-commie, while retaining the seat (it's more likely to go to a Green than a Republican, if I'm not mistaken). If she knew about the torture, she should go down because it's the right thing to do. If it's the right thing to do, that principle should cross party lines. Herbert Hoover said "Honor is not the exclusive property of any political party," and he was right, but dishonor isn't either, and torture shames us all. The fact that dealing with this dishonor is also politically expedient for the Obama administration is just icing on the cake.

Garfield minus Garfield

Tonight, listening to a podcast of NPR's "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me", I enjoyed Peter Segal's joke about how the recession has become so hard on the comic strip industry that Garfield is considering actually being funny. Well, Peter can take heart; even if Garfield can't pull it off, the strip can be made funny by simply removing the annoying, smug, fat cat from it. I was exposed to this wonderful site by a former student (thanks, Grahame!) and highly recommend it to everyone: Garfield minus Garfield

Some Very Hard Candy

I just saw the movie Hard Candy. It's an indie film based on a merely clever gimmick that rises well beyond it. I won't say what it's about, but I will say that at every point in the film it's not quite what you think, and (and this may be the highest praise I can give it) that feeling does not dissipate once the movie is over. My immediate reaction was negative. Three minutes later I started to really like it. Five minutes after that I was still contemplating what it meant. That has most Hollywood celluloid drivel beat by a mile.

Bravo, Dan Froomkin!

Dan Froomkin, in his piece "Krauthammer's Asterisks", takes on Charles Krauthammer, his colleague at the Washington Post and a grade A hole. After Krauthammer argues that torture is "impermissible evil" that should only be undertaken in two circumstances (when we think we need to, and when we feel like it), Froomkin takes his claims apart one at a time and shows Krauthammer for what he really is: a sociopath apologist for torture. Thanks Mr. Froomkin!

We Need Accountability for Torture

Back in January, I encouraged everyone to read Tom Junod's piece from Esquire, "What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years". In it, he called us all to take our share of the blame for the Bush torture policies. Now, in Slate, Jacob Weisberg uses our collective guilt as a rationale for not going after criminal prosecutions of the people responsible. In his piece "All the President's Accomplices: How the country acquiesced to Bush's torture policy" he essentially argues that because we all knew the gist of what was going on, and because we allowed it (and even re-elected the people doing it), there's no point in going after the people who wrote the memos, gave the orders, or carried out the torture. After all, we would be going after more than 51% of the population, right? Instead, he says we should have a South African style truth and reconciliation commission and move on.

I completely disagree.

This is a representative democracy, not a direct one. We elect people to enact the popular will, but we also choose people who should know when to stop in those cases where the majority of people are simply wrong. The day of 9/11 I was teaching at a high school. One of the kids in the class said, "We should just nuke Baghdad." I was appalled. I convinced him that killing millions of innocent people when we didn't even know who was responsible was simply wrong. Then, when I tried to share how horrified I was by the student's reaction with another teacher, she basically agreed with him. Now we know that there were no Iraqis responsible for 9/11, but what if this teacher and this student had been expressing the popular will? Would we have caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis because we were reacting out of ignorance and fear?

Oh, wait, we did that.

I understand that a full blown prosecution could create a myriad of problems. It will tie up the Obama administration in accusations of partisan recrimination, and they will lose some political capital necessary to do good work. It will redirect the national focus from more pressing issues. It could create paralysis for future legal and political actors who are afraid of recriminations from future administrations. All of these are real fears. They can be minimized in some ways. The President can separate himself as much as possible from an independent prosecutor. The trials could be held slowly, deliberately, and with as little flashiness as possible, to bore the hell out of the American public so that they keep their attention focused on more immediate concerns. And as for paralyzing future leaders, that moment's hesitation might not be a bad thing at all. Reagrdless, these concerns are outweighed, at least in my mind, but a much greater danger that would come from inaction on the issue of torture.

If we don't hold anyone accountable, we will have created a nightmarish precedence: the ultimate Nuremberg defense for the most vile, evil politicians of the future. They will be able to say, in coming times of crisis, that the people were scared and wanted them to ignore any legal and moral boundary in order to be made to feel safe, so they did what they thought was right. They will look back into history and say, "Look what people have gotten away with in the past. Why should we be held to a different standard?" In fact, Weisberg does this same thing for them. He brings up examples of what he calls "American history's hall of shame," including "the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era." What do those have in common? Not only were they shameful, but no one was held accountable. In the American hall of shame, each shiny brass placard reads, "The perpetrators got off scott-free."

Whatever the negative consequences of criminal prosecutions for those responsible for illegal torture of detainees may be, they are outweighed by the power said prosecutions would hold in preventing future illegal and immoral acts in times of crisis. This time it's torture. The next time it could be a nuclear bomb dropped on Baghdad.

Bye bye, Texas!

I have relatives in Texas, whom I love. I also enjoy traveling internationally, so bye bye, Texas!



Couldn't have said it better!

Chaperone Fun

Tonight I chaperoned the annual Spring Fling dance at the high school where I teach. While playing the role of bouncer at an exterior door, sitting next to a student teacher studying education at a nearby university and doing her time at our school, I got to enjoy watching the following exchange over the course of the evening:

A student obviously lacking in social skills came up to the female student teacher and asked her to dance. Or, rather, he came up and just started doing crotch thrusts in her direction. She simply shook her head. Then he tried to flirt by asking what she would do if he poured her soda on her head. 'Cause, you know, women love that. Trying to make clear that she is faculty rather than a student, she said, "Then I would flunk you."

"Not here," he said.

Due to the loud music, he thought she'd said, "Then I would f*** you."

I came over and he took off.

A couple minutes later he came back and asked her to dance again.

Before he left, he came up and asked her for a hug. Considering what he'd heard, his persistence is understandable. She offered to shake his hand.

As he walked off, confused and disappointed, I nearly fell on the floor.

"Buy American" is Unpatriotic! And Socialized Medicine is the Capitalist's Choice

I've always felt that the notion that Americans should favor goods is inherently unpatriotic. If capitalism is to be our economic system, then we should follow the fundamental guiding principle by which prices are determined: the market. Americans who value this principle will buy American-made goods when they are the best options. To choose to buy an inferior product because it's made in America is to concede that American companies and American workers can't truly compete in the global market; it's an individual version of a totalitarian state's isolationist trade policy. Well, I was very glad to hear that the new CEO of GM, Fritz Henderson, not only shares this view, but was willing to articulate it clearly and boldly this last weekend on NBC's Meet the Press.

"MR. GREGORY: Do you expect and would you like to see President Obama encourage the country to buy American cars?

MR. HENDERSON: No, actually. I, I, I think the consumer should buy exactly what kind of car they think meets their needs and that excites them. And as I look at it, it's our job to make sure we provide that, not necessarily have it mandated or otherwise encouraged. I think we have fantastic cars and trucks. We're going to win in the marketplace and not necessarily because--just because we're a U.S. company."

Personally, I have no dog in the fight, but if the CEO of a major US corporation is willing to forgo the possible reward of "Buy American" campaigns because he genuinely believes in the quality of the products his company makes, that gives me far more confidence in the products than any speech about how we should buy American products just because they are made here. Way to go, Fritz!

Now, on that note, I should add that there are limits to my devotion to capitalism. Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko, in the movie Wall Street, famously said, "Greed is good." Sometimes that's true, but it's what Augustine would have called a "lesser good". When the profit motive overtakes human decency, capitalism can quickly go from the best economic system to the absolute worst, at least for its victims. A great example is our health care system. Lots of people die in this country because a few people want to make a lot of money (not just make a living, but a huge profit) by treating only those who can pay for it.

Luckily, as Timothy Noah points out here, we have a solution that can satisfy everyone but the greediest among us: an optional public insurance. Rather than a government mandated system, which could benefit from economies of scale but which also might lack quality, flexibility, and inventiveness, or our current system which has those qualities at the expense of a lot of lives, not to mention great additional cost, let's give people the choice of a public plan or their private one. The public plan would have a huge advantage on price, but it would still have to compete to offer comparable care. The private plans would hold on to the upper-end of the economic ladder as niche products but they could drive the rest of the market with their quality and inventiveness. The big losers would be the current health care insurance conglomerates which would be down-scaled to boutique businesses, but if they have any foresight they'd see they would be better off that way than to be completely eradicated in a complete government takeover.

Once upon a time, industries like the automotive industry sided with the health care insurers against the government. Now they've come around and are begging for a public option in order to compete with countries which provide socialized medicine. The market has spoken, and in this case, it's opted for socialism. The health care insurers are on the wrong side, not only of history, but of capitalism, and they stand to lose everything if they don't adjust. They can choose to side with the crack-pot talking heads on Fox News, and so can the ignoramuses who still give credence to anything anyone says on that station, but a good capitalist economist would tell you not to: The Fox News blowhards have every economic incentive to rant and rave, and no price to pay when they lose a political battle. They just get to go on raving. The insurance companies run the risk of pushing the country beyond the point of a public option, to the point of a public mandate that wipes them out. And as for the viewers of Fox News? They could very well end up bedridden and uninsured, nodding in agreement with the fools on their screens, while dieing of some treatable disease and crying, "Those damned liberals want to take away our choice!"

Take it from the CEO of GM: If you can't win in the marketplace, you won't have any choice at all.

Turns Out Smoking IS Good For Us!

Not for you. Not for me. But for us.

The funny thing about this is that Adam Corolla, in his great new (free) podcast made this same point before the data was out. I was sure he was wrong. After all, one would assume that when health care professionals, congressmen, reporters, and every smoker's concerned mother makes the same point about smoking costing a society money, somebody, somewhere, would fact check that. They'd run the numbers and see if maybe there's a net saving from people dieing from smoking before they can become the really expensive burdens on society we all long to be when we're 95 years old. Someone would make sure these people aren't pulling the wool over our eyes with their common sense. Well, as usual, by virtue of everyone's certainty, we were all wrong. Check it out:


April 7, 2009
FACT CHECK: Do smokers cost society money?
By ERICA WERNER
Associated Press Writer

Smoking takes years off your life and adds dollars to the cost of health care. Yet nonsmokers cost society money, too — by living longer.

It's an element of the debate over tobacco that some economists and officials find distasteful.

House members described huge health care costs associated with smoking as they approved landmark legislation last week giving the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco products. No one mentioned the additional costs to society of caring for a nonsmoking population that lives longer.

Supporters of the FDA bill cited figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that smokers cost the country $96 billion a year in direct health care costs, and an additional $97 billion a year in lost productivity.

A White House statement supporting the bill, which awaits action in the Senate, echoed the argument by contending that tobacco use "accounts for over a $100 billion annually in financial costs to the economy."

However, smokers die some 10 years earlier than nonsmokers, according to the CDC, and those premature deaths provide a savings to Medicare, Social Security, private pensions and other programs.

Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi studied the net costs of smoking-related spending and savings and found that for every pack of cigarettes smoked, the country reaps a net cost savings of 32 cents.

"It looks unpleasant or ghoulish to look at the cost savings as well as the cost increases and it's not a good thing that smoking kills people," Viscusi said in an interview. "But if you're going to follow this health-cost train all the way, you have to take into account all the effects, not just the ones you like in terms of getting your bill passed."

Viscusi worked as a litigation expert for the tobacco industry in lawsuits by states but said that his research, which has been published in peer-reviewed journals, has never been funded by industry.

Other researchers have reached similar conclusions.

A Dutch study published last year in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal said that health care costs for smokers were about $326,000 from age 20 on, compared to about $417,000 for thin and healthy people.

The reason: The thin, healthy people lived much longer.

Willard Manning, a professor of health economics and policy at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies, was lead author on a paper published two decades ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that, taking into account tobacco taxes in effect at the time, smokers were not a financial burden to society.

"We were actually quite surprised by the finding because we were pretty sure that smokers were getting cross-subsidized by everybody else," said Manning, who suspects the findings would be similar today. "But it was only when we put all the pieces together that we found it was pretty much a wash."

Such conclusions are controversial since they assign an economic benefit to premature death. U.S. government agencies shy away from the calculations.

The goal of the U.S. health care system is "prolonging disability-free life," states the 2004 Surgeon General's report on the health consequences of smoking. "Thus any negative economic impacts from gains in longevity with smoking reduction should not be emphasized in public health decisions."

Dr. Terry Pechacek, the CDC associate director for science in the office on smoking and health, said that data seeking to quantify economic benefits of smoking couldn't capture all the benefits associated with longevity, like a grandparent's contribution to a family. Because of such uncertainties the CDC won't put a price tag on savings from smoking.

"The natural train of logic that follows from that is that then anybody that's admitted around age 65 or older that's showing any signs of sickness should be denied treatment," Pechacek said. "That's the cheapest thing to do."


-Okay, I'm not saying we need Logan's Run-style suicide centers for the elderly, but this does throw a wrench in the rationale for anti-smoking campaigns as a cost-savings measure. So, next tome you see a smoker, instead of faking a cough to show your disdain, consider walking up and thanking that person for saving you money.

Flutter is the future

Hate twitter-mania? Love this:

Coolest Cat Ever?

When Paige told me she wanted a second cat, and that her aunt had very cute longhair kittens, I was more than a bit skeptical. I knew longhairs can easily turn into the feline version of that nasty white blond chick with the trust fund who decides she's a Rastafarian while she's in college (some friends of mine have dubbed them Trustifarians). The long-haired cats can look just as bad, and smell just as bad, too. Well, sure enough, Xeno (we name all our pets after philosophers. That's what happens when two philosophy majors get married) turned into that nappy co-ed cat, and we needed to shave him. It would have cost a pretty penny to have it done professionally (Hazzard pay. He was gross) but Paige's uncle is a vet, so he generously agreed to knock Xeno out and let me use his clippers to shave the cat. Not only did it serve as a kind of bonding experience, making me feel more attached to the cat than I have since he was that little puffball kitten, but it gave me a chance to give him a haircut I wish I'd had the courage and opportunity to pull off back when I had hair. That's right; I gave my cat a Mohawk. He is much happier with his stinky, probably painful matts removed, and now I not only like petting him or having him on my lap, but I crack up every time he saunters into the room. Behold, Xeno, the coolest cat ever!



"You lookin' at me?"



Showing it off.



On the catwalk.



Makin' love to... the camera?

Oh, man, I just realized I'm blogging about cats. If I become any more of a cliche I think... I splode!

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twenty-five

25. I supported George W. Bush in the last two elections, and still feel he did a heckuva’ job.



Furthermore, I feel history will completely vindicate his presidency for all the so-called “crimes” liberals try to pin on him and the good, decent, hard-working people who served in his administration.



And if I could go one step further, I think Robert Mugabe is doing an equally good job of running the government of Zimbabwe right now.

The Narcissism of Great Powers, part two, KFC edition

To continue with the theme of connecting disparate items I'm reading, yesterday I read a piece, again in Slate, asking why capitalists are such a bunch pf pansies right now. Apparently, as part of the plan to rescue them from their own greed, Geithner will allow them to buy up the toxic assets for 84% of their value using loans from the government, guaranteed by Mister and Missus taxpayer, for 72 of that 84%. They would have to pitch in 6% and the government would match that with a 6% gift. Basically, they are risking only 7% of the assets' paper value, and stand to make a lot. We take all the rest of the risk. The article asks where the gutsy capitalists have gone.

The answer came in my mailbox, in the form of a coupon advertising KFC's "Bailout Buckets".



Sure, the former Wall Street masters of the universe may have lost faith in your average American's ability to pay off his or her home mortgage, but they still have confidence that we'll drown our collective sorrows in cleverly marketed buckets of greasy, mass produced, corporate chicken-death-camp yumminess. Combine this with our national tendency toward Narcisisstic Personality Disorder and you can see why America behaves like the big, fat, greasy bully pushing everybody else around on the playground: Why play nice in hopes of trading bag lunch items in the cafeteria when you know your corporate parents sent you to school with a Bailout Bucket full of KFC to keep all to yourself?

The Narcissism of Great Powers

This last week I read an article in Slate about how as much as 6% of our population has NPD, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and rates for our children may run as high as 10%. I also listened to one of the Sunday morning talk shows where three prominent politicians went on and on about how great America is and how we'll come through this economic crisis better then we were before. Essentially they said we should all adopt the position of the thief on the cross next to Brian in Monty Python's The Life of Brian and "Look on the bright side of life" simply because we're American and we've got this great history which dictates our invincibility. I found myself wondering, without that history, did the founding fathers believe that Americans could weather any storm by the simple virtue of their nationality? In contrast, did the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, The Romans, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the British all go through periods late in their empires where their leaders told them they needn't worry about looming disasters simply because of their countries' respective histories? And, if so, is it likely that, had the diagnosis been available, some 10% of those countries' populations might have suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

Now, for the record, I'm not saying the American Empire is doomed. Or, to be more specific, I'm not saying it's necessarily doomed quite yet. Maybe we've got another three hundred years left in us, maybe a thousand. But empires come to an end. If we're going to take heart from the history of America's rise to prominence, we have to temper that with a recognition that history also teaches us about the inevitable demise of empires.

More specifically, if our own history is going to tell us we're great, it should tell us why. If America rose to become the global super-power because of its people's industry, I fail to see how narcissism will take the place of hard work. Personally, I'd like to believe that what has made the United States special are our ideals of liberty, our respect for law, and our progressivism. These seem to be the forces which called people from all over the world to cross oceans to become Americans. If this reading of history is correct, then looking on the bright side of life will not make up for a bullying foreign policy, the use of torture, or the doctrine of preemptive war. Too many of us have become too fearful; we're afraid of everything from terrorism to immigration to socialized medicine to stem cell research to gay marriage. William F. Buckley, the father of modern conservatism, famously described the job of modern conservatives as standing "athwart history, yelling, 'Stop!'" If "Stop!" is our only answer to this crisis, or if that is only qualified with Bill Kristol's advice to Republicans, "Obstruct and delay," then the past victories of the United States will not compensate for our current intellectual and moral weakness.

I take no joy in watching the people of my country suffer, regardless of their political stripes. Schadenfreude quickly comes to an end in times like these. But where derision provides no solace, at least there's the consolation of this accidental camaraderie. I'm at that age when a person discovers that his favorite athletes are younger than he is, that he is now older than some of his favorite musicians were when they killed themselves in one way or another, and that some of his dreams might be just as dead as those rock stars. I take a perverse comfort in the fact that life tries to beat some measure of humility into individuals and nations alike. Whether we prefer our comeuppance in spoonfuls or inundations, the universe gives us our medicine in the quantities it sees fit.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twenty-four

Lots and lots of people have pet monkeys. It's a well known fact.



But I had a pet silverback gorilla.



His name was Fluffy, which seemed totally appropriate when he was just a baby.



Then he grew up. Pretty soon things got a little frightening.



After Paige and I started dating, Fluffy created a lot of tension for us. Eventually she would say things like, "I just feel like we're not alone when we're in your apartment," or "It's Fluffy or me," or "You do realize he could rip one of your arms off on accident, don't you?"

But I was very loyal to Fluffy until he did, in fact, rip a UPS man's arm off when Fluffy got to excited about a delivery.



That was the first and last time I had to admit to Paige that she was right and I was wrong. I'll never put myself in that position again. And I learned my lesson. Fluffy had to go so that I could forge a relationship in which I'm always right.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twenty-three

23. I love reality TV.



Watching fully grown adults...



...try to scratch and claw their way to their fifteen minutes of fame while complete camera crews surround them to capture all that gritty reality just seems like the pinnacle of Western culture to me.



Who needs writers?

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twenty-two

22. I once picked up a woman at a bar. That's it. That's the whole story. I'm pretty proud of the accomplishment.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twenty-one

21. You know when you see a car add and there's some tiny writing at the bottom that says, "Professional driver on a closed course"?



That's not me. But once I pulled off to the side of the road because I'd witnessed an accident, and the driver at fault was that very guy.



He can't drive very well in traffic; us amateur drivers freak him out.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twenty

20. They once based an episode of Law and Order on an event from my life. It wasn't Law and Order: SVU, cause that kind of stuff is just gross.



Plus, the real event didn't involve a murder, so they had to add that.



Actually, it didn't really involve an interesting legal question, either. And it didn't really take place in New York. And it didn't make any headlines from which to be ripped. Mine was the one where the old lawyer gave this impassioned speech in court until the really slimy defense lawyer yelled "Objection!" while the super-hot assistant DA watched and looked concerned.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue ninetten

19. I am not bald because of some genetic predisposition.



I had a full head of thick hair until the day when I learned a valuable lesson. I was living in Hong Kong at the time, and, as you can imagine, my apartment was very small.



Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, was close to everything else.



This included the household cleaning products and my shampoo.



I'm not even sure which of the cleaning products I accidentally used.



The place was too small for a shower, and the bed that converted into a bathtub was impractical, so luckily I was washing my hair in the kitchen sink. Otherwise I would have no eyebrows and would probably be blind.



So, obviously, the lesson I learned was that one should always wash one's hair in the kitchen sink.

Mac Compatibility

After yesterday's lie, a friend sent me this useful graph that really ought to be shared. For those of you who missed the film Independence Day, it's now a documented fact that alien craft are compatible with Macs, if only to acquire dangerous and highly complex viruses from them, and as long as those viruses were written by noted computer expert Jeff Golblum.



Credits: Caption by: pirroplato | Picture by: dunno source

25 Random Lies About Me, issue eighteen

18. I love Macintosh computers and refuse to use anything else.



Once, I had a chance to meet Steve Jobs backstage at the Macworld conference.



Maybe he was just having a bad day, and maybe I handled the situation poorly by giving him a bear hug before speaking to him, but as soon as he was free he started screaming about how I should leave him the f*** alone and go take all the other sycophantic freaks and go get a f***ing "ilife" 'cause at the end of the day it's still just a f***ing computer. Justin Long was standing nearby, and he really looked like this hurt his feelings.



I didn't have the time to worry about Justin, though. In a Mac-fan induced rage, I grabbed Steve Jobs by the collar and I slapped him hard across the mouth, screamed, "Blasphemer! You will burn in the digital fires of a poorly-designed virtual hell for an eternal load-time!"



Then I ran away from security.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue seventeen

17. I am a member of the JabbaWockeeZ, a competitive dance crew.



We wear white masks and gloves when we dance. You may have seen us in that new Nike ad. We gained our fame on the show America's Got Talent before we won it all on MTV's America's Best Dance Crew, but people probably don't know that I'm the one who came up with the name for the group.



Actually, I thought it would be more clever to be the "JabberWalkies". I thought we could mumble to ourselves and make nonsense sounds while we danced, as a kind of homage to the absurdity of Carrol's poem.



But that turned out to be taken by a bluetooth earpiece company. Another guy in the group, my hommie J-DoG LaRotZ, previously of the dance team LeViATHanZ, came up with the new spelling and capitalization, which we all agreed was off the hizzle!

25 Random Lies About Me, issue sixteen

16. I was once called upon by a friend in the police department to take part in a ransom drop because I looked like the brother of the victim.



The experience was pretty intense. I had to wear a wire and everything.



I brought a suitcase full of unmarked bills into a bus station, sat down where I was supposed to, and waited. The victim came in between two guys in trench coats. We made the exchange, and then the police moved on the kidnappers in the parking lot, leaving me with the man I'd helped to rescue.



It was one of the most awkward conversations of my life. We had nothing in common. For one thing, he was a kidnapping victim, and he'd gone through a few days of interrogation and torture. For another, he liked baseball. Even our taste in music was different. He really didn't like it when I asked him about his family. Plus, he seemed anxious and irritable to the point of rudeness. Finally I stopped asking him personal questions and we just sat there in silence.



The next time my police officer friend called and asked me to take part in another drop, I said no. Kidnapping victims are not as sympathetic as they seem on TV.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue fifteen

15. One time I was struck by lightning.



I didn't gain any super-human abilities from the experience, and it hurt like a mother!



All in all, a big disappointment.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue fourteen

14. I may or may not be a secret agent, working for the CIA.



That's all I can say about that.

But I am.

Seriously.

On one highly classified mission that I can't tell you about, I may or may not have been sent by our government to shoot one of our own sitting senators with a dart which makes an otherwise intelligent man ramble on in a way that's designed to be career ending.



In fact, this senator experienced this kind of attack multiple times. He may or may not be vice president now.