What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame—no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We're deeply loyal to it. Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.
Seen from a sufficient distance (a decade abroad, for example), or viewed through a protective filter, like film, or alcohol, there can be something almost endearing about it. It can appear quaint, part of our foolish-butauthentic, naive-yet-sincere, roughhewn spirit. Up close and personal, unromanticized and unfiltered, it's another thing entirely. In the flesh, barking from the electronic pulpit or braying back from the audience, our ignorance can be sobering. We don't know. Or much care. Or care to know. What do we care about? We care about auto racing and Jessica. We care about food, oh yes, please, very much. And money. (Did you catch the last episode of I Love Money?) We care about Jesus, though we're a bit vague on his teachings. And America. We care about America. And the flag. And the troops, though we're untroubled by the fact that the Bush Administration lied us into the conflict, then spent years figuring out that armor in war might be bookstores to lay our money down.
Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has migrated to the region of the belt—not below it, which might at least be diverting, but only as far as the gut—where it has come to a stop. The gut tells us things. It tells us what's right and what's wrong, who to hate and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it's where American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer appears in the little window of the eight ball: "Don't trust him. Don't know. Undecided. Just because, that's why." We know because we feel, as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love. I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don't believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing — a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don't believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers' speculation that's so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that's so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. "Way I see it is," a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, "if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us."
I've been reading the posts on 538.com regarding how the presidential campaigns have been run with intense interest. In particular, today's post paints a vivid contrast in volunteer enthusiasm. In the article, there is an implied correlation between the enthusiasm of the effort and the amount of power and trust the volunteers are given.
With the McCain campaign, few (if any) volunteers are given enough rope to so much as talk to reporters, for fear of going off-message. Obama's campaign, on the other hand, gives their volunteers guides but are otherwise given free reign to organize, call, and knock on doors. Sometimes this backfires on the Obama campaign. A long while ago, during the primaries, there was a volunteer with a Che Guevara poster hanging up, and more recently, an Obama caller did some drinking and dialing.
Although -- frankly, that audio is awesomely hilarious!
But the payoff is huge: Every town in America has a slew of Obama supporters creating meetings, doing phone bank parties, and canvassing neighborhoods. 538's correspondents have had a hard time just finding McCain volunteers, while Obama supporters are up late every night in houses and offices across the nation.
The conservative ideal is for people to have the power and freedom to guide their own lives without government interference. It's amusing and ironic that the Democratic candidate is running his campaign in such a grass-roots manner.
All of this is background information for a startling conclusion I came up with while reading that 538 article (appropriately called "The Big Empty"): Obama has run his campaign like a community organizer. That much-ridiculed term, which has served as a talking point and particularly ridiculed as resume padding is going to win him the election.
The role of the President is the most mercurial of the 3 branches of the U.S. Government, and its power and stature has ebbed and flowed through the centuries of our nation. But at the moment, I would say that its role is not unlike that of a community organizer: To develop and implement programs that help the U.S. help itself. Many of the most famous Presidential Programs are community programs writ large: Just Say No, The President's Challenge, and so on.
I've maintained for a while now that the power of an Obama presidency lies in his ability to get Americans to help America. Hopefully he will be enough of a centrist to allow those he inspires to do the heavy lifting.
The school I work for has an ad up for Ode Magazine, which I'd never heard of before now. I knew I would probably like it because of its tagline: "for intelligent optimists." But a good tagline does not a good magazine make, and I started reading.
I was hooked by the first article: "Because God Whispers." It's about people who try to get a little bit (or a lot) of silence into their days in busy Western life and in particular the author's experiences with silence in Bali (if only we could all rely on our Balinese meditative experiences). But I like what I read here because this article can apply as well to a Buddhist as it could to me (a Catholic). It is a part of what I consider to be prayer. Key point in the article:
"Of course it's scary to be confronted with all those voices in your head. It's unpleasant to hear voices of pain, despair or depression. But the point is it's far scarier not to hear these voices. Silence may be scary, but a lack of silence is much scarier. Those who don't seek occasional silence to make contact with their deeper core, higher self, pure soul, Buddha nature or whatever you want to call it, become detached from God.
As a yogi friend said, "To hear the voice of God, you must be silent."
I asked why.
He looked at me as if the answer were obvious. "Because God whispers."
I know what's going to happen tomorrow and it is this:
After work I will go to the bar, order a beer and a cheeseburger, and watch the Mariners game, because I'm so fucking bored of this primary fight and I'm saving my energy and attention for talking shit about McCain once we eventually get a nominee.
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You're bored by this primary fight, but fucking BASEBALL doesn't bore you? I commend you, sir.
Every generation considers itself an improvement on the previous. In some areas, it is probably true. The World War Two generation (in addition to that whole World War Two thing) was far more responsible with alcohol than the people who came of age around the 1900's. Their excesses made Prohibition sound like a good idea. Their children - the boomers - led some bone-fide revolutions in culture. But some dirt remains on their shoes, and due mostly to circumstances, the Gen-Xers and the Millennial Generations are moving the bar higher in the department of racism.
Unfortunately in total, the benefits of these generation shifts are slow - there's still plenty of the WW2 generation lowering the overall bar in terms of racism, and so it's no coincidence that the second-oldest state in the nation (Pennsylvania) used the "America isn't ready for a Black President" line with disturbing regularity. This is also an indication that Democrats are no more (or less) enlightened than Republicans; they play the race card, too. It's still everywhere.
That stark reality has garnered some fascinating sociological press, though. Philly.com has two greatarticles, for example.
Along those same racial lines, (and partly because the airing of these types of issues is becoming more acceptable and relevant) Harold & Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay got a positive review from the New York Times largely because of the way its gross-out stoner-movie premise manages race in remarkably subtle and intelligent ways. Here is one sentence I never expected out of a review of a movie like this:
The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience. "When we start to write, we're under the assumption that everyone knows racism is bad," Mr. Schlossberg said. "If you don't know that, you're a moron. Harold and Kumar's attitude toward racism is more frustration at having to deal with idiocy than moral outrage. We try to create a world where racism is stupid."
Regardless of whether or not he wins the Presidency, there is one thing I'm grateful to Barack Obama for. I'm finding out just how much I like or dislike America.
The America I love is full of idealism and grit. It's the nation that got to the Moon, and always acts with its heart in the right place (even when it screws up). It's the nation that faced its demons of segregation head-on and won. The America I love is one in which the determining factor in success is work, not wealth or birth or luck. It retains the almost fanatical Puritan work ethic that built the nation to begin with.
The America that I can't stand is willfully ignorant, judicial, and blames all its problems on other people. It thinks that torture is OK, that Muslims are all evil and crazy, and is so much quicker to judge than to think. It's the America that can't get through a non-fiction book, a movie that questions their world-view, or a speech that asks them to work for what they want. It's welfare-think; group-think; pundit-think.
I know that America is both sides, just as I'm both hard-working and lazy in turns and circumstances. Obama, because he says things as honestly as he can, exposes both sides. When confronted with the anger of his own pastor, he didn't run away; He used it as a metaphor for American Blacks writ large. The America I hate is willfully ignoring that anger and bristles at the thought that anyone could be angry at America - even when a black person is 8.2 times more likely to be in prison than a white person. At that rate, about one in three blacks would have done some jail time during their lifetime.
So much for land of the free.
And Obama took that head on, and, more bravely asked America to look at themselves and their own families for that kind of racism. As an example, he acknowledged his own grandmother as occasionally saying some strong stuff. People freaked out! Oh my God! That nigger called his grandma a racist!
It's so much easier to point a finger than to think about yourself and your own family in a critical light. I've heard an occasional slur out of my friends, family, and myself, although here in Arizona it's much more likely to be directed at a Mexican. Or maybe I look at someone differently, or cross a street earlier than planned. But unless you are looking, you won't find it.
More recently, he acknowledged another kind of anger, and again it was used to manufacture some outrage. He noted how communities in the Rust Belt have been struggling for decades, and that struggle leads to anger that the politicians' promises never materialize. That anger is expressed not in right-left politics, because after thirty years, they know that doesn't matter. So instead it's expressed in the more-polarized politics of God, guns, and gays. But Obama caught flak for this because he, again, pointed out that yes, people are angry.
It's easier to be outraged than thoughtful.
I love to hear people disagree with the policies he wants to implement. That takes thought and at least a basic understanding of policy in general. I hate to hear people ignore his pleas for self-criticism, and for acknowledging anger and real problems within the nation.
So Obama will tell me how much I like this nation. I try not to let the pundits tell me what the nation thinks - they can't help but color their thoughts with their own opinions - and I know there is a bit of both, but who is the majority? I am so afraid and hopeful.
People on both sides have decried the United States' role as the "world police" - endlessly stomping out trouble in other people's back yards for fear it will spread into ours. Such difficulties are to be expected in the new, connected world, but the financial burden as well as the lives lost are difficult to justify. The Republicans, in their recent stint in office, have taken the "world police" notion to a whole new level of ridiculousness: the preemptive war. This sort of thing was once a funny joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"The phases [of the history of warfare] are retribution, anticipation, and diplomacy. Thus, retribution: "I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother." Anticipation: "I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother." And diplomacy: "I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it."
It takes a conspiracy theorist to believe we are at the "diplomacy" level, although there are plenty of them, and they probably could make convincing arguments that we have killed people in our "brother" nations and that we've framed others for it, or otherwise mixed up the politics enough to make the situation similar. Remember: we gave Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan most of their guns. Same goes for the warring factions in Somalia, too. It's pretty clear that this method of giving lots of guns to people who hate each other, and then going in and fighting with everyone in the name of security isn't working.
I am a political Independent, because above all, I'm a pragmatist. With apologies to SNL, bitches don't get things done. Hard-thinking, level-headed, smart people get things done. And the only way to get meaningful change like universal health care, an end to abortion, worldwide green power, and especially relative world peace is to make it profitable and in every single person's best interest to make sure it happens. The very powerful have to be given a reason to care, and the weak have to be given a way and the hope to act.
So how can the powerful be given reason to care about world peace, given the military-industrial complex, and how can the weak be given hope and means when they are at its mercy?
This, above all, is the role of government. The government is able to change the rules for normal people. For example, right now you get a tax break for donating a lot of money to charities. It's also in the best interest of rich owners to treat their workers well, because of laws and unions. That wouldn't exist without government. The execution of this responsibility has made great strides in the U.S. and elsewhere, although the U.S. took several leaps backwards in the last 20-30 years or so.
But it's time for it to get back on the horse. Because the world is more connected, turning a blind eye to corporate greed abroad is as harmful in the long run to us as arming the Middle East to the teeth, because irresponsible greed breeds hate. On the other hand, we already have rules that encourage green technology, programs like the Peace Corps, and other worldwide charity - and we need more of those rules.
The ways and means have been defined well, and they've been shown to work. We just need to see them implemented.
I'm not an advocate of state-sponsored arts just because I'm working on my 4th album, or because Tech Theater was the best thing about high school for me (OK, yes, I did get an awesome education), or because my last class at UA was painting, or because I have more Mp3's than I could listen to in six months of continuous listening.
Although that helps.
From a purely social engineering point of view, I am an advocate because I know how happy it makes people. There is a self-sustaining circle that goes like this: a happy society is a productive society, which can afford to institute programs to keep itself happy and healthy. The Arts make us smarter, get us to know other people, and generally improve society on a lot of levels.
Why do I post this (generally-accepted) assertion? Because a little bit of arts in people's day makes me, personally, gleeful. That's why I love Improv Everywhere, which is a loose group of musicians, miscreants, and like-minded crazy people who stage public events unannounced in order to make normal people's lives just a little more interesting, funny, and generally awesome. If anything, their involvement in events such as no-pants-day (which, to be fair, wasn't invented by them), and other surreal events make people look up from their text messaging and realize they are, really and actually, in the waking world.
This skit was done recently, and still, really, really, really makes me happy:
The skill involved in delivering hundreds and hundreds of speeches, without "um," or awkward pauses is tough enough. But the way he can do so with grace and, indeed, rhythm akin to music is unreal.
Not only is he able to deliver these messages in a beautiful way, but he also is delivering several thick books' worth of information in them - all memorized. He rarely looks at his notes. He doesn't even have notes in his interviews, but is able to deliver that same tone and nuance.
The most ridiculous example of this was during a recent interview on Cleveland TV. The interviewer first asks about NAFTA, and he debunks a rumor about his campaign. Then, he was asked to name two things he could do as President immediately (i.e., without Congress) after being sworn in. He could've said, "get out of Iraq," but instead he had a more nuanced response involving a meeting about the Chiefs of Staff. He also (admirably) wanted to tell his Attorney General to review every executive order to examine which are necessary for national security. Not breathless rhetoric about restoring American rights, but a thoughtful response about what he would do and how.
Then he gets a question about NASA. Incredibly, he had a finger on the nation's pulse: it's been stuck in place, needs to review its budget to make for more effective innovation, and starting to plan for manned flights deeper into space in order to grab the imagination of the people again.
His third question was easy enough, about whether there would be a divisive campaign between himself and McCain (he didn't think so).
Finally, he was asked about the basketball trade between Cleveland and Chicago, and he gave a pretty detailed analysis of the Chicago Bulls' and Cleveland Cavaliers' position in the NBA.
No "um," no awkward pauses, no notes, and no half-cooked answers. Why can't all politicians do this?
Driftglass on why Obama's enthusiasm/inspiration matters in the practical affairs of politics:
People are willing to go to war for scraps of cloth called flags.
They are willing to die for scraps of wood called a cross.
And 70 years ago as their world fell apart, Americans were willing to give their hearts away to a horse.
A horse.
Because people are flesh and blood, not circuits and spreadsheets, and we need hope and inspiration every bit as much as we need 10-point programs.
Which unfortunately makes us go weak in the knees for saints and charlatans alike.
Maybe this not the way it should be, but it is the way it is, and as proud members of the Reality Based community we need to accommodate ourselves to the fact that human nature is a force every bit as real and formidable as gravity.
If you do not understand this, you will never understand politics.
I realized today, while lying face-down on the bed blowing raspberries, that materials with different thread-count (which is a sign of quality) respond differently to trying to make farting sounds (raspberries).
I really wish that, when snooty rich people went shopping for quality linens, they would put their faces up to it and make farting sounds to judge the quality. That would be awesome.
In general, I like Microsoft Vista. They made a lot of changes that obviously needed to happen, added a bit of chrome, and generally it works for me. Now, I realize this is because my computer kicks ass: two dual-core 3GHz 64-bit processors, 4GB RAM, two RAID arrays totaling 1TB, and a pair of 512MB video cards connected to a pair of flat monitors.
Yeah, I know.
The trouble with Vista, though, is often that it's new: compatibility and configuration are a bit harder. I had this problem when I couldn't figure out why my video card wouldn't display higher than 1024x768 (I prefer 1280x1024). Thankfully, there was this little article on softpedia, describing the symptoms exactly and how to get around it.
Apart from the incredible convenience of the article, it's remarkable how specific the article is. This is an example of how the Internet allows for group thinking that isn't hampered by "groupthink." The first time I saw this potential was way back in 2001 when the movie A.I. had the first really successful alternate reality game (later named by its participants The Beast). The game was impossibly difficult for any one person - it required people to work together. Unfortunately for the developers, their own puzzles (which required knowledge of dozens of languages, expertise in chemistry, physics, philosophy, programming, and other sciences) would be solved within minutes by the thousands of people who worked on the solutions. Inevitably, someone in the Cloudmakers (as the participants named themselves; the website is down but the link goes to the Wayback Machine cache from 2002) knew how to solve the problem.
I love this concept: the Internet allows communication between people. People are generally inherently capable. MIT created "Fab Labs" that were able to create most anything (3-d printer, circuitboard printers, etc.). 3 students at MIT are doing their theses on the work of six year old villagers in Africa, who had better basic designs than the engineers in the U.S. Harnessing the total knowledge of a huge group of people is something that, if it can be done efficiently (i.e., with a minimum of groupthink), would be as massive a step forward as the Industrial Revolution.
I'm pretty glad to be alive sometimes.
This dissemination of information isn't limited to merely solving technical problems or riddles. It has also been suggested by Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) that if a massive e-mail pen pal initiative among all nations would make it vastly more difficult to go to war:
"You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family?"
Also, if that family helped design your super-cool phone/lamp/radiator, you might think twice if you wanted to upgrade anytime soon.
It seems that consulting is a lot like graphic design...
I recently got an awesome, salaried, full-time, from-home job with benefits for about 2.5x more than I was making before. I briefly negotiated this job with my new boss and experienced what a consultant told me about how to negotiate a wage:
The night before you do this, stand in front of a mirror. Offer an absolutely astronomical sum, and grin like an idiot. Then, slowly lower the price. Repeat this process until you can keep a straight face. That's the amount you want.
Of course, after holding college jobs for such a long time, "middle class" seems filthy rich to me.
Name: Steve Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think. See my complete profile
I know what's going to happen tomorrow and it is this:
After work I will go to the bar, order a beer and a cheeseburger, and watch the Mariners game, because I'm so fucking bored of this primary fight and I'm saving my energy and attention for talking shit about McCain once we eventually get a nominee.