Category Archives: w/r/t politics

Sep 15 2011

metaphor*

On my way to the store this afternoon, there was one of those over-sized pick-up trucks in the right lane. The truck had a metal U.S. flag affixed to it, just above one of those fake scrotum things that people with issues I don’t even want to understand hang dangling off the end of the hitch. There was one large man looking incredibly severe in this out-sized abomination.

In the left lane, the was a cutely rusted smallish car with a bumper sticker that read "I Heart Teddy Bears." There were three twenty-somethings in the car, each of them skinny and laughing and generally behaving as though nothing could be better than this moment right now.

We were all stopped at a red light.

And I thought, “Man, I couldn’t think of a more perfect visual metaphor for our current American political climate if I tried.”

*a true story
May 23 2011

entertainer-in-chief

David Foster Wallace, in his satiric novel Infinite Jest,[1] has, as President of the U.S.A., a former Vegas crooner named Johnny Gentle. A consummate entertainer, Gentle is the “first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech.” He awards even cabinet members the epithet ‘babe.’

One of the points of satire in the novel is American culture’s drive for perfect and/or constant entertainment, and obviously Johnny Gentle is an extension of that. But every satire contains at least some truth.[2]

We’ve been electing entertainers in public office for decades. From Sonny Bono through Jesse Ventura right up to Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Ever four years people start rallying for Jon Stewart to run,[3] and in 2008 Stephen Colbert actually announced he would run. In possibly the state’s most intelligent and/or divisive move since withdrawing from the Union, South Carolina refused Colbert’s application and his bid was over before it really began.

But not before he released this campaign graphic that tells you everything you need to know about Stephen Colbert.

So while having former entertainers in the occasional public office is nothing new for the good ol’ U.S. of A., these days there’s a trend that worries me greatly: that those running for office must be entertaining.

Consider Sarah Palin. She quit being governor seemingly so she could star in a reality TV show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska.[4] Just as everything else she does, her purpose for starring this show seems to have been showing the American voters what she wants them to know about her when they go to the polls in 2012.[5]

Consider Donald Trump. For years Mr. Trump was mostly known as the richest man in the U.S., many people only vaguely knowing the guy in any other way. Put him on a reality TV show and now everyone knows him.[6] He announced that he was thinking about running and for a while there it seemed he would.[7]

But then another entertainer stepped in the way: President Obama. Mr. Trump was slammed again and again during the Correspondents’ Dinner as Mr. Obama reminded us that part of the reason we elected him is that he can be really, really entertaining when he wants to be.

The current crop of Republican presidential candidates is certainly less than entertaining. The newest member of the field, Tim Pawlenty, actually addressed this on Today this morning:

Matt Lauer: “People often look at you and say: ‘Is there enough charisma for Tim Pawlenty to beat Barack Obama?’ What’s your answer to that?”

Tim Pawlenty: “I’m not running for Entertainer-in-Chief. These are serious times and they need serious people with serious solutions. So if you’re looking for the loudest, or a comedian in the race, vote for somebody else. I’ll fix the country.”[8]

And you know what? For the first time ever I’m seriously considering a Republican candidate. Maybe I’m just getting old or something,[9] but just to hear a candidate acknowledge and respond against the notion that the people running our country – the people in charge of its millions of citizens – should be people who themselves are as entertaining as possible has me thinking that maybe this guy is worth considering.

But then again, that’s pretty much the only thing I know about this guy right now. Probably it’s better than I learn what he stands for and what he intends to do than to base my vote on one thing.

[1] Which yes I know I’ve talked about ad nauseum but it’s my favorite book pretty much ever and, well, frankly there are other blogs to read. Or you could read the book and find out why I talk about it all the time. (back)
[2] No evidence yet that the people of Ireland really were eating their young back when Swift wrote his A Modest Proposal, though. (back)
[3] Who told Oprah that he will never run for public office: ‘If my job became solving problems, I would suddenly become a lot less good at what I do, unless the problem being had by the country was a lack of jokes.’ (back)
[4] I’ll admit that I could be wrong about her reasons for quitting, but I haven’t seen her do anything else with her free time that she couldn’t have done whilst sitting in the office for a few more months. (back)
[5] That she hasn’t announced her candidacy yet may be a sign that the show backfired. I’ve read here and there recently that the people of Alaska are somewhat embarrassed by her and there’s almost no way to win the presidency if you can’t even carry your own state. (back)
[6] A show, I’ll point out, that stars more-or-less former entertainers entertaining the American populace in a wholly different way than they used to entertain us. (back)
[7] And he told Fox & Friends just this morning that he might still run. (back)
[8] You can view it here. (back)
[9] Lord knows I’m not suddenly rich, which is about the only other reason to vote Republican. (back)
May 14 2011

the tax suck

I’m certain that the company providing this infographic, Online MBA, has some kind of agenda in presenting it. Nevertheless, assuming the information is true, it’s incredibly interesting. The part in which foreign subsidiaries save corporations enough in taxes to pay for the federal defense and healthcare programs is simply shameful, since every single American relies on these two programs for their everyday well-being.

How Corporations Get Out of Paying Taxes
Via: OnlineMBA.com

Yet let’s remember that corporations are not responsible to citizens, only to stockholders. Social responsibility is merely an initiative to them, not a purpose. If we want any of the above to change, we have to make it happen ourselves. No corporation is ever going to change anything simply because their money-saving practices are shameful. We have to step up and elect people who will change the laws and plug the loopholes, and then we have to make those elected officials keep their promises. Because that’s the biggest problem: accountability. People in power will get away with exactly everything that the people over whom they hold sway will let them get away with. I suggest that we be less tolerant of the Charlie Wrangles and Meredith Attwell Bakers out there.

Mar 21 2011

sick-time guilt and a hamhanded segue into a few paragraphs re: Ohio Senate Bill 5

After fighting an angry stomach1 all weekend, I called off work today. My stomach still feels off, and I’m very, very tired. Now I’m afflicted with another issue: sick-time guilt.

A good number of gainfully and honestly employed Americans do not get sick-time. If they are ill enough to miss work, they simply don’t get paid that day. It’s this larger, socialistic awareness that always has me feeling terrible when I call off for a day.

I don’t have this issue with vacation. I view vacation as the workplace rewarding me for getting out of bed every weekday and choosing to go to work. My guilt is somewhat assuaged by the fact that the reward is so mathematically disproportionate.2 And plus part of the aim of vacation is to have fun.

Sick-time, though, isn’t about having fun.3 It’s about your body not working the way it’s supposed to work and you therefore can’t work the way you’re supposed to. So even though I feel like crap, I feel like I have to do something with my sick days because otherwise I’d be taking advantage, or at least sticking it in the face of all those who don’t have sick-time.

So I clean the house. I read, as opposed to watching TV. I don’t play video games. I try to do something educational. Basically, if a non-sick-time-possessing person asked me tomorrow what I did with my free day off today, I’d be able to say that I honestly didn’t waste my time.

Which of course means that since I feel impelled to do all this stuff, I’m not doing the one thing I’m supposed to be doing with sick-time, viz, convalescing. So am I really using my sick-time appropriately?4

I suppose this is a very typical, white-man, middle-class guilt sort-of thing and I feel lame even feeling it. But it doesn’t come from a place of selfishness. In fact, I wish there were some sort of national or state-level sick-time bank into which I could deposit the vast quantities5 of sick-time that I don’t use every year for people who don’t have it. But I can’t. It’s probably for the best I suppose because who knows what might happen down the road. But if I could vote to change it, I would.

As opposed to Ohio Senate Bill 5, which on the surface seeks to abolish collective-bargaining rights amongst public employees – such as yours truly. But there are all kinds of little pieces of bullshit in this bill, the primary concern for me being that they want to limit employees to no more than ten sick-days per annum. I doubt that the amount of sick-leave I take every year adds up to more than ten days, but:

Say, for example, Ashley and I were married. The bylaws of the university would allow me to take sick-time to care for her, if necessary, for as long as I have the sick-time to cover the absence (and as long as I follow the Family Medical Leave Act). As someone caring for a post-double-lung-transplant patient, this is always a possibility. But the state wants to say that I only get ten days, total. To care for me and/or her and/or any kids, if we had them. This is main part of SB5 that really chaps my ass. Gov. Kasich and most of the Republicans in the Ohio legislature seem to think that limiting sick-days will somehow save the state Madoff-quantities of money, which is the point of this whole bill since Ohio can’t even pay the interest on the Federal money we borrowed.

If this passes, I hope Gov. Kasich has to experience the double-bind he’s put public employees in with this law, what with he himself being a public employee. Because the governor is an example of the problem: upper-class Americans pulled all kinds of financial shenanigans and in time the rug was pulled from under them. Banks crashed. Money was lost. And how they’re making middle- and working-class Americans pay for their mistakes. To say nothing of the poor. This is the kind of thing that really makes me sick.

  1. Not an official diagnosis. Nor is my stomach avenging itself upon porcine villainy by using a large slingshot.
  2. I get three weeks per year, since I’ve been there 5+ years.
  3. Well, unless you’re taking one of those ‘mental health’ days.
  4. And I’ll add, lest you think I’m totally bats, that if I have a fever I tend to lie on the sofa and watch movies all day. And usually if it’s gastro-intestinal related at all, I either do the same or I play video games.
  5. Most of the sick-time I use ends up being for medical appointments, rather than days off. I try tough it out at best I can.
Feb 24 2011

lou sarah

Yesterday the world discovered that Sarah Palin is her own biggest fan.1

This surprises exactly no one.

Here’s the skinny: One of Mrs. Palin’s former aides is circulating a manuscript, ostensibly about how she’s not exactly the best or the brightest person.2 In this manuscript someone had forgotten to take out a Gmail address and so someone else noticed it and did a bit of detective work. The address traced, surprisingly, to a Facebook account for someone named Lou Sarah.

Lou Sarah, it seemed, was a big Palin fan. He/she ‘liked’ pretty much everything Mrs. Palin posted. Lou was also friends with a few of the Palins, not to mention Bristol’s Dancing with the Stars partner.

By all reckoning, this is an account that Sarah Palin established for seemingly the sole purpose of ‘liking’ Sarah Palin’s actual Facebook posts.3

Now: I’m not going to get into the underhandedness of this whole thing. The fake account is curious and perhaps somewhat underhanded. Mrs. Palin has sort-of denied that it belonged to her:

On a side note, there’s always buzz about fake Sarah Palin Facebook and Twitter accounts. Please know that this is my only authentic Facebook account and SarahPalinUSA is my only authentic Twitter account. Pay no attention to the fake accounts and their fake messages.

Obviously this isn’t any type of real, viable denial. She’s in no way saying that Lou Sarah wasn’t her account. While lame and, again, underhanded, I don’t take issue with this either. Politicians don’t answer questions, at least not in America.4

What gets me about Mrs. Palin’s tactic is how wholly unnecessary it was.

We’ve live in a post-postmodern, post-deconstruction world in which everything is self-aware.

Think about it:

  • A television show about a baby makes a joke about how shows about babies never last more than a year because everyone gets bored with babies.5
  • Lady Gaga writes songs about being at the club that themselves are played at the club.
  • Commercials, since at least the 80s, love to point out how constructed they are.
  • Even award- and fashion-shows are broadcasting stage manager’s cues that normally are transmitted to stagehands through headsets.

It’s not just cool or hip. Being meta is a fact of our culture. Being self-aware has become as American as apple pie baked in the shape of the Greek letter pi. And it’s funny to point it out.

This is why Mrs. Palin’s fake account is so astoundingly unnecessary. She could have simply ‘liked’ her own posts.6 Yes, people would have caller her self-absorbed, narcissistic, and perhaps kitschy.

But they do that already anyway.

She could have tied it into her whole ‘folksy’ PR façade. If pressed by media outlets, she could simply have said, “You betcha! Why wouldn’t I like what I say?” She could have been up-front and honest without doing anything to her oh-so-carefully-constructed image.

But she chose a different route.

This concerns me greatly – not so much that someone who will likely vie for the office of the president chose the under-handed method over one that did no harm. What bothers me is that she’s not enough aware of American culture to know that ‘liking’ your own stuff is totally okay.7

  1. Source: The Huffington Post.
  2. The former aide, Mr. Frank Bailey, is having a bit of trouble getting the book picked up because he’s not really telling the world anything we don’t already know.
  3. I use the past tense here because Lou Sarah is no longer around. The account has been mysteriously deactivated.
  4. I was shocked Wednesday morning when, on The Today Show, the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, flat-out and unequivocally denied any plans to run for president in 2012. It’s a bit of a tragedy though. The ability to give an honest answer would have gotten my attention.
  5. Raising Hope, which I honestly enjoy quite a bit.
  6. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to denote the Facebook like other than to use quotes. Any advice here would be awesome.
  7. And I don’t mean just because I do it.
Feb 13 2011

to the people of egypt. sort of.

In many ways – perhaps the important ways – you are much more courageous than we are here in the United States.

Or perhaps more fed up. Though maybe not.

We have no Mubarak. The genius of our founding fathers is in how they sought not to duplicate what they’d just rebelled against. They instilled no sole, limitless dignitary. They built-in a balance of power. They gave voice to the people.

You, the people of Egypt, found your voice after years of unhappiness. That that voice was magnified by the tools of the internet is no small thing, nor is that you used the internet to help find that voice in the first place.

In the U.S. we use the internet – and all media, really – to create a multitude of voices: a digitally driven heightless tower of Babel. We use those voices to complain. To spread vitriol, slander, lies and divisiveness. We use those voices as extensions of individuality – of individualism – and often concern ourselves little with what damage we may be causing.

You use the internet to bring yourselves together; we use it to rend ourselves apart.

And to post pictures of cats. Your ancestry is full of depictions of felines, appreciating their odd half-in/half-out-of-the-underworld nature. We like them because they’re funny.

Because in America we like to be entertained.

We demand to be entertained.

We want our news to be funny.

We want our events to be dramatic.

We want everything to be as visually appealing as possible.

We post pictures of cats because it’s more entertaining than seeing ourselves in the mirror of your headlines.

The truth is, we Americans are incredibly unhappy. This seems ridiculous in a nation of such excess. But I tell you: if you really examine it, all that excess is simple candy and chocolate bars. It’s nothing we can live on for a long period of time.

We have no Mubarak. We have no one figure to blame for our decades of unhappiness. This is the upset stomach and rotten teeth we bear under the sheen of sugar and frosting. Would that we had a king: at least we could depose someone and try again.

You, the people of Egypt, have set an example for those of us here and for the rest of the world.

We have a lot of work to do. We have no king, no president-for-life, no dictator. We have a system that is breaking down, maybe has broken down already. The world has moved on and we simply aren’t willing to do the work to fix it. We aren’t willing to give up our entertainment-addiction for a few long decades of hard work.

Of thinking, and thinking critically.

Of doing rather than opining.

Of accepting though we don’t understand.

Of forgiving what we cannot own.

To the people of Egypt, I don’t know that I’d want to be where you are right now, with so much uncertain and dangerous. But I think I’d choose it over watching this American machine grind ever more rapidly to a halt.

I wish you luck, health and fortune. I wish you work and I wish you happiness. I wish you the strength to continue your conviction to its end. I wish freedom from as much as freedom of.

To the people of America, I wish you would stop your mouths and open your eyes. A house with a giant flat-screen television in every room cannot stand.