Waiting for Sabot

I’m just a fucking redneck.

-Levi Johnston, baby-daddy of Bristol Palin

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

-H.L. Mencken

“Plain” is an anagram for “Palin”.

-My brother

Ever since McCain announced his tragic, Hogarthian choice for Vice President many of us have been pushing the limits of bandwidth by obsessively refreshing web browser windows displaying our favorite news sites. We’re waiting for the headline that will announce the final and fatal shoe-drop that unmasks Palin as something so much more vile than what we already have come to know and loathe that even her staunchest supporters will turn away in horror, suddenly sharing our nausea and existential dread.

Here we are three weeks later, and (hold on…let me check Huffington Post quickly…damn!) no shoe seems forthcoming.

Is it possible? The very same National Enquirer crew that outed John Edwards’ improbable inamorata has been on the case in Wasilla, yet somehow Palin is still standing.

As I was pondering today where the hell the shoe is, I spent some time imagining what the shoe might turn out to be. A torrid affair with a bull moose like some Alaskan Catherine The Great? Genetic proof that little Trig emanated from the backwoods union of skanky Bristol and the first dude? Photos of Todd and Barracuda smooching in Ku Klux Klan garb as a burning cross illuminates the Alaska Governor’s mansion?

Frighteningly none of these fantasies seemed adequate to the task of decisively fumigating the Republican ticket. Somehow such stories would be spun, denied, rationalized until, when the fumes cleared, the blurry family would still be standing, complete with their way-beyond-even-Bush smug certainty as implacable as it is born of righteous ignorance. How can this be?

Then, in a horrible epiphany, I realized The Truth oh my brothers and sisters.

The truth is, to paraphrase The Matrix, there is no shoe. Or, more accurately, there’s just one colossal shoe about the size of the combined red states, and it fell a long time ago. We’ve been living in it since the nation was founded. The first person to take its measure was de Tocqueville, but Mencken, in the quote above, was pithiest in its identification.

The choice of Sarah Palin was not an event, it was an inevitability. She is our predicament made flesh. She is so close to the epitome of how a majority of 21st century Americans wish to see themselves that she might as well be a goddess, above criticism. To mock her is to blaspheme against everything NASCAR nation holds dear.

Hell, she’s practically president already. Think about it. POW + White Trash Saint versus Muslim (as they think) Black Guy.

Who do you suppose wins that match-up here in the land of redneck pride?

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9/11 Idiots : Para-Annoyed

Excuse me, maybe I never got the memo, but when did paranoid conspiracy theories about the government’s role in 9/11 become some kind of conventional wisdom among leftists?

These people remind me of the enormous and credibility-destroying gap between rhetoric and action we see in the forces arrayed against abortion. They claim that abortion is the same as murder, but the vast majority of them sure don’t act like it. Wouldn’t most of us take the law into our own hands and overthrow the government if we and millions of others really thought millions of innocent people were being routinely and legally slaughtered? And what about the disgusting and intricate bathroom activities and absurdly frequent funerals that conferring full legal and moral human status on very early term miscarriages would require but which are never carried out by even the shrillest pro-lifer? Surely this is all the evidence we need to prove that all anti-choicers who stand anywhere on the Planned Parenthood side of Eric Robert Rudolph implicitly admit that there is quite a bit of gray area here?

Which brings me back to the 9/11 conspiracy believers. Anone who honestly thinks that our government planned or blessed 9/11 needs to put down their various narcotics ingestion paraphernalia, quit their jobs (those that have jobs), and spend their full energy acting to uncover the truth and punish those involved.

Anyone who can sit on their ratty couch in a filthy dorm-room believing the movie “Loose Change” and do nothing more than rant inefectually about 9/11 as if our government’s culpability is a foregone conclusion deserves to suffer the kind of tyranny they ignorantly believe rules over them.

So which is it, conspiracy idiots?

Either you don’t really believe the conspiracy, in which case please, please just shut the hell up and return quietly to your xboxes, or you do, in which case let’s see the largest demonstration in history on the Mall in Washington demanding the truth!

Oh, and one more thing. Bush and His Evil Omnipotent Masterminds stopped by, they left a message for you. It was something like “thanks for either not voting in 2000 or voting for Nader, you morons!”

Traditional Definitions

Will we soon see George W. Bush, of all people, take over William Safire’s famous “On Language” column?

He seems, after all, to have a newfound passion for linguistic fidelity in the form of “traditional definitions.”

This past weekend the vocabulary-teacher-in-chief used his radio address to express his abiding fear that tolerating gay and lesbian matrimony will cause irreparable harm not to the institution of marriage, an easily refuted inanity, but to the traditional definition of marriage, a clumsy but indubitable tautology.

It is, of course, impossible to demonstrate how gay marriage in any way harms the institution of hetero marriage and easy to argue the opposite premise.

So Bush suddenly feels compelled to defend the honor of the traditional meaning of the word marriage.

It’s as if slave owners had called a constitutional alteration meant to ensure the survival of their peculiar institution the “defense of citizenship amendment” because freeing slaves would alter the traditional definition of “American Citizen.”

But, okay, I guess I can get on board with all of this protecting of traditional definitions. While we’re at it, I’d like to suggest a few more words whose traditional definitions seem in dire need of protection.

Take “war” for example. Can we agree that war on a tactic, i.e. terrorism or eye-poking, is nonsensical? And can we agree that war is something that needs some sort of achievable end goal?

Hey, protecting traditional definitions is fun! No wonder they like it so much they want a constitutional amendment.

Let’s try another one. How about…hmmm…let’s see…oh, I know! “Torture!” Maybe we can get an amendment protecting the definition I found in Webster’s, “anguish of body or mind”. That would take care of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo pretty quickly, and, if my reaction to them is considered, might actually end Bush’s weekly radio addresses as well.

Boy, once you start thinking of these it’s hard to stop. “Patriot,” as in “USA Patriot Act,” springs to mind almost unbidden.

Then, of course, you have to wonder about the word “elected.” The last time I checked “something the Supreme Court does” didn’t appear in the OED under “elected.”

And, not to epistemologize, but what about “know”, as in “we know where the WMDs are?”

And then there’s “accomplished”, like “mission accomplished.”

“Intelligence” has a number of traditional definitions, and this administration has managed to wrong each one.

Why don’t we have a contest? You, my nearly nonexistent readers, can suggest some of your own. Some more suggestions: “compassionate”, “conservative”, “uniter.”

In the meantime, can we please take advantage of Bush’s nascent respect for the power and sanctity of language to get a constitutional amendment protecting some traditional pronunciations in addition to traditional definitions?

I’m particularly partial to an amendment protecting the traditional pronunciation of the word “nuclear.”

Shot-in-freund

The press has been missing the big story in the Vice President’s “peppering” of his friend. It’s not the delay in reporting possibly allowing time for any alcohol bloodstream evidence to dissipate. It’s not the prima facie negligent breach of hunting protocol. It’s not Whittington’s heart attack caused by a vice-presidential pellet. It’s not the permanently, and taxpayer-expensively, proximate medical roustabouts that trail after the VP like punished guardian angels (who knew?). It’s not even the garish obviousness of the itchy trigger-finger metaphor made flesh.

It is simply this:

Dick Cheney…has a friend.

Could anyone have guessed that the ultimate mad dad, this cantankerous uber-grinch of American policy both foreign and domestic, this epiphany-immune Scrooge , this man who, though compulsively draft-dodging, is a dead ringer for some Pat Conroy novel-inspiring brute of a military academy commandant, this unapologetic and presumably first-ever-in-the-senate-halls “go fuck yourself” sayer, this grunting millionaire, this proud swinger of the revolving door between the governmental and the military-industrial, this fear-mongering stone gargoyle of a party chief who’d look terrifyingly at home in an old black-and-white Kremlin photo, clad in heavy dark overcoat and fur hat, gazing sternly out over a sea of goose-stepping troops and world-ending ballistic missiles, this mirthless, shipless Ahab so sour and without pity that his own heart attacks him on a weekly basis…has a friend.

Could there be some scrap of human love in him? Not Agape, of course, and certainly not Eros, but at least a smidgen of Philia?

Might he have a chance at redemption? Maybe so…

Go ahead, God, it’s finally time. I sense an opening. Send in the ghosts of carefully chosen Christmases! Send in that “Tuesdays With Morrie” guy and team him up with Barbara Walters and let’s just see what happens! Yes, it’s just crazy enough to succeed! Maybe things really will work out for the best…Iraq will settle down, Katrina victims will be able to return to a safe New Orleans, global warming will finally be addressed! We might just be okay, because Dick Cheney has a friend!!!

But then Dick Cheney went and shot his friend,

in the face,

with a shotgun,

while ostensibly endeavoring to extinguish the blameless life of an almost weightless, defenseless creature with the temerity to defy gravity within 20 yards of the Vice President of the United States.

——

Why’d you shoot your friend, Dick?

Did you share some feeling or idea earlier in the day with Whittington, a like-minded and congenial compatriot? Did your heart warm, just a little, and did that scare you?

Were you attempting an auto-amputation of this friend to stem what might otherwise have become a life-changing transfusion of milk of human kindness?

I think we’ll never know, and maybe, tragically, Dick won’t either.

Maskism

So my intravenous NPR feed instructed me today, via excessive intonations of comfort-words like “moms” and “kids”, that being cold does not lead to getting a cold.

Moms have no good reason anymore to wrestle their kids into big, bulletproof wool balls. Evidently all this bundling up in down simply satisfies the natural parental urge to protect, and meets cultural expectations for appropriate parental behavior. (As NPR noted, an apparently inadequately swaddled child will automatically prompt nearby “seasoned” ladies to admonish the responsible parent.)

Here’s the irony, which NPR completely missed: what does work to slow the spread of viruses is skipping work/class when you’re ill, and, if you must attend, then wearing a surgical mask. Yet American culture abhors both practices in the extreme. Calvinism rather neatly explains why employers and coworkers resent any sick days you might take.

But what could possibly explain the horror at surgical masks? After all, Asians wear them all the time.

A “friend” provides a perfect example of just how extreme the unacknowledged anti-surgical mask feeling is. This “friend” is currently pursuing a masters degree in public health. The academic requirements involve small classes sitting facing each other around tables in ideal cough and sneeze range. Due to their low frequency, these sessions really can’t be skipped even if a student is terribly ill and contagious. Amusingly, the subject of these classes is inevitably how to improve public health and minimize its expense with preventive techniques.

Here’s a suggestion, WHY NOT HAVE YOUR STUDENTS WEAR SURGICAL MASKS WHEN THEY HAVE HORRIBLE RESPIRATORY VIRUSES?!? Half the students are doctors, for God’s sake! If this group won’t wear them, no one in this country ever will. (Except, maybe, in the event of Bird Flu, or confirmation of the recent study suggesting obesity may be virally spread.)

A few possible explanations for this situation:

1. Vanity. This can perhaps be fixed if Nike and Adidas start marketing expensive masks with prominent logos.

2. Coolness, a sub-category of vanity. What’s more nerdy than wearing a shapeless, celibacy-inducing down coat in the winter-time? A surgical mask reminiscent of a Japanese salaryman, obviously.

3. Fear of death. Americans don’t like intimations of mortality, or even intimations of cold and flu season, in their midst.

4. Cussedness. After all, I’ve already got the cold. The virus spreading to you is filed under “your problem”. America is all about flinty independence. If you’re worried about catching my cold then maybe you need to GET OFF MY PROPERTY!

What’s the word for a culture which values pointless, silly aesthetics over health and comfort?

The Terminader

I received no complaints about my reference to 2000 Nader voters as “idiots” in my last post. Given the total number of readers of this blog, zero turns out to be a significant minority, so I felt an obligation to address this issue in more detail.

Nader voters represent a big problem in our particular form of democratic republic: idealists who are willing to split the vote on their side of the political divide in close elections, willingly ensuring victory for the other side. Bush’s 2000 win is their greatest folly, but they continue to spoil elections all over the country, especially in Vermont, where they put an ultra-conservative in as Lt. Governor and are threatening to tip Bernie Sanders’ house seat into Republican territory later this year.

These self-satisfied would-be rebels put forth a few flimsy arguments and naive assumptions that I would like to demolish once and for all.

“Democrat and Republican front-runners are pretty much indistinguishable anyway, so why not cast a protest vote?”

I think that the recent selection of Supreme Court appointees chosen directly from the right-wing’s a la carte menu throws into high relief the real, undeniable differences between, for example, Gore and Bush, and the profound long term consequences of those differences. There are a few other policy variations I could list, such as a little thing called THE WAR IN IRAQ, but I think the Supreme Court alone is enough to lay this one to rest.

“You should vote your conscience over political expediency.”

Really? Let’s leave aside the fact that causing a Bush victory and all of its nightmarish sequelae shouldn’t exactly work as a salve to the progressive conscience. Instead, let us imagine that all of these progressives really do want to simply vote for the person they can feel best about rather than for someone with any chance of actually being elected. If this is true, then surely individual progressives can think of someone more heartwarming to them personally than Ralph Nader and write them in on the ballot.

William Sloane Coffin, perhaps. Or, now that I think about it, why restrict yourself to the living? How about Harriett Beecher Stowe? And don’t forget favorite fictional characters, like maybe that psychiatrist played by Barbra Streisand in Prince of Tides or Aslan from Narnia!

Ultimately maybe they’ll feel the most comfortable just writing in their own names. Why leave anything to chance, and you never know…

“It’s not Nader’s fault, it’s Gore’s fault for not running a better campaign”

Oh, so mean ole’ Mr. Gore forced your hand in that ballot box, did he? Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes that Nader ran an outsider campaign to make a point and should have dropped out and endorsed Gore before the election. It is proof of his pathological ego that he did not. The responsibility lies more squarely on the Nader voters’ shoulders than those of Nader himself, however.

But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that Al Gore had suddenly taken positions pleasing to these addle-pated Greens and Progressives. Do they really think he would have picked up more votes than he would have lost? And then his failure really would have been his fault. Or, even more ridiculously, let’s imagine Gore had dropped out and endorsed Nader. Anyone not sure of what the outcome would have been in that case? Winona LaDuke a heartbeat from the presidency? Please.

Face it, this is, at heart, a very conservative country. There is no popular progressive revolt just about to emerge. The best you can hope for is to nibble around the edges, and that must be done within the current political duopoly. This is not Italy or Israel, whose coalition governments demonstrate the advantages and flaws of multi-party systems.

In almost all elections, local, state, and national, progressives must stop splitting the liberal vote.

Those who are willing to childishly generate more conservative victories are more directly responsible for the current scary state of our government, all three branches, than any neocon.

Schrodinger’s Ass

“Ass” as in “Donkey”.

“Donkey” as in “Democrat”.

“Schrodinger” as in the pioneering quantum-mechanics theorist.

He created the following thought experiment, commonly referred to as “Schrodinger’s Cat” (among people who commonly refer to such things), to illustrate an important idea known as a “superposition” :

A cat is placed in a windowless box along with a vial of poison gas. The vial will perhaps open, and thus kill the cat, based on some unpredictable random mechanism. (We can safely infer from this set-up that Schrodinger was more of a dog-person, and, more worrisomely, was German.)

Since, without looking, we have no way of knowing whether or not the random process opened the vial at any given time, the only way to determine the health of the cat is to open the box. Until we open the box, the cat is, for all practical purposes, both alive and dead. The cat is said to be in a “superposition” of states, both thriving and deceased at the same time. When we overcome our revulsion at Kitty’s Edgar Allen Poe-like predicament and peek inside, the cat is said to “collapse” into one of the two states.

Which brings us to the Democrats.

Polls show that a generic, unidentified Democratic candidate will beat a Republican in a huge number of races around the country. The same was true of the last presidential election. Let’s call this unidentified candidate “Schrodinger’s Ass” since they are in a superposition of positions. All that’s known about them is that they aren’t Republican.

Are they for or against the war? Are they socially and economically liberal or conservative? Are they centrist or progressive? We can’t know until we name a real, live candidate and they collapse into a specific set of policies.

Understandably many Democrats have tried mightily to retain the enviable qualities of superpositionality all the way through election day. A vague policy position allows individual voters to project their hopes and priorities onto a candidate, but a strong and clear position that delights one group will permanently alienate another. But this is no way to run a campaign or a country.

Leadership, a word whose modern usage I generally loathe for its meaningless, high-school athletic awards-dinner banality, but which is actually required in this context, demands specificity. This is the genius of turn-of-the-century Republicans. They have constructed a clear platform and demanded and received loyalty from their entire rank-and-file, no matter how at odds individual Republicans might be with specific parts of the platform.

Democrats, such as the terrifyingly unapologetic mindless progressives whose Nader votes handed Bush the 2000 election, may well be too ornery to engage in such herd behavior, but they have to try.

The only alternative is for the candidates to run for their various offices silently and with Unknown Comic-style paper bags over their heads. Maybe they can even change the election laws so they can list themselves on the ballot as “Generic Democrat”. But that begs the question of what the hell they’ll do if they actually manage to get elected, because superpositional cats can’t chase mice or play with string, much less deal with a nuclear weapons wielding Iran.

Separated at birth, part 2

President Bush surveying Katrina damage, and Emily the stowaway cat.

Amazingly enough, they were both thinking exactly the same thing!

A Match Made In Heaven

Oil companies are profiting from high prices engendered by the synergy of demand and chronic worry about terrorism, both of which are increasing robustly.

Meanwhile bankrupt airlines are falling financially like autumn leaves in Vermont due to fear of terrorism and high fuel prices.

Obviously the oil companies need to buy the airlines and provide jet fuel at manufacturer cost.

The higher the fear and demand the less airlines make but the more oil companies make. It’s perfect.

Separated at birth?