Whipsaw.
There’s a woman copping a smoke in the doorway of a building one stop up from where I get off. It’s right next to a Men’s Wearhouse. The windows are done up for Christmas already: one of those foxily silver male models looms in a window-filling poster, dapper in a dark suit, holding up a puppy with a big red bow around its neck. The next window over, he’s casual in a den somewhere, a nice bright sweater, a mug of something hot and spiced in one hand. He’s wearing the same airbrushed grin in both shots, and not a silver strand is out of place: a metrosexual CEO, his hands never dirty, his lucre never dreaming of filth. Someone just like him was hanging in those windows last year, and the year before that: the river is never the same, but it takes a while to wear a loop into an oxbow. As it were. I mean, it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet, but here’s the Christmas swag; the Payless down the street got its holly-swaddled signs up the Friday before Hallowe’en. I ought to be livid. It’s one of the harmless little things I let myself blow up over. (Not until Black Friday, people! Please.) But I’m not. I’m not. —And her? She’s standing there in her business drag, blowing smoke: taking a break from answering the phones, stepping and fetching, an early morning deathly dull sales conference with successorized PowerPoints, trying to sort 500 boxes of document production for the upcoming class-action suit. She might have been copping a smoke there yesterday, too, or last week, or the year before; maybe I just never registered her. Maybe I never looked up in time. Maybe her schedule changed; maybe she just started here. Maybe she was working in Tualatin last week. The river is never the same, but how different is it, really? A little ripple here, that’s gone before you know it? A different twig rolling down the current than the one that was there a minute ago? The scree shifted a little when you weren’t looking? What does any of that matter? Don’t these people realize Everything Changed last week? Don’t they see what happened? Doesn’t anyone?
The second of November, 2004: and nothing was ever the same again.
And sometimes what I’m listening to is Paul’s band, Arms; a lot of the time what I’m listening to specifically is “Build on the 9s.” And yes, I know, the song is built out of nine sections, and no take was ever more than nine bars long, and they chopped it all up and edited it back together, and they’re singing “Build on the 9s, build on the 9s,” because, you know, that’s what they were doing. But they recorded it in 1999, when the tail wind that carried us through that decade hadn’t yet begun to sputter, and even if a decade is a wholly artificial demarcation, a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas (important events, and important ideas), and just when did the ’90s begin, anyway? The World Wide Web? Clinton’s inauguration? “Right Here, Right Now”? That night the Wall came down? —Remember when all our wars were going to be for the right reasons? (They weren’t, but remember?) Remember when we were going to abolish stupid work and outsource ourselves in our pyjamas? (We never really could, but remember?) Remember when somebody would show up at your cubicle with an orange messenger bag full of DVDs and ice cream you’d just ordered online? When the hit TV show was “Northern Exposure”? When we were all going to move to Prague and become uncitizens of the Middle World? Remember when the clouds finally looked like they were lifting and the sunlight lit up the sky and the drums kicked in and then they blew that amazing horn break that sounded like it was going to last forever? Remember when we were going to save the world?
Those are the nines, right there: nine one, nine oh, nine three, nine five, all the way up to ninety-fuckin’-nine. (Eight nine, even, and the Wall, coming down. There’s a photo of me somewhere, with a ponytail, in the long dark coat I still wear to work when it’s cold, chipping away at that Wall with a hammer and chisel. When I was six or maybe five we went through Checkpoint Charlie and Mom was told she couldn’t photograph an old bombed-out church in East Berlin, so she turned around and caught its ruined reflection in the oranged glass cladding of the people’s office box across the street. —My God. Was it all really that long ago?) —Build on those nines, dammit: and the song lurches in its engagingly undrunken way from nine-bar to nine-bar, and all those names come thundering through the speakers, universal in their particularity. The increasing us and the decreasing them. The past didn’t go anywhere! The nines are still here, all about us. Build on them!
And I’m listening to that because it’s something I need to know, here and now. It’s easy to forget.
Remember Y2K? Remember why we were gonna party like it was 1999?
The twelfth of December, 2000: and nothing was ever the same again.
Later than eleven
Trying to make the earth into a heaven
So, yeah: saving is what misers do, and there’s something else I’m listening to, when I’m not listening to that. What I’m listening to is the Mountain Goats, and specifically what I’m listening to is “The Plague.”
There will be cotton clouds
Above the fields, as white as cream
There will be loud singing in the churches
As we all come out to take one for the team
And all our great schemes and plans
Will slip like fishes from our hands
And the rivers will all turn to blood
Frogs will fall from the sky
And the plague will cover
The country with its anger
La la la la
La la la
La la la
I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime.
So here I am, at the edge of everything, ready to take a leap into moonbattery. Deep breath. Flex your knees. Roll your head this side to that, loosen your neck, free up your shoulders by swinging your arms back and forth. Spit in your palms and rub them together. Even though you’re not about to grab anything, it’s something to do, a sign and signifier of focussed intent. Step up to the edge. Grip it with your toes. Crouch a little, find your balance, careful. Easy. Feel that clutching tingle in your glutes. Savor the air, suddenly sharp in your nose. Your heart’s beating faster. Let it. Swallow. Okay: coil your muscles, arms back, ready to fling yourself over and out, take one more deep breath, hold it a moment, let half of it out, and—
There.
—Of course, I had to climb back up out of moonbattery to pose for that leap, and now I’ve made it, I’m not actually falling tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle into the outer darkness, shrieking oddly umlauted vowels, coughing up words with too many consonants: I’m maybe a foot away, still on the ground, hunkered over a little, dust puffing up from my feet where I landed. There was no edge. This isn’t moonbattery. It’s just a step or two away from where you are now. Maybe a little darker, but otherwise the same. We were warned, goddammit: it doesn’t take the pattern-skrying of a Teresa Nielsen Hayden or the fever-stoking of a Greg Palast to make it clear. We were told, up front. That nameless Bush aide cheerfully copped to it, in the Ron Suskind article linked ’round the world:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Well, Bev Harris is studying what they did. You want a barricade? (Or a levee, to sandbag?) That’s as good a place as any to start setting one up.
The election was rigged. They stole it. Last time, they cold-cocked us when we both found ourselves in a suddenly dark room with nobody looking; this time, we went in with a flashlight, but they’d slipped us a mickey, and that’s why our lips are numb and our mouth tastes like cold pennies as we stand here, ready to make our little leap: the election was rigged. George W. Bush still isn’t president. (Except in all the ways that actually matter.)
And I’d like to say leaving is a crock, all due respect to my favorite popstar notwithstanding. I’ve said it, actually: leaving is a crock. There’s too much left to fight for and too much left to fight with for us to go gently into exile. But I’ve said it as much to buck myself up as anything else: I repeat it to myself, trying to spit that taste out of my mouth, to convince myself it’s true. Leaving is a crock, yes, but more to the point: leaving is hard. —But I’ve read “Jesus Plus Nothing.” They’ve told us up front what they want. They’ve cheerfully copped to it. We’ve been warned. And here I stand in Little Beirut, the capital of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County: somehow alienated, somewise cut off; alone, despairing, so very, very sorry.
Leaving is hard. But is it really harder than fighting?
What comes next? I don’t know. Whither the left? Ha! I barely can tell you what I’ll be doing tomorrow, beyond following Bruce Baugh’s sage advice the best I can, and keeping a weather-eye out for galiel’s canaries to start dropping. But can I just for a minute jump on the “moral values”-bashing bandwagon? We don’t need to start preaching, and we don’t need preachers (though we need everyone we can get). We know our morals and we know what we stand for and we know we’re right. What we need here on the left side, the side of progress, the side that gets things done, the somewhat more purple side that keeps picking those somewhat more magenta states out of the gutter and loaning them a sawbuck till payday that we know we’ll never see again, what we need is, and bear with me on this, we need a Daddy. We need father-figures to go on all the TV chat shows and sternly and implacably stick up for our values as we know them and lay down the law as we would write it with an ineffable air of authority that reaches right past the frontal lobes and plugs into the monkey-brain, there to patiently bit-by-bit unwire the awful “moral values” meme bombs with Truth and Justice and the American fucking Way, and I realize this is the voters-are-rubes argument, which is seemingly at odds with the voters-was-robbed argument, and I’ve plumped for the voters-is-mean argument, too, and probably will again, but elections are legion; they contain multitudes, and I know this is about to decohere into gassy rhetoric, babble and fury, but hear me out: what we need now is Atticus Finch, ladies and gentlemen.
So, hey, let me end with a quote from Barry Goldwater, that seems to have fallen off Will Shetterly’s site:
Now, those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.
Using their own words against them! That’ll show ’em!
Premature, perhaps, but.
HYDRIOTAPHIA.
ENTIERRO DE LA URNA;
O, Un DISCURSO De las URNAS De SEPULCHRAL ENCONTRADO ÚLTIMAMENTE EN NORFOLK.
A mi amigo digno y honorado,
Thos. Le Gros, de Crostwick, Esq.
La gallina el pyre general estaba hacia fuera, y el valediction pasado encima, los hombres tomó durar adieu de su interred a amigos, esperando poco que la curiosidad de las edades futuras debe comentar sobre sus cenizas; y, no teniendo ninguna vieja experiencia de la duración de sus relicks, llevada a cabo ninguna opinión de tales despue’s-consideraciones.
¿Pero quién sabe el sino de sus huesos, o cómo él debe a menudo ser enterrada? ¿Quién hath el oráculo de sus cenizas, o whither él debe ser dispersada? Los relicks de muchos mentira como las ruinas de Pompey, en todas las partes de la tierra; y cuando llegan sus manos éstos pueden parecerse ahan vagado lejos, que, en un recorrido directo y meridiano, tenga solamente pocas millas de tierra sabida entre se y el poste.
Not quite right. I shall try again, in the morning.
Hope dies last.
I was going to kick up an old entry on the commemorative slang we all should be using to describe Republican Fuck Tha Vote initiatives, but who needs that shit? We’re in the last days, the die’s rattling in the cup, our toes are damp in the Rubicon, and be damned if it’s the same river it was last time. Joshua Micah Marshall has the only post you need to read from now until Tuesday. He’s quoting somebody working the polls in Florida:
My job is to get people to the polls and, more importantly, to keep them there. Because they’re crazily jammed. Crazily. No one expected this turnout. For me, it’s been a deeply humbling, deeply gratifying experience. At today’s early vote in the College Hill district of East Tampa—a heavily democratic, 90% African American community—we had 879 voters wait an average of five hours to cast their vote. People were there until four hours after they closed (as long as they’re in line by 5, they can vote).
Here’s what was so moving:
We hardly lost anyone. People stood outside for an hour, in the blazing sun, then inside for another four hours as the line snaked around the library, slowly inching forward. It made Disneyland look like speed-walking. Some waited 6 hours. To cast one vote. And EVERYBODY felt that it was crucial, that their vote was important, and that they were important.
And there were tons of first time voters. Tons.
Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll see you on the other side.
Winning friends; influencing people.
Y’know, Ted—can I call you Ted? Ted, I could, if I wanted, thank you, for finally giving me a glimpse of what it is y’all think you see when you take a look at Kerry; I could sneer at you, and tell you that your partisan ideal of God is a pathetically transparent crutch, devoid of mystery and grace, part and parcel of the exclusionary rhetoric that has so bitterly divided a country so sorely in need of uniting these past four years. I could point out that the soldiers whose vote you so assiduously champion are many of them paid so little they must feed their families with food stamps—which puts them squarely in the freeloaders’ camp, whose vote you so thoughtlessly disparage. I could slyly allude to the charming hubris in whingeing on about the unworkable inefficiencies of public works over the internet—one of many great public works that make this modern world of ours at all possible—but it’s an old and tired point, worn smooth with overuse. (Besides, you doubtless go out of your way to use private toll roads, and think the free market would do an even better job of keeping cholera at bay; also, I’d have to hear you rationalize an administration that’s presided over one of the largest public-sector growth spurts in history. I’d really rather not.) —I could be rude, and unload a mercilessly colorful stream of invective that attempts to plumb the willful depths of your ignorance; I could be shrill, and hold you up as an example of all that is wrong, as one of the tuneless tootling flutes that bedevil our sleep and hold us back from all that we could be; I could be deferential, since the ground I need to cover has already been well and truly mapped. I could be a mensch, and let you know, privately, that anyone who goes on about how dumb Democrats are had probably better know how to spell Republicans. (Hint: there’s only one “i.”)
But what I’m gonna do, Ted, is this: I’m gonna tell you to stop sending me unsolicited commercial email. This may be one of the most polarized elections ever, or at least in a while, but if there’s one thing that will bring us all together, Democrat and Republican, Green and Libertarian, and unite us in a common cause, it’s an undying hatred of spam.
Verb. sap. and all that, old boy.
November criminals.
The evidence is abundant that Kerry has no concept of unintended consequences. He has been protected from those all of his life. Nutured as he is in the ideas so dear to the Left, of victimology and irresponsibility, of class warfare and division, of “situation ethics”, nannystatism and “internationalism”, he is as ill prepared to deal with the results of his “policies” as he is to tell the truth… or even to know what truth is.
He’ll be sure to fuck it all up while remaining clueless, protesting his own innocence and blaming it all on Bush.
He simply must not be allowed to take office, no matter what the rigged results of the election may be. And we must not tolerate the kinds of post election shenanigans the dipocrats are planning.
It is our American tradition to tolerate the elction of those with whom we disagree. Gear up for the next election and try to reach some accomadation with the other side, for the good of the Nation. That has been or practice and our salvation. And we have been trying in naive good faith to accomodate the Left for most of a century, to our sorrow and peril. Most of the ills in our politics and in society generally can be ascribed to this alone.
This time, there will be nothing left of that Nation in which this was the way of peaceful and civil governance. If Kerry “wins”, it will be too late to save the Nation which showed the world the miracle of representative republican government. Our soveriegnty and our Constitution will be further demolished, our economy and military weakened, our enemies emboldened, our confidence and spirit disheartened and, most likey, we will suffer catastrophic physical attack on our own soil.
The combination of disasters ensured by a Kerry “victory” amounts to a national crisis that we simply cannot allow. In four more years, it will be far too late.
Posted by LC Jon , Imperial Hunter at October 28, 2004 11:32 PM
So yeah: one thing and another and it’s looking enough like our long national nightmare might actually be over on the third of November that I’m biting most of my down-to-the-wire nails over Measure 36.
But you know what happens when a nightmare’s over, don’t you?
You sit up, gasping, and then the alarm goes off, and you jump, and you hit the snooze button, and maybe you try to go back to sleep for another five minutes, but you can’t, so you finally get up and I hope you remember to turn off your alarm clock, or otherwise it’s going to go off while you’re in the shower and God that’s annoying, but however it ends up you make coffee in your bathrobe and if you’ve got some time you read the news, and then you go and you put on some pants and you put on a shirt and you get your jacket and your keys and your wallet and you go get on the bus and you ride downtown and you go to fucking work.
That’s what happens when a nightmare’s over.
Voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also just about the least important thing we can do, politically. —Butterfly effect aside, swapping the smirched and tarnished R on the White House for a magical golden D is just the barest beginning.
Magician and Superman.
Favorite line from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, thus far:
“Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people,” said Wellington.
Doesn’t hurt, I suppose, that it’s Stephen Fry’s Wellington I’m seeing in my head.
I’m enjoying the book a great deal: it is, in its own gentle way, precisely the antidote I needed for Stone, even if it’s coming from an unexpected quarter. (I like wondering what Aubrey and Maturin are up to, in this alternate history.) —But (as with any upstairs Britfic, or Merchant & Ivory production) I’m spoiling the fun a little with those nagging issues of class: how delightfully easy it is to study magic, when one doesn’t have to worry about meals or a mortgage or a day job! (But that’s just envy talking. Don’t mind it.) I’m reminded of sprezzatura in evening clothes, and how keeping one’s head when all about you etc. is much easier when you have a certain amount of power, over the situation that’s lopping heads, or at least yourself; it’s therefore a sign of power, and that’s why coolth’s so cool—and maybe, just maybe, why I’m finding Mr Norrell the more sympathetic. (Thus far.)
Which leads me to Scott McCloud, ruminating on the difference between rage, and calm, and how they apply to power fantasies. And I suppose I could dig into the differences between power over and power with—but I’ve just straddled the Pond, by golly. And there’s work elsewhere to be done.
The company kept.
Kevin Drum is surprised by who turns up on Reason’s poll of prominent libertarians, and I suppose I am, too: any movement than can (avidly) count Wendy McElroy and Charles Murray as members is—oh, hell, one just doesn’t know what to say. —But at the same time, I’m not at all surprised: it’s the usual suspects who measure their liberties in tax cuts and care more about being right than trying to do right—and run the risk of fucking up. You all know these guys, if you’ll permit me a gross generalization: he’s in every comics shop and sci-fi club and weekly Dungeons & Dragons session—actually, let’s swap that out for Diplomacy, or maybe Starfleet Battles, or, yeah, Advanced Squad Leader. —There’s a certain social power that comes from digging into an argument and overwhelming the other side, and nothing fosters argument like making an abstruse, persnickety, anti-conventional choice, clasping it to your bosom, and defending it rigorously against all comers. (“The grapes are sour, as anyone with eyes can plainly see.”) Hence the impish delight that wafts from the screen when Reason asks its assembled panel for their favorite presidents: “Bush 41,” says Jonathan Rauch, almost daring you to ask why. “Grover Cleveland,” says Robert Higgs. Losers fall back on the classics: Washington, Lincoln; Jesse Walker scores over-the-top cool points: “Richard Henry Lee,” he says.
But that certain social power easily evaporates when you find you have to walk your rigorous defense back, and power’s a hard thing to give up, and maybe this is why so many libertarians on this list are voting for Bush again, in spite of. Tax cuts, they say, ignoring the explosive growth of a government that will never fit in that bathtub; Islamofascism, they say, and blithely order up another round of aerial strikes in urban areas full of people who mostly just want to get on with their lives—but really, it’s for much the same reason as the principled non-voters and the Elmer Fudd write-ins: I’d rather be right on my own damn terms, they say, than run the risk of ever being wrong. —The poetic justice of the reality-challenged candidate so many of them have backed into, who clasps his impetuous choices to his bosom and defends them against all comers, on his own damn terms, is chilly comfort. —It’s not that I think that Libertarians for Bush is a large-enough constituency to swing a state, much less the election; it’s just that it’s always hard to see a dream so shiny turn so foully rancid.
(I mean, the Greens at least have a basic faith in the enterprise, however touchingly naïve. —Us Greens? Oh, look: my own concern for coolth is getting in the way!)
The ice has gotten thin beneath my feet out here, so it’s time for me to walk it back. I had a much pettier point to make, before I got distracted; a bean-counting, politically correct point, persnickety in the extreme: reading my way down Reason’s poll, I was surprised to note there’s three times as many Kerry supporters listed as there are women.
One just doesn’t know what to say.
Isn’t it nice we’re all in on the joke.
It’s amazing how quickly a random cruise through the web can send a Lewis Black joke screwballing at you:
The ‘Dirrty’ singer—who is fronting a new MTV documentary promoting sexual abstinence to US teenagers—also says she tries to make love every day and claims she is open to all sexual experiences.
Much as hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, due diligence of a sort is the tribute prankster pundits pay to what passes for objective reality, these days. So I’ll note that it’s all a little more complex than the writer of the blurb above (oh, how they must have high-fived and bumped fists with everybody in the bullpen when that one went through) would have it seem: the documentary in question, “Sex, Votes & Higher Power,” is part of MTV’s Choose or Lose programming, which this year is committed to getting 20 million 20-somethings to vote—which, demographics being what they are, is all to the better end of the short stick we’re holding. And a brief perusal of more in-depth descriptions proves the show is more complex than “promoting abstinence to US teenagers”:
By traveling back to her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, to meet several young women and men who have been directly affected by the government’s policies on abortion, abstinence-only sex ed and dating violence, Christina finds out firsthand what’s going on in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The special will present several sides of the many issues affecting young people and present where both political parties stand on these issues.
And while I didn’t watch it (due to a lack of cable, and not having known of its existence), them what did report what sounds, indeed, like a studiously bent-over-backwards fair-and-balanced approach. —But! The atheists in the audience are already chomping at the “Higher Power” in the documentary’s title: pun or not, it’s a loaded gun of a phrase this year, especially when you drag it out for sex and youth and our misbegotten approach to the incendiary intersection of the two. And much as I might be amused by the image of Christina Aguilera, who says she tries to make love every day, impishly quizzing a couple of Silver Ring Thingers about just how far it is they can go and still abstain, I keep coming back to that MTV press release, which so lovingly cites the Heritage Foundation’s bullshit statistics about the “success” of abstinence-only education.
But again, I didn’t see it, and so I’m not going to get any further out on that limb than this. What’s important here is the Wile E. Coyote moment I had when I first read that line cited above: and what can you say when a pop star who’s working the post-t.A.T.u. mediasphere with coy gossip about shamelessly red-blooded quotidian fucks is cited in the very same article as leaping at the chance to promote abstinence to American teens? —Even adjusting for the Brit-tab snark factor, you have to admire the tesseract of pre-breakfast impossible things lurking at the heart of it all.
Maybe hypocrisy is the tithe virtue pays to vice. Yeah. That’s it.
Oh, right, I have this blog.
It would appear I am on something of a hiatus. (An hiatus? Oh, shush.)
There is work: the balloon went up at the day job, and now I have three times as many people to oversee as before. I really need to finish the ceiling in my office (those of you who’ve assisted, my thanks: it is now just under two-thirds complete. In May—or was it June?—it was one third less than it is now); winter, after all, is coming, and unceiled eaves are drafty. Having in a rash moment submitted a manuscript to a magazine for their consideration, I now feel a nagging itch to do so again; the story that presented itself as next in the queue, however, though clearly outlined on paper, refuses to budge past the opening of the second scene, such as it is. And the Spouse, in a bid to finish her current chapter by the end of October, hell or high water, has drafted me as a jackleg flat colorist, which is pleasantly tedious work, but hard on the carpal tunnel. (Basically, I’m doing stage 3 and a little of stage 4 on a couple of pages.)
So, um. Yeah. The blog-thing. You heard Derrida died, I bet? Yeah. And Superman, right?
Hey, how ’bout that election?
(Oh, don’t feel too badly. There’s emails going back weeks I need to answer, and let’s not even look at the phone calls to be returned, shall we?)
Whoa.
Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York’s was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.
—“Arrests at GOP Convention are Criticized,” Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Let’s not muddle this with nuance.
Once more, folks:
- Democrats depend on registering as many people to vote as possible.
- Republicans depend on preventing as many people from voting as possible.
Vinegar and honey.
The whole point of building on the nines, as slinkP will tell you, was to increase the us, and that you can’t do by walking up to them and sneering and spitting and backhanding them in the face, telling them they’re idiots, full of shit and nonsense, signifying nothing. Find the common ground—it’s always closer than you think: enemy soldiers on the front lines will forever have more in common with each other than with their own generals. Find that common ground and show them the way to us. —Anything else is chest-thumpery, sound and fury, heat without light; aggrandizing the us. Not increasing it.
But sometimes—
Here’s the Yes on 36 site—the one that’s, you know. For kids. Check its hip air of faux defiance, its commodified dissent: “I won’t be redefined.” Check the language in the Q&A on 36: “Measure 36 puts very simple wording in our State Constitution saying marriage is only between a guy and a girl.” Check how open-minded they’re trying to be: “Hopefully all Oregonians are against discrimination. But Measure 36 is only about marriage.” Check the focus of the clippings in their morgue: “Support for same-sex marriage among youth is shallow and summed up in one of the young generation’s favorite words: ‘whatever,’ Stanton says.”
(Of course, you should also check the muddled mix of rough and smooth edges, the use of white-on-grey Trebuchet, the outdated, washed-out rave flyer colors, the Gen X nostalgia-trip Fisher-Price rip in the logo, the awkwardly obvious stock photography and off-the-shelf clipart. You should meditate on why the promotional videos might only be available in Windows and RealPlayer formats. You should view the source and ask yourself what webdesigner worth their salt would use tables for something like this. But hey.)
This is honey, from a comb that’s slick and sophisticated enough. Conn Creative may be a small shop, but it’s a small New York shop, and that alone is enough to suggest this wasn’t ginned up by plucky volunteers with a passion for parttime politics. This them has a bankroll, and they’re using it in a bid to reach out and tear up Larry’s and Cshea’s marriage license, and they have the nerve to try and tell me it’s for my good—and they want so very badly to look hip while they’re doing it!
Gah. It’s the old paradox of contempt for contempt, intolerance of intolerance: I tell myself it would do no good to tell Conn Creative to sit down and be you silent, Christian; they would only stuff their ears with Leviticus and yammer “Sodom Sodom Sodom” till I gave up and went away. I tell myself it would do no good to show them the weddings that will not be stopped by this farce, and the families that will be hurt; they will swear up and down that they aren’t discriminatory, wouldn’t dream of it, that marriage is indeed threatened, oh yes, that this and this alone will save it. —I can’t find common ground with this moonshit bullshine. I have no honey to give them in return; all I have in my mouth is vinegar. All I can do is spit, and sneer. Thump my chest. Throw off some heat, no matter how dark I seem.
This amendment—if it passes—is written on tissue paper. It won’t last the decade. We will unwrite it, one way or another, and one day Larry and Cshea will once more be as married as Jenn and me, and just about everyone who ever spoke prominently in favor of 36 will shift and look away and change the subject whenever it’s brought up; if pressed, they’ll write it off as youthful exuberance, as having been caught up in the spirit of a time and a place. One or two of them might have the class to apologize for what they did, but most will just shrug: it all worked out for the best, didn’t it? You got what you wanted. Thank God it’s over and done with.
—Wouldn’t it be so much better to beat them back this year?
If this were a joke, I’d laugh, if it were funny.
The Portland Tribune has a front-page piece this week about the apparent 57% majority here in Oregon who favor Measure 36, which will amend the state constitution to define valid marriages as being only those “between one man and one woman.” The headline reads: “Voters back off from big changes.”
Sorry. Should have warned you to put your coffee down, first.
Look, there’s a sense in which this is true: for over 150 years, the Oregon constitution had language explicitly privileging whites, and retained outdated sections which set up such prohibitions that “no free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the State, or employ, or harbor them.” —We ripped that language out back in 2002, with Measure 14; so, in a sense, in this one sense, Measure 36—returning, as it does, a measured dollop of discrimination and bigotry to our state constitution—can be read as voters backing away from that 2002 change.
But in every other sense. The obliteration of the legal status of thousands of marriages. The willful imposition of a majority’s bigotry, hatred, and fear on a harmless minority. The appalling ignorance with which we’re setting out to second-class our friends, our neighbors, our families. The conversion of the state certificate that seals my marriage from an implicit mark of privilege to an explicit badge of shame.
These are very big changes indeed, that 57% of the state apparently wants to visit on the rest of us.
And so, in all these other senses, the Portland Tribune ought to hang its collective head in shame at such a misleading lede.
I’ll guarandamntee you this, though: if it passes, it’ll be one hell of a lot less than 150 years before we rip this putrid amendment out. It’s gonna make your head spin, how fast we dustbin this bullshit.
Which side are you on?
Then there’s the days I think it all breaks down as easy and simple as pie:
- Democrats depend on registering as many people to vote as possible.
- Republicans depend on preventing as many people from voting as possible.
“...the first time as satire, the second as product launch.”
These guys probably thought they were being funny.
We buy Kenworth semi chassis and build SUVs on them. Shown is the Dominator model, which includes the eight rear wheels for handling those trips to Sam’s Club.
FEATURES:
- Fits under most bridge underpasses.
- The first SUV to be rated in Gallons per Mile by the EPA
- Meet interesting people while waiting in line at Interstate Weight Stations.
- When kids do the arm signal, you get to honk that really cool air horn!
- Get a big rush when your Firestone tires blow out.
- Lots of road-hugging weight for occupant protection, the ultimate in safety.
- Can seat 20. Go ahead, take the whole soccer team.
- Can tow your camper, yacht, a trailer-load of frozen pizzas, or even your house!
- Yours for under $200,000 ($100,000 for truck chassis + $100,000 standard SUV markup)
But no—they were visionaries.
POSSIBLY TOO MUCH TRUCK. LIKE THAT’S A PROBLEM.
Your eyes don’t deceive you. It’s a pickup truck. From International. Which makes it much more than a pickup truck. It’s an International®CXT—born out of the proven International 7300 severe service truck used by professionals for the most rugged applications.
So you get all the attributes of a commercial truck—but you don’t need a commercial driver’s license to drive it.*
The legendary International®DT 466 diesel engine provides up to 6 tons of hauling power.** The air-ride cab and seats provide an exceptionally smooth ride. And aspacious (sic) and well-appointed interior ensures automotive-like comfort and convenience.
The result of more than a century of leadership in the truck market, the International CXT delivers performance. In a big way
*State restrictions may apply. Talk to your local motor vehicle department.
**Tow hitch required at extra cost.
Splitter.
Joey Manley’s Graphic Novel Review has launched with, among other things, a meaty interview with Eddie Campbell; read it, even though he’s cranky, and you’ll mourn the vine-death of Egomania and The History of Humor, and despite the fact that in his laudable attempt to atomize all of art into a great amorphous cloud, he somehow staggeringly misses the point of the comics on Trajan’s column. The syllogism Campbell disparages—
- Comics are sequential art;
- Trajan’s column is sequential art; therefore
- Trajan’s column is comics
—is lousy logic, true, but it’s also made of straw. Say instead that you accept, for the sake of argument, the definition of comics as sequential art, well, look at Trajan’s column: see? How much bigger your idea of comics has become? —Campbell and McCloud are trying to do the same thing from the opposite ends of the table: grab somebody, anybody, readers and artists both, by the collar and show them that all they have to work with is one picture after another. That’s it: the only tool; the only limitation. Go! But Campbell’s trying to do it by jettisoning the word “comics” and the brightly colored longjohns overstuffed into its baggage; he wants a new name, a new movement, of graphic novelists, doing some different, other thing. And he’s not without his point, and his point is not without its sympathy. But we’re you and me both at once tenacious and fickle: once we’ve named a thing, we balk at the idea of changing that name—but that very truculence lets black-garbed stagehands work some magic by changing the thing just enough when we’re looking somewhere else. I’ve seen previous attempts to do what Eddie Campbell wants, from “comix” to “drawn books,” and while I’d never say never or not in a million years, nonetheless: my money’s on “comics.” Sad as it may seem, it’s much, much bigger than the longjohns—and it always would have been, if only we’d known how to look.
(“Manga”? Well, yeah, manga’s caught on as a term, but hey: those are Japanese comics. Different thing entirely. —Geeze, what were you expecting? Logic?)
