Give me but one firm spot on which to stand—
Swiftly kicked pants for morale unite! Me, I’m still trying to scrape something together, so it’s a good thing Dylan’s on the ball. Here’s the sweet spot:
Robyn commented afterward that the strange thing about this campaign is the less you pay attention to it, the more you somehow assume it’s doing badly, that Kerry is a popsicle stick, that somehow everybody really does just buy into the blatantly painful things this administration has bungled in the past four years.
And then everytime you actually stop to consider it, to actually listen to this guy, you go:
Who the hell was it said we were down on the mat? Screw this Curse of the Bambino mindset, I don’t want to wait till next year.
I want to hear the words President John Kerry was sworn into office today, I want this country to rejoin the planet Earth, I want national forests and fuel alternatives and united allies and goddamned better health care than this corporate bleeding machine we have now.
I want terrorism to decrease because we’re aiding the Middle East instead of exploiting it, I want AIDS funding worldwide, I want couples, no matter what their chromosome tally, to be able to raise children and own houses and go to work without being terrified it will all be taken away.
I want to stop seeing blocks of red and blue, I want a conservative party whose causes I respect with freedom to dissent, I want a liberal party not afraid to be exactly that, and I want moderates to bridge the gap and small parties to give us all a good sock in the nose now and then.
I want American kids to be taught to eat good food, I want schoolteachers to be paid like doctors instead of like dishwashers, I want a strong and able military but one which no longer cancerously devours billions of unnecessary dollars.
I want women to keep their hard choices about childbearing between themselves, their doctor, and their own conscience. I want my library record to be between me and my librarian, I want a working class that doesn’t sell itself out to culture war charlatans in fear, I want solid jobs that are for the good of America and not the board of executives.
Read the rest. Then go! Move the world!
Where were they then?
16 September 1968: American League President Joe Cronin fired umpires Al Salerno and Bill Valentine for trying to start an umpires’ union. Also, the Detroit Tigers whupped the Yankees 9 to 1 at Tiger Stadium. The Beatles, or at least Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were over at Abbey Road recording “I Will.” The Amtrac Platoon in Vietnam completed Operation “Lancaster II” and began Operation “Scotland Trousdale North.” Orlando Bosch fired a bazooka on a Polish ship in Miami, and is also connected with a bomb blast on the Satrustegui in Puerto Rico; Miami later proclaimed an Orlando Bosch Day. Richard Nixon said “Sock it to me!” on Laugh-In, thereby securing his victory over Hubert Humphrey. Over on CBS, the last episode of The Andy Griffith Show was airing. And the British Royal Mail eliminated the separate rate category for inland postcards, creating a two-tiered system of first- and second-class mail. Confusion reigned, briefly.
Also, I was born. (Thanks, Mom! —I’d link to you, too, Dad, but you don’t have a web presence, and let’s face it: Mom did most of the heavy lifting.)
—16 September is also the birthdate of General Motors, Ed Begley, Jr., and England’s Henry V.
Hearts & minds,
or, The Man in Black.
I spent the bitter month of February, 1992, dressed entirely in black and canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG. I was dressing entirely in black because I was finally starting to get over having been crushingly dumped the summer before: the sort of break-up where you find yourself on your figurative knees saying something like I love you so much that if you need me to leave I will. —Later, I found a cheery Mexican restaurant and drank too much cheap beer and staggered home singing Waterboys songs at the top of my lungs. I swore off love earnestly and loudly to whomever would listen. Now I was dressing entirely in black. How else was I to reclaim my dignity?
And I was canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG because I hadn’t had a job in half a year. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment under a cliff in the middle of western Massachusetts nowhere with three close friends (we got up to six total for a bit there), spending entirely too much time hanging out at the UMass Science Fiction Society’s library cum offices—this despite the fact that I was in no wise a student. For a while there, I was trying to perfect my Florentine fencing with a couple lengths of PVC pipe wrapped in foam insulation and duct tape; when I went home for the holidays, I took my brother to the plumbing supply shop so we could make a pair of fresh swords and hack away at each other in the backyard. I have no idea what my parents thought of the whole situation. I spent the rest of that dour vacation hacking away on an old typewriter at a story that still hasn’t gone anywhere, patiently ignoring the doubtlessly good advice they were trying to drill through my skull.
One day after I got back I was musing aloud in the USFS library about jobs and money and the getting thereof. Someone (and I can’t recall who, but I don’t think it was the skinny guy who said he was ex-Special Forces and that we shouldn’t wake him unexpectedly if he dozed off, since he couldn’t be held responsible for what his trained reflexes would do) told me about this guy that this guy he knew knew, who could hook me up with a Situation: I’d get a car key and a piece of paper with two addresses on it in the mail. I’d then go to the first address, somewhere in Greenfield, or Northampton, say, and I’d use the key to open the door of the car I’d find parked there. I’d drive it (scrupulously under the speed limit) to the second address, in an outer borough of New York City, say, where I’d park it, take a manila envelope out of the glove compartment, put the key in its place, lock the doors, and walk away, not looking back. There’d be a sheaf of grubby bills in that envelope: enough for dinner in a restaurant and a night in a crappy hotel before training back up to Massachusetts for another work-free month or so. Until the next car key arrived in the mail. Und so weiter.
Somebody else (and I’m pretty sure it was the cute girl who was into filmmaking and pot, which is how I later came to realize that pot does absolutely nothing for me—nor her, neither, but that’s another story) told me about MassPIRG. You know: the bottle bill? Putting the people back into politics? Ralph Nader’s baby?
I ended up at MassPIRG. They were renting a room up on the second floor of an old open-court motel that had been refitted as a strip-mall, there above the pawn shop where I’d already sold my bass guitar to make rent (no great loss; I’d never made it past Peter Gunn), and they were looking for door-to-door canvassers (they’re always looking for door-to-door canvassers), so I signed up. I had a pulse, so I had a provisional job: canvassers had a couple days out on the sidewalks to make the cut. The PIRG wanted a return on their investment, you know? And I made the cut, so I had a job, my first in six months.
Which I promptly muffed.
I’d like to think when you tot it all up that I raised more money than I cost in wages, though I was goose-egging at an alarming rate toward the end, there. (So maybe if you added in overhead..?) And much as it’s easy to laugh nowadays at the follies of lovelorn drop-out me kicking my way through ice-crusted snowdrifts from one suburban Springfield door to the next in my black boots and black jeans and black turtleneck and my long black coat, it doesn’t change the fact that at the time it all hurt in some deep and ineluctable way that made knocking on strangers’ doors and telling them about such eminently worthy causes as the Reduce Reuse Recycle and Polluter Pays initiatives, asking if such public service weren’t worth twenty, forty, seventy-five bucks, all much harder than it had to be.
And there were those annoying get-to-know-you team-building goal-congruencing exercises! Oy. We had to play them every day before hitting the streets for some godawful reason (then, turnover was high): “If you could be any color, which would it be, and why?” “What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?” “What do you see yourself doing five years from now?” —Gah. I turned in my clipboard after four or five weeks and went back to sulking, thankyouverymuch.
But not before the New Hampshire primaries.
In 1992, Ralph Nader put himself up as a write-in candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the New Hampshire primaries—to make some noise, test the waters, provide an alternative, scare up a soapbox, shake things up. Nobody was thrilled with front-runner Tsongas, but none of the other Democrats seemed ready to call for the all-out revolution needed to undo the 12-year Reagan-Bush interregnum. We wanted fire; we wanted bellies; we wanted motherfuckers up against the wall. We got genteel bupkes. —Hell, Barry put himself up as a write-in from over the border in his UMass Daily Collegian comic strip and got, like, a dozen votes. Discontent was in the air. (Then again, maybe not: Mickey Mouse never actively campaigns and he regularly gets written in, so what do I know?)
So, on that fateful day, when it came time for the get-to-know-you stuff before we got in the car and drove to Springfield to hit the sidewalks (which time, it should be noted, we didn’t get paid for), whoever-it-was who was in charge of congruencing our goals eschewed the usual Barbara Walters group interview for a rousing Nader sales pitch: he’s the guy who invented PIRGs! He saved us from Detroit! He’s running a campaign against corporate interests, for the people of this country, and he needs volunteers! We were asked to sign up for a slot on the bus to go up to New Hampshire and knock on more doors to help get the word out.
Well. I didn’t sign up for a slot on the bus. And I was miffed when he dropped out of the race after posting disappointing returns in New Hampshire. But when the Massachusetts primary rolled around, I wrote him in. And by early November, it was clear Clinton was going to hammer Bush for Massachusetts’ electoral votes, and Clinton was a slick-talking centrist who damn skippy wasn’t going to be putting anybody up against any walls. So I had no qualms about writing in Nader for president again.
(Of course I voted for Nader! I was a whiny pampered guiltily liberal ivory-towered at-loose-ends young white man! Weren’t you paying attention?)
Platitudinum.
All unbeknownst, Messrs. Nielsen Hayden and Humphries are rendering my latest self-indulgence obsolete. Go: present your pants: be swiftly kicked.
Hearts & minds.
There’s a story Utah Phillips tells on one of the CDs he’s done with Ani DiFranco, about a shingle-weavers’ strike up in Everett, Washington. The Wobblies and the cops traded some gunfire and some people died on both sides and when the Wobblies got back to Seattle they were arrested and chucked into the brand new Snohomish County jail—a jail they broke, quite literally, by jumping up and down all at the same time and hollering and singing until they cracked the steel south wall. “‘Thus proving,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘everlastingly what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can’t get done alone.’”
Which is a beautiful moral and it’s something to tuck into the cockles of your heart these days so you can try to fight off the chill whether it’s unions or protest marches or the sacred and profane business of government its own damn self we’re talking about, but it’s not the moral Utah draws, and it’s not why I’m telling you in turn.
“‘Now,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘we didn’t have any intellectual life. We lived in our emotions. We were a passionate people and we were comfortable in our emotions. We made commitments to struggle, emotionally—commitments for which there are no words. But those commitments carried us through fifty, sixty years of struggle.’ Now,” says Utah, “he says, ‘You show me people who make the same commitments intellectually, and I don’t know where they’ll be next week.’”
And Utah pauses a moment, Ani’s gutbucket guitar twanging along behind him, and then he says, quietly, “Kinda stern, isn’t it.”
That’s the first thing to keep in mind. The second is this:
There was this debunker. His name escapes me. He had a shtick like Randi’s: an accomplished stage magician, he’d do the same things psychics do (only better; his cold readings put John Edward to shame, and he did some scary shit with subliminal cues) and, though he wouldn’t give away all his secrets, he’d make it clear how easy it is to pull this stuff off with trickery and sleight-of-mind and a heaping helping of the all-too-willing madness of crowds. But no magic. No psychic frippery. No hints and intimations of the paranormal at all. —He also did some stuff on the side with cult-busting and deprogramming and the like, debunking some specific flim-flammers and helping cops and psychologists pick up the pieces and I don’t know, maybe he saw one too many things; maybe he had that one bad day. Maybe that explains it.
Because between the time he did a show at Oberlin, the one Sarah saw, and the one he did at UMass, the one we all saw together, he’d converted to a rather insistent brand of Christianity. The show he’d done at Oberlin, he’d just done his debunking magic tricks. The show he’d do at UMass, he’d be spending a good half of it proselytizing. —Still, Sarah said we ought to go. He was good. Spooky good. It’d be worth it.
So we went, and he was. He did cold readings and tricks with subliminals (“queenofspades”) and this thing where people on stage wrote secrets on slips of paper that were folded up and then he was on the other side of the stage with a nurse holding his wrist so she could announce that his heart had stopped which would happen whenever the folded-up slip of paper with the right secret was held up. And he assured us all that it was trickery and fast talking, and he told us how someone could use these tricks and an audience’s credulity, its cheerful suspension of disbelief, to make her- or himself look impressive, powerful, connected, in the Know; to exploit and extort and bamboozle; he told us all how important it is to be skeptical, to be rational, to think. And then he told us how the facts recorded within the various Gospels prove the literal truth of the Resurrection—that stone, for instance, rolled in front of Jesus’s tomb, would have taken the effort of several people—people who could not have been there, that first Easter Sunday—to roll back.
He seemed—tired, as he told us this. Resigned, maybe. No: relieved. (I also seem to recall a charmingly idiosyncratic—if alarmist—interpretation of some Cure lyrics, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Anyway. That’s the second thing.
Words—
I only ever really knew him through his words, but they were good ones: they were funny, they went on both wisely and too well about things like comics and Buffy, they stood up for small things; they suffered no fools gladly, but he’d occasionally let ’em take a fool around the block and back, and if sometimes they got outraged, it’s only because he was paying attention. He paid a lot of attention; you were going to learn something whenever you let him have his say, and there’s a lot of things in this world both little and big that are the better for it.
A moment of silence, please, for Aaron Hawkins.
—And then start making more noise than ever. He was the Uppity Negro, after all.
Bushgate.
James Wolcott’s take is funnier, but the Editors are far more shrill. —Also, the Editors out-do Josh Marshall’s I-will-show-you-hardball-in-a-handful-of-dusty-paperwork hints one better, with some actual slivers of red meat.
On the other hand, last minute perusal of hithery-thithery pings brings up a pithy post from Majikthise, which will prove, I’m afraid, all too germane to, well, everything.
(Sir, I’m worried about our mood swings.)
M.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
—“Dulci et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen
Sweet and meet, motherfuckers. Sweet and meet.
Further up, further out.
Here I am, trying to get some writing done, and Ray Davis with a footnote has to go and open up a wonderful, terrible world where I can while away a Labor Day afternoon. Here’s what you’ll need to play along:
- James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1973 story, “The Women Men Don’t See”;
- Karen Joy Fowler’s 2002 story, “What I Didn’t See”;
- Maureen Kincaid Speller’s mid-August essay, “What James Didn’t See and Karen Didn’t Say”;
- and then, tripping back in time, Ray Davis’s 2002 essay on Fowler and Truesdale, “The enemy of my friend is confused; the friend of my enemy is instructive.”
Have it at. My only contribution to the mix would be the memory it stirred up, of a childhood confusion I doubt was particular to me: on hearing of all those gorilla wars on the nightly news, in Asia and South America, I would lie back and wonder whether they wore uniforms, and how on earth you trained them to hold guns.
No, wait: one more thing. Much as I love Tiptree for her steel and her skew and her sly, sharp sentences, I’ve always come at her stories warily, as if approaching something I was not meant to know. “My usual method of writing,” she said, “is to take one of those pockets in my head that is full of protest against unbearable wrong and dangle plot-strings in the saturated solution until they start coming up with plot-crystals on them.” And she had an uncanny ability to limn a rectitude that, hopelessly outgunned, stood up nonetheless howsomever it could against that unbearable wrong, and even if some of those pockets are thankfully quaintly outdated today, still: it’s hard to look a rectitude like that in the eye when you’re indisputably part of the problem. —I don’t agree with Tiptree’s gender essentialism, or her all-too-apocalyptic take on the war between the sexes; but to ascribe to her a belief in gender essentialism, or an apocalyptic war between the sexes, is deceptively reductive. She was exaggerating to prove a point, is all, and even though I’ll go on chanting “Biology is not destiny!” till my dying day, “The Screwfly Solution” is still going to wake me up now and again in a cold, cold sweat.
(Something else she said: “Listen! Listen and think, you dolt! Feel how it really is! Let me inscribe a little fable on your nose that will carry more than the words with it when you look in the mirror!”)
But some few of those pockets are outdated, quaintly, thankfully, finally. Ruth Parsons digs it up in “The Women Men Don’t See”—
“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth.” [And I cringe; if there’s anyone in the world I don’t want to agree with, it’s Don Fenton from St. Louis.] “Women do everything men do.”
“Do they?” Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars …” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefield. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—” She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”
It’s not the My Lai reference, no; if there’s anything the past few weeks have proven, it’s that My Lai is still somehow too astonishingly deep and painful for us to be honest with ourselves about it. —But: the whole world has changed. It’s been changing, it’s still changing, it will never stop, and the choice that Fowler’s narrator makes in “What I Didn’t See,” the character of Eddie, what she sees in him, that she can see it at all: ample proof that the whole world did just that. Not enough, no; not nearly enough, except in the ways it’s changed unimaginably much. (It’s hard to see how far we’ve come when we no longer see where we were.) And Lord knows this is far too Pollyannaish a reading to do much more than mark my own starting point in the complex tangle these two stories make when you set them next to each other. Rest assured, it’s not that I’m papering over the prickly price paid by Fowler’s narrator; it’s just I’m weak enough to take what comfort I can from the promise of compromise in the face of Tiptree’s unimpeachable rigor.
Especially when, as aforementioned, I’m part of her problem.
But what comfort I take is itself cold and prickly: the choice Eddie makes, the things that Fowler’s narrator did not see, open whole oceans of unbearable wrongs that have barely been glanced over in this discourse.
She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”
“Men hate wars too, Ruth,” I say as gently as I can.
“I know.” She shrugs and climbs to her feet. “But that’s your problem, isn’t it?”
The mood I’m in—
He shrugged gracefully, rolling his beard between two fingers. “I’ve had a local reputation for a long time as a sort of knowledgeable nut. People invite me to their history classes, and I give them demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl.”
Farrell was startled to feel his own skin stir with the words. Hamid said easily, “Well, you make them real edgy, John. This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don’t know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you’re like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real.” The round eyes seemed to flick without closing, as parrot’s eyes do.
“A dinosaur. You think so?” John Erne laughed—a rattle of the nostrils, no more. “This is my time.” He leaned forward and patted Farrell’s knee hard. “This is the time of weapons. It isn’t so much the fact that everyone has a gun—everyone wants to be one. People want to turn themselves into guns, knives, plastic bombs, big dogs. This is the time when ten new karate studios open every day, when they teach you Kung Fu in the third grade, and Whistler’s mother has a black belt in aikido. I know one fellow on a little side street who’s making a fortune with savate, that French kick-boxing.” Farrell watched the combat master’s face, still trying to determine how old he was. He appeared most youthful when he moved or spoke, oldest when he smiled.
“The myriad arts of self-defense,” John Erne said. “They’re all just in it because of the muggers, you understand, or the police, or the Zen of it all. But no new weapon ever goes unused for long. Pretty soon the streets will be charged with people, millions of them, all loaded and cocked and frantically waiting for somebody to pull their trigger. And one man will do it—bump into another man or look at him sideways and set it all off.” He opened one hand and blew across his palm as if he were scattering dandelion fluff. “The air will be so full of killer reflexes and ancient disabling techniques there’ll be a blue haze over everything. You won’t hear a single sound, except the entire population of the United States chopping at one another with the edges of their hands.”
Farrell asked quietly, “Where does that leave chivalry?”
—Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle
I don’t know; I don’t know. It’s September, and last week the weather slowly began to turn with a great creak into aumumn. It’ll yet flutter into summery heat now and again, but we’re sleeping under heavy blankets now, and we dress in layers, and I really should be losing this urge to grab half the country by the collar and scream myself hoarse about how mind-bogglingly stupid they are, how blind, how irresponsible.
A blue haze over everything, of invective and two-minute hate.
(Don’t mistake this as a plea for reason and moderation. Can’t we all just get along? Be decent, to one another? —Some of us sure as fuck can’t, but there’s not much we can do about that without persuasion, and it’s hard to persuade somebody when you’re screaming in their face.)
It’s been a week. Alex Lencicki can tell you. He was there, and I wasn’t, and while maybe now that the freak show has packed up its narrow tents there’s maybe something of a catharsis, still, like the summer breaking, it isn’t enough.
And I don’t know now that there ever will be.
His life with the ghosts of Bush.
In the spirit of Roy Edroso’s unhealthy (but amusing; yea, amusing unto death) fixation on that perennial reactionary empowerment fantasy, “Life Among the Liberals,” I offer up this link to Rick Perlstein’s “The Church of Bush,” which I missed the first time out—despite the fact that he’s reporting on life among Portland conservatives. (Thanks to the Slacktivist for calling it to my attention.)
Elucidating the differences in approach is perhaps best left as an exercise for the reader. Wouldn’t want to spoil all your fun.
—Bruce Broussard, by the way: most recently famous for suing to get Multnomah County to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Despite his righteous outrage, it was found he didn’t have standing. Just one more way activist judges and the liberal media and that darn fascist homosexual agenda are conspiring to oppress true Americans.
Forget 15%; try 90%.
And so I’m feeling shitty about the (yes, irrational) analogy that finishes off the rant below, which was on shaky ground to start off with, proceeded with some little rhetorical deftness to a point of questionable taste, and never got around to any sort of disclaimer or safety instructions; just chuck the whole thing before it gets out of hand, okay?
Because Barry points us to this New Yorker piece which reminds us all that squabbling over 3% here and 11% there has nothing to do with actually winning elections and everything to do with stoning apostates and kicking the exiles’ bread and salt into the ashes: makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something for about five minutes, and then what?
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.
The at-once depressing and uplifting moral to take from all of this is simply to realize: voting is terribly important. It’s absolutely vital. It’s also the least important thing we can do, politically.
Your blind item for the day.
X can’t say that because he evidently does not believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He and his handlers portray him as virtually perfect in the past and omniscient in the present. In and of itself, that’s also not unusual: it’s so hard for a presidential candidate not to get puffed up when laudatory remarks follow him as closely as Secret Service agents. But do we want a president who pretends that he can do no wrong and never has?
Okay: who’s X? And what color is the sky in the writer’s world?
Answers not so much below the fold as over yonder, in your Talking Points Memo.
Portland is a small town, except when it isn’t.
It’s pretty much a truism, once you’ve been here longer than, say, six months: you go to a party here in Portland, you’re going to meet somebody you know from a context other than the one which occasioned the party. (Someone who actually knows network theory help me out: your supposedly discrete nets overlap in ways you don’t expect. Two degrees of separation recursing back to yourself. Or something.) Anyway: Portland’s a small town, is my point; maybe the largest I’ve ever lived in, and it’s a small town in part because it’s easy to curl up with your own ontogroups of choice and let the rest of the world go hang, until you’re at a party and see somebody you know that you’d never have expected in that context.
So it’s nice to pick up the Mercury and read an article on the local comics scene and realize I only know one of the cartoonists mentioned. (Though if I’d been paying attention, I would have remembered most of the rest from Team Alternative. Did I tell you Team Alternative totally rigged the scoring? Had some people up on top of this closet that boomed when you kicked it. Plus they had foam fingers. On the merits, trust me, Mainstream kicked their scrawny indie butts. —Did I tell you I was cheering for Team Mainstream? —Did I tell you the most mainstream team Portland could field was three out of four self-publishers, who’ve dabbled in the capecapades trade? Portland. Small town.)
Dispatches from the War on Common Sense.
Apparently, any protestor who breaks the law during the Republican National Convention in New York City should be treated as a terrorist, and prosecuted accordingly.
Update! These terrorist acts will include releasing swarms of mice, giving false directions to “little blue hair ladies from Kansas,” throwing pies, and encouraging prostitutes with AIDS to seduce Republicans without condoms.
Man, I miss New York.
On the other hand:
Now that I’ve snarled and snapped, I’ve got to tell you: ain’t nothin’ in comics lately that’s filled me with that shivery oh boy! Comics! glee like We3. Except maybe Whedon and Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men, which keeps getting better with every issue.
Oh, and Flight is finally out on the shelves, but I’ve raved about that enough already. Go, get yourselves a copy, if you haven’t yet.
Every single one a youse can just go straight to hell.
Yeah, I know. It’s irrational. Maybe I’m tapped; maybe all my moonlight’s drained away. Normally I’m as waffly as they come, if by “they” you mean terminally indecisive eldest children who in their zeal to make nice between all the various factions that tug and push their lives end up seeing the merit to every possible point of view and never really finding some floor for their own feet that stays safe and stable for long. I mean, there’s no way under the sea or over it that I’m going to vote for Nader this year, but I’m not about to apologize for having done so in every election since 1992, and if I can recognize there’s something sky-pied arrogant about the whole enterprise of third parties in American politics, well, still: something’s got to be done, right? If the Democratic party is assured of my vote no matter what, because where else am I gonna go, well, why should they ever listen to me? (When was the last time I ever tried to tell them something?) And if there’s more than a little irrationality and nose-slicing spite in the vituperative hatred of Nader players that gets to strut down the Democratic catwalk with depressing regularity, well, the comfort I take in knowing that my Nader votes did nothing to steal electoral votes from the Democrats I was trying to message is a cold and hollow comfort, indeed. (I’ve got little enough time as it is for the things I need to do to keep my own life on track. How else can I help steer the ship of state?)
And if my sudden flirtation with the lesser of two evils has more to do with where we all are now than any yawning gap between 1992-me and 2004-me, well, 1992-me is still pissed. Every election is a crisis. It’s always never the right time to rock the boat. That this election is demonstrably the most critical of my voting life, if not the past 50 years, if not the past 100—that the boat has already fucking capsized, and we’re all paddling about, doing our best to right it in heavy seas—it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. 1992-me still wants his fuck-you vote. And if you maybe think 1992-me is as spoiled and wrong-headed as he is idealistic and righteously frustrated, well, I’d probably agree with you; then again, you don’t have to live with him.
Like I said: irrational. I mean, very little good can come of the white-hot rage that lights up my skull and leaks out of my eyeballs when I read something like this in a recent poll of registered voters:
Can I repeat that? —In the here and now, this current situation, with a choice between—
- a manifestly incompetent boob who’s crashed the country, looted our treasury, smeared our reputation with blood and shit, done his damndest to restrict our speech and our freedom of association—not out of any actual desire to keep us actually safe, but merely to score feel-good points in the polls; who sees no fault at all in claiming to be above the law, and has seized upon the most craven and dishonest means to keep us all split and squabbling, at each other’s throats, so that his outnumbered and outgunned faction can hold onto power just that much longer, squeeze that much more money from our pockets to his—
- and John Kerry—
15% of all registered Democrats are seriously considering the boob. Margin of error somewhere just north of plus or minus three percent, but hey: line up seven random registered Democrats. Chances are good that one of them is planning on voting for Bush. (Back in 2000, when Democrats were suffering Clinton fatigue, and hated wooden, beta-male, earth-toned Gore, who lied about the internet and lied about Love Canal [and Story], back when we weren’t all seized with knee-jerk treasonous Bush-hatred, Bush scored 11% of the Democratic vote. And maybe that’s a good argument for taking this LA Times poll as a sport, a freak, an outlier, and maybe tomorrow I’ll feel like grasping this slender reed, but right now I’ve got a head of steam on, so siddown and shaddap.)
But that white-hot rage is fucking irrational. What do I want, unswerving, unthinking party loyalty? (Well, a crushing landslide defeat, with all of us on the one side, and the five percent of those wealthy enough to benefit from Bush on the other—minus those human enough to feel guilty about their perks; plus a smattering of white men so stupefied by the creeping loss of what they see as their due that they can’t vote their own self-interest. Three percent of Republicans are considering Kerry, by the way. Plus or minus something slightly north of three percent.) —I mean, tag the Democrats themselves for this? They’d just panic and go haring after that mythical rightward nudge, the fatted calf to sacrifice that would bring all those chimerical NASCAR dads and soccer moms back into the fold. Which is beyond stupid: the problem isn’t that we’re too far left, for God’s sake. On every single issue you care to name, from abortion to child care to health care to education to the Wars on Drugs and Terra, we win. Our positions are the positions the majority wants; our direction is where the country wants to be heading. (What “we,” kemo sabe?) —But that’s not the choice people think they’re making. They think they’ve got these two options, this guy, and that other guy. And if one of the guys seems a little rank to them, what with the French and the yacht and the ketchup and the stuff about how maybe he lied but it’s all so confusing and it happened thirty years ago so who knows, fair and balanced, remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt he waffles, you know, and so, gee, I don’t know, I guess what’s left then is this other guy, and hey, steady leadership, right? Times of change?
Tacking right doesn’t do a goddamn thing except amp up the talk about waffling.
There’s a rule of thumb about schizophrenia and psychosis that I heard somewhere, and while I have no idea how actually useful it is, it stuck with me: psychosis can be seen, largely, as atypical, abnormal reactions to normal, present stimuli; schizophrenia, on the other hand, is (again, largely) reacting normally and typically to stimuli that just aren’t there, or don’t map reality in a terribly accurate fashion. And while there’s a lot of psychotic “I’d never vote for a guy who said we committed atrocities in Vietnam” (when we did, and anyway, your other choice is a deserter who lied about serving in the US Air Force) or “I’m not voting for a guy who’s going to raise my taxes” (when he won’t if you’re with about 95% of the country, and you’re going to pay the other guy’s tax bill in more ways than you can possibly imagine)—what I want to believe, what I hope, what must be true is most of that 15% (that 11%, that 49%, that 47) is schizophrenic: making the best choice you can from a field of factoids and stories and opinions that have little to nothing to do with what’s really going on, what you really want, life as it’s actually lived, and governing as it’s actually done. Because, while the psychosis makes me want to leave the country, the schizophrenia we can do something about. With a lot of hard work and deft argument and careful organizing and speaking clearly and openly and honestly and without a lot of rancor and spite and anger about where we are now and where we ought to be going and how it is we think we’re going to get there: offering new opinions, new stories, facts instead of factoids. The odds are against us, but the world as it is is for us, and we can get it done, and a lot of bitching and moaning and white-hot recriminating rancor doesn’t help. It’s irrational.
Still.
15.
Anybody sneers about Nader spoilers anytime soon, I’m gonna give ’em such the smack.
(And then promptly apologize, I’m sure. Gah!)
