Are you a loudmouth? I am! I frequently rant and rave about the injustices of our world and feel like, should I ever be the one in control, it would be easy to define my priorities and, in the inestimable words of Capt. Picard, make it so!
Do you enjoy games? I do! If given my druthers I'd skip work and play games, occasionally taking a break to alternate between ranting and raving on my blog and abusing the Western, 12-tone musical system on my guitar.
So, I give you my latest obsession: Budget Hero!
Put your skills where your mouth is…and realize why sticking to your principles—and promises—while spending way more money than you've ever imagined even frickin' existed is harder than you think!
I am, no surprise, a socialist: All of you would end up paying much higher taxes in exchange for cheap education and free health care, were I in charge.
Of course, your children would grow up happy, healthy and knowledgeable in a country free of crushing debt.
So…my name's John and I'm a news junkie. Can't leave the stuff alone—New York Times,Guardian, CNN, BBC, al-Jazeera, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Aiken Standard: I read 'em all.
Seriously, I admit it: I have a problem.
I'm such a news junkie, that I've gone ahead and signed up for releases from both presidential campaigns, even though I only support one.
Anyway, what follows is a release from the McCain campaign that just showed up in my mailbox; it's long, and I'm going to summarize parts of it because it's so long:
(All emphasis is added by me.)
John McCain's Remarks on the Economic Crisis New York, NY Wednesday, September 24, 2008
America this week faces an historic crisis in our financial system. We must pass legislation to address this crisis. If we do not…(all kinds of horrible things will happen; Obama and McCain both have some ideas about what should be done; McCain's met with his advisers and some members of Congress).
It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration's proposal. I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.
Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me. (Additionally, McCain's talked to the president and asked him to get everybody together for a powwow.)
We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved. I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the commission on presidential debates to delay Friday night's debate until we have taken action to address this crisis.
I am confident that before the markets open on Monday we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people. All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so.
Following September 11th, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now. Americans across our country lament the fact that partisan divisions in Washington have prevented us from addressing our national challenges. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country.
Let me see if I'm understanding this, Mr. McCain: The general election, during which my fellow citizens and I gather together to exercise our Constitutionally granted right to decide who gets to lead our nation for the next four years, is slightly over a month away, and you think that it would be more patriotic to not hear the two guys running for the job publicly outline precisely what their positions are and what they have planned for the next four years? You think it would be more patriotic to go up to Washington, D.C., and…do what, precisely? Bicker? Posture? Pose? Act all heroic for not providing the proper oversight for the last eight years?
In fact, Mr. McCain, most of the serious holdouts against this bailout are members of your party! You remember them, right? The guys you've been furiously trying to distance yourself from ever since your convention?
Here's my answer, Mr. McCain: no. In fact, hell no. As a candidate for president of the United States, you owe it to the people of this country to meet your opponent in a public forum for an open debate on the issues. You should be able to do this and lend a hand in ending our country's economic crisis. Nobody said the job of president would be easy: Having to handle multiple responsibilities seems to be the least part of the job.
I mean, for God's sake, man, this isn't freeze tag; you don't just get to call "Time out!"
And, by the way, I resent your comparison of the current economic crisis to Sept. 11. To equate a vicious attack on our country from outside forces with a foreseeable and avoidable economic meltdown caused by greed and neglect trickling down from the very top of our political infrastructure is to distort and smear the facts until they are unrecognizable from fantasy. Frankly, I'm insulted.
And to imply that it is unpatriotic to continue to run for president when this country so obviously needs someone at the top who can accomplish something? That's beyond insulting; it's un-American.
LOUDON, NH—Shock, grief, and the overwhelming sense of loss that has swept the stock car racing community following the death by apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace has moved NASCAR to cancel the remainder of its 2008 season in respect for the acclaimed but troubled author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
In deference to the memory of Wallace, whose writing on alienation, sadness, and corporate sponsorship made him the author of the century in stock car racing circles and whom NASCAR chairman Brian France called "perhaps the greatest American writer to emerge in recent memory, and definitely our most human," officials would not comment on how points, and therefore this year's championship, would be determined.
At least for the moment, drivers found it hard to think about the Sprint Cup.
You dig? It's funny, because it is in no way, shape or form even close to being true!
Satire: Giving positive people a reason for cultivating their sense of irony since 5800 B.C.E.
Wow. This place has been downright miserable for almost a week, hasn't it? I mean, fascist cops, racist neighbors, assaults, suicides, rants about suicides…and that's just the stuff I've posted.
So, time to lighten up a bit, no?
Here is a picture of Keira Knightley eating a banana:
Why did the Associated Press feel compelled to move a photo of Keira Knightley eating a banana? Your guess is as good as mine.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table… —T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
David Foster Wallace is dead. He hanged himself while his wife was out.
I can't respect that: it's selfish, it's horrible, it's pathetic, it's evil; to disregard someone you ostensibly love, or even once loved; to not factor in the very real, very tangible people in your life—and, judging from the obituaries I've been reading, there were many: Wallace was survived not only by his wife, but by both parents and a sister; he was beloved by his students and respected by his colleagues, to boot—is to be so willfully self-centered and short-sighted that one reduces the vast universe to only two entities: oneself and everything else, which is precisely what Wallace warned against in every one of his works that I've read: the worst type of hypocrisy.
The thought that he did think this through, that he did take all of these factors into account and went ahead with it anyway? That thought terrifies me and may keep me awake for days.
Wallace was one of my favorite writers: brilliant, imaginative, unflinching. He was in that rare strata of writers like Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and Herman Melville: I can't read their books over and over the way I'm fond of doing with lighter fare because their books change the way I think and feel about myself and the world. Their writing is like surgery, requiring a balance of surrender and expertise, numbness and unwavering attention, plus thought and pain and swathes of your own blood until you come through the other side of the book raw and aching but much better than before.
Wallace's work was brutally funny and tenderly horrifying and laced around and through with irony. But the irony was not, as with so many postmodern writers, there to separate and protect the author from the reader—he was right there with you, saying, "My God, man! Isn't it funny how fucked up the world is? How did we let it get this way? Is there anything we can do to make it any better?"
Seemingly, now, there isn't. Yet finishing his books, even at their darkest (and Infinite Jest ends on an episode so abysmally dark that, had Wallace started the book with it, I would've dropped it in tears) there was always some note of hope. Because of the way he wrote and arranged his work, and because he came with you as an author the entire way, the last impression was not of darkest endings.
Wallace made of his work major literature: grand and sprawling and seething with ambition, erudition and unapologetic intellect; of his life, ending with this personal yet exponentially reaching apocalypse, he made minor literature of the kind Anthony Burgess referenced in one of the quotes Wallace used as epigraphs to "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," the final story in the collection Girl With Curious Hair:
"As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse."
Which brings me, momentarily, back to the reason I'll have trouble sleeping tonight: I fear that when suicides kill themselves, it's not because they want to die, but because they want the rest of us to die.
And yet, the thing with feathers is knocking around, alone, in Pandora's box waiting to be let out.
One of the things Wallace wrote that I hadn't read before today is the commencement speech he gave at Kenyon University back in 2005. I urge you, when you have time, to read that transcription. If you don't have time right now, here's a little something that gives me hope:
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
I never thought of that before, any of it. But it's true. The portion I've emphasized is the thought that resonates with me most; through realizing its truth, I know the truth of the rest.
David Foster Wallace is dead, and I can't respect him for what he did.
I'm still alive, and I can't help but love David Foster Wallace for all he's done.
The latest bit about the deputy fired on assault charges here in Aiken is here.
The FBI will investigate the incident. As the first commenter on the story notes, it seems likely this will be the focus, although the FBI hasn't said so. I can't imagine what else it could be, though.
I'm not sure how the community is going to take to a Federal investigation into this incident. Comments on the stories seem to indicate a seriously divided community opinion. Plus, well…Southerners don't have a long and happy relationship with the Federal government. I mean, there's that whole Civil War thing, and Reconstruction—you'd be amazed how many white Southerners are still pissed about that. And then there's forced desegregation and, well…pretty much the entire 1960s and a good chunk of the '70s.
I think there are going to be some very angry people in this town. A lot of folks who swear up and down they're not racists are liable to show their true stripes.
I'm not looking forward to that.
Is anyone else having problems with the embedded videos? Morgane has said she's having difficulties, but it works fine for me. If other people are having troubles, let me know and I'll check into it.
…a little embed action for the videos I mentioned in my last post. The full story explaining the videos still lives here. I'm happy to say that many people have begun commenting against the deputy's actions; my faith in humanity is somewhat restored.
That's the website of our local newspaper, the place where I work. See the "Latest Video" box? Click on it and watch the video, please. I'll wait…
What you've just watched pertains to this story. Read it, if you would. Make sure you check out the comments, as well. Again, I'll wait…
What you've just seen and read happened in the county where I live—where I've chosen to live. And most of the comments on that story support the cop. That's what my neighbors—the neighbors I've chosen—think.
And I am sick and scared and very somber about it.
Today is not a good day. And tomorrow doesn't look so hot, either.
Well, I was going to let it slide by without saying anything, but Ombra ratted me out in her comment for my last post.
So, yes, today is my birthday. I'm 38. Which, frankly, is a lot older than I ever planned on being.
I know that sounds horrible, but hear me out on this: I'm not saying I'm unhappy with my life (I'm not), or that I thought I'd be dead by now, I'm just saying that I never planned for being almost-40.
It's kind of like when you go to a party but you're not really in the mood for a party. You plan to say "Hi" to a couple folks, hang out a bit, be sociable, then split at the earliest polite opportunity. Those are your plans, dig? The way you figure it's going to happen.
But the party's great and, before you know it, the sun's coming up and you don't really want to go home, but you're not sure what you want to do because you'd planned on being in bed around midnight.
So…uh, yeah. Life's like a really horrible analogy. I guess.
Anyway, here's what people who believe that lights in the sky know more about my life than I do have to say about today being my birthday:
IF SEPTEMBER 8 IS YOUR BIRTHDAY: The world is your oyster for the next several weeks, so embrace new people and ideas—and bask in unqualified admiration. All this popularity, however, does not mean you can afford to shirk duties or ignore commitments. If you want to embark on crucial changes, such as a new job or a move, wait until the end of October or beginning of November. That is when you will have the best judgment and most help from the universe that may come in the form of wise counsel and assistance from others. Take care of nagging problems with your health or home while conditions are optimum.
New people! New ideas! Embraces! Unqualified admiration and (dare I say it?) popularity!
Before I decided to chronicle my San Francisco adventures (and, yes, I know, I'm not done yet), I had been absent since Halloween. So, what the frak had I been up to in the intervening time period?
I don't understand this article at all: I don't own a house and, frankly, never will; and I'm okay with that. But does this mean that taxpayers—some of whom have mortgages, I imagine—will now be paying the government to financially back the companies to which these taxpayers are themselves indebted?
I mean, that's kind of stupid, isn't it?
I'm not saying the mortgage holders are stupid, by any means; property is expensive, and there are few among us who can afford to just drop between five and seven figures to own their own homes. But…
I mean, seriously; is this the way money is supposed to work?
…take away one lowercase L from Palin, and you've got Pain.
And I'm sure some conservatives somewhere have made the same connection I have and are crowing about Sarah Palin's speech this evening. "Oh," they are shouting, "man, did she ever lay in to him! Palin brought the pain!"
I then imagine them high-fiving each other. Perhaps they hop up into the air for a jockish belly-bump.
I don't know, maybe I'm a kinder and gentler person, but I was kind of hoping that things wouldn't get quite this caustic quite this quickly. I was kind of hoping the overall tone of respect for one's enemies I caught from the Democratic National Convention would carry over into the Republican National Convention and, from there, into the general election. Since I have, up until this point, respected the four principals involved for being either groundbreaking in their uniqueness or steadfast and sincere in their views, I was kind of hoping this election would take the high road.
Call me an idealist or a hopeless romantic, if you will, but I thought it just might happen.
But, you know, when politicians get smug, sarcastic and self-righteous, publicly attacking a guy who took a potentially lucrative Harvard education and parlayed it into a life of fairly humble public service; when these blunt and bombastic blowhards refuse to recognize that eloquence, politeness and tact require huge amounts of thought, not to mention dignity, self-possession and diplomacy; and when thousands of responsible citizens stand up and cheer for what amounts to froth-flecked rage and resentment beaded like water on a freshly waxed antique car parked off to the side of a starship set for lift-off, well, that pains me.
I mean, seriously, consider this my friends.
See that guy there, shaking hands with George W. Bush? That's John McCain at the 2000 Republican National Convention. Do you remember the 2000 primary battles? The lying smear campaign leveled against John McCain in 2000's South Carolina primary? Do you remember how ugly it was?
Do you remember John McCain coming out at the end of the Republican National Convention, his pained rictus of a grin as George W. Bush was smugly and unselfconciously named the Republican presidential candidate? The quintessential empty suit took the nomination from the party of Abraham Lincoln while the one Republican with the stones to buck the party line sat on a stick of butter, grabbed his knees, thought of Old Glory while humming "The Star-Spangled Banner" and set his calendar for 2008.
That's right, I said it, folks: Eight years ago, John McCain sat down in a smoke-filled room in Philadelphia (my fair city) and made a Faustian deal with the Republican powers that be. "Eat it and smile," they said, "and we'll see what we can do for you in 2008."
And John McCain rounded up his maverick thoughts, gelded them, branded them and put them out to pasture.
And not a damn thing has changed since then. John McCain is getting precisely what is due to him, by his own measurement. The Straight Talk Express has gone into evasive action, and the senator from Arizona doesn't care what he has to do to assume the position he feels he's earned.
If you have any doubts—and I can see how you might, but when the mighty fall, they invariably fall long and hard—listen to how some conservatives are taking Ms. Pain's nomination as vice president:
Oops. "Cynical" and "gimmicky."
Obama may be earnest, that's true. And it may be an earnestness that grates on some of y'all's nerves; I've been there and I can understand that position. But when other people who ostensibly share your beliefs begin to refer to you as cynical and gimmicky?
Well, you know, you may just have gone beyond the pale.
San Francisco parts 3 and 4 are coming, folks. I promise. Despite what you may be thinking after part 2, they have a happy ending.
So, I'm still working on the San Francisco posts (I'm actually waiting to see if one of the threads concludes, if you must know), but today has been a banner day and I've got something that's pretty much ready to go.
See, my dad called me today, just to check in, and we got off on some pretty heavy political tangents. Poor Dad had stuff he needed to do, so he indulged me as long as he could, then suggested that I write some of my thoughts down and e-mail them to him. And, right after I got off the phone with him, today erupted into the weirdest political day since sometime in 1972, by my estimation.
Once I got through chronicling the day at the paper, I came home and dashed off an e-mail to my dad, because I had some thoughts and he'd asked me to do that.
So, what follows is a (slightly) edited version of the e-mail I sent Dad, under the subject line…
Er…you did ask me to write some of these thoughts down and stuff…
Hi, Dad,
So, imagine my surprise when I got off the phone with you and our fun political conversation, sat back down at my computer, refreshed my homepage and saw that Sarah Palin's daughter is 17 and pregnant out of wedlock!
Now, the situation itself really is a private matter, as everyone with any common sense is saying. However, it really does bring up some startling questions:
If this is a private matter, why did they announce it? Especially why announce it as a counter to the, frankly ridiculous, accusations that Sarah Palin is actually the grandmother of 4-month-old Trig, not the mother? She and her husband have taken their 17-year-old daughter's private matter and made it astonishingly public in order to prove to a bunch of Internet crackpots that Bristol couldn't've been pregnant with Trig, because she was already pregnant with this baby when Trig was born. Is that bad judgment, or what? I mean, c'mon, this is a 17-year-old kid who is about to be thrust into an incredibly adult situation: She's got enough to worry about without being made a pawn in her mother's political ambitions.
(Really, something of an aside) When the heck did the presidential election start cribbing its plots from daytime TV?
Who the heck does McCain have vetting his VP choices? The Keystone Kops? Not that a daughter pregnant out of wedlock is a dealbreaker (although imagine, if you will, that this was Chelsea Clinton's out-of-wedlock child and Hillary was on a ticket), but there are other realizations coming to light in spite of Gustav not turning the Gulf Coast into a Third World country. Foremost, there's this whole abuse of power issue (Palin's hired a private attorney to deal with that). Next, there's the fact that Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party (which has, as its name implies, occasionally adopted a plank in its platform advocating secession from the U.S.). Third is the "First Dude" of Alaska's arrest on drunken-driving charges 22 years ago (although I'm really inclined to chalk that up to youthful indiscretion…I mean, sheesh, the current president was busted for that as well…and Obama has admitted to using drugs in his youth and was a two-pack a day smoker as little as a year ago, to boot). Finally, though—and most damning—the New York Times is reporting that nobody, not a single soul the Times—THE NEW YORK FREAKIN' TIMES, pinnacle of journalism and paper of record for this great nation of ours—could find in Alaska, from state legislators all the way down to neighbors, can remember talking to ANYONE from McCain's campaign about Palin's past. NOBODY.
Can you believe that? Hell, you remember what you had to go through just to get a security clearance. (Heck, my neighbor while I was living in downtown Aiken was trying to get his clearance renewed, and I—who barely knew the dude—had a little chat with an FBI guy!) Yet here's somebody who could, conceivably, be president of the United States before the year 2012, and the best the McCain campaign could come up with is standard credit- and criminal record-checks?! Sheesh, man! You're not hiring an assistant manager! At least have a P.I. on retainer!
Anyway, I feel like coining a new phrase, so I'm going to: McCain has McGoverned himself: He's picked a running mate with serious issues, and he can't ditch her without looking like an incompetent and doddering dingbat.
And, you know, I'm kind of sad about that. While I wouldn't've voted for him, I've always liked John McCain and thought his heart was in a good place. Maybe not the right place, mind you, but he's a sincere guy trying to do what he thinks is best for his country.
But, man…this kind of impetuousness and shallow thinking? We've had too much of that over the last eight years.
Give my love to (my step-mother), and thanks for inviting me to rant. :)
love, j
So, there's that. It may be Wednesday night before I get the rest of the San Francisco posts up. Sorry to keep my regular readers in suspense.
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