Notes on my weekend television viewing

I don't watch much of it - don't have cable, and I stick mainly to Netflix - but I admit yesterday evening I had something of a TV blowout.

First I saw a SoCal man get pinched in a new episode of "Cops". He was already out on probation, and somebody'd phoned in a tip. So the police were free to come round to the guy's place at their leisure and roust him, which didn't take much effort because the man bolted off across his yard the moment he saw them, and unsuccessfully tried to chuck a baggie of meth out of view before they tackled him. We have seen this scene in every episode of "Cops" in existence.

Anyway, it was a "strike three" for the man, so his possession of this drug spells life imprisonment.

Then I saw the first bit of "America's Most Wanted". I was shown the recreation of an incident where a Louisiana rapist, released from Angola after fulfilling a 25-year sentence, gained the trust of a woman whom he then drove out to a bog, raped, and tried to murder. By a miracle she got away and swam to freedom with her hands tied behind her back. Swam, with her hands tied behind her back. No joke.

Now - without exactly coming out yay-rah methamphetamine here, I must say that seeing these two things in sequence really stunned me. First I was stunned with amazement, then with quiver-jawed rage. Naturally much of this rage is directed against the rapist. None of it, really, is directed against the meth guy, whom I just feel terrifically bad for. And therefore the rest of the rage is directed at our national drug laws.

The fact that as a society we should put anything like an equivalency of effort into capturing and punishing these two men: I hope you'll excuse me for saying that's a god-damnable outrage. After all, one of these two felons is hurting people. The other one is getting high. Is it socially responsible to get high? Is it good for his marriage or for his kids? No. But neither is his going off to prison for the rest of his life, duh.

Here's a simple question. Which man would you prefer having as a neighbor, the meth guy or the rape guy? You know the answer. You're not insane. You know the answer. Yes, I know, you don't want the meth guy as a neighbor either. Good on that. But you know the answer.

How can it possibly, possibly be necessary for me to say this - the social offenses of the drug-user and the rapist are not equal? But yet their jail terms are. People, let us please all think.

Alcohol and drugs can do all sorts of terrible things: we know this. And there are plenty of circumstances where the case is clear-cut that a compelling social interest exists to control how these chemicals are used. When people are at work, or driving cars, or simply raising children. But the very suggestion that the ingestion of euphoric drugs is a social problem of such magnitude that not only may the State dictate to private citizens what they are and are not allowed to do with their own bodies anymore; but also that in the enforcement of these restrictions, a vast national apparatus of investigators, informants, and lifelong imprisonment must be maintained with our tax dollars - this suggestion, I say, is so screamingly idiotic, so vile, so indefensible, that the national imagination simply appears to close down around the whole thing and accept it as reasonable. "Wellp, I guess that's just what we've gotta do. What, do you expect me to defend using methamphetamine?"

Nope, nobody expects anybody to defend using methamphetamine. Nobody expects anybody to defend schizophrenia, either. But the thought that anyone should spend so much as an hour in jail for being under the influence of either one of them: this is absurd.

[Note, added later: I'm obviously not talking about this kind of thing. Schizophrenia and extraordinarily acute drug use have in common that they can cause people to go delusional and become a serious risk to innocent people. As a society, we have every reason to press sanctions (incarceration) against this, and to work to prevent it. This is an observation I would count as self-evident... but when it comes to the hysteria surrounding the drugs debate, and the constant magnification of rare and shocking anecdotes into the perceived norm, I guess it never hurts to spell out the self-evident.]

I know I take an unusual view here. Even most folks who believe in decriminalization are at least careful to confine their talking points to marijuana, since every sane person alive knows marijuana is harmless (well, it makes you incredibly stupid, but who are we to deny stoners the right to be incredibly stupid if they insist?). No, not many would come out swinging like I do, using meth in their examples.

Although JFK seemed to tolerate the stuff well enough. Yep, JFK: daily amphetamine user. (Plus every soldier on every side of World War II. And several million regular folks throughout the fifties and sixties, who could readily pick up pills from their doctors, or inhalers OTC.) And Hitler, too - well, amphetamines may have made him a little battier than he already was.

Now you're defending Hitler. Nope, not defending Hitler, nor drugs. But I thought if I was going to trot out one famous amphetamine user who managed to come out not too much the worse for it - JFK - then I should be fair and toss in another one I know of off the top of my head who makes for a less heartening example.

Anyway, using an extreme drug in my discussion here is rather the point, since for me the matter is pretty absolute. There is no compelling state interest in regulating what I do and don't put into my own body, period, full stop, the end, boom, simple as that. One calls this idea freedom. And wouldn't it be a relief if we free adult Americans were treated as such and extended the freedom that we are told, on paper, we inalienably enjoy?

[The big exception I can see is antibiotics. There is a compelling social need to regulate the use of these drugs, since their private abuse leads to their general inefficacy. But since we're squirting a hundred billion liters of the stuff into caged pigs daily, I'm not sure what difference this even makes anymore. That genie may be leaving the bottle.]

And, why, as free Americans, we could then all take responsibility for how we treat our own selves. Because Christ knows half the stuff available in the snacks aisle at Kroger is more dangerous than any schedule II narcotic in the first place. Just slap some labels on the cocaine vials with descriptions of the side effects, the long-term risks, and the addictive potential: the same sort of stuff we informed consumers have learned to expect from our manufacturers of cigarettes, echinacea, homeopathic tar-water, dietary supplements, and all our other cherished placebos and bunkum.

(Nyaa nyaa - for ten years now I knew "Airborne" doesn't work, folks. Know how I knew? Because it calls itself an herbal remedy.)

Now, would it be the end of civilization if cocaine - which, after all, is not an herbal remedy, and therefore works - could be bought from off the shelf? No, it would not. How do I know this? Because it did not end civilization the last time it was the case, right here in the good old U. S. of A. Our great-grandparents barely had any OTC medicines available except as contained either cocaine or heroin or marijuana. You mind if I repeat that? Cocaine and heroin and marijuana were readily-available over-the-counter drugs 100 years ago. I know the paternalistic Republican Daddy-State, those lovers of personal choice, would blow a gasket contemplating this degree of personal choice: but to give a short answer to the question - no, it would not be the end of the world if free adult Americans could go to their local drug stores and buy drugs there.

I don't get any nobility points for stating these things, to be sure. Nobody sounds noble saying that hey, maybe we're overreacting to our nation's drug problem. And so nothing changes in our justice system's ongoing crisis, except inasmuch as that, perhaps, it keeps getting worse. Tough drug laws - presumably affecting only poor people and pariahs, since rich people don't get arrested for these things - have long been a political winner (a) for the notoriously pro-rich Republicans, whose campaign contributors can go get a scrip for the analog of any illegal street drug they like (see Limbaugh, Rush); as well as (b) for the Democrats, who find being anti-drug such a safe message that it's a perennially reliable place to go prove how frigging "tough" they are in contraposition to all their softy stances in areas like welfare. Thus we end up with two parties spending decades out-"tough"ing one another. Meanwhile poor people and pariahs everywhere are having their lives heinously wrecked, at our nation's general tax expense.

Has anyone noticed what it is that our two parties are being so tough about? Nothing. This is 100% Rod-Serling-The-Monsters-Are-Due-on-Maple-Street nothing. We are tearing our own selves apart in reaction to a problem infinitesimally less damaging than the response.

Because what's that problem again? Oh yes, getting high: a social indiscretion, an addictive disease for many, a potential destroyer of families, and a thing to treat clinically to be sure; but something as reasonable to "punish" as the average mood disorder. Not only are we talking about a sustained and systemic human rights atrocity here, but this is also the quickest and easiest way to eliminate "wasteful government spending" that I have ever heard of. Yes, foreign war included. Because hell, sometimes foreign wars are necessary. This never is.

Because you do know that all the crime surrounding drugs is because of their illegality, yes? The gangs and the Al-Pacino-in-Scarface stuff? We had gangs like that, not to mention the original Scarface, back when we misguidedly illegalized liquor. When we re-legalized it, those gangs went away, poof, overnight, gone. And a huge boon of government tax revenue came back into play. There is every... as well as every... reason to believe the same would happen with the legalization of these other substances. Not to mention that drugs would also cease being a funding source for the Taliban.

So, why are drugs illegal? It'll sound like common wisdom to some, but for many I think it would come as a surprise if you could boil it down to discover how much institutionalized racism lay at the heart of the thing. Not that our drug laws are a cleverly-crafted racist cabal: I don't believe that at all. What I mean is that if this "war" were taking out white kids at anything like the rate it's hitting our pigment-enhanced brethren, a truce would be called post haste.

The drug laws originally came online for all your typical corporate-lobbyist-type reasons. Patents, drug companies, market share. The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was pushed along partly by William Randolph Hearst, who was concerned that paper and newsprint might be manufactured not through business with his timber holdings, but instead more cheaply (and cleanly and efficiently) from hemp. Not that there wasn't a racial concern in tandem with the corporate one - attitudes toward marijuana had been darkening as its use became more popular among blacks and America-dwelling Mexicans in the first decades of the 20th century. Ditto for opium and its derivates, except that their unpopularity had stemmed from the (wholly legitimate, no doubt) fear of white women becoming enslaved to creepy, mustachioed orientals in their subterranean pipe-smoking dens.

And today I would say there is a lingering sort of muddle-headed, nonconscious racism to our attitudes about the penalties attached to drug crimes. Because the crushing wheels of justice are always, you know, "out there". Happening to somebody else. Why don't "those people" just stop taking those terrible drugs? For goodness' sake, they know how severe the penalties are! ...And then, when Junior gets picked up holding a dimebag, Miffy and I hire the necessary legal counsel to make that embarrassment go away. And then duly chunk the kid's ass down into rehab. But prison time? Lord no.

Well. There will surely be no end to this nonsense while I'm alive - politically, it's a total dog. No one will champion the elimination of this evil, and expensive, and ineffectual social injustice. But if the war on drugs ever were to go away, my friends, I think the best result of all would be that we could finally devote our police budgets entirely to the pursuit and curtailment of, ahem, crime. You know - crime. By which I mean rapists, Enron executives, and government employees who wiretap the entire nation's telephone/internet system, or smuggle people to Bulgaria on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations in order to torture them.

Because drugs aren't crime. You mind if I say that again? Drugs are not crime. I know I sound like a froth-mouthed lunatic saying so. A hundred thousand indignant parents and loved ones might want to raise their voices in anger to me for saying something so flippant, and to tell me the story of someone close to them who ruined his or her life, or died, from drugs. I don't deny that any of that happens. I would just say this:

There is nothing bad about drugs that our drug laws aren't making much, much worse.


[Parting note: If you haven't already, and if you don't mind getting wildly infuriated, read Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness. The non-drug part of the book, about pornography laws, is somewhat less infuriating, but equally fascinating.]


***


Next, I watched Rambo III. I've been waiting quite awhile for this one: what with the new Rambo movie coming out last month, III was actually held up quite awhile in my Netflix queue.

I was a little disappointed - I'd hoped it would be funnier. Granted, when Rambo and Trautman face off at the end of the movie four-handed against the entire Soviet army in Afghanistan... and actually start trying to fight that army, the two of them alone... but are saved at the last minute by a grand cavalry of Afghan Mujahandeen who come riding round from behind a mountain to save the day; well, then I laughed. Oh, I laughed. One of these saviors even bore a striking resemblance to Ayman al-Zawahiri (bin Laden must have been back at the cave getting his dialysis).

And the closing title was a real marvel: "This film is dedicated to the gallant fighting men of Afghanistan." Or words to the effect, but gallant was definitely one of those words. None of the words was repressive, fundamentalist, Taliban, or burqa.

This film makes an excellent companion volume to Charlie Wilson's War, by the way. The premise of Rambo III is that ever since the Afghan Mujahadeen began receiving Stinger anti-aircraft missiles (sent, as everyone knows, by Tom Hanks), they have been making substantial progress in their fight against their Soviet occupiers: except in one sector of the country, where an especially brutal Soviet commander has been assaulting civilian populations and suppressing the flow of these much-needed Stingers. Trautman - an over-the-hill Special Ops Colonel who should clearly be behind a desk somewhere - goes into Afghanistan by himself to investigate things and hopefully loosen up the supply channel. He is captured by the Soviets within ten minutes. Rambo, working now as an odd-jobs man at a Thai Buddhist monastery, goes in (also alone) to save his erstwhile mentor. Hilarity ensues in the form of 70-plus pyrotechnic events, and the on-screen killings of more than 200 people (if imdb is to be believed). Yet somehow the whole thing unfolds rather boringly.

***

Then, Saturday Night Live. The cold open was fine but after three months' writers' strike I'd dared hope for a little more. I don't mind confessing to the world that I have a desperate but harmless crush on Tina Fey; her snip of monologue about Hillary was great. And other stuff. And other stuff.

***

Man, I basically slept through the Sunday shows. I hate when I do that. But Nader announced on MTP that he's going to run, eh? Is that supposed to matter? He's been chasing after some diminishing returns these past few elections: this one will clearly fall into that pattern.

Rove v. Crow

My friend Jim sends this:

wow... this is something I'd never imagine...

Sheryl Crow is saying she suspects Karl Rove spread the "toilet paper conservation" story to make her look silly. Geez, that Karl Rove sure gets around !

--link--

...To which I said:

Karl Rove couldn't possibly have enough hours in the day to dream up smears of rock musicians. The very idea is sketch-comedy-worthy. Rove in his office, chomping on a cigar, chuckling devilishly: "I've got it! We'll win the midterms decisively... by making the nation believe Sheryl Crow wants everyone to use one square of toilet paper per bathroom trip!"

Also, Sheryl Crow was going around publicly at that point saying, "People should use one square of toilet paper per bathroom trip." I read a blog post she put up at the Huffington Post saying as much. Karl Rove did not make her do any of this. Sure, in context she was obviously speaking in jest. But with a little trim of Occam's razor we scarcely need bring Karl Rove into the picture to explain how that got misinterpreted....

(This reminds me of Al Gore's troubles in 2000. No, not Florida - before that. I mean back when everybody said he said he'd invented the internet, and was the star of Love Story and of Love Canal and etc. So many false, boasty claims that if fact-checked were actually true, and not even very boasty? Karl Rove didn't sit around crafting weird campaigns of misinformation like this, which were entirely dependent on the amplification within the echo chamber of a hungry news hole 0f misstated facts from lazy initial reports. We know Rove didn't do this, because (a) only the news media itself can be responsible for lazy initial reports and their later amplification, and (b) this sort of misinformation is too weird to make up on purpose.)

In short: the phrase "Karl Rove" is liberalspeak for "the way right-wingers think". And the danger is in considering one-off news items and self-organizing opinion trends as the results of a conscious, evil plot.

Roe v. Wade

[ Roe's 35th anniversary was this week. So...]

This is why I'm pro-choice:

One of the biologically defining features of the human species is neoteny - the fact that our rate of development has been slowed relative to that of our closest kin. Long childhood, long babyhood, and long fetushood. Some events of late gestation that for other primates occur inside the uterus, take place for humans in the first year of independent life. That is, human embryonic development has stretched out so long that bits of it now actually occur after birth. Dramatic changes have been selected for in our recent evolution to accommodate this slowed development. For example, female hips have widened in the effort to keep up with ever-larger babies (particularly their heads) - and sadly without complete success, as the phenomenon of death during childbirth attests. Moreover, humans are born with unfused skull plates so the brain can continue its explosive rate of growth after birth.

That's on the hardware side of things. Growing to be a fully socialized and participatory human can be viewed as its own evolutionary process, and absorbs years of training. Consciousness is no lightswitch flipped on at conception, or at the second trimester, or at birth, or on the first birthday. There's no moment. It is a gradual process of coming into an intentional and reciprocative relationship with one's environment (particularly the social environment) as based on an ever-refined mental model which a child builds of world-and-self.

It's my belief that consciousness lay in the process of building and maintaining a model of the world - and then of course pursuing one's intentions within it. As social primates, the models we build intimately involve our interactions and transactions with other social primates (which, tangentially, is why most of us are so religious: we find it natural to extrapolate the idea of a social hierarchy all the way on up). And I believe it is no terrible oversimplification to say that this process of becoming conscious, indeed of becoming fully human, maps closely onto the process of acquiring language. They're not one and the same, but they're powerfully correlative.

So if you catch the implications of this - of my emphasis on the great duration involved in the development of consciousness - you can see how my personal pro-choice view may even be considered extreme. People want to find a pat answer in this debate and stick with it: life starts here, or life starts there. I say that life - conscious life - comes gradually, meaning that it comes late. And so I strongly believe abortion is not and cannot be murder. Which doesn't make it particularly laudable, nor goes to deny the difficult feelings it entails for any woman choosing it. But for all that, it is morally unobjectionable.


Now, that was a tough argument to make. Not because the argument is baseless, shabby, or uncompelling - I obviously happen to think it's none of those things - but because nobody wants to find themselves in a political debate saying, "I shall now explain why my position is not pro-murder." Because that's a tough rhetorical spot to be in, the pro-choice movement as a whole has gravitated toward other framings. Understandably, they'd like to spend their time talking about something else. Heck, look at that name: pro-choice. What does that mean? Of what sort of choice are we pro-, here? Pro-choice-of-bunnies? Pro-choice-of-peaches? The movement can't even address its own position in its own moniker.

And watch out, because if the pro-choice movement won't argue that abortion is not murder, they've abandoned the field for the pro-life movement to hold that debate all by themselves. Which is why rhetorically I think the pro-choice side has slowly been losing this fight over the past couple of decades.

Consider:

Pro-Life Person: "Help! There is a murder taking place!"

Pro-Choice Person: "Butt out! Everyone has a right to privacy!"

And that's why the pro-choice argument must strongly articulate that there is no murder taking place. The pro-lifers are simply pressing a prior claim.

[Here's a stoned-in-the-dorm-room thought experiment: suppose a woman and a man are into extreme infantilistic fetishism. And suppose the woman is morbidly obese. Okay, the woman has her abdomen surgically opened, is liposuctioned to clear space - the grown man is thoroughly disinfected, fitted with a snorkel, and insinuated in her belly where he is sewn cozily into place. I guess the snorkel is left poking out of the woman's navel. Now, does the woman have the right to block the man's snorkel - or by another means kill him - because he happens to be inside her body, and she has a right to privacy?]

The awkward terms of this national debate - "murder" versus "privacy" - were in no small measure set by Roe v. Wade. Unlike many other western democracies (Britain, France, Italy) America did not establish a right to abortion through a publicly-debated legislative process. The right to abortion was given by judicial decree, and it happened to be handed down on this specious basis of privacy rights. To that extent, perhaps the pro-choice movement hasn't found itself in its awkward debating posture out of the rhetorical cowardice we're so accustomed to from the Democratic Party. Perhaps it's more because they've been making the case they need to make in consonance with the legal defenses of Roe they've been pressing for 3.5 decades now.

But rather than defend Roe - that is, rather than make the privacy argument - a better idea may be to take the offensive - and also abandon a double-negative for a positive - in fighting for a legislative guarantee of reproductive rights: something which would be independently assured in the case Roe were ever to go away as a piece of legal reasoning protecting abortion. The Republicans have had an anti-abortion amendment in their plank since 1980: why not pre-emptively push for a reproductive-rights amendment from the other side?

Hillary wins

As of 3 minutes ago, it looks like Hillary pulled ahead in the New Hampshire primary: 40 to Obama's 36. Thus ends a brief, shining moment - beginning last Thursday night - when it appeared for a little while that somebody other than Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee.

But I think that's over; I think she'll go on now to sweep "Super Duper Tuesday" on February 5.

Oh, wait - I thought I wasn't posting to this blog anymore. Damn!

I don't care about politics anymore.

An exaggeration for effect? Maybe. But if you scan down to my previous post, you'll see it was several weeks back (ten already - yow). And I'm only writing today, on this first day of a new year, to announce that this experiment in political blogging is going on ice (lest one fret, I'm commencing a new blog. So you could say I'm not so much abandoning politics as taking up religion).

Oh yeah - there's another reason I'm writing today, which is to post this:

[The idea for this cartoon is actually about as old as the blog itself (six months), so I'm glad to have drawn it at last. Even though I didn't draw it very well. George Bush Sr. sure doesn't look like George Bush Sr., despite being traced from a photo. In the second panel he does look a little like Bill O'Reilly, if that helps, and it doesn't.]

But to the matter at hand: not caring about politics.

All my life I never really did care about politics, by the way. My apathy was based on the sound intuition that America is a behemoth. It's got a vast and peculiar momentum - economically, culturally, socially; and sure, doing one's piece by being an engaged voter and so forth is a wonderful thing, platitudinally speaking. But it has always been clear that the Beast is going to do whatever the Beast is going to do. And it was also clear, back in the '90s when being a political junkie meant following non-issues like Whitewater and blue-dress ejaculate, that politics was at best just a food fight, something for Rush Limbaugh to simper about. Sure, maybe stuff was at stake - will some tin-pot dictator, formerly on the CIA payroll, get bombed this year? Will we get universal health insurance someday - or will the Republicans keep your second cousin's grandfather from getting that transplant he needs? In other words, you could always consider the stuff at stake to be reasonably remote if you liked. And why not like? We all have other stuff in our lives to worry about.

So I didn't care about politics.

And then - 9-11 didn't change everything. Of course that's not what you hear from most quarters, where it's well-echoed that 9-11 changed everything. For me, no. Not that I sided with the terrorists, mind you, as I might have been accused of doing for saying such a thing in the hurricane of jingoism following the attacks. All I mean is that 9-11 didn't surprise me. In the back of my imagination I'd always figured something like it - or something much, much worse - would be coming down the pike. And, terrible though it be, things like 9-11 and things much worse than 9-11 are still coming down the pike at us today. Very little of what's gone on in the past six years has helped make that any unlikelier.

But what did change everything, as far as I was concerned, was the substantially-less-famous October 11, 2002. As it happened, I was at home in bed that day, hung-over, lying next to a radio tuned to NPR. They were running live Senate coverage of the Iraq war resolution debate, which had passed the House the day before. Now... I hadn't been paying a great deal of attention to politics in the months prior. But I knew the claim that nothing more was on the table than a "use-of-force resolution" - rather than an open declaration of war - was perfect bullshit. Bush was clearly going into Iraq, and that was clearly that.

I also knew that the arguments being adduced in favor of this resolution, with mind-numbing repetitiveness, by Senator after Senator - whether Democrat or Republican - were perfect bullshit too. "Saddam gassed his own people." Yeah, 14 years earlier, partly abetted by Reagan's de-listing of him as a supporter of terrorism. An undoubted atrocity nonetheless - but grounds for invasion? We'd gone through a Gulf War and a dozen years of sanctions since the Halabja massacre, and needed to invade his country now? While our Uzbek ally Karimov was out there boiling people in oil that very day?

(I know, Saddam had also been screwing around with the weapons inspectors. But there were some very shrewd proposals on the table for beefed-up inspection regimes: let the inspectors show up for a look-see whenever and wherever they like, and if they're turned away then the facility gets an airstrike within 15 minutes. What was Saddam going to do about it? In other words, there were options available to us shy of taking over the whole frigging country.)

So, hearing the debate that day changed something for me. Not my belief that political activism "makes a difference" (which it actually does: just a very, very, very small difference). But rather my belief that the stuff at stake - in this case, our response to 9-11 - was something I had the luxury of ignoring. Because here we were, starting a war on manifestly absurd grounds. Folks running around years later saying "Bush lied" were either disingenuous or missing the point. Not that he wasn't lying about his case for war; of course he was. But he never did lie very well, and I can attest as a casual observer of the period that it was always obvious his case for war was false. Thus, I figured - best to get that voter registration updated, spend some effort keeping abreast of the issues, and, you know, generally do my very-small piece.

So I went on to read 30-odd books, and spent a couple hours daily for the next few years inhaling the news (my knowledge of current music was an early casualty of the War on Terror). For the sheer quixotic joy of it, I went to New York during the '04 Republican National Convention and ended up carrying a flag-draped coffin past Madison Square Garden. I didn't think the world was getting particularly changed by any of this - just like it wouldn't if I took up writing summaries of political items for the online reading pleasure of a dozen or fewer friends. But I did hope that writing a blog might be entertaining, which it has been, at least until lately, when I began to realize I'm back to not caring about politics so much. This comes partly as a relief, as I appreciate getting back those two hours every day.

But mainly it's saddening, because of why politics has been losing my interest. Ironically the problem is that things have generally been going my way. But at what cost? The Republican Party has dealt itself some pretty nice blows of late. Through sheer, brilliant incompetence they've lost a war they readily could have won, and in any event should never have started. They're so damn venal and sexually repressed that they've buried themselves beneath an impressive hillock of scandals. They've undermined our economic health in ways that will continue to become clearer in the couple years ahead. They've hobbled our international power diplomatically, militarily, and economically for the foreseeable future. If this stuff is the price of being proven right, I'd like to be shamefully and embarrassedly wrong. But I'm not; they are, and each candidate the Republicans has out there running for President right now is wronger than the next (Ron Paul weirdos be damned). Which is why the Republicans will lose in November. Iraq-plus-the-bursting-of-the-housing-bubble is more than enough to do it, but their whackjob anti-immigrant nativism truly seals the deal.

But this brings us around to the Democrats, and closer to the heart of why I'm finding myself losing enthusiasm. They refuse to take the ball of their success - thrown into their hands this past year through no great fault of their own - and simply run with it. Before us now, in the looming post-Bush power vacuum, lay a politico-historical moment where a lot of stuff could get set straight. Insert your whole liberal laundry list here. Single-payer health insurance. A Manhattan-Project-esque "Apollo" program to remake our energy infrastructure. Little stuff like the restoration of civil liberties and true checks and balances in our government. And some kind of plan for Iraq, since I'm not sure what the hell we should be trying to do over there anymore. The three-state plan always sounded like a good idea to me; maybe it still is.

But there's the rub: there isn't a very imaginative debate going on around these issues. The Democrats will cobble together some kind of health program (but nothing particularly optimal or visionary). They'll toss some bucks at ethanol, and at those new lightbulbs. Maybe the rate of lobbyist control over our regulatory agencies will go down a tic. The same crap will proceed largely unaltered in Iraq, but strenuous efforts will be made to frame it differently for the press. Maybe some of the more egregiously illegal abuses of executive power - torture, surveillance, and stuff we don't yet know about - will be more or less rolled back, but not publicly repudiated to the extent that the precedent won't still be there for the next guy.

In this next, Democratic administration I just anticipate a lot of "Yeah, whatever" all around. A plethora of minimal solutions born from the deathly fear that anything bolder will lose the next election. And should that turn out true, and should nothing change too dramatically, then soon enough it'll duly be considered time to give the Republicans another shot. And there we'll all be all over again.

In short, I've been feeling pulled back toward my original intuition about politics. An attitude well-summed-up by Bill Murray's brilliant "It Just Doesn't Matter" speech from Meatballs. Things change in this great nation of ours - but slowly, annoyingly, by half-measures and rarely very decisively. Consider civil rights: have things gotten better for African Americans in this country in the past fifty years? Sure. But that's just the point - it's been fifty years. And things may have gotten better, but there's more "better" out there for them yet to get. That Beast - the American behemoth - is going to do what it's going to do, in its own way and on its own schedule.

Hope has not escaped Pandora's box, of course. Best still to keep one's voter registration current and to stay abreast of the issues. I haven't changed my mind about that. But - to keep score on whether House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers intends to follow up on the flouted subpoenas for testimony from top administration officials regarding their roles in the US Attorney firing scandal? (to take one example out of 218) - I guess I'm not feeling like I've got two hours a day for that anymore. Because Conyers isn't going to follow up; Pelosi has made sure of it; she's scared to death of stumbling in the next election, and believes that somehow meekness will help. Sickest of all, from a market-research standpoint she is perhaps right. And impeachment? Don't make me laugh, or cry, or laugh until I cry. Impeachment of every impeachable member of the Bush Administration goes so far beyond being richly deserved as to be an exigent matter in the defense and preservation of our democracy. But no, not this time, that's not how the ball bounces. The Beast is going to do whatever the Beast is going to do.

So I figured I'd take up writing about the Bible for awhile instead.

Local Politics

Since low-rent impresario Chicken John is running for mayor of San Francisco, alongside a nudist, a professional clown, and a rather spaced-out homeless cab driver; I thought it would be good fun to attend the only mayoral debate in which the incumbent, Gavin Newsom, planned to participate. This took place last Thursday in the auditorium beneath the City's main library.

I was ten minutes late getting there. On the one hand, this didn't matter since Newsom was about ten minutes late himself, and the first half hour of the show was taken up anyway by a lecture about how San Francisco's new system of ranked-choice voting will work. --On the other hand, being late mattered a lot because the auditorium had already filled beyond standing-room capacity, and spilled into a short line outside. Guards were only letting us in when someone else left.

But I was #12 in line, and there was some movement happening; plus I had a book to read and some time to kill before I had another place to be at 8. So I waited.

I was well-buried in that book when a klieg light kicked in on me, and a thoroughly-groomed man was tipping a microphone into my face while introducing himself from CBS-5 and asking what had brought me to the debate.

Ambush!

Before anybody gets excited about the fact that I have the video clip below, be warned that (a) it's of abysmal quality - I mean, criminally bad. I VHS-taped the 11:00 news off of my little TV, tilting the rabbit ears into the best position I could (because yes, I can only watch TV with the help of rabbit ears); then transcoded it to quicktime for upload. And considering that (b) I am a catastrophic disappointment in the video (if not, indeed, a bit of a fool), I wouldn't even have gone through that trouble had it not seemed like an amusing tech experiment.

Yeah, I blew my big opportunity in front of the camera. I didn't say, "Why, I came to see Chicken John's agenda of art and affordability enunciated in the public square!" I did not say the truth, which was, "I came here to see whether a circus erupts!" Instead, I gave a numbingly dull good-citizen translation of that latter thought:

Anyway, I was finally let into the debate for its last 40 minutes or so. Some funny things were said. The cab driver, who calls himself Grasshopper, kept putting his hands into the "flying birdman" goggles position while other people were answering their questions (as per left, below). When answering questions himself, he just gurbled on in spaced-out tones about how marijuana and sex work should be legalized.


A candidate named H. Brown was giving Newsom a little hell, saying apropos of the new system of neighborhood security cameras, "If we'd had a camera in the mayor's office this past year, Newsom wouldn't even be in office today." --An evident reference to Gavin's affair with a top aide's wife, which is about the only piece of local politics I've actually heard anything about.

The nudist (who was, sadly, not nude) actually sounded level-headed enough. He just kept saying San Francisco should borrow more progressive ideas from major European cities.

Chicken John - at least while I was watching - ignored the questions he was asked about surveillance cameras and earthquake preparedness to hold forth about how the City drums out artists with its high rents, and that Muni buses should be run on coffee grounds. In his summary statement, he jabbed in the very funny line that, "San Francisco is not a city of zombies!" - funny, since there was a zombie flash mob slated to gather outside the library and attack the audience and candidates as they left.

And that's San Francisco politics for you, at least in an off-year like this one.

Before the batteries in my camera died, I was able to take one or two pictures of the zombie flash mob that were as bad as, or worse than, this one:

(If you click on it you'll at least be able to get some detail.)

Update: Jim Lamb has provided me the link to some much better documentation of the zombie attack.

citizenship test

This is a bit of fun. Ten questions from the new version of the US citizenship test.

I got nine out of ten - god knows how I was able to pull from out of the dim reaches of my recollection that there are (spoiler alert) 27 amendments to the Constitution.

But I didn't understand their interpretation of the question, "Name two rights of American citizens," and, silly as it sounds, I missed that one.