Alabama’s Crappy Constitution

Check out It’s a Thick Book, a very interesting and informative video essay by Lewis Lehe about Alabama’s bloated (and quite possibly fraudulent) Constitution and tax system. It’s a little lengthy (48 minutes) but well worth your time. I learned things about my state that have really opened my eyes. And I don’t like what I’m seeing…

a word or two about the new job

So I started my new job as an AT&T DSL tech on Tuesday. After months and months of either being jobless or working for peanuts at dead-end jobs, let me tell you – it’s nice to finally get paid what I think I’m worth. Also, I’m very proud to finally work for a union shop. The union rep hasn’t come around to my new hire class yet, but in a few days I will become a member of the Communication Workers of America. Labor unions have done a world of good for people who, before the advent of unions, had no choice but to work under deplorable conditions. Yes, I’m a pinko socialist wingbat and proud of it.

a Reality Check from John Scalzi

I could not be happier today that Obama won the presidency of the United States. But it would be good to keep in mind the points that John Scalzi made today in his blog:

For those who need it:

1. It was Obama who won, not necessarily the Democrats. Which is why, while the Democrats gained in both the House and the Senate, they don’t appear to be having the blow-out additions to their numbers some folks seemed to think would happen (note that at least a couple of Senate races are still in play). Which suggests, to me at least, that rather than the Democrats putting wind into Obama’s sails, they rode on his coattails. I think people who are under the impression the Democrats now have a mandate are misreading what happened yesterday. It’s Obama who has the mandate. The Democrats are along for the ride. Don’t think Obama, at least, isn’t aware of this. Which brings us to:

2. The United States did not become a deep blue paradise overnight. Fox News will not implode. Matt Drudge will not spontaneously combust. Rush Limbaugh will not choke on his own tongue. And aside from all those pleasant images, America is the same essentially purple-y place it was yesterday. If you need proof of that, please to see the results of Proposition 8 in California, which, alas, seems headed for a win, along with amendments and resolutions in other states intended to make sure same-sex marriage is illegal in those places. It would be tempting to imagine that this is a departing knife twist by religious and social conservatives before they start to tear at each other’s intestines (”I can’t have Sarah Palin but at least I can screw the gays”), but that’s delusional thinking. There are more pro-Obama, pro-Prop 8 (and etc) types out there than some folks are ready to admit. Which brings us to:

3. Obama will not give you everything you want, when you want it. Since Obama seems to have this crazy idea that he might want to be president of the whole damn country, I think he’s going to be small-c conservative in his battles, at least the early ones, and will likely stick to the economic issues that got him elected. Anyone who’s observed the man in the campaign who is also not totally high on crazy wing juice (either the right or left vintages) will note that Obama is a man of exceptionally practical strategies; one of those strategies is to lead people to where he wants to go by using the paths they like to go by. Per point 2, this means frustrating people who want to go off the beaten paths. Which brings us to:

4. Your next president is going to disappoint you. Barack Obama does not fart cinnamon-scented rainbows. He is not trailed by angels and unicorns. Reality does not reshape itself to his wishes. Dude’s a human being, and a politician, and he’s going to have to work with other human beings who are also politicians. Per point 2, some things you want him to do he won’t be able to do, and some of the things you want him to do he won’t want to do, so they won’t get done. He will make mistakes. He will make errors. He will be caught flat-footed from time to time. He will be challenged by antagonists, foreign and domestic, who will have an interest in seeing him faceplant. He will piss most people off. His approval rating will drop below 50%. He is going to disappoint you. Get used to the idea.

5. Last night’s election didn’t change the country; it offered a chance for the country to change. Which is something Obama himself pointed out last night, because he’s a smart man like that. He will effect some of that change through the power of the presidency, and through his relationship with Congress, but ultimately what will change things is whether people want change and are willing to work for it. Elections are the easy part, basically. Now comes the work. As the saying goes, you have been offered a country, if you can keep it. It’s up to you more than it’s up to your next president.

rules for election day in Alabama

Here’s a useful post from Left in Alabama. I thought some of these rules might be nice to know:

1 – Campaigning is not allowed with  30 feet of a polling place – This includes handing out literature and/or urging someone to vote for a particular candidate, this includes campaign workers and candidates.

2 – You may wear buttons, tee shirts etc espousing a candidate into the polls unless you are a poll worker or poll watcher. you can not linger in the polling place however, vote and exit.

3 – You may request assistance in voting and you may request whoever you choose including a candidate or campaign worker – you do not have to accept a poll worker as an assistant

4 – You may carry a sample ballot into the polls

5 – If you are a registered voter and your name does not appear on the poll workers list you may ask to vote a provisional ballot, formerly known as a challenged ballot. Your registeration will be checked by the Voters Registars office and if you are registered the vote will be counted.

6 – If the poll list shows you should be voting in another polling place you may also vote a provisional ballot (for example if you changed addresses) – important in local races

7 – If you are in line when the polls close, poll workers must allow you to vote.

8 – You do have to show an approved form of identification

9 – If you insist on voting naked and are over the age of 35, you must vote absentee.

 

Also, remeber this advice that my dad sent to me in an email:

“We can thank “Chelle for this.  It seems pretty bizarre but apparently (at least according to snopes.com) it is true. 
 
If you decide to vote a straight ticket (no that isn’t one that excludes gay people), you may not be voting for the presidential candidate.  Of course a straight ticket is when you vote for the entire slate of a party’s candidates at once by what used to be called “pulling the big lever” in the voting booth (I will refrain from going there though I am sorely tempted).
 
Apparently a lot of states have separated the vote for president from the rest of the voting options on their ballots and you will need to vote for president IN ADDITION to any full slate vote you cast.  You would do well to check before you vote if you plan to do that.
 
The latest polls (today) indicate an extremely close vote so a bunch of uncounted votes due to not knowing this could actually sway the election.”

RIP David Foster Wallace

I was floored to find out that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide. He was, without a doubt, one of our most treasured authors. Everything he wrote was worth reading. I could spend countless words going on about how his Infinite Jest changed my life. (I was actually in the hospital going through detox as I was reading it. The only other time I had experienced synchronicity of that order was as I was reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld on 9/11/01.) But in order to really get it, you have to read him. Harper’s has put up everything he’d ever written for them. But considering the election season, I wanted to post an excerpt from an interview DFW did with The Believer in 2003. (Yes, it’s Dave Eggers interviewing David Foster Wallace. Which is some kind of literary hipster pornography.)

The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is. Failing that, maybe at least we can help elevate some professional political journalists who are (1) polite, and (2) willing to entertain the possibility that intelligent, well-meaning people can disagree, and (3) able to countenance the fact that some problems are simply beyond the ability of a single ideology to represent accurately.

Implicit in this brief, shrill answer, though, is obviously the idea that at least some political writing should be Platonically disinterested, should rise above the fray, etc.; and in my own present case this is impossible (and so I am a hypocrite, an ideological opponent could say). In doing the McCain piece you mentioned, I saw some stuff (more accurately: I believe that I saw some stuff) about our current president, his inner circle, and the primary campaign they ran that prompted certain reactions inside me that make it impossible to rise above the fray. I am, at present, partisan. Worse than that: I feel such deep, visceral antipathy that I can’t seem to think or speak or write in any kind of fair or nuanced way about the current administration. Writing-wise, I think this kind of interior state is dangerous. It is when one feels most strongly, most personally, that it’s most tempting to speak up (“speak out” is the current verb phrase of choice, rhetorically freighted as it is). But it’s also when it’s the least productive, or at any rate it seems that way to me—there are plenty of writers and journalists “speaking out” and writing pieces about oligarchy and neofascism and mendacity and appalling short-sightedness in definitions of “national security” and “national interest,” etc., and very few of these writers seem to me to be generating helpful or powerful pieces, or really even being persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already share the writer’s views.

My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.

a few days late but Happy 4th of July

While going over my RSS feeds from this past long weekend I ran across this post by normboyd40 from the Left in Alabama blog. It pretty much sums up my feelings regarding our country’s political and moral future. I love the idea of “my country, right or fix it” as opposed to “my country, right or wrong.” Dear Lord, I hope the tide is turning…

“Well, I woke up Friday mornin’ with no way to look at America that doesn’t hurt….” apologies to Johnny Cash.

Obama is backtracking on FISA and gives us pathetic, carefully nuanced reasons why. 

The media – that great defender of America’s values, and provider of truth- has become Rupert Murdoch’s plaything and truth is no longer available.  “Sorry, fresh out.  Check Comedy Central on the ‘truthiness’ aisle” 

The Bush/Cheney administration has proven long since that there truly is nothing they will not do to consolidate more and more power in the White House.  The United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the laws and structures of this great nation, have never been in such peril.  Never! Not at Pearl Harbor, not at the hands of Hitler, not when planes crashed into the World Trade Center, not even when the nation was rent asunder by Civil War. 
So, I awoke this morning and walked out into my front yard, stood on the porch, directly under the flag flying in the breeze, and felt my eyes fill up with tears.  A little history may be in order.  Personal history. 

The flag that flies from my front porch once saw duty as a drape over my father’s coffin.  Dad was a patriot – a different kind than his son, but a patriot of the highest order.  A simple man, he believed in “my country, right or wrong” and could never get his mind around “My country, right or fix it”.  And I realize that the blind acceptance of “my country” for so many of our parents’ generation and indeed even today’s generation, has been largely to blame for where we are.  I do not fault them.  They had no reason to believe that our greatest danger lay in the very halls of the government  they had elected. 

The idea was unthinkable.  But here we are.  The current administration has harnessed Congress like an old well-broken team of mules.  They have re-constituted the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for the executive branch on all but the most bizarre cases.  The president actually believes he has a right to change laws as written by the Legislature before signing them, with no one’s approval but his own. He is, after all, “The Decider”.

He can order anyone who ever worked for him or his corrupt administration to refuse to testify before the United States Congress.  Now, think about that! There are three co-equal branches of Government established by the United States Constitution.  Not “A Decider” and his lackeys. And the Supremes, the only check on his powers, simply nod sagely and refuse to hear cases that would curtail his excesses.

In the past, no administration could have presumed to usurp the power of the Congress and the courts.  That great defender of truth and honesty, the Fourth Estate, the American press and broadcast media, would have exposed this usurpation in a minute. Who can imagine Edward R. Murrow, Lowell Thomas, Cronkite, parroting the President’s lies, just because he is “a good ole boy” and “fun to drink a beer with”.  Who can envision  these reporters pretending that distorted claims of national security really carry weight, or that “temporary” suspensions of Constitutional and Civil Rights are sometimes necessary evils in this dangerous world.

It has been said that once there were giants. Churchill, DeGaulle, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler were, in fact just men, thrust into the spotlight of history- a spotlight so bright that their silhouettes appeared as giants  Where are the giants today? What will the spotlight of history expose?

Where are the historians today?  Have they – like the honest and fearless news correspondents- become an endangered or even extinct species? One of the truest of all maxims is that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Returning to my premise, it is a day to be sad for what America is no more.  It is a day to be aware of what she can be again.  It is a day to remember the words of Jesus, and of Mohammed, and of Confucius,  Dr. King, Schweitzer, Zoroaster, Gandhi, all the great moral leaders in our history. Unanimously they stood for the responsibility of every person to have concern for every other person. “Whatsoever you do for the least of these…you do for me”. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” .

This is why I have a garden.  My neighbor likes cucumbers and lacks money, so I grow the abominable things and take them to her. That is why I am a substitute teacher, even though it interferes with my retirement activities (sitting and occasionally rocking). That is why I care about our poor pathetic political system and lose sleep over it, even deluding myself into believing that Alabama will eventually decide to join the 21st Century.

So, I wish you all a Happy Interdependence Day.  I have no desire to be independent of you.  I will not permit you to be independent of me.  When I see you in need or in distress, I will be there  When you are thirsty, I have water.  Hungry?  i have,,..uh.. cucunmbers.  Desolate, I have a word of cheer and a prayer for tomorrow.  And I know that you have the same for me. 

Happy Interdependence Day, America! And a better tomorrow for us all.

my hat

So I bought a hat at City Stages a couple weeks ago. It’s an Obama hat. It’s a simple white hat with black stitching. Pretty cheap really. I took it to work and set it on top of my cubicle’s cabinet. Today my manager told me to take it down. She said that she is an Obama supporter but that we can’t have political stuff up at work. Apparently it’s in the employee handbook. Also, somebody complained. Maybe more than one somebody. So I took it down. No problem.

But I can’t help but wonder why I never heard first hand from anybody who had a problem with the hat. (Set aside for now the question of why somebody would have a problem with it.) A few people came up to me and told me that they also support Obama but nobody said a word to me about disagreeing with me or having a problem with the hat. I don’t think I’m a mean person; in fact I think I go out of my way to listen to other points of view and be kind to folks who disagree with me. I wonder why nobody said anything to me about the hat…

I guess my question is if somebody at work were displaying a hat or a poster or whatever and you disagreed with it would you confront them or go to your manager?

why proofreading matters

Auto-correct. It was my friend back in college when I was writing research papers. But apparently it’s no friend to the American Family Association. Seems that they use auto-correct on Associated Press articles in order to replace words that they deem unacceptable. For instance, they replace the word “gay” with the word “homosexual.” Why? I guess because they’re afraid of homosexuals being associated with being happy.

Of course, the word “gay” has more than one meaning. Which led to this.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-Ohio) Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush

Everything I could or would say about Kucinich’s Articles of Impeachment against W is said here. On that page you can also find a link to the Articles themselves as well as a way to email Rep. Kucinich to let him know how you feel about his Articles.

Will W. be impeached? Of course not. Should he be? Of course he should.

By the way, if you’re in Alabama and consider yourself left-of-center, progressive, Democrat, etc., you should really add the Left in Alabama site to your list of favorites.

the Kingdom of God thinks I’m a Nazi

So a guy by the name of patrick wrote a comment to my Indy post from May 19. The comment itself was a little cryptic but harmless. Turns out patrick has a blog. In this blog, patrick talks about movies from the perspective of a born-again Christian. Which is Kool and the Gang. But then I read the following in his post on Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed:

Darwinism erects walls between those who believe correctly and those who believe incorrectly. This resembles the efforts of the Nazi party, who used walls to separate themselves from anyone they deemed unacceptable or (in honor of their Darwinian roots) insufficiently evolved. This helped them weed out the weak and imperfect (or anyone who didn’t support their cause). The holocaust was Hitler’s proud attempt at speeding along the evolutionary process.

So I decided I’d wanted to comment on being compared to Hitler. But someone beat me to the punch. I went to the comment section and a very civil, intelligent person by the nom-de-blog of “test” went through and quoted many of patrick’s points and refuted them with level-headed arguments and citations. (The comments section of the post in question can be found here.) patrick’s response?

hello “test”

your response goes like this:

a) a quote from my post
b) why i’m wrong and you’re right

… this pattern repeats until the end of your response. this is unoriginal, unproductive and unenlightening.

Oh yes, and if you study something a lot of course it’s going to affect your morality/worldview. if you are convinced that people are super-evolved animals, for example, you won’t see any harm in “weeding out the herd” as the Nazis attempted to do.

I can’t argue with that logic.

Maybe I shouldn’t have but I posted a response to patrick:

So when someone like test makes a cogent argument based on facts and what you said in your original post he is “unoriginal, unproductive, and unenlightening.” patrick, the intellectual exercise test is engaged in is called “debate” and it has been the accepted way to argue for and against a point for centuries. It blows my mind that someone would completely dismiss another person’s entire argument by dismissing the act of (civil) argument in and of itself.

And of course I (and all other non-murderous folks who accept evolution) have a problem with “weeding out the herd.” That’s like me saying that a Christian obviously has no problem with burning witches or the Inquisition.

Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode, ya know?

Here is the imdb page for Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed.