No, Don't Vote for Nader Anywhere

Four years ago there was a fairly large coordinated effort to match up Gore supporters in "safely Democratic" states or "safely Republican" states with Nader supporters in "battleground" states, so they could agree to vote for the other guy's candidate, giving Gore the support he'd need to win the electoral college, but also giving Nader some popular vote to help promote the Greens or alternative parties in general. I was a strong supporter of it.

There's a similar program going on this year, but I think it's a bad idea, considering the circumstances. There's a very good chance that Bush is going to win the electoral college again. If he does, he's going to take it as "mandate" for everything he's been wanting to do, and he'll be able to. He's also pining for the validation of winning without the taint of having to go to the Supreme Court to decide it. Because he knows he lost the popular vote.

In the event that he does take the electors, the only thing that'll hold him back and give the opposition an excuse for saying "no" to him, is if people can point to the fact that he lost the popular vote again. It dragged him back for several months in 2001 (before 9/11 gave him a blank check of "loyalty"), and it could do the same in 2005 and beyond. But not if Nader does well. If Nader gets 3% of the vote, Bush could get 49% and Kerry only 48%, and it'd still come across that Bush "won" this time. But if those 3% swing to Kerry, he'd have 51% and rob Bush of his popular legitimacy. (And maybe give more momentum to the electoral college reform.)

I strongly believe that America needs additional parties. But what it needs in 2004 is a coalition opposition, one that puts aside its differences and unites to form a new government. Because one thing Democrats, indy progressives, Greens, and even Libertarians should agree upon is that Bush has to go. I know that I'd hold my nose and vote for Badnarik (the Libertarian) if he was the best chance to accomplish that. To some extent that's what I'm doing voting for Kerry. He wasn't my first choice, after all. I hope that Nader's supporters, and even devout Greens and Libertarians would do the same, rallying behind Kerry. Not because he's the lesser of two evils, but because he's the center of a coalition.

So, Californians, and Utahites, and New Yorkers, and Dakotans... your vote really could matter this year, even if it doesn't change who gets the electoral votes from your state.

Please vote Kerry, and just maybe... save us all.

Twisting in the Wind

I feel like I've been twisting in the wind.

Not literally, though there's a pretty stiff wind blowing through the area today, bringing clouds, rain, and declining temperatures since this morning. I'm speaking more figuratively.

This whole presidential election is part of it. At this point I just want the damn thing to be over. Not knowing whether Bush is going to get his near-50% "mandate" to expand the war, overhaul the Supreme Court, and continue redistributing wealth upward; or if Kerry is going to pull it off and send GWB down in history as just a meaner version of his unremarkable father... is nerve-wracking. Not even knowing when there will be a definitive answer (I don't expect one on Election Night) makes it even harder.

But then my watch broke yesterday. I've worn a watch since I was old enough to tell time (my first one had the minutes etched along the perimeter, to help decipher what "the big hand" was telling me). So I've become accustomed to being able to find out the time with just a gesture. But for the past day (and until I buy a replacement), I have to find a clock.

Ordinarily, I'd turn to one of my network-connected, time-synched computers for that, but yesterday afternoon, I lost that as well. I first got the alert at work, an automated phone call telling me that my server was not responding to requests from the internet. I rushed home fearing that the leaking roof had shorted out my server, or that the main hard drive had crashed, or that my firewall (built using an ancient 486 motherboard) had died, or that my house was burning to the ground, or that the police had received a tip that I was kiddie-porn-publishing, pirate-video-swapping, president-hating terrorist, and had confiscated my computers.

Turns out it was "only" my internet connection. That's not necessarily good news. For one thing, it's not something I can fix myself. It requires contacting my service provider, who has to contact their network provider if it's not an account or premises equipment failure, who has to contact the phone company that owns the wires if there's a problem with the circuit itself. And late in the day on a Friday is not the best time to get the ball rolling on something that's going to require a cascade of techs to actually fix. The word "Monday" kept popping up.

Fortunately, the trouble ticket got escalated smoothly from one company to the next, and by mid-morning the next day a tech from SBC showed up to start fiddling with the line to my house. She ended up spending a few hours on it, often disappearing, but eventually returning. (Between her short and stout build, her deft ability to tread through my leafy yard me hearing her, and general geniality, I suspect she may have been a hobbit.) It turns out there were problems with two sections of the line from here to the central office downtown, which she resolved somehow. She also replaced the ancient junction box on the side of the house with a new one, for good measure.

So I'm feeling a little less lost now. But still far from centered. But even if I don't know what time it is or who's going to be in charge of the planet for the next four years... at least now I'll have a means to find out.

Shameful Pride

To hell with "pride".

It's one of the cardinal sins, according to traditional Catholic teaching, and despite my misgivings about a lot of Chrisitian theology, I've come to agree with it. Pride is one of the biggest stains on humanity. National pride, racial pride, ethnic pride, school pride, gay pride... all just a bunch of people trying to make themselves feel better because of some superficial connection they have to somebody else who did something good. And feel superior to people who aren't part of that group.

I don't make this statement lightly. Going to a "gay pride" event was one of the biggest positive steps forward that I've ever taken, and for a few years I helped organise the gay pride celebrations here in town. But the more I see of this kind of collective pride - of various sorts - the more I have to see that it's ultimately destructive.

Anti-gay people sometimes spit that being gay is nothing to be proud of. Now, their argument is that it's something to be ashamed of, and I don't agree with that. But I do have to agree with the statement on the face of it. It wasn't anything in particular that I accomplished; I turned out gay with no special effort on my part. And it doesn't automatically make me a better person; I can point out any number of gay people who are horrible role models: deceitful, abusive, selfish, lazy, etc. Not because they're gay, but because they're... bad people. There are some really swell gay people too, but that has nothing to do with what shape bones they want to jump. It's just how they were raised.

The same thing applies to any other group that people take pride in. White people are admirable people, and white people are despicable people. Nothing to do with them being white, which is why the Ku Klux krowd are so full of shit. Same with Aryans. Sure, Nazis in general were/are a pretty contemptible bunch, but not all Aryans were/are Nazis, and as an ethnicity they're a pretty mixed bunch. African-Americans too. Make no mistake: Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B. DuBois, George Washington Carver, and so on were people to emulate. But you don't have to be racist to see some pretty lousy role models with similar skin color.

What all of these come down to are groups who feel (correctly or not) that they've been oppressed, so they draw together and build up some kind of collective pride to fight back. "Don't feel bad about being a ____," they tell each other. "____s are good people. We're ____ and ____ and _____. Just look at ____: he was a _____ like you, and look what a great person he was." I can confirm from the inside that this is where "gay pride" came from, and I can see how it developed in other groups (though it takes a little creative paranoia to see where the Klan got the notion that they were being oppressed by black people asserting their rights as... people).

That's not a horrible phenomenon by itself. Again, I speak from experience that seeing "proud" gay people like Harvey Milk and Harry Hay and Barbara Gittings ws good for me in rebuilding my self-esteem. But if I ever started taking pride in them, that was going too far. That's like taking emotional credit for their accomplishments, which I had no part in.

And I do see people who take "gay pride" further than just believing they're as good as other people, to the point of thinking they're better than other people. That's the whole premise of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, isn' it? These five queer guys are more savvy, sophisticated, and tasteful than their straight makeover subjects because... they're queer, and that makes them fabulous. Anyone seen my apartment, kitchen, and wardrobe? It's fabu-lousy.

I'm sure I've ruffled some feathers already, but I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been said a hundred times before by a hundred other commentators. I might get booed off one stage for saying some of it, but I'd get applause from another. Not to get shooed from the whole country:

"American pride" is just as bad.

I have absolutely no reason to be (as so many bumper stickers proclaim) "proud to be an American". Nor do I have any reason to be ashamed of it. It's a just a fact of where I'm from and where I live. It says nothing about me, personally. I didn't choose to be an American; I was born into it. That means I didn't do anything to become one; I just stayed here. So it doesn't say anything about my decision-making or my accomplishments. If I'd been born a few hundred miles due east of here, I'd be a Canadian. Or a few thousand miles, and I'd be an Italian. And have just as much reason to be proud.

But what if it were several thousand miles to the west, and I was a North Korean? Still no different. Sure, it's a very different country, and it has neither the great accomplishments of America, nor - perhaps more importantly - the humanitarian ideals of America to be proud of. But that wouldn't be my doing. I didn't write the U.S. Declaration of Independence or its Constitution. I didn't cultivate the plains, build the railroad, or mine gold in California or Alaska. I didn't establish the legal principle of one man - or one person - one vote. I didn't build modern industry. I didn't liberate Europe and the Pacific from the Axis powers. I just showed up here. Or there. Nothing to be proud of.

Sure, there are American contemporaries of mine who are doing great things or showing exemplary attributes. To cite the most obvious example right now, most of the men and women in the U.S. military are doing their jobs with honor and deserve our admiration. They should be proud of themselves. But they don't make me proud. Why should I be proud of what they are doing? That's no different from being proud of what other white people are doing, or what other gay people are doing. That kind of nationalism is fundamentally the same as racism or some other -ism: taking pride in one's membership in a group that happens to have some admirable people in it... even if that has little or nothing to do with me.

We see the same thing on a smaller scale with schools. It's especially prevalent with sports teams. When I was in college, the whole campus would be abuzz when the football or basketball team was doing well, and we'd expected to go out and cheer for them, and celebrate when they won? Why? I didn't even know anybody on the team? I understand the players' friends being happy for them, and their parents being pleased to see them doing well. But why should I be happy that a bunch of strangers who go to my school scored more than a bunch of strangers at some other school?

Now, if I were actually on one of those teams, it'd be a whole different ballgame. Then it would make sense for me as a player to take pride in how my team did. If I sat on the bench the whole time, that might be a little dodgy, but you could argue that I still had an influence on the outcome, by how I trained with the team and presumably helped the first- and second-stringers become as good as they were.

Likewise, I don't think it's out of line for the players' families to be proud of their successes. Their parents are indirectly responsible for the games' outcomes, because they're the ones who created and shaped the athletes on the field. Their siblings and friends can take some credit - and pride - as well.

But the ones who really ought to be proud are the players. That's taking pride in themselves, and that's not a sin... it's a virtue. I'm not proud to be gay; I'm proud to be a gay person who overcame the difficulty of growing up with the pain of being different, the fear of being discovered, and the consequences of being open about it. I'm not proud to be white; I'm proud to be a white person who is conscious of his prejudices and strives - usually successfully - to overcome them. I'm not proud to be an American; I'm proud to be an American who actively supports freedom of expression, exercises freedom of religion, and consistently employs the power of his vote to elect candidates who'll try to make the world a better place.

None of these are essentially gay/white/American things to do. They're the kinds of things that people of many countries/races/sexualities do, and the kinds of things that others would do if given the chance. Group identity is meaningless; individual identity is what counts.

So stop taking pride in the accomplishments of others, and start taking pride in your own character and deeds.

The Write Time

In The Sandman, a comicbook series written by Neil Gaiman, there is a character named Lucien who tends a supernatural library filled with books that are dreamt of, but never written. Next month the library is going to get raided.

November is National Novel Writing Month... NaNoWriMo, for short. It's an event in which the participants will each devote their free time for one month to the task of writing a complete 50,000-word novel. It doesn't have to be the Great American Novel. It doesn't even have to be good. It just has to be 50,000 words, and it has to be started and finished in November.

I think it's a brilliant idea. There are so many people who keep telling themselves that "someday" they're going to write a book, but never actually sit down and start it. And there are those who've started, but have been dragging the process along for so bloody long that they'll probably never finish. NaNoWriMo offers a gentle kick in the head for either kind of person.

There are some who scoff and sneer at this challenge, complaining that it encourages mediocrity. But you know, it's easier to fix a poorly written first draft of a novel than it is to fix a blank ream of paper or an empty diskette. And even if the product of a month's writing ends up sitting untouched and unread from December onward, it's still a worthwhile exercise. The way to get good at writing is to write, and participating in NaNoWriMo would force you to do just that.

I do have to admit that I won't be participating myself. For one thing, my free time for the next month or several is pretty much spoken for... and since some of those commitments may put much-needed money in my (creditors') pockets, they have to take priority. And to be honest, I don't think I have any novels in me. I'm more inclined toward graphic novels (long-form comics), which are in many ways a very different medium. I want to tell stories with pictures, and a simple translation of 50,000 words to 50 pictures doesn't work.

Instead, I'll be participating in a similar challenge next April: 24 Hour Comics Day. It doesn't last as long as NaNoWriMo, but it's more intense, requiring the cartoonist to produce a complete 24-page story - plot, script, finished art, word balloons, captions - in 24 hours. To put that into perspective, a busy comics writer generally produces maybe four such scripts in a month. A typical comics penciler does one page a day... and that's not even counting the time somebody else then spends inking it, lettering it, and so on. Do the math and you'll see that it's insane to think that one person working alone could produce a professional-quality 24-page comic in 24 hours.

But that's not the point. The point, again, is to get the juices flowing, to get something out of your head and onto paper. For pros like the ones described above, it means throwing their usual self-critical analysis out the window and just creating. For amateurs like me it's mostly about the same old issues of getting started on something, and getting it finished. I'm a pathological procrastinator and perfectionist, so I need that. Badly.

In the meantime, I'm giving myself a little challenge of sorts to get my pencil moving a bit more. This whole blog thingy is here to get me writing more (opinion, not fiction), and it's working nicely, thanks. But I'm still not drawing like I need to be. So, instead of (or perhaps in addition to) the photo/graphic images I've been decorating my weblog entries with, I'm going to be illustrating them. Some of these illos might possibly be works of expressive genius and exquisite craft, some will definitely be hasty scribbles. But what matters is that I'm doing them. And with each one I do, that's one more piece rescued from the "Art" section of Lucien's library.

Urban Turkey

When I went for a walk just now, I saw a real turkey. Literally: a real turkey.

Between the political season, the gloomy weather, and the ongoing angst of looming middle age, I was feeling down. So I figured I'd get out of the house for a little bit and treat myself to comfort food: a chicken sandwich and fries from Wendy's. There's one about half a mile or so away, so I put on my coat and hat and started walking. A couple blocks from home, on one of the side streets, I saw it wandering down the side of the road.

Naturally I did a double-take. Sure enough, it was a turkey. No mistake. It was as tall as my waist when it held its head up... way too big to be a pheasant. It was fairly plain, so I assume it was female. And it was just slowly walking along. It saw me as I approached, and strutted quickly to the other side of the road. (Insert silly joke here.) But otherwise it just went about its business as I slowly passed.

I've seen wild turkeys before, even here in the city, so I wasn't completely floored by this. But that was at my parents' house, out closer to the suburbs, where there are more "undeveloped" patches of land around (or at least there were when I lived there), and it's only a few miles to the nearest farmland. In this part of the city, the largest wild animals one usually sees are squirrels, with the very occasional raccoon.

But there are still some semi-wild areas nearby: the wooded campus of a college, a big park with a few medium-large stands of trees, and a couple miles down the street there's a small lake with some wetlands and woodlands on one side of it. You don't have to look very hard to find trees that are decades, even a century or more old; they're just part of the landscape here. In fact, near the edge of the aforementioned campus, there's a tree that must have been here when the first Europeans got here. It's a hoary and wizened old thing, barely holding up its splayed and leaning trunks, and only a few branches even show signs of life... the sort of tree that neo-pagans would revere as an elder soul. I just see it as an example of the wilderness that survives here.

The "save the wilderness" campaigns of a hundred and more years ago were a Good Thing, and I'm glad that they preserved (at least to some extent) the places now designated as government parks and wilderness areas. But they also promoted the idea of wilderness being something "out there", when it shouldn't be. It should be "in here" as well. Especially in cities.

We need some wilderness in our daily lives, because wilderness is what we're built for. It's demonstrably better for our health than a paved urban wasteland. We need trees, and bushes, and plants other than homogenous heavily-trimmed lawns of grass. We need fireflies, and ladybugs, and spiders. We need squirrels, and chipmunks, and yes even mice. We need sparrows, and jays, and... turkeys.

There were those (Ben Franklin in particular) who thought that the wild turkey should be the United States' mascot, rather than the bald eagle. I kinda wish it were. Nationalist reverence for the eagle is probably what got it federal protection and perhaps saved it from extinction, which is good. But if our national bird were the turkey it'd make for a lot less militaristic and (so to speak) hawkish images representing the nation, and maybe that'd rub off on the populace. Unlike the eagle, the turkey is an animal I can relate to. And even bump into on the street.

Team America: Satire without Comedy

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I went into Team America: World Police afraid that I was about to sit through a bunch of stoopid adolescent "shock" gags of the sort that South Park is infamous for. By the time it was over, I was wishing for more of them, because there was so little else there.

The movie consists of maybe half a dozen funny ideas, each with the potential for some laughs. But that's not enough to fill a feature film, so there's a lot of padding in which nothing interesting happens. The characters and plot plod through the clichés they're trying to satirise (in effect, making this just another bad action flick, but done with marionettes), boring me to the point that when the funny bits came along, all they got was a chuckle.

Then there's more predictable stuff happening, then the same joke comes along again, and this time it doesn't even get the chuckle. By the time the martial arts scene in which the puppets freeze in mid-air (suspended by their strings) and spin around, you've been waiting so long for it, it's not even funny. Doing the movie classic-Thunderbirds style, with marionettes is a fun idea. But it's not enough to turn all the dull, clichéd scenes into satire. They're just dull, clichéd scenes featuring wooden actors.

I was also prepared for the possibility of being offended... not by the "adult" material, but from the political jokes, which were promised to be scathing and aimed at figures across the political spectrum. I must have missed most of them. OK, so there's the worse-than-the-disease Rambo-mentality American military intervention on the one side (pretty obvious stuff), and the pawns-of-terrorists liberal celebrities on the other (stretched so far that it fails to be funny, because it bears no resemblance to anything we've seen). Yes, Kim Jong Il features prominently in it, but to be satire, you need to take actual characteristics and exaggerate them, not just take a standard megalomaniacle villain, and put a real person's name on it. The trailer promises to make George W. Bush and John Kerry very mad, but aside from W. pretending to be offended by the sex scene, I can't see why they would be; neither of them is even mentioned, let alone satirised.

The fact that so many prominent public figures were parodied doesn't make it satire, either. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that this was just a chance for the producers to titter as they ridiculed (and eventually killed) lots of famous people. Likewise, there's a song (one of the writers longs to write Broadway musicals) that exists only to whine about how the writer didn't like the movie Pearl Harbor. A movie that relentlessly ridicules popular entertainers for making political statements comes across as particularly lame coming from... a couple of popular entertainers.

The movie isn't without it's good points. There are genuinely funny bits sprinkled throughout it, and even the frat-boy-level humor of the puppet sex scene or the theme song with all the "fuck yeahs" in it were amusing. But if the movie has no serious point to make, and all you've got in the humor department are those half-dozen ideas, then it would have been better off as a non-stop half-hour laff riot instead of two hours of snores punctuated by snickers.

Stuck in Credit Purgatory

For the first time since I moved out of my parents' house, I find myself having trouble with money. I've never been rich, but I always had enough that I never had to worry about cash flow: whether I'd have enough money in the checking account to cover my rent at the end of the month, etc. Even when I was unemployed I had savings enough to prevent any missed bill payments.

Back when I was first establishing my personal finances I built a spreadsheet to factor in all my upcoming expenses and income and make sure that I wasn't over-expending myself, and it worked really well. It was really handy for figuring out when I'd be able to make major purchases like a new car, or a splurge on a trip overseas. But these days, the projections say that I won't be able to do anything like that until... well, not before the decade is out. The best case scenario it gives is that I keep my head above water.

The fact that I'm not making a very good hourly wage these days is part of the problem, but I'm really no worse off in that regard than I was 15 years ago. The problem seems to be that I've picked up some substantial additional monthly expenses: insurance and debts.

I've always avoided borrowing money. One of the points of that spreadsheet was to help me do that: instead of buying something immediately on credit, I'd wait a few months (or years, for stuff like the new car) until I'd saved enough to pay cash for it. The credit card was strictly for convenience, and for kiting expenses from this month until next month; I never allowed myself to put more on it than I'd have in the bank 30 days later when the Visa bill came due.

This past year I gave in and started borrowing. I took a student loan as part of my financial aid package for college. I bought a computer - my first new machine in years - on credit. I justified the credit purchase on the grounds that I'd be graduating soon and would certainly be getting a job that would let me pay it off pretty quickly. I justified the loan pretty much the same way, plus - being unemployed, with my savings nearly used up - it was the only way I could actually pay for that last year's tuition. It was still all about cash flow, just on a slightly longer term... months instead of weeks.

Better make that "years". I got a decent job, but it doesn't pay what I was expecting. I have to pay the full cost of my health insurance, as well. That doesn't leave much money to spare after my basic monthly expenses. In fact, it means I'm left with just slightly more than the minimum allowed payments on both loans. Which is another way of saying that at this rate, they'll almost never be paid off, because that's what "minimum payments" are for: a way to keep milking the borrower for the rest of his life, then collecting the principle from his estate.

To put this in perspective - and demonstrate that I do in fact have some - I ain't got it half as bad as a lot of people. I've got a friend who fell into the trap of using credit right out of high school, and has spent much of the time since then in and out of credit counseling and bankruptcy. He's financially "stable" for now, but that just means he's not getting any poorer from one month to the next; he's not saving anything. When he's ready to retire... he'll won't be able to, because he'll have nothing to live on.

I don't intend that to happen to me. I do have some retirement investments from back in my fiscally-solvent days, that (the holy Stock Market willing) I'll be able to draw on to supplement my income as a WalMartIntl greeter in my golden years. And if things don't improve in the next decade or so, I can probably shove happiness aside and pick up some McJobs on the side to add up to a decent income. But for now, it means maintaining a spartan lifestyle just to keep the loan sharks at bay.

Unfortunately, because I've never lived extravagantly, there aren't many places I can easily cut back. I could save $13/month by dropping basic cable TV (a recent extravagance). Maybe I could downgrade my internet service, but that'd impact my webhosting business (and this weblog). I really don't want to move, and getting a roommate is... not an option. I've replaced most of my incandescent lightbulbs with fluorescents. I'm already using the cheapest forms of transportation available (bike and bus, most of the time), and selling the car wouldn't get me much. I can't quit smoking, because I never have. I can - and will - cut down on my book-buying. I'll shop for beer based entirely on price, not taste. And I guess I've got a new tool for my weight-loss efforts: buy fewer groceries.

Christopher Reeve, Superman

It's a rude awakening when the wake-up timer on your clock radio turns it on just in time for the announcer to tell you that one of your heroes has died. Christopher Reeve died yesterday, of heart failure.

I wrote an entry about Reeve last year, which expresses much of what I thought of the man and why. What it boils down to is the fact that, despite spending the last decade of his life as the physical antithesis of Superman, he even moreso typified the character of Superman: good-natured, courageous, altruistic, and unwilling to accept defeat. He continued to pursue his Lois Lane (directing and acting) and he never gave up the fight against his Lex Luthor (paralysis... not just his own, but that of any spinal cord injury sufferer).

I wrote earlier: In the first movie, Jor-El (played by Brando) said to his son, "They can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason, above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son." Who knew that he was really talking about Christopher Reeve?

Friday Night Lights - Pathological Football

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I went to a high school that didn't have any athletic programs, and after seeing Friday Night Lights, I thanks the gods that I was able to get an education in a place that was free of that sort of thing. The movie is (mostly) a welcome deviation from the standard Hollywood "sports movie" formula in which a team or player triumphs over adversity to make it to the championships and so on.

Instead it portrays academic athletics (in this case high school football) as the focus of dysfunctional communities. This isn't the story of a high school and a town that have lost sight of the true spirit of football; this is the story of a community and its citizens who have been twisted into horrible people by football.

You have town leaders who tell the coach that the team is going to win, period. You have teachers who let students slide through classes without learning anything because it'll give the team a good player for a couple years. You have former players whose lives since graduation are so empty that they have nothing to live for but to live vicariously through their children. You have neighbors who put "for sale" signs in the coach's yard when they lose a game. You have parents who'll risk their child's health and safety to let him play.

It's not "town spirit"... it's more like a town haunting. Scene after scene of abuse... psychological, physical, mental... and the people who are supposed to be looking out for the well-being of these kids - their parents, their educators, their coaches - are the ones fucking them up.

Unfortunately, the script changes direction near the end and undercuts everything it was trying to say before that. It's not quite a textbook Hollywood ending, but it's full of plays pulled from the sports-movie playbook, even the "play it for the gipper" scene. At the end it almost tries to tell the audience that these poor abused boys are going to be alright, even though we'd already seen what abuse-perpetuating wrecks other former athletes turned out to be.

It also can't decide whether to present the coach as a victim of the town's obsession (they turn against him when he doesn't give the wins they want), as part of the problem himself (telling his players to "be perfect" and blaming them personally for their every shortcoming), or as an inspiration for the players (in a final locker-room speech in which he suddenly shows a hint of perspective about the game).

But at least it raised the questions in the first 3/4 of the movie, with enough disturbing scenes that the thin papering-over of the ending doesn't completely wipe them from memory.

I know it's possible to play sports in school and to get good things out of it. I've had friends who've done that, and they were glad they did. But it's always seemed to me that they enjoyed in spite of the athletics system, not because of it.

If someone wants to make a movie about athletes overcoming great odds to be victorious, how about one about some high school students who say "to hell" with school spirit, community support, family expectations, and the win-at-any-cost mentality of academic athletics, and learn how to have fun and enrich their lives by playing games together?

Big Dick, Little Car

If conventional wisdom about the relationship between automobile size and penis size is to believed, I must have a really huge cock.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that I do have a really big dick, but I'm not saying that I don't, either. I mean, it fits in my pants... at least most of the time.

But I definitely do have a car that's the anti-thesis of the stereotypical "compensating" car that so many Americans (especially insecure American males) prefer these days. It's a Chevy Metro, and before the Mini Coopers started showing up in North America, I had bragging rights to (implicitly) one of the biggest dicks in town. I drove an over-sized Honda Civic for several years, but before that I had a Ford Festiva, which - if not for being cheaply made - would've been a perfect car for me.

If I were in the market for a car, and could afford to buy something new, I'd definitely consider the Mini, for its combination of convenience, performance, fuel economy, and style. But I've recently seen another alternative that's making its way to North America, that makes your typical Mini owner look like a pin-dick: the Smart Car.

They're already fairly popular in Europe, where the roads are narrower, parking is scarcer, and unsubsidised fuel prices are substantially higher. (The Mini and its peers have been available in Europe for quite a while as well.) Even though it runs entirely on gasoline or diesel (no electric assist) the standard model gets 60mpg or higher. It only seats two people - which is why this model is called the Fortwo - but that's not a limitation, it's a feature. Every "compact" car I've owned has had a back seat, and in the two decades I've been driving them, I've had someone sit in my back seat about five times. It's wasted space; take it out and give me a smaller, lighter, more efficient car. The Smart Fortwo also doesn't have a trunk or cargo space, which would be an inconvenience for trips to the store or laundromat, but since I never have a passenger when I do that, I'd manage easily enough.

One thing I love about driving a small car is the ease of parking it. Not only can I use the "compact only" spots in parking ramps and lots, I can fit it between poorly-spaceed cars at the curb, and I can often pull into full-size metered spaces forward, without having to do the "parallel park" routine. With an 5-foot-wide and 8-foot-long Fortwo, it'd be even easier. Heck, you could even perpendicular park without it sticking out very much past the 7-foot-wide trucks on either side.

Of course there's the issue of safety. Mercedes Benz (who makes the Smarts) says they've engineered it to be more structurally sound than a more traditional design... kind of like the difference between an egg and a shoebox; even though the egg is made of, well, eggshell it's studier than a box-like cardboard... box. Most cars will crumple and fold when hit; this one is too small to. Granted, there's still the automotive arms race to consider, in which people keep buying bigger and bigger vehicles to protect themselves from other vehicles, but at this point anything less than a mid-sized SUV is fodder for the tanks, so I don't think it'd make much difference.

My Morons are Bigger Than Your Morons

My friend nitecrawler has written an impassioned article in which he argues that the nearly half of American voters who have decided to vote for Bush and Cheney are "fucking morons". His reasoning is hard to argue with.

But I'm going to quibble with it anyway. {smile}

He's probably right about a lot of the Bush supporters. Real intellectual midgets. They probably buy "regalis" from spammers, buy lottery tickets with their "lucky numbers" every day, and think it's great when a new Wal-Mart opens in their town because they think it'll help the local economy.

But I know people who are voting for Bush and I know they're not all idiots. Some of them aren't persuaded by the evidence that the president is lying and serving the destructive interests of his class, because they don't want to believe it. He's a Republican, and so are they, and they accept as an article of faith that Republicans are more responsible than Democrats. Others do see his warts, but they don't care. By their values, a corrupt Republican is still better than a tax-raising, social-program-loving, gay-whale-hugging Democrat. Their take on Watergate was, "At least McGovern didn't get elected."

But I think the real idiots in this election are the ones who are going to choose the outcome: the small percentage of voters who are still undecided. How can anyone still be in doubt about which candidate to vote for?

Granted, there are times when it's hard to tell the difference between them, like when Kerry says that he also would've invaded Iraq, even knowing as Bush did that there was no real evidence of WMD or a threat to the U.S. But you don't need to take your mind off "America's Funniest Top Model Make-Over" very long to figure out which of them you trust least. Even the dolt who says, "We can't change presidents in the middle of a war," is doing better than that: he's at least drawn a line from a fact (we're at war) through an opinion (see above) to a decision (keep Bonzo).

And don't try to tell me that they're "weighing the issues", because anyone who isn't engaged enough in politics to have developed opinions about the issues these two do disagree on and their relative importance, can't have the attention span to still be working on an answer. Not if they're cognitively functional enough to be making decisions for themselves (and not all people are).

What we have here are people who are either incapable of understanding the question, or are pathologically impaired in their ability to make a decision.

And these are the people who are going to decide who's going to be president for the next four years.

President Hand Puppet

Comics writer Steven Grant, one of a handful of (non blog) online columnists I read regularly, refers in the political segments of his column to George W. Bush as "the Hand Puppet", because he feels the president is a mindless spokesmodel being manipulated by Cheney, Rummy, and their crew. An article on Salon.com supports this theory. They have a photograph from the first debate that shows the "strings". The image I'm showing here was was taken from aired video (provided to the other networks by Fox, who drew the long straw for covering the event) and sharpened using the software NASA uses for enhancing space probe images. (Click it to see the full-size unclipped version from Electoral-Vote.com.)

One of Bush's rules for the debate (don't you love how the candidates get to set the rules for these things?) was no photos from behind. (Surprsingly, Fox ignored him on this point.) This is why: you can see the radio receiver strapped to his back with a wire running up to an earpiece giving him answers to questions he didn't know himself.

Either that, or he's an alien.

But it would explain the president's peculiar posture during the debate and his strange-even-for-him speech patterns, like when he abruptly stopped talking as if listening to something, or when he interjected "let me finish" at a time when Kerry was silent, the moderater was passive, and the green "you've got plenty of time left" light was still on.

Either that, or he's hallucinating.

It should be interesting to see how he performs without a puppeteer in the "town hall" "debate", where a prompting device of this kind would be harder to hide and the questions from the audience will be less predictable.

Boy Sacrifices His Safety for Flag

Today's heart-warming/bone-chilling human interest story is a little boy who took a blow to the head rather than let a U.S. flag touch the ground. It was on the front page of the The Grand Rapids Press with a big color picture, and a glowing article about how this kid single-mindedly "protected" the flag when he tripped and fell to the ground, injuring himself in the process.

Fortunately his injuries - included a scraped forehead and nose where his head hit the pavement - were superficial. But that's just luck; he didn't know on his way down how he'd hit, and whether his own safety was in danger. He could have broken his nose, gotten a concussion, or even broken his neck. He explained to the reporter that all he thought about as it happened was what he'd been told since kindergarten: don't let the flag touch the ground.

What's most alarming is that no one involved is questioning the priorities he's been taught. Sure, self-sacrifice is a noble characteristic, and if he'd risked injury to protect a classmate, or even a puppy dog, I'd smile and congratulate him. But he did it to protect a thing. And not from physical damage (the flag wasn't likely to be harmed), but from the supposed indignity of touching the ground.

Flag etiquette isn't a bad thing. Taking care of one's flag and displaying it according to protocol is a way of demonstrating one's respect for the government and the principles it represents and aims to carry out. And in battle, defending the flag as a tactical or psychological rallying point makes sense.

But this goes beyond etiquette or combat motivators. This kid's treating it like something holy. As if the rituals for handling a cloth banner were more important than his own safety.

Just as he's been taught.

The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a state religion, but we've done that anyway: it's a religion of the state. It has its holy days, like the Fourth of July. It has its saints and martyrs, like Washington and Lincoln. It has its holy places, such as the Capitol Building and a Holy of Holies: the Oval Office. It has its scriptures, most notably the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It has priests in the form of Supreme Court justices. It has holy icons such as The Flag. Children are taught this religion from the time they enter school, and even before. It's no wonder the kid acted this way.

If there's any doubt that the U.S. flag has been elevated to the status of a holy icon, listen to the language we apply to it. We pledge allegiance to it... not just to the republic for which it stands, but to the flag itself. Congress likes to pass laws against desecrating the flag, and there are those who want to add a Constitutional amendment to ban that. But by definition, you cannot desecrate something unless it's sacred.

Personally, I find the whole notion of a sacred banner silly. I imagine that Moses (the real one, not Charlton Heston) would have smashed some tablets over it. By Christian standards, it's idolatry. And yet somehow flag veneration is considered just completely wholesome and admirable, and little boys are praised to high heaven for risking their necks to practise it.

Circumcision Psychosis

Men have a certain attachment to their penises. And not just in the physical sense. I've always known that, and it certainly makes sense.

Many men (particularly gay men) - but certainly not all of them - have fairly strong feelings about whether they prefer a penis to be circumcised or not. Personally, I like them either way, but it's no surprise - and I don't question - that other people might feel otherwise.

What surprises me is the fact that, in some quarters, the question of circumcision takes on the importance of, say, the abortion debate. On one side you have those who describe it as mutlitation and child abuse. On the other you have those who characterise the anti-circumcision movement as a threat to public health and perhaps American society itself.

I'm circumcised. Most boys born in the United States are. Most boys born elsewhere are not, unless their families are Jews, Muslims, or other religious sects that consider it an expression of their faith. My former long-time boyfriend Andy, is not. I never had any problem with the fact that he wasn't and I was, nor did he. If you pressed me for a position on the topic, I'd say it's unnecessary but mostly harmless. The reasons most Americans have it done to their boys (because it was done to Dad, and because their pediatrician says it's routine) are pretty flimsy. Most of the rest of the world seems to be doing OK without it. But I'm not traumatised by it, and neither are most American males.

But some are. And some are traumatised by it not being done. It's even become one of those intractible "controversial" topics on Wikipedia (like Israel or abortion) where there's seemingly no hope of reaching a neutral, factual article about it. I made a brief attempt to fix up the article in question, but walked away pretty quickly when I saw what nutcases were lined up on either side. Not everybody with an opinion shows pathological hysteria about it, but there's enough of them to make it a phenomenon, not just isolated cases.

Why are these guys so worked up about it? I don't get it.

Then it dawned on me that maybe there's a Freudian explanation. It seems that both sides are wrapped up in some kind of obsessive fixation on the condition of their penises. The pro-circumcision folks are concerned about hygiene and the greater potential for uncleanliness with a foreskin. The anti-circumcision folks are hung up on the concept of "genital integrity" and the notion that they've lost part of themselves. Both sides, it seems, suffer from the classic anal-retentive fixation of cleanliness and possessiveness.

Where it becomes so incredibly screwed up, is the fact that they're channeling this anal fixation... on their phalluses. Note: This has nothing to do with homosexuality; it's about Freud's theory that we go through developmental stages, from oral to anal to phallic. They've got their stages cross-linked! I'm no expert in developmental psych, but that's gotta be hard on a person's mental adjustment.

I don't know. Maybe I'm as full of it as Freud and Jung and their contemporaries were about oh so much of psychology. But the thought occurred to me, and I owed it to the world (or at least myself) to record it.

Presidential Miscellany

I watched a little bit of the debate between Kerry and Bush last night, and it looked like Kerry put on a good show: confident, thoughtful, and critical. But then, I'm biased, so my impression that Bush was constantly fumbling at a loss for words, and grousing defensively may not be shared by the voters.

Another election-related tidbit is the fact that Dwight Eisenhower's son John has reregistered as an independent voter and is going to vote for Kerry. His main reason: Bush's Republican Party isn't his father's GOP. So that's two children of Republican presidents jumping ship and endorsing Kerry (Ron Reagan being the other). On the other hand, Chelsea Clinton, Amy Carter, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg have yet to endorse Bush. And we haven't heard from the Johnson, Nixon, or Ford offspring. But I think it's pretty clear that none of George H. W. Bush's kids (or grandkids) will be endorsing Kerry.