4 May 2005

Volume Two

One month later, I've finally gotten around to setting up "volume two" of the "God's ex-Boyfriend" site. From now on, all new entries in this category will go there.

Tourism: Economy of Last Resort

It seems like every time community leaders and government officials talk about the future of the local economy, they talk about tourism as one of its pillars. You hear it about cities and towns of every size, state after state, and even occasionally on the national level.

Around here the economy has always been based on manufacturing (furniture in this part of Michigan, cars in the southeast of the state), but as anyone who follows business news knows, those industries have been heading overseas. For a while they talked a lot about high technology as the source of new jobs, but since the dot-com bubble burst you don't hear quite so much about that.

(Not that they've stopped saying it, of course. Last year when a bunch of plant closings were putting huge numbers of people into the job market, the "experts" kept telling them to get certificate training or 2-year degrees in "high tech"... while, I - a laid off computer specialist with a 4-year-degree and oodles of experience - couldn't even find jobs to apply for. All that advice did was to take some people out of the job market for a little while and put some federal grant money into local schools; those people will be just as unemployed when they're done with school.)

So they keep coming back to tourism. It sounds attractive, because it's all about getting people from other places to come here and spend their money. When it works, it's great for the locals. Tulip Time has been an ongoing annual infusion of cash into Holland, Michigan for decades. Sure, the people who live there have to put up with busloads of (mostly) senior citizens cluttering their streets and sidewalks for a few weeks in May, but the money they spend makes it worthwhile.

But when it fails... it's a complete waste of resources. Back when Flint (the former auto manufacturing city in east Michigan, whose economic collapse was spotlighted in Michael Moore's first big film) was in freefall back in the 1980s, they tried to attract tourism with Autoworld, a big automobile-focused theme park. Disaster with a capital D. No one came.

Even when tourist attractions prove successful, that doesn't mean that they're succeeding as an economic tool. There's an article in today's Grand Rapids Press about who's dominating reservations at Michigan's state parks for the upcoming camping season: us. Michigan is supposed to be a great tourist destination, with hundreds of miles of sandy beaches, inland lakes for fishing, forests for hiking, etc. But instead of drawing Kansans, Missourians, Kentuckians, Indianers, West Virginians, Alabamers, and whatnot to the Great Lakes State to spend their disposable income, we're mostly just passing the same dollars around with our fellow Michiganders. That's no replacement for the money we're not getting from making and selling cars, office furniture, refrigerators, and so on.

If that's how well the tourism economic strategy is working for Michigan - a state that has some natural and obvious reasons for people to come here - imagine how badly it's going to fail in all the places that are trying to make up tourist attractions. More Autoworlds.

Tourism has been a great windfall for various Old World capitals, and for some Third World countries and island-states in the tropics, and it's been good for a few select parts of the United States. But it's not a cure-all for an ailing economy. When everyone's trying to use tourism as a cornerstone of their local business model, you'll just end up with a bunch of hotels that people can't afford to travel to and stay in... because no one's coming to and staying in their hotels. It's kind of like you can't build an all-service economy where everyone's trying to make a living serving food or cleaning houses... and no one can afford to pay them for it. Or an economy based on information and other intangible "products". You need people doing things that are actually productive: growing food, making things, etc.

So unless you live in the Carribean or next to a Disney park, the next time you hear someone discussing local economic strategy, and he starts by talking about tourism... be afraid for your future.

God is a Terrorist

For God so loved the world that on Christmas Day 2004 (early the next day, local time) he sent a 9.0-magnitude earthquake to the Indian Ocean, creating tsunamis that would kill hundreds of thousands of people in the surrounding countries of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, etc. Similar numbers would be wounded, and millions left homeless, hungry, and sick, as far away as Africa. With one singular "act of God" he easily belittled the result of years of planning and four jetliners by al-Quaeda in 2001.

This wasn't his first holy-day attack. It was exactly a year (almost to the hour) after he caused a 6.6-magnitude quake in Bam, Iran, killing 26,000. Four decades earlier, on Good Friday, he sent a 9.2-magnitude quake to the waters off Alaska. Erzincan, Turkey lost 30,000 in his 7.8-magnitude quake late on Christmas in 1939. On Christmas in 1932, he killed 70,000 in a 7.6-magnitude quake in Gansu, China. (Where he'd killed 200,000 in an 8.6-magnitude quake in mid-December 12 years earlier.)

He hasn't been limited to seismic attacks, as evidenced by the cyclone he redirected on Christmas Eve in 1974, doubling back and nearly wiping out the city of Darwin, Australia (population 43,500). On Palm Sunday in 1965, dozens of 250-mph-wind tornadoes hit the North American Plains and Midwest, brutally killing 260, injuring 1500, and doing billions of dollars of property damage. Including demolished churches.

Which is not to mention the massacre nearly two millennia earlier, in which countless boys under the age of two in greater Bethlehem were killed in connection with the birth of God's son Jesus. And flip through the Old Testament for more large-scale attacks, hitting the children of Egypt at Passover, the cities of Gomorrah and Sodom, flooding the entire world, etc.

Of course as these last examples show, not all of his attacks have been timed to established holy days. That would make them too easy to prepare for. Instead these "acts of God" often happen randomly. Sometimes, like a human terrorist phoning in a bomb threat, he'll provide some advance warning, as with hurricanes, but that only emphasizes our inability to actually prevent these disasters. It's much more effective when he slaughters an estimated half a million souls without warning, like he did in Tangshan, China in July 1976.

God's followers generally argue that it's not God who causes all this suffering, but his evil counterpart Satan. Which begs the question of who's responsible for causing Satan. Also, the notion that God is incapable of protecting us from Satan is a little frightening. And the notion that God is unwilling to protect us is downright horrifying.

Personally, I find comfort in the notion that there is no such being. Given a choice between believing in a malicious or impotent or indifferent deity, and a universe in which everything happens by mere chance... I'll take my chances with chance.

Person of the Year

OK, so Time magazine has picked George W. Bush to be "Person of the Year" again this year. At first I was disgusted with the choice, making the common mistake of thinking of that designation as an honor. But it's not. The idea is to identify the person who had the most impact on the year's events.

I'm sure GWB and his worshippers are looking at it as an honor. The way Time wussed out and named the suddenly heroic Rudy Giuliani "Person of the Year" for 2001 instead of the more deserving, villainous Osama bin Laden, makes it easy to look at it that way. The news coverage of Time's choice this year (yes, a newsmagazine is being covered by newspapers) makes it sound that way as well, for example pointing out the esteemed company he's in (several popular presidents) for having been chosen twice.

But I'd like to put him in context of some other "Persons of the Year":
* Pierre Laval (French prime minister, collaborated with the Nazis)
* Adolf Hitler (Nazi führer, you know the story)
* Josef Stalin (Soviet dictator, a lot like Hitler just within his own country)
* Mohammed Mossaddegh (Iranian prime minister, took over oil operations and allied with radical Muslims)
* Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet premier, told U.S. "We will bury you.")
* Richard Nixon (U.S. president, resigned in disgrace)
* Faisal bin Abdul Aziz (Saudi king, created the 1970's oil crisis)
* Ruhollah Khomeni (Iranian ayatollah, held the U.S. embassy hostage)

There are other folks on the list, such as Deng Xiaoping, Gen. William Westmoreland, Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich, and Kenneth Starr, who aren't quite world-class exemplars of evil, but not exactly heroic role models, either.

The first time GWB was named was for 2000, the year in which his sole accomplishment was to get himself appointed to the presidency. This year that's his chief accomplishment again with even more divisiveness than before, with the added "bonus" of his occupation of Iraq going badly. He truly does stomp across the world stage like a microcephalic brontosaur, and his misdeeds currently dwarf those of any other player on that stage, including bin Laden. "Person of the Year"? Damn right.

Dividing Up the States

With all this talk on the web lately of the Northeast, the West Coast, or even the upper Midwest seceding from the Union, I have to point out that I suggested this months ago. I actually think it would be a good idea in the long run, not just for electoral politics and maintaining cultural distinctiveness, but in terms of representation and good government (smaller districts and legislatures). The world could certainly use one less "superpower". Here's the gist of it:

The Pacific: These states share a common lean toward the left (except for Alaska) as well as cultural and economic ties to their Pacific counterparts in Asia. California would probably have to be split into two or three states to avoid it dominating the others... which is something many Californians want to do anyways. San Francisco would make a nice capital for Pacifica. (Top-level country domain: .PC)

The South: The membership of this nation doesn't match up exactly with the original Confederacy (I omitted Texas, and added the then-disputed border states of Kentucky and Maryland, and yes even the District of Columbia) but it captures "the South". Overall very socially conservative. I think they even have a flag ready. Although the city of Washington would be part of this nation, it might be best to dissolve the District of Columbia into Maryland, and put the capital in Atlanta (rather than Montgomery or Richmond) to establish that the Dixie Confederation isn't your great-grand-pappy's confederacy. (Top-level country domain: .DX)

Note that I carefully avoided using red or blue for any of the states. {smile}

There was a bit of debate in the comments of that article about whether to include Maryland and DC in New America or the Dixie Confederation. I changed my mind, but I'm thinking now that my first instinct was correct, and they should go with the Northeast. Maybe we'd get more cohesive results by redrawing some state lines as well. And I skipped the whole question of whether certain states with a history of independence (e.g. Hawaii, Texas) should revert to that. But I think the basic concept is good. Another four years of the current "culture wars" and another electoral disaster in 2008, and maybe it could happen. I think it should.

Traumatic Stress

Did you notice that the Terror-alert level went down right after the elections? For most of the country it was "yellow", but for New York City and D.C. it was orange. Not enough to send people into a panic and blame the president for them feeling unsafe, but just enough to make them nervous... about changing presidents.

Of course the Bush administration will claim that they lowered it because we successfully got through the election without a terror attack. But what they really mean is that the alert is no longer needed. It helped get George re-elected, and now they want to lower it so people will feel more relaxed and euphoric about his election.

It hasn't worked for me. I've been horribly stressed out the last couple days. I haven't been sleeping well, my gut's been irritated, and (probably the direct cause of much of that) I've drunk enough since Election Day to match what I usually drink in a week. Which, to be honest, is a substantial amount.

One thing that's helped is having the Virtual Canadian web site to work on. It's now a proper-looking web page, and I've set up an online store to sell t-shirts and mugs, as a way for people to spread the word about escaping their U.S. identity and becoming virtual Canadians.

I've done some blatant whoring about on the blogosphere mentioning it wherever I can find people talking (seriously or not) about moving to Canada. It seems to be catching a little buzz, and I'm getting some registrations from others who want to escape the states (even if just in their heart), which is kind of exciting. Time will tell whether it becomes The Next Big Thing, a little sizzle in the pan, or what.

O Canada

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Since it looks like Bush is going to be re-elected, it's time to look at the handwriting on the wall. It says that the United States is no place I want to live.

The political system itself and the principles it represnts have a lot to say for them, but what the voters themselves are saying through that system... I find contrary to my own values and to common sense. The arrogant foreign policy disgusts me. The embrace of intolerance frightens me. And the sheer fearful irrationality of the voters astonishes me.

My nation has again chosen a Republican executive, legislature, and judiciary. This time even more so than last. It gave Bush an actual majority (not just a plurality) of the popular vote. Let that sink in a moment; it doesn't usually happen. It has thrown out the Democratic leader in the Senate, and elected a handful of far-right-wing Republicans to replace occasionally moderate Democrats in the South. Kentucky re-elected a Republican who's obviously suffering from dementia. My state (along with 10 others) has voted overwhelmingly to make me constitutionally a second-class citizen without the right to marry. (This issue seems to be a major factor in the right-wing turn-out in the king-maker state of Ohio.) Even my county commission district (representing my supposedly lefty neighborhood) has elected a Republican.

There are bits of good news here and there (Obama beat his token challenger, and a Democrat beat one of the Coors clan in Colorado), but they're not enough. I want out.

I'm too settled in my house and my job to pull up stakes and move, so instead I'm declaring that my home is now part of Canada. Ontario, to be specific (since it's closest). I'll be doing this through VirtualCanadian.org, a just-created web site providing a means for disaffected U.S. citizens to declare themselves Canadians... of a sort.

This will allow me to travel abroad without being abused for my nationality. It will entitle me to health care, though I suppose I'll continue using my Michigan-based insurance, since Windsor's pretty far to go for a check-up, and would take too long to reach in an emergency. I still won't get to marry, but at least I won't be singled out in the constitution.

Getting legal recognition of all this will be impossible, of course. It'll only be true in my head. But at this point I'd rather live in a deluded state of denial, than in the United States of America.

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.

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.

Why Isn't Bush Getting a Landslide?

Republicans have been crowing about how well George W. Bush is doing in voter polls, but even if you ignore the question of bias in certain polls... no, he really isn't doing all that well. Certainly not as well as he should be.

Think about it: We're in the middle of a war, and there's am understandable reluctance to change leaders in the middle of one. He scores high on the "likeability" scale, with lots of people saying they'd like to sit down at a bar or backyard barbeque with him. He exudes confidence and certainty, which people also find appealing, especially in times of crisis. But he's way behind his peers. Look at the last few war-time presidents and see how well they did in their re-election bids:

• Richard Nixon (1972, Vietnam) 60% popular vote, 520 electoral votes
  
• Lyndon Johnson (1964, Vietnam) 61% popular vote, 486 electoral votes
  
• Dwight Eisenhower (1952, Korea) 55% popular vote, 442 electoral votes
  
• Franklin Roosevelt (1944, WW2) 53% popular vote, 432 electoral votes

By contrast, the highest Bush has gotten in the electoral-college projections I've been following has been 331 electoral votes, he spent much of the summer in the low 200's, and as of today he's at only 311. Sure, that's more than he got last time, but if he's supposed to be the Commander in Chief that Americans either trust or are afraid to replace during war time... why is he still fighting to get above 50% in the popularity polls, and scrapping over half a dozen medium-large electoral states?

I'd like to think that it's because Americans don't really trust him, and see his illegal invasion of Iraq and the mess it's created as evidence of his duplicity and/or incompetence. But I think Clinton's 1992 campaign manager probably got a better handle on it: "It's the economy, stupid." I don't believe it makes much sense to give the president blame/credit for what happens to the economy during his tenure, but that's how people vote. It's why Michigan has been pretty safely in the Kerry column all summer: we're losing jobs here... lots of them. Other parts of the country don't have it as bad, but it isn't exactly "morning in America" anywhere else either. To compare GWB's score on the job-making tally with that of the past ten presidents, see this graph, which puts him dead last, behind his father and Jerry Ford. Despite its other ills, war is supposed to be good for the economy, but apparently not the way GWB fights it.

He might squeak by with a more decisive margin in the electoral vote and a slim popular majority, but that's not a victory or a mandate; for a war-time president, it's a slap in the face.