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Tag Archive for 'likely to offend'

Your choices according to David Sedaris

Published on October 21, 2008 in politics.

The chicken or the “platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it.”

“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked,” says Sedaris. “I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?”

Ok, I know there are sane, smart and thoughtful undecided voters out there who still need more information (despite the 24-7 print/web/television coverage of a 20-month primary season) before heading into the voting booth. And I realize that a good many of those sane, smart and thoughtful people will end up pulling the lever for John McCain. They will have their reasons, and absent among them will be an affinity for shit with bits of broken glass in it.

Sedaris’ utter confusion over how people can be undecided in this election is something many on the left are feeling right now (including yours truly).

But that confusion is typical of anyone who believes anything strongly. It’s really hard to understand where other people are coming from when they disagree (or merely hesitate to agree) with something you feel passionately about.

Reading Sedaris’ take on the election, I was reminded of an article in Harper’s by the late David Foster Wallace. The article was about the fierce and ideologically-charged English usage debates. Noting the link between politics and the English language, Wallace offered this incredibly cogent description of what he calls the “Democratic Spirit,” a strength of mind that is required for civilized debate on vexing issues:

A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.
This kind of stuff is advanced U.S. citizenship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit’s constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it’s almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp’s line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that any other camp is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

At this point in the presidential campaign, the Democratic Spirit is much harder to find, and I have to keep reminding myself to strive for it.

But damn, that David Sedaris is funny.

More coded language from the GOP

Published on August 7, 2008 in politics.

Here is Terry Neal, writing for The Root, on the GOP’s dog-whistle politicking:

“Uppity” used to be the preferred term for Negroes who didn’t know their place. There was a time when it was regularly applied to any number of black men and women who strived to be more than day laborers, nannies or sharecroppers.

The GOP, ever aware of the connotative power of words, has steered clear of the direct usage of that loaded term. When they speak of Barack Obama—a man in pursuit of the most lofty of prizes—they simply use the words that define the term. Snobbish. Arrogant. Presumptuous.

…

The fact that the mainstream media has embraced the uppity-Obama storyline is further evidence of the right’s ability to advance whatever preposterous storyline it chooses, despite its persistent whining about the liberal media.

Republicans have long been able to win races by doing a better job of negatively defining their opponents with coordinated media attacks. What the right does particularly well is not just framing the arguments but coordinating the response to the fallout.

When Obama suggested that McCain was attempting to make him seem different and scary, McCain and his supporters wailed that Obama was “playing the race card.”

That term, of course, has become the de facto line of defense for whites who want to immediately end any uncomfortable conversations about race. “Are you calling me a racist? You’re calling me a racist!”

Interestingly, calling someone a racist has become a worse offense than actually being one. [Emphasis added] And thus the media will allow McCain and his defenders to have it both ways—play to racial sensitivities and express mock horror than anyone would have the audacity to question their motives.

Neal goes on to say that he doesn’t think McCain is racist—he’s just willing to play the role for the sake of getting the racist vote. McCain himself admitted as much after the 2000 primary. Here he is talking about how he censored his true feelings about the Confederate flag:

I should have done this earlier when an honest answer could have affected me personally. I did not do so for one reason alone. I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth.

You can admire his candor here, but the troubling fact remains: McCain sacrificed his most cherished principle—straight-talking honesty—when it became politically expedient to do so. And what’s worse, he sacrificed it—and continues to—in order to appeal to the very worst aspect of our country’s character—our persistent racism.

Good copywriting

Published on July 24, 2008 in ephemera.

Via Ask a Copywriter

Obama

Published on July 2, 2008 in politics.

Disclaimer: the following post is my unfiltered opinion on matters political. Read it at your own risk.

I stand to the left of Obama on a lot of issues. So you’d think I would be troubled by his recent veer to the center.

Rejecting public financing; issuing wishy-washy statements on court rulings on gay marriage, capital punishment and guns; affirming Bush’s practice of allocating taxpayer money to religious charities; and airing uber-patriotic television ads—it has been quite a few weeks for Obama. The Economist referred to his recent behavior as “posturing, hedging and outright flip-flopping.”

Those things don’t bother me. They don’t because they make it clear that he is in it to win—and thank god for that, because I don’t think the country can afford—literally, figuratively, politically, militarily, diplomatically, environmentally, spiritually—a McCain presidency.

Obama is a pragmatist (that word has positive connotations for me). He knows that unwavering public commitment to every item on the progressive agenda will result in one thing: our country’s rapid movement away from every item on the progressive agenda.

NGOs, lobbyists, pundits and party apparatchiks derive strength from their strident adherence to a specific agenda. Candidates for president do not. When liberals ask Obama for total progressive purity, they essentially ask him to alienate 80-90 percent of the electorate. They ask him to lose.

I know what you’re saying—winning isn’t everything. But I would argue that this is a special case; it’s special for a number of reasons, but I’ll pick just two: the global climate and the U.S. Supreme Court. Both are inching toward the point of no return.

The Supreme Court: All of the liberal judges are, to be blunt, really, really old. Even crotchety Scalia is spry by comparison. And then there’s Thomas, Alito and Roberts, who have decades in front of them and seem to still exude a youthful extremism. If McCain is given the opportunity to replace any of the aging liberals on the bench, it could take half a century or more before the court regains a semblance of political moderation.

The Global Climate: We might be too late, but if we aren’t, it’s essential that we elect a president who believes in doing something about global climate change—not someone who merely uses the issue as a marketing tactic to differentiate himself from President Bush.

And then there’s the “Who is more likely to start another war in the Middle East?” test. We all know who fails that one.

Lest it be interpreted otherwise, please understand that I have a lot of positive reasons for supporting Obama, but above all of them, there is the fact that he is not John McCain.

I hold no personal animus toward McCain—just a strong conviction that he would be a terrible president.

Mah-widge

Published on May 23, 2008 in politics.

IT LOOKS LIKE MARRIAGE is back in the spotlight, or hot seat, depending on your point of view. Expect a whole new round of “DOMA” (defense of marriage act) ballot initiatives this fall, and not just in California.

The irony is that those who purport to defend the institution of marriage seek to defend something that doesn’t exist anymore—and hasn’t for over 300 years. Or so says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families and author of “Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”

In January Coontz wrote a post—essentially a distilled version of her book—for the Cato Unbound, a blog of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank. In her post she outlines the evolution of marriage.

For most of it history, she says, marriage has been a way to put people in their place and distribute (read: concentrate) wealth and power. Coontz: “[For] millennia, marriage was much more about regulating economic, political, and gender hierarchies than nourishing the well-being of adults and their children. Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission.”

Love, compatibility, equity and equality—the things we now associate with marriage—weren’t considered as a basis for matrimony until the Enlightenment, a short 300 years ago.

“These [Enlightenment] marital ideals appalled many social conservatives of the day,” she says. “’How will we get the right people to marry each other, if they can refuse on such trivial grounds as lack of love?’” they asked. “Just as important, how will we prevent the wrong ones, such as paupers and servants, from marrying? What would compel people to stay in marriages where love had died? What would prevent wives from challenging their husbands’ authority?”

Not much has changed. The idea that love is the only prerequisite for marriage, the principle that drives advocates for marriage equality, doesn’t sway conservatives today for the same reason it didn’t sway conservatives 300 years ago: Marriage is about proper societal organization and allegiance to Judeo-Christian morality, not merely the love between two people.

Some so-called defenders of marriage aren’t actually trying to save the institution of marriage as it exists today; it’s already too far gone to be saved. They’d have to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment times. Instead, they’re trying to save us from what they see is the socially and morally destructive aspects of homosexuality, and if they can no longer have an outright ban on same-sex relationships (not politically feasible or culturally acceptable anymore), they’ll settle for a ban on same-sex marriage (still politically feasible and culturally acceptable—though I suspect not for much monger, what with Millennials showing an exceptionally high level of tolerance for the untraditional).

Anyway, check out the Coontz’s post. Very illuminating.

Questions

Published on April 16, 2008 in politics and uncategorized.

 [In no particular order]

1. SHOULD we boycott the Beijing Olympics? Point: China executes about 20 people per day. Counter-point: What a crappy thing to do to the athletes, who have nothing at all to do with China’s human rights record. Plus, we execute people, too. To boycott on that principle would be a little hypocritical, right? Conclusion: Still unsure.

2. WHY did Michael Johns get booted from American Idol?

3. WHY are we still in Iraq? No, really, why? I want to hear good reasons for staying there.

4. WHAT’S UP with that 28 percent that approves of President Bush’s performance? Sub-question: What would Bush have to do to get their disapproval?

5. WHY are you using Evite when you can use Pingg? I can understand using Evite only if you like poorly designed, shaming invitations that are filled with ugly ads.

Also, while I can’t put it into question form, I thought I’d acknowledge how cool it is that Spain recently appointed Carme Chacon as defense minister. Chacon is the first female to become a top defense official—and she also has a bun in the oven.


Nothing is obscene anymore …

Published on April 7, 2008 in Uncategorized.

THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES: My October post entitled “Nothing is obscene anymore” is still generating some comments (not a ton, but significant for this blog) including a rather bizarre one from a conservative pundit named John Lofton.

Add your $.02!

http://threeroadsblog.com/?p=33#comments

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