So, the Democrats in my very blue state put up a depressing, entitled, out-of-touch candidate for our vacant senate seat and she lost. The only reason I voted for her was because she wasn't a Republican. Supporting someone you don't even slightly like is psychologically draining.

At this point, I would vote for a Democratic party (or a Republican party!) with the exact same fiscal policy as the current Republicans if they actually made a principled, moral stand on equal protection and civil rights, habeas corpus/due process, and reproductive rights. Those don't cost anything[1].

Maybe they should be solved before the stuff that does cost billions of dollars. As it is my choice is weak, almost grudging support for those rights from people who want to hand the economy over to the government, and disgusting, immoral, vehement opposition to them from people who want to hand the economy over to wealthy corporations.

Neither side is doing anything effective to keep us free, or to keep the market free. Each side says or implies that this is a Christian nation, which it explicitly isn't, while failing to do what's right. Sometimes I want to give up and stop voting.

As we walked back toward Mass Ave to catch the bus last night, fresh from the euphoria of my friend Josef's election-night party, I thought about how fortunate we are to be here, now.

We cheered, we screamed, we sang the national anthem at the top of our lungs, popped champagne, and danced. I'm on some stranger's facebook somewhere, at the edge of a crowd of people smiling for what felt like the first time in years. I knew I'd remember, but I wanted to write something down. I'd been following along on Twitter all night, but I didn't know what to say when the good news finally came.

I thought about our friends in California, where Prop 8 looked like it was going to win. Despite how far we've come, it's likely three states are about to write discrimination into their laws or constitutions rather than out of them.

So I picked up my phone and just typed in, "charged." Everyone was excited, yes. I haven't felt electrified by the possibility of change like that in a very long time. But we also haven't automatically won change by changing our leaders. We have won a responsibility to make that change happen.

"Yes we did", we joked to each other, and I emailed to my parents in the morning. But no one actually meant, "yes we can win an election". That's just the starting line. Now, we are charged with making America better. We are charged with protecting the liberties of everyone. I wanted to remember that too.

That's why it matters that we won. Eight years from now, this could be a nation where the whole idea of "banning gay marriage" sounds as antiquated and offensive as segregated schools or not letting women vote. We have the ability to change our culture, nothing more. Mandates don't do that; people do. And yes, we can.

There was a lot of political talk last week in the US about this guy "Joe the Plumber". I'm really quite mystified by the (lack of) Democratic response to this one; it seems like a perfect opportunity for the Dems to explain what their ideals actually mean, after years of complete inarticulacy.

The Republican party, and conservatives in general, have somehow successfully sold their platform of, as Robert Reich brilliantly put it on the Daily Show last week, "socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else", to poor but socially-conservative citizens for quite some time. They've convinced people to vote against their economic self-interest, and cut taxes on the rich instead of themselves.

Is voting for policies that directly benefit you less necessarily bad? I don't think so. In many cases, selflessness and altruism are better in the long run. Conservative economic policies speak to a sense of right and wrong that give people a feeling of purpose, and so an incentive to create: this is mine, I made it, you can't take it away. In a theoretical sense, leaving more wealth in the hands of the rich should "trickle down" to society in general, by providing more capital, and thus creating jobs, etc.

However, I do not believe that this is why Americans, specifically, tend to support conservative economic policy. The USA has this idea of the "American Dream", pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, if you will, and striking it rich through hard work and character. It's advantageous for conservatives to sell this idea because it makes people think "tax the rich? What if I get rich?", which is a sort of enlightened self-interest, arguably. And it gets poor people to vote for them.

What makes this "plumber" thing interesting to me is that is should demonstrate where this approach ought to fall down, logically and emotionally. But it does not. Here is the problem.

A working stiff who earns "five figures", such as myself, generally makes that money by going to an employer every day, performing some services for them, and then drawing a paycheck. Where this money comes from is abstracted away (this is the marvelous thing we call "business"). Let's say you want to sell the "American Dream" to this person. They get their paycheck every week, and there's a chunk taken out of it by Uncle Sam. Maybe they're saving up to start a business, or go to college, etc. They sure could do it faster if taxes weren't so high. So you remind them this: when you do strike it rich (since this is America, where anyone can strike it rich), do you want those taxes to be even greater?

This story contains a lie of omission, probably the greatest lie ever told in US politics, and one that has almost universally succeeded as far back as I can remember. And that is: when you do make that jump to where our hypothetical Joe is, making just over a quarter-million dollars, that it's not going to look any different. You'll get your paycheck from some abstracted source, just like before, but more will be taken out unless we stop raising taxes on those higher income brackets. There will be some node higher up in the tree for that wealth to "trickle down" from; you could say it's implied, even, that wealth is created at the root and destroyed at the leaves.

What's wrong here? Simple: a self-employed plumber does not have a paycheck, except maybe to him/herself for accounting purposes. They collect their income in the form of payments from customers. They don't have an abstraction: they hire more labor and become the abstraction. If their customers have no money, the abstraction leaks, their employees have to be laid off (and then can no longer afford plumbing services themselves). The success of the plumber depends as much on how many people are able to pay them as it does on his costs (such as taxes). We want to make sure those customers can still pay. This is, in theory terms, the idea of demand-side or Keynesian economics. (Not really exactly. I took about two econ courses. But bear with me for a moment.)

Now, you can argue demand-side vs. what we would call supply-side economics, which is the idea that no, first you have to stop taxing Joe so he can hire people so they have money to go buy things, for ages. People have made whole careers out of it. I am not here to do that. What I am here to wonder out loud is: why is this argument not happening, now, in our public sphere? Even if only as a small plot point in one Presidential campaign? There are very good arguments for both sides (I agree with the Keynesians, myself), and they should be what this debate is about, not digging up dirt on some guy whose real name, horrors, might not be "Joe" or protests about all those you-know-what poor people getting "government giveaways" that are disturbingly close to racism in my opinion.

When I turn on talk radio I hear zombies, unable to string together any thought more complicated than "Democrat == higher taxes on everyone" (which would be depressing even if the claim were true). It begins to get unsettling when you understand your opponent's argument, and yet watch them completely unable to articulate it. When they deal with this by appealing to fear and thought-killing sound bites, it gets alarming.

Obama has backpedaled whenever the whole issue has come up. In the last debate, he was saved by merely shutting up and letting out enough rope for McCain to hang himself. Not very inspiring. As a result I hear repetitions of Obama's phrase "spread the wealth around" constantly met on the airwaves with... silence. He won't touch it, and honestly, I can't blame him for not wanting to fan the flames of class warfare with only two more weeks left to stick it out. But I don't understand why, and why a single person on the left hasn't had the faith that this idea can be discussed in our society. I think that, whichever side you are rooting for (and yeah, I am for the Democrats), the Democrats should have won this point readily. Not to belabor the point, but it really amazes me that they have not. It wouldn't have taken much.

Here's what you do: go to Wherever, OH with your crack PR team and find several of "Joe the Plumber"s customers. Interview them all. A few of them are, in this economy, going to be really hurting. If you're lucky: Remember that Joe owes taxes to the IRS. Very possibly, someone owes Joe money! That would be a coup. You just put them in front of the media and the whole thing sells itself. Mary needs to make these repairs... if only her tax credit were larger... etc. This would not settle the argument, by any means, especially not for political junkies. But it would begin it. We could talk about policy, whether one way of "spreading" things will result in more wealth to spread than another, instead of red-baiting. I feel a bit ripped off that we haven't even gotten that much. The theory part is pretty much irrelevant to most people; that's fine. But they deserve context.

I can only assume that my ("my") party is still either terrified or stupid. I hope winning the Presidency changes that somewhat. That whole right and wrong, purpose, "noble cause" thing, right? Right, guys?

"Obama had the additional skill of criticizing George W. Bush."

Basically: yes. And that's what passes for politics over here, folks. Sorry about your economies and all that.

Every year on September 11th I listen to all 4 hours of The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski. Part of me never understands why. I'm a bleeding-heart liberal and I cringe at every "Support our Troops" and "Never Forget" sticker that I see. Yet I keep my own solemn ritual of our civil religion. Why?

It was a tragedy that 3,000 people died that day. But it was a greater tragedy when we abandoned the principles of liberty and justice that separated us from our attackers. 9/11 was invoked as justification of some of the greatest sins imaginable. We are financially in ruins. The level of our national discourse and its connection with reality has been damaged for perhaps a generation.

America lost its soul that day, that next morning. Here's the thing, though. We can fight, we can persevere, to build it up again. Repair our moral compass, tend to our economy, educate ourselves. And this year is the first one since that I have felt like we are going to make a first step, come November, towards doing so.

But those other 3000 souls? They don't come back.

I guess that's what I'm marking. That I cannot extricate the two.

A government, since 800 years or so now, is an agreement between people to put the liberties of everyone above the liberties of themselves. In some sense this is purely a practical matter: if we let the strong kill the weak, and then fight it out amongst themselves, there won't be enough of us left to feed ourselves. But mostly, and I think we are a nation that prides itself in being explicitly founded on this, it is an acknowledgment that you deserve rights because you are a soul, not because you can defend them with force, caste, or crown.

That means we cannot toss anyone away, we cannot march into the desert shooting first and asking questions later, we cannot compress a life into a rhetorical device. The rights we defend are not an eloquent argument from first principles; they are an accumulation of sacrifice. And my anger doesn't raise any liberties from the dead.

William created this record, that September, by finding some physical tapes from the year I was born and playing them over and over while their magnetic charge literally disintegrated from use after being stored so long. Everything we value is a piece of what we give up our self-interest for. We create art from loss. But we also create a nation out of loss; this is what mattered, because this is where we failed. The 300,000 that didn't die? We're in this to make their lives worth saving, not to clear the way for them to fend for themselves. All the ideals and fancy words only arise from that.

So, I haven't blogged in almost a year. I am a horrible, horrible, horrible person. But at least I've been on LowThresholdNmu. Barely.

Since I still read a blog or two so that I can pretend to be informed: I really like this post. I would make a comment about the bumper sticker on the Prius normally parked around my part of ye olde Prospect Hill, but then people might think I was actually talking about politics or oil or cars or gentrification or something like that. It's a violent world out here on the interweb. One can only be oblique.

When did I get so old? Did I fit in at some point? I really don't know.

Some images: one, two, three. I trust the French is easy enough to understand.

Laura always gets it better than anyone else.

JV is on tour. Yesterday:

Today in Copenhagen I saw a group of Muslim kids taunting and kicking an old man in front of hundreds of people. I stood and cried, and in my anxious and depleted state I felt very clearly this was a sign of terrible things to come.

It is necessary to document things. That’s what his music says to me, for some reason, even though most of his songs read like crazy short stories; that lets you say, “ah, that’s where I was when I wrote that” or “ah, that’s where I was when I listened to that.” So that’s where we are.

There are MP3s on the site; they got me to buy the album, so take a minute to give them a listen.

This is without a doubt the best spam I have ever received.

Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 18:14:35 -0060

From: Brandon Corbin <jincl@0577.com>

To: 9wm@packages.debian.org

Subject: Former President Bill Klinton uses Voagra!

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It is a natural phenomenon, because Bill as a real man in order not to

shame himself when he was with Monica regularly used Voagra.

What happened you see. His political figure became more bright and more attractive.

It is very important for a man to be respected as a man!

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[URL REDACTED]

I do not like movies that have no particular reason to be a movie. Many things are just stories, some things are just politics, and that is fine. So, case in point here: Turtles Can Fly. This was in from the Netflix queue when I went over to Denise’s. I was underwhelmed.

It’s what I would call a Sundance movie. Not because it has anything to do with Sundance itself, but because that’s a genre, really, and a market segment, if you want to be really cynical about it. And Sundance movies bother me because of this: they’re always just stories and politics. They’re not told on a screen because they need to be, they’re told on a screen because if you want to buy something that lets you feel good about how well you can understand what a fictional character is feeling and how enlightened your politics are, a movie takes up far less time and (as long as it follows the rules) imagination than a book.

Like all Sundance movies, this one was self-congratulatory and emotionally manipulative and had a sort of pre-chewed moral that went well with your fair trade cappuccino.

What really killed me was that there was an easy way for it to be something actually visual, which is what I’m always looking for. Something where it matters how the images are composed because they reflect and reference whatever it is that gets composed inside the film (story, politics, a moral—I’m not opposed to these. Really.), and vice versa. The kid (the main character) is named Satellite, because that’s what he does. There’s a satellite dish that he can use to pick up TV channels from out in... civilzation, I guess, is what is implied, he knows a bit of English, and so forth. This is used at the beginning mostly to point out that he is intelligent and enterprising or something like that, and then that’s it. There’s a whole bunch of subtext about cultural representation and translation and even the politics of the war at a small scale that goes completely wasted because the movie brings each sub-part to us separately and says “here, see? They’re related! That’s deep.” because, well, that’s what you do, as a Sundance film. There’s a product you gotta provide.

It doesn’t say anything about how the parts see each other and how we might be able to learn something from them and still accept that we can’t ever know what life is like over there. Instead it does what books do, or what all my stupid bleeding-heart mailing lists do, just not as well.

There’s this one shot of the girl though that is almost worthy of Greenaway. It had to be entirely unintentional. Immediately before or after it’s back to the little kid in the mine field, or being drowned, or whatever (it must have been the drowning one, because it works as a dream). And there are also these bits of video spliced in there (by necessity, underwater) and completely at random in this silly sweeping Lawrence of Arabia scene (reused from something else?), that are really jarring because the rest is shot on film, and the one place where we see video and it means something is on that satellite TV. There was no taking into account of this in the director’s mind as far as I could tell.

So that’s what I don’t like. I did in fact, however, go out for Pas sur la bouche, and loved it. It is an operetta, so unless you are predisposed to liking that sort of thing and/or are really gay and just haven’t figured it out yet, you may have trouble getting past that part, and you have to read subtitles that twist things about a bit to keep all the corny rhymes, but if you are willing to take all that in stride and say “alright, monsieur Resnais, I will go along with your absurd conceit, because you are, after all, Alain Resnais”, it is really, really wonderful.

It’s totally, completely, about how it’s all faux-sentiment and hypocritical. You’ve got all these layers of distance: right now, New Wave, operetta, serious art, farce (my favorite IMDB comment went, “So far, so Molière”. Oh.). So there’s all that intellectual crap to chew on, and everyone’s sort of in on the joke, but you’re also laughing with it and at it at the same time. I could not stop smiling. There was what must have been a French class in the lower level (this is why I love the fact that Cinestudio is on the Trinity campus) and they were quite into it. The American guy’s accent was fabulous. I find it interesting how the differences between cultures was such a big bold red underlined plot element here (along with the usual comedy of errors stuff), and yet, you weren’t expected to read some subtle cultural truth into it to appreciate things. Americans in France are funny. Humor is one of those things we can’t explain so sometimes it gets to explain things we can’t. Americans in Iraq is just a boot to the head, whichever side you happen to be on. I think that whether you are looking for the laugh or looking for the layering that makes the laugh so that you can write your own, taking sides or judging what you want to say can’t make a good movie. You make it, you show it, and putting that together says something. (Sometimes it says: How utterly fucking ridiculous it is that we relate to characters on a screen the same way they do, and additionally sex is funny, and especially songs that are really about sex but don’t say so are even funnier.)

And Audrey Tautou can act! I wasn’t sure. (No, I liked Amélie, but I refer you to Ted there. I just wasn’t including that one because you can’t, really; the—well, I hate to use an overloaded French term here, but, mise en scène—sort of overpowers everything else.)

Evan linked to this much earlier today, and I wanted to share it, but the blog was out of order. (I broke it.)

Anyway, a discussion of life and happiness and success and wealth and what matters to people and so on, in the UK versus over here. I keep seeing examples of this and it makes me wonder if I really want to stay here.

I decided to pass on this one. However, courtesy of Ana Voog: