Rude Much?

There are two types of people in the world — those who believe there are two types of people in the world and those who don't. If I were one of the former, I would assert the following:

There are two types of people in the world — those who are perfectly comfortable purchasing seven books at Barnes and Noble and asking the only working cashier to gift wrap each individual book while the line behind you grows literally into the double digits, and those who prefer not to do Satan impersonations while shopping.

A Modest Proposal

ATTN: Californians

Do you enjoy shouldering a disproportionate amount of the federal tax burden? Handicapping our biotech industry because someone somewhere in Arkansas thinks stem cells are people? Watching in disgust as the American economy tanks while we remain one of the top ten economies internationally?

If not, then get involved with the Californian independence movement and join the fight for secession!

Now I know what you're thinking — if we secede we'll have to pay really high tariffs on all those wonderful manufactured goods from Michigan and Pennsylvania and whatnot. Oh really? What manufactured goods? All those jobs have long since been outsourced to Mexico thanks to NAFTA! As a nation located in North America, the People's Republic of California (working title) would continue to profit hand over fist off of the indentured servitude of Mexican children. Thanks to the Clintons (who rammed NAFTA through congress in 1993), California can retain its top-tier economic status without its citizens having to feel honor-bound to pay twice as much for domestically manufactured goods.

What's more, we've been producing the lion's share of the nation's food for the past 50 years, averaging $32 billion in profits annually. You want cheese from our happy cows, Las Vegans? Better double down.

Of course I anticipate that there may be problems, namely illegal immigration. We just need to lay it down up front. Texans need not apply, and should probably go get a job, the lazy bastards.

Come on, fellow golden staters, and join with me now. Free the Bear! Free the Bear! Free the Bear!

Spidey Senses Tingling

Someone somewhere sat down and thought, what is it that no one has that everyone really needs? And that someone invented the Spiderman Pumpkin Bomb Replica.

Creepy spandex suit not included.

E Plural-us Unum

Chris Matthews has finally shined a light on why politicians of all stripes are so insufferable — all they do is talk about themselves! Who wants to spend time with someone like that? Granted, considering that the politician is selling self-as-product, a certain amount of self-reference is necessary. But the more election coverage to which I subject myself, the more I feel like I'm watching Marcia Brady run a brush through her hair 100 times before crawling between perfumed sheets.

Let's take a look at Hillary Clinton's perhaps best-known speech, "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child". The word "I" appears 13 times in the first 15 sentences ("thank you thank you thank you's" excluded).

Now let's contrast that against Barack Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, where in just as many sentences he uses the word "I" zero times. And — here's the kicker — it's his life story he's talking about! There's another word that tends to pop up in Obama's speeches that Clinton doesn't seem to know much about: We. Regardless of whether there are any substantive policy differences between the two — and I'm not convinced that there are — Obama seems to be selling people themselves; the notion that we are capable of taking meaningful political action, not merely capable of selecting some other person-product to do it for us.

There's another politician who liked that "we" word a lot, and the day he became president he said, " We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution." Not "I will carry on the spirit the revolution" but "we are the revolution together." This is not to say that Barack Obama is any John F. Kennedy, but at least he can recognize a product worth peddling.

I wish more politicians would take a page out of that book. If I wanted to hear people talk about themselves ad nauseum, I'd let my teenage students hang out in my classroom at lunch.

The Eight-Year Itch

Last night while I was at the gym, I saw a woman on a treadmill gazing transfixed at one of the myriad ceiling-mounted televisions with one of the most rapt expressions I’ve ever seen on a human face. Curious to see what she watching, I sleuthily glanced in the mirror and discovered it was, lo and behold, CNN election coverage. Well, color me pleasantly surprised!

Thing is, I glanced over a few minutes later and the station had switched to ads – itch cream, station wagons, weed killer. Same damn expression. Barely even blinking.

This woman was either an actual zombie, or really itchy. I don’t know. But here’s one reason she should be more interested in the democratic process than her rhododendrons — unemployment just hit a two-year high.

Can’t stave that itch off with no snake oil, lady.

Neigh

In the spirit of lightening up, today I have a music rec. If you like twangy hippies who remind you of Patti Smith, then check out Band of Horses. I particularly recommend the tracks "Is There a Ghost" and "The Funeral".

See how nice I am when I spend the day reading about Phoenicians instead of watching the news?

And Nary a Bill-O in Sight

I have a theory : Khazad-Dum (of Gandalfian fame) was not a geological chasm at all, but was actually Rupert Murdoch’s pants pocket. Only a cavern deep enough to swallow Tolkein’s fiercest wizard is deep and dark enough to contain all of Murdoch’s money. I know this because when I wanted to watch Iowa primary coverage at 11:00 last night, the only station still carrying live coverage was my dear friend Fox News. So I watched.

It was… edifying. I learned that watching Republican TV apparently means that I’m likely to be in the market for joint and cartilege formula as well as a home security system (now that was a funny ad — beware youths in hoodies who burst through your front door at three o’clock in the afternoon when you’re home alone washing dishes while your husband is at work… or with his mistress).

In addition to some amusing implications about the Fox audience based on the station’s marketing assumptions, I picked up a few other interesting items.

First, Fox News refuses to invite libertarian Republican Party contender Ron Paul to participate in their televised Republican primary debates because in their words “he’s not going to be president” — this despite acknowledging that he more than doubled the number of votes received by invitee Rudy Giuliani in the Iowa primary with ten percent of the vote. Who needs actual human voters when we have 24-hour news stations to select our viable candidates for us!

Second, Rush Limbaugh hates Mike Huckabee almost as much as he likes making fun of his own drug-induced hearing loss. Hey, I confess, I’d like the guy if he weren’t kind of a fascist.

Third, the only women Fox allows to grace the screen are those with bleach blonde hair and primary color sweaters.

Fourth, there’s at least one Fox commentator capable of uttering the phrases “rich patrician Republican” and “I think Rush is wrong” — in the same sentence, even!

Fifth, Mike Huckabee brought Chuck Norris up on stage with him, while Mitt Romney brought along Olympic skater Dan Jansen. I think I now understand the election results.

Having now officially walked a mile in someone else’s Manolos, I’m going to go shower. At length.

I Do NOT Heart Huckabees

I've been casually watching CNN's coverage of the Iowa presidential primary, and the station has now projected that Mike Huckabee will receive the state's Republican nomination and that Barack Obama will receive the state's Democratic nomination. I have mixed feelings about Barack Obama which I'll probably write about in the coming weeks, but that's not what this post is about. Instead I decided to look into a question to which I've paid little attention until today, and that is who exactly is this Mike Huckabee guy?

I am so, so glad I asked.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the expression, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." I by and large find this to be true. I am equal parts my mother and my father, as is my brother (although in vastly different configurations, which makes for enjoyably lively family dinners!). I believe that the good things I do and my accomplishments in life are greatly influenced by their parenting, which occurred both through example and through explicit communication (admittedly, often resented at the time). Equally powerful is their influence in the choices I have not made; in the mistakes I have avoided. My actions are guided by the ethical system I developed as a child under their care, and I'm proud of that fact.

I now make the following statement as the daughter of good parents and as a teacher who has had the heartbreaking experience of working with some pretty disturbed teenagers: When there is something really wrong with a kid, there's something really wrong at home. When I interact with a student who clearly lacks qualities such as empathy and good judgment and respect for living things, I surmise that there has been a significant breakdown in parenting to the immense detriment of the child (and to all with whom the child will interact throughout his or her lifetime).

It was through that lens which I approached a news story exploring the circumstances surrounding Mike Huckabee's son David getting fired from a job as a Boy Scout camp counselor due to having tortured and hanged a dog. Tortured a dog. Even writing it now makes me feel ill.

As if that fact alone weren't enough to leave me with a permanent distrust for all things Huckabee, I went on to read that then-Governor Mike Huckabee fired the Arkansas police chief, John Bailey, because Bailey wouldn't help him cover up the incident. According to former Little Rock FBI Chief I. C. Smith, "Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son."

Since the incident was made public, Huckabee has asserted that his son did not engage in "intentional torture," and a campaign official said that he "'regrets' the incident." Oh, well, if he's SORRY, I guess it's all good. Huckabee, of course, also claims that he suddenly fired Bailey for reasons totally unrelated to his pesky ethics... reasons that apparently failed to manifest themselves until after Bailey refused to lie about the fact that David Huckabee hanged a dog. You'll be pleased to know that David Huckabee later made Eagle Scoute.

Lest you think that this clearly sociopathic behavior poor judgment was simply symptomatic of David's youth, consider the following: he was arrested for trying to get on a plane with a loaded gun this past April! (Detained terror suspects will be pleased to know that he was appropriately fined accordingly.) Guess he just forgot that he was carrying a loaded pistol in an airport. I may do crazy things like not eat chickens (or hang them), but I can definitely say I've never tried to board a plane with a Glock.

Good job with the bambino, Mr. Would-Be President.

I don't know what the people of Iowa were thinking, but I know what I think — a man who raises an animal killer and then fires an employee for refusing to compromise his own ethics has no place in the White House.

Rocking All the Way to the Bank

There's this thing I have my journalism students do during the first week of school where they bring in any magazine of their choice and cover every single ad with the same color construction paper. At first they think it's pretty fun — look ma, no work — but then they start to notice how much blue or green or red paper there is. It's pretty powerful.

The only magazines to which I subscribe are The Nation and Harper's, both of which boast an extremely low ad to content ratio. I just thumbed through the copy of The Nation sitting on my coffee table and discovered that only 11 out of the 40 pages were ads. Furthermore, it wasn't until page 14 that I found the first full-page ad. Pretty cool. The January 2008 issue of Harper's had an even lower 18 percent ad content, albeit a little more front-heavy in the distribution.

I figured my magazine collection probably wouldn't accurately reflect the quantity of advertising contained in the average American bird-cage liner, so I did a little research. According to a publishing industry website, the average magazine's ad to content ratio is 1:1, meaning that a full fifty percent of what you're paying for when you pick up a copy of Newsweek or Sports Illustrated is the privilege to be sold to someone else.

Of course, that fifty percent average takes into account magazines like The Nation and Adbusters (which contains exactly zero percent advertising). That means that somewhere there's got to be a magazine that's pretty much entirely ads! Sure enough, Vogue boasts an impressive 87 percent ad content. Somewhere a board member is very, very happy. (Then again, with a magazine like that, can you really tell the difference between the ads and the editorial content anyway?)

Today I strayed outside of my little haven of lefty news rags and thumbed through the latest Rolling Stone (which, for all that it styles itself as a lefty news rag, is no such thing). It was sort of like reading the The Nation upside down and backwards, because I don't think it was until page 15 that I actually saw one iota of non-advertising content — and that was just the table of contents! Or should I say, "contents."

All I know is that by the time I'd gotten halfway through, I felt strangely compelled to smoke, drink and then go driving on a twisty mountain road. In that order. Also, I kind of wanted to change my middle name to "Killah" but to be fair, that's probably been building for a while now.

The Lines Are Your Friend

In the words of my husband, "See, this is what happens when you venture out into the world of other people. You find a bunch of morons."

I don't want to start off the the new year dwelling on the inadequacies of human nature, but sometimes you just have to stop and marvel. In clicking randomly from link to link this afternoon, I somehow stumbled onto a message board full of runners engaging in a spirited debate about — not making this up — whether on not runners should wear iPods in races.

It's good to have something to be passionate about. I think.

The case against iPods contained three main arguments. First, they ostensibly cause an insurance liability for the event coordinators because iPod wearers, in a fit of AC/DC-induced obliviousness, may inadvertently wander in front of a big rig. Um, isn't in my own fault if I walk in front of a moving vehicle? Also, I guess I'm at a loss as to why it's a bad thing when an adult dumb enough to dart out in front of oncoming traffic suffers the predictable consequence, so I moved immediately onto the next argument.

The second objection to iPods (and I'm barely paraphrasing here) was that if you can't run without music then you're not a real runner, you're just a "weekend warrior." Golly, if Joe "Lance Armstrong" Smith doesn't think I'm a real athlete, I don't think I'll have the strength to go out in public ever again.

The third argument was even better than the other two, if you can imagine that. In short, "Why can't you people just follow the rules??? If you don't like the rules, don't sign up!" Yeah, well, if you don't like being around people who lack your inexplicable need to always do what you're told, why don't you sit this one out?

That last argument was the one that sent me scrambling for my soapbox. Assertions to the effect of "if you don't like something about an organization don't participate" (often seen in its "well maybe you should just move to another country" form) irk me greatly. We don't live in a dictatorship; we are well within our rights to attempt to changes rules we don't like, and conscientiously refusing to obey rules is a time-honored form of resistance. Ask Gandhi.

In my experience, a rule exists for one reason — to benefit the person/s who made it. I should know; I'm a teacher. I really don't understand the personality type that seems to genuinely believe rules should be followed simply because they exist. There's nothing inherently right or just about any particular rule; these codes merely reflect the desires of those within a particular community or political entity who possess the power to have their desires reified as law. Travel through history and/or geography and you'll infinite, conflicting rules. Things which are expected in one culture give offense in another.

There are only two reasons to follow a rule: either because you agree with it, or because the penalty for not following the rule is greater than the inconvenience you suffer through obedience. I generally follow the rules of my society, as often for the second reason as the first. I stop at red lights largely because the stoplight system is a good way to prevent accidents, but also because I don't want to get a ticket for a California rolling stop while turning right. But if I do roll through a red light at one in the morning when no one is around, I really don't think anyone suffers, and I certainly don't think I'm throwing the world into disarray by using my own judgment in formulating my actions rather than doing what I'm supposed to do just because I'm supposed to do it.

At any rate, the case for allowing iPods was a bit simpler — quit being a goose-stepping little busy-body and run your own damn race.