17 posts tagged “i am going to bed now”

I've written several times now, both here and in the comments on friends' Voxes, that I've been more turned off by the Cult of Obama than by Obama himself.  For a long time, I couldn't separate the two, and I had to really bring myself to focus on Obama himself, rather than the quasi-religious following that he has.  I hoped that once he was elected, the cult of personality would die down a bit and the man himself would emerge from behind the cloud of messianic rhetoric sometimes spouted by his supporters.

Near the end of the campaign, Palin said several times that we still don't really know who this Obama guy is, and she was roundly scoffed at by the press, because my god, how could we not know him after such an interminable campaign.  Yet, in a way, I think she was right.  Only I don't think it's Obama's doing that we don't know him (partly, maybe--his campaign was a bit withdrawn, not to say "secretive" which would put one in mind of GW Bush and Nixon).  I think it's that too many people look at him and see whatever they want to see, regardless of what he has said or done.  Of course, his opponents do that, but what has disturbed me, perhaps unduly, is that his supporters do it even more.

Listening to Obama's supporters is, honestly, confusing.  Other than the key words "hope" and "change," they often don't seem to know anything about him.  For example, it is commonly said with approval that he espouses a platform of "universal health care" when he espouses no such thing.  He may at some later point in time, but the proposal he put on the table is a far cry from that.  Most people will just go on with their employer-sponsored programs, although he does propose some changes to what insurance companies must offer and cover, and he proposes to offer the government health-insurance plan to individuals and families who do not have access to an employer-sponsored plan.  This is hardly the radical change that many of his most ardent supporters seem to think it is.

It's not just the specifics of policy, though (and it must be said, because I am stony-hearted and not especially moved by appeals to "hope," I vote on matters of policy).  Some of his supporters seem to think he's a hardcore liberal; some of them think he is a moderate or even a conservative, at least inasmuch as he is reserved and cautious in judgment.  For the record, I tend to think the latter, but not only because he is reserved and cautious in judgment.  He also seems moderate-to-slightly-conservative on some issues, like abortion.  During their live election coverage, Stewart and Colbert talked to one of his old mentors at Harvard Law (whose name escapes me--pardon) who has known both of the Obamas since that time and confirmed my belief that both of them are somewhat conservative people and take quite moderate stances on social issues.  Yet, many supporters of the President-Elect seem to think he mirrors perfectly their own leftist views.

Moreover, many of his supporters are claiming that his election is a mandate from the American public for a broad shift to the left.  I'm sure they'd like to think so, just as GW Bush's supporters liked to think the opposite 4 years ago.  Unfortunately, there is no great evidence of this.  Obama's lead in the electoral college was huge (more than twice the votes McCain received) but he only won 52% of the popular vote, only 1% more than Bush 4 years ago.  This, of course, also proves again that the electoral college makes perfect sense [1], just as the 2000 election demonstrated.  It remains an open question whether Obama would have won at all--along with the Democrats who won seats in Congress--had it not been for the precipitous decline of our economy in the months before the election.  He may still have won the electoral college, but a reasonable guess is that he would not have won the popular vote, and so I cannot see how this constitutes a broad mandate for the country to shift left.  There is still the rest of the people, 48% of them, most of whom voted for McCain but who remain part of this country and quite obviously did not shift left.  Indeed, looking at the map of how each county voted, there are huge swaths of this country in which Obama did not win a single county (I heard that in my own county, he only won 61 votes, total--not that Idaho matters at all in the electoral-college addition).  If the country is going to move forward in any meaningful way, all of those counties and states are also going to have to be brought along for the ride.  Anyway, I think the more reasonable view is that this vote was a mandate from the public to be anything but Bush.  Obama has remarked that he will be a president for us all, presumably even Clark County, Idaho.  Then again, Bush said the same thing (and he was more bipartisan and conciliatory as governor of Texas than he has been as president) and look what happened.  Obama's most ardent fans currently don't seem to care at all if Obama governs the 48% of the public who did not vote for him--some of his devotees, indeed, seem to be filled with a noxious hatred of most of those counties where Obama did not win and the people who live in them (and then they wonder why those people don't like to vote for them). 

In Obama himself, though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of hatred or self-righteousness.  He never seems to harbor the messianic fantasies that so many of his supporters seem to.  I could be wrong (I know many people on the right attribute this to him directly rather than to misguided flocks of worshippers--I think I did for a while, too), but in his speeches, in his musings on legal issues, and so on, he seems to be a very measured man.  I have thus come to believe two things about the next two years.  The first is that his most leftist, most adoring fans are likely to be the most disappointed in him.  I could be entirely off-base with that, of course.  It could be that his plan is to govern to the left of where most of the country is, but at the very least, since I expect he will want re-election in 2012, I don't think it's going to happen.  Bear in mind that even many people who voted for Obama are to the right of Obama on some social issues; the results of Proposition 8 in California are one indicator of this.  Obama could lose a lot of votes if he does some of the things his fans want him to.  Again, though, the case of Proposition 8 may be illustrative here:  Obama has expressed opposition to "gay marriage" while also expressing support for equal civil rights for same-sex couples and also for states' rights to decide.  Perhaps he is in line with many of the people who voted for Prop 8 in this case.  Many of the people who voted for Prop 8 recognized the need for equal civil rights for all couples, regardless of sexual preference, but at the same time attributed religious and historical connotations to the word "marriage" that they don't want to see changed.  If this is in fact what Obama thinks as well, then it would seem to make him a moderate, not a real hardcore liberal, at least not on this issue. 

The second thing I think is that, because the country has not taken a broad-based left turn and because the Congressional Democrats have a tendency to make themselves totally fucking obnoxious, they will lose some seats in 2010.  I don't know whether they'll lose enough to really threaten their current majority, but I expect the country will grow weary of them.  I am already weary of Pelosi, for crying out loud, but for some reason, I have no authority to unelect her.  Maybe Obama will have the testicular fortitude to keep them all in check once he is in office and once they're done occupying themselves with the Lieberman witchhunt (really, guys?  Still don't have anything better to do than shuttle Lieberman out to Congressional Siberia?).

Am I babbling again?  I've been writing this post off and on, while doing other important things, for over an hour, and my eyes have glazed over.  The point is that while I think I finally have Obama the man separated from the Cult of Obama, I'm not sure most people do and this is only going to make his job--already a task to make Hercules shudder and Sisyphus rejoice his fate--harder.

[1]  For those who are unfamiliar with the system, Americans don't actually vote directly for the president.  We vote, instead, for electors who promise to later go vote for the candidate they are promised to.  The number of electors each state gets to represent it is based on population, so California has 55 electors while Idaho has a measly 4 because hardly anyone lives here.  The problem is in most states, the electors are chosen on a winner-take-all system rather than a proportional system, so that when a Democrat wins in California, even if only with 51% of the vote, the Democrat gets all 55 electoral votes.  Thus, since California pretty much always goes Democrat thanks to its large urban populations, you don't really count if you're a Republican there (at least not in the presidential election).  Similarly, since Idaho is reliably Republican, anyone who votes for anything other than a Republican for president here is basically wasting their time.  While dividing up Idaho's votes in a proportional manner would be unlikely to affect the outcome of the election at all, dividing up California's (and Washington's and Oregon's and Florida's and Texas's and a bunch of the other well-populated states) likely would make a difference.  In this case, Obama would still have won since he won a majority of the popular vote, however there would not have been people claiming that this was a landslide because those people are judging mostly from the electoral college vote.

I hate to keep harping on The Big Sort, but I just found this one today, and if this is true, then, yes, I'm really abnormal. 

I've heard things like this before, and I've seen this kind of thing in action.  Students in graduate lit seminars--or, god help me, white students in an African-American studies class--become gradually more extreme in their views over the course of a semester to the point where they're calling Joseph Conrad all kinds of horrible things (and to the point where they think Kate Chopin is some kind of genius). 

But, see, I usually do the opposite of this.  When I'm stuck in one of these groups who are reinforcing each other's prejudices and beliefs, I usually take an opposite side or at the very least start arguing with some of what they're saying.  I probably sound more liberal after I've spent an hour with some of my more conservative friends and sound more conservative after I've spent an hour with some of my more liberal friends.

Am I just plain abnormal?  It's a bit more than playing devil's advocate.  It's more that...how to describe this...it's more that it bothers me when people get really sure that they're right.  I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about a law of physics or something, but about political beliefs, religion, anything like that, I just really take a dislike to people who are absolutely confident that they're right and the other side is absolutely wrong.  I really think people ought to know better than that, I guess.  The one thing I'm usually most confident about is that I still have a lot to learn, and some of what I will learn in the future will contradict what I believe. 

In one of my first philosophy class, a tiresome class (tiresome primarily because it met 5 mornings a week at 9 a.m. and I worked the night shift) on Greek philosophy, the professor--a very stern traditionalist type with rigorous standards--lectured us first on how we were to read.  I thought that was an interesting place to start.  The thing that has stuck with me the most of that lecture is what he called the Principle of Generosity.  The Principle of Generosity states simply that when you read a work of philosophy (this could apply to other subjects, too, of course, and I most especially like to apply it to works of sheer fantasy), you always must assume the author is right and the arguments are valid UNLESS AND UNTIL you can come up with arguments that defeat them.  When you read Aristotle's Physics, this is somewhat less challenging, if you know anything about modern physics, than it is when you read his Nicomachean Ethics.  (On the other hand, and this is sad, Mill's Utilitarianism, on which much of America's public ethics is based, is so full of fucking holes that it's pretty easy to argue against.  It's much easier to argue against than to defend, I think.) 

If you take this seriously, and I did mostly because it fit with my already held belief that listening is the fundamental ethical act and reading can be conceived as a mode of listening, this puts a rather different spin on your reading.  Obviously, for one thing, it makes you a much stronger thinker because when you read something you know must be wrong, you have to find valid arguments rather than just flat dismissing it.  It makes you a better listener, too, if you learn to listen to people this way because no longer can you be sitting there formulating your rebuttal before they're even finished speaking--you have to listen to the whole thing first.  And if you ask yourself, as part of the process, "Well, what if this were true?" you start to see the faults and cracks in your own cherished beliefs.  You start to argue with yourself.  You start to realize that a lot of what you believe(d) is indefensible, really, nothing more than potty old beliefs.  Ultimately, I think, you start to develop a confidence that is based not on a certainty that you're always right but on a certainty that you've really thought about what you're saying, that you're as right as you can be given what you know, can defend your position, but also have the strength of character to admit when you've been wrong.

And so when I'm in the room (or on a discussion board) with a bunch of people who are reinforcing each other's beliefs and patting each other on the back for how very smart and moral they are, I want to verbally slap them because so much of what they end up saying is indefensible (in logical terms, especially), and really they have no defense prepared or even considered because they take it as given that all highminded people think the way they do and everyone else is either stupid or uninformed or a bigot or whatever.  I have to say that I really hate this kind of self-righteousness, and, yes, I hate it the way a nonsmoker who secretly wants to smoke hates smoking, if you know what I mean.  Because, yeah, I get that self-righteous quality sometimes, less now (I think) than I used to.  But admitting you have a problem is the first step to correcting it.

That's why, as I've said, I argue more with liberals than with conservatives--it's the amount of exposure.  Well, more than that:  Liberals are supposed to the open-minded ones, so when I find them being closed-minded and even bigoted, it vexes me more than when conservatives do it, because, hey, conservatives don't really claim open-mindedness for themselves.

The more I read The Big Sort, the more convinced I become that I really need to stop interacting with the public and just stay on my property muttering to myself because I'm really a freak. 

Goddammit, people.  I'm sick of this.  Right now my actual biggest fear about the election is that afterwards Jon Stewart isn't going to be funny anymore.  I don't know if any of you ever liked Dennis Miller or P.J. O'Rourke, but I think something is going to happen to Jon Stewart that happened to them.  It's funny when you make fun of everyone more or less equally.  It's not as funny when you get bitter and pick a side and start focusing your bitter jokes only on the side you dislike.  This will be a sad thing, because I really enjoy The Daily Show.  But Stewart's starting to lose his grip a little.  This election cycle is clearly making him angry; Palin clearly makes him angry.  The fact that his rage leans one way more than the other is starting to show.  Don't get me wrong; I agree with a lot of what he says about McCain, but really?  Really, the best you can do with Obama's performance in the debate is that quoting all those numbers is boring? 

He said the other night, and I forget who the guest was, that he doesn't see what's so great about small towns versus New York, since New York is just like a bunch of small towns, all stacked up on top of each other.  I'm not going to say that small towns are "better" than big cities, but he can't literally mean that they're the same.  Right, Jon?  Because if they were the same, then you could live in one just as easily as the other and the issues in Manhattan would be precisely the same as the issues in Idaho, but neither of those things is true, is it?  People usually have a clear idea about whether they are city people or country people.  I love cities; they're fantastic, but I don't like living in them, and I do not want to raise a kid in one.  I'm not passing judgment on people who do raise their kids in cities, because all it means is that they've decided that different things are important for their kids.  I remember when my son was about a year old, we took him to Seattle, and it was an unholy nightmare.  I love Seattle from the very bottom of my heart, but we had to restrain my son at all times because of the traffic and the bikes and the strangers and the unknown dogs.  Life there would have meant life on a leash for him.  Some people think the cultural activities and access to things like airports are worth that trade; I don't.  So, they live in cities, and I don't, and it's OK that we're different.  It's funny to me that city people think "diversity" means something completely different from what I think it means.  To me, the important kind of diversity is not based on skin color or sexual orientation; it's based on values and beliefs.  I think we need people with different kinds of intelligence, all kinds, and talents and values and beliefs, and I think that we all need to learn to respect each other's differences (notice I did not say tolerate; tolerance is for pussies--respect is more difficult).

Then he had Sarah Vowell on and she said something like, "If the Eastern Seaboard was American enough for al Qaeda then it's American enough."  True.  Did someone say that the Eastern Seaboard wasn't American?  Some Republican operative?  And did anyone take that seriously?  Because, listen, Sarah and Jon:  I realize that we all believe now that Afghanistan and Iraq were huge, pointless wastes of life and time and money, but the soldiers who went off to war because they were told that this was defending their nation mostly come from the red states, from the South and West, and I have not ever heard a soldier complain that defending New York was not what they had signed up for.  I'm sure all the New Yorkers are like, "Well, they're not defending us.  Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11."  True.  But not everyone realized that at the time.  I believe the junior Senator from New York, in fact, voted to invade Iraq.  Am I wrong?  Anyway, fuck off, we know you're America.  Damn, we wouldn't have Martin Scorsese if not for you people, and we're glad to have him.

On the other hand, I'm trying really hard to remember a time when the Smithsonian published an essay that was more full of self-congratulatory twaddle than Joan Acocella's essay (in maybe April or so of this year...hang on...let me Google...found it) about why New Yorkers are smarter than the rest of the nation.  This is, to my knowledge, an otherwise respectable magazine, so jeez, it must be true that New Yorkers really are smarter than us rednecks out here.  Jesus.  If I wrote a piece for a major, essentially nonpartisan magazine about why rural people are smarter than New Yorkers, and I am pretty sure I could make an argument at least as convincing as hers, you think they'd publish it?  Right.

But then, THEN!  Tonight I found this delicious document.  I especially love how he uses a picture of a Code Pink demonstrator at the top, because Code Pink is not an extreme fringe, not at all.  This thing is sure to build the trust of rural, working-class people--just sure to!  I'm going to take a few of the points and respond to them:

I think Karl Marx had some valuable insights into capitalist economies!  He did.  Unfortunately, because of that whole vanguard thing and state socialism, so far every Marxist government has been extremely oppressive and has simultaneously sucked at economic issues.  Adam Smith had some valuable insights into capitalist economies, too, although some of his most valuable are routinely ignored now.

I think Mormons are kooks!  No comment, I guess.  I don't know what to say about pundits who think that comments like this should enter the national dialogue.  I mean, gee, what if we replaced "Mormons" with "gays" or something?  Yeah, it's only OK if it's a religious minority that is mostly white, I know.  Because religion and whiteness have become the fucking cardinal sins. 

The Second Amendment does too allow government to ban handguns!  Well, unfortunately, the Second Amendment does not say that, and the Court has disagreed with you.  It is possible to make an argument that had the people who wrote the Second Amendment been able to see what our country is like now, that they would have made other provisions for regulation of guns.  I'm sorry--this one particularly irritates me because a) the problem with handguns is almost exclusively urban, b) this is part of the Constitution, equivalent in status to freedom of speech and religion and all of that, and c) Democrats bitch constantly, and rightly so, about how certain elements on the right want to enforce conformity to a specific standard of morality, and well, so do Democrats, at least on this issue.  And by the way, I don't own handguns and I don't use them or really want them in our house, especially not with a little kid in the house.  If you take away the initial dependent clause of the Second Amendment, it says pretty clearly that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."  Infringed?  I think "banning" constitutes infringement, don't you? 

Promiscuity between consenting adults is good exercise!  And also a good way to have unintended pregnancies and to pass around STDs.  Hey, I don't have a problem with that.

Saving the boulder darter was worth a few thousand jobs!  Well, probably not to the people who lost the jobs.  I'd like to make a few points about this.  The first thing is that the US Fish and Wildlife Service and state Fish and Wildlife services receives a very large portion of its funds from hunters and fishers, two groups that liberals tend to dislike (well, hunters get most of the ire; for some reason people don't see fishing as "killing" or something).  In other words, it is probably not big-city liberal tax dollars that paid for that shit; much of the funding came from the same rural rednecks y'all hate so much.  Probably some of the funding came from the same people who lost their jobs because of it (if any--I can't verify that anyone lost their jobs over this particular fish, but that's what Slate says).  Also, most of the actual research and work was done by the same types of people.  But the main thing about this kind of argument is that in rural areas, the loss of a few thousand jobs can mean the death of an entire region, because those few thousand jobs support a few thousand families who in turn support a whole bunch of businesses large and small.  It's fine to be all gleeful about the death of small-town America, but it brings very real and very serious economic consequences when there are no other jobs available.  I wonder if liberals would be so glib about the loss of jobs in an area of urban poor; from what I've read, I'd have to say that they would not.  Or, really, how would a New York Democrat respond if I was flip and joyful about all those Wall Street brokers losing their jobs? 

If Israel isn't out of the occupied territories in six months, we'll cut off all aid.  I doubt you can find a Democrat running for any political office who would even take this seriously.  I mean, I would personally be OK with cutting off all aid to Israel right now, but this isn't really a Republican thing.  The love for Israel is bipartisan and apparently total.

Higher gas prices are good because they make everybody bike and take public transit like they should!  Ah, yes, I know a lot of people who already believe this.  And I believe it, too--for city dwellers.  The simple fact is that people in rural America do not have access to public transit and frequently cannot reasonably bike the distances they have to travel.  It is not economically feasible to bring mass transit to most of rural America, except possibly bringing back Amtrak between major towns.  I have to drive 45 miles to get groceries; you want that I should do that on bicycle?  Would you?  Of course, we don't have to live out here, I guess, but this is where we can afford a house and anyway someone has to live out here to do the types of work that can't be done in urban areas.  So, the upshot is that high gas prices hit rural drivers who have little or no choice about how much they drive (and also, overall, have lower incomes already than urbanites) very hard.  I can understand that Democrats don't give a shit about that, but it doesn't reassure me in their ability to govern the entire nation that includes rural people as well as their beloved mass-transit-riders.

America's official languages should be English and Spanish!  This is more or less already the case, isn't it?  In every state I've lived in, official documents are available in both languages, and translators are available for free for Spanish-speakers.  I don't have a problem with this, although I don't really see what would be gained by making it official.  I don't see why this deserves an exclamation point. 

Judges should legislate from the bench if they want to. Conservatives do it, so why not liberals?  *sigh*  Do you not understand the Constitution, in theory or in practice?  For one thing, judges are not lawmakers; that is nowhere in their job description.  They are interpreters of existing law.  Period.  For another thing, just because "conservatives do it" doesn't mean it's then OK for liberals, too?  Ever hear that thing about two wrongs not making a right?  Also, the Founders specifically kept the judiciary and the legislative branches of government (and the executive) separate but equal because there are supposed to be these checks and balances.  This means that, in theory though not always in practice, lawmakers make laws and the judiciary judges whether they are coherent with pre-existing laws, namely (in the case of the Supreme Court) the Constitution.  The reason we have this system is to prevent wild swings between extremes; when the Democrats controlled all three branches, for example, we would have legislation that violates pre-existing law in the form of the Second Amendment, and then when the Republicans regained control of the three branches, we would have violations of previously existing laws regarding things like "due process."  If you're going to bitch mightily when lawmakers blatantly disregard court decisions and keep making laws they know will be found to be unconstitutional, then it is somewhat absurd to argue that the real problem is that the courts don't just go ahead and do the same thing the legislators do.  Bloody hell.  This is pissing me off.  Judges should not legislate from the bench, no matter which side they're on.  They are there to interpret the Constitution (or other laws) as best they can.  This is one of the things I most respected about Sandra Day O'Connor; she was appointed as a conservative, but she didn't legislate as a conservative.  She judged as a Constitutional scholar. 

What's so great about the Judeo-Christian tradition?  Haha.  And Democrats wonder why people accuse them of just having an anti-Western prejudice.  It's not that it's so great; it's that it's what we've got.  You can ignore it and deny it and rail against it, but it's still the tradition we've got.  I prefer to take the approach that it's worth being knowledgeable about because it forms the underlying and usually unconscious frame of reference for very much of American life.  Sorry.  It isn't better than other religious or mythological traditions, but it has more to do with the development of our culture.  The Jewish tradition in particular has a great deal to do with our values and belief in charity and compassion.  Is that really something you want to throw overboard just because you dislike religion?  This is a problem with "progressives" and "liberals"--so often they seem to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  (For mcco's sake I will note that one of the problems with conservatives is that they seem to want nothing to change, ever, which is ludicrous, especially because they often don't seem to mind keeping the bad parts of traditions along with the good.  Fair enough?)

Big-city values are better than small-town values!  And, again, you have to wonder why small town people don't vote for assholes like this.  OK, so what are "small town values?"  Some Republicans have pandered to the people using these terms, but what are they supposed to be?  I don't really know.  I mean, as I've pointed out before, nobody in small towns considers it their business if you keep chickens or hang your clothes out to dry so long as you do it on your land.  So, there's that.  Most of the small-town people I know believe that if you're capable of working, then you ought to be working, and that applies even to kids.  I suppose there is a greater tendency to be religious out here, but I haven't noticed any pressure on those who aren't (I only ever went to church when I was in Arkansas, and that was mostly because there was nothing else to do--nobody in the small towns I've lived in in New Mexico, Texas, Idaho, or Alaska has ever asked me about it or bugged me about it).  I think in general small towns, at least in the West, have a libertarian sensibility.  Are those the things that are meant by "small town values?"  If they are, then what's so bad about them?  And what are "big city values?"  And what's so great about them?  If I have a hard time generalizing about small town values, then how much harder is it likely to be to generalize about "big city values?" 

We're going to need affirmative action for a long time.  I don't know if I have the energy to go into this one in depth, but I disagree.  At the very least, I disagree with basing affirmative action on skin color and gender; if we're going to use the government to promote equality of outcome, then at the very least, it should be gauged on a more diverse set of factors, such as socioeconomic status.  I realize that Democrats don't give two shits about poor white people and certainly not poor white people who are also conservative, and so it is anathema to think that a poor white might get a leg up out of poverty via affirmative action, but you can't be serious about social justice and fighting poverty and ignoring the problem of poor whites, many of whom are rural and face similar problems to urban poor who are often minorities (i.e., lack of access to education, lack of access to jobs, lack of means by which to effect lasting change in their lives, etc.).  Also, I find some of Clarence Thomas's arguments on the subject compelling, and believe me, I really never thought I would say something positive about Clarence Thomas.  Damn.

We're undertaxed. Look at Europe!  I'm kind of tired of looking at Europe.  If the Europeans want the tax structures they have and the government they have, that's fine for them.  That doesn't mean I have to want it.

Many welfare moms kicked off the rolls by the 1986 welfare-reform bill are worse off in their crappy jobs!  I don't really remember what the 1986 bill entailed, but the same thing can be said of President Clinton's 1996 bill.  Of course, some of them are also better off, but it's true that many of them are worse off.  This isn't necessarily a good argument for welfare as it was, though.  I see it more as an argument that America has ceased to do what it was once great at and that was making sure that there were good jobs available even for undereducated people.  Democrats and Republicans alike have supported the measures that have brought us here. 

Broad availability of gay marriage: good. Broad availability of gay divorce: better!  Uh, fine on the first part, but why the second part?  Why the enthusiasm for divorce?  What good, exactly, does divorce do for society or even for most individuals?  I know a lot of people believe before a divorce that they will be happier once divorced, but in my experience, this does not always pan out.  A lot of these people are merely suffering from "grass is greener" syndrome.  It's extremely weird to me that divorce as a general thing is "better" than marriage.  Freaks.

You want to know why George W. Bush was a lousy president? Because he's stupid!  Huh.  I know a lot of uneducated rednecks who could articulate why he has been such a lousy president much better than this.  But it's so much easier if he's just "stupid!" 

The problem with public schools is private schools!  This doesn't even really make any sense.  There are a lot of problems with public schools.  I personally oppose public schools on a theoretical level because I think they are a tool of social indoctrination rather than of actual education, and that goes for all public schools.  Actually, early educators like Dewey were quite clear about that being their goal, but that seems to have been forgotten now.  But anyway, if you believe in public education, the problem you need to deal with isn't private schools.  The problems are:  the ways teachers are "educated" and I use that term very loosely because "education" degrees are a fucking joke, worse than a joke because then we have a bunch of semi-literates teaching our children; the way public schools are funded which guarantees inequality; the emphasis on things like "self-esteem" and "computer and/or media literacy" in lieu of critical thinking and, well, actual literacy; the "experts" who keep passing off total crap like "new math"; the way most schools necessarily teach to the lowest common denominator, or at the very least to the middle, and very bright students get bored and don't live up to their abilities because they have no real way to do so; text messaging during class and parents who won't allow teachers and administrators to take cell phones away from students, but anyway if students are primarily in school to be taught "self-esteem" and how to be a good little worker bee and also to provide a babysitting service for the parents, then I guess they can keep the damn text messaging up because they don't really need to pay attention anyway.  Fie on public education.

Meh.  If I thought that Obama believed most of that shit, I would have VERY serious concerns about his fitness for the presidency.  Oh, right, he's only supposed to respond to the needs and concerns of urban folks.  Fuck the rest of us, right?  Right!  Hey, let's hear it for divorce!  Woo!  Go Europe!  Yay, social indoctrination!  Hurrah for public transportation!  I'm so jazzed to go vote for this program now.  This is going to be sooooo cool.

Sorry for the bitter sarcasm at the end.  I am very tired of this.  For the record, let me unequivocally state that while I do not wish to live in a big city, I don't have an actual problem with big cities or city dwellers.  There were also a lot of points in that essay that I agreed with, but bloody hell.  I'm so sick of all of this.

Let us hear the weirdest song from your music library.
Submitted by Hydranokaori.

Isn't that a little subjective?  What makes a song "weird"?  If I think a song is weird, that doesn't necessarily mean you think it's weird, does it?  And things that sounded weird 10 years ago don't necessarily sound unusual today.  Not to mention that some songs that are weird don't sound as weird as they actually are (for example, there's a Frank Black song--I think it's "Parry the Wind, High, Low" but I could be wrong) where in one segment he has the drummer playing in one time signature and the guitar in a different one.  I don't give it any thought, but if you really stop and think about it while you're listening, it does sound distinctly odd.  I think the drums are in 3/4 and the guitars are in 4/4...or maybe one of them is in the always-baffling 5/4.  I can't remember.  The point is, it's a weird thing to do to a song).

Maybe I don't have any weird songs in my collection.  Maybe that's the problem.  Maybe the task of finding a weird song is making me self-conscious.  Am I weird enough?  If my musical tastes are found to be unweird, will people still like me?  Is even mentioning Frank Black a sign of my age and secretly all the kids are laughing at me?  The burden of trying to be weird.

I have Camper van Beethoven singing about the day that Lassie went to the moon.  I have Los Amigos Invisibles singing a discofunk song about having a pimple on your nose.  I have a song called "Cowpunk" that apparently some people find odd and even off-putting.  I have the Reverend Horton Heat exhorting you to eat a thing that goes moo.  I have "Parry the Wind" for sure.  I have a song about mighty dwarves flying in the sky and fighting in the night.  I have an entire CD of solo accordion (hey, the accordion don't need no reason).  I have much music by famed weirdos Danny Barnes and Timothy Young.  The first time I saw Tim Young play live he was wearing sweat pants with cowboy boots and before the show he was standing by the bar muttering to himself.  Danny Barnes was the sort of lead guy in a kind of bluegrass band that consists primarily of Danny on banjo and other instruments plus Mark Rubin on tuba and acoustic badass bass and then a fiddler, which is probably weird, and then they did that Butthole Surfers song about Pee-Pee the sailor. 

How about "Auto Modown?"  Weird?  Or normal? 

Does any of that strike you as "weird"?  I am pretty sure it will strike many of you as "unlistenable."  There seems to be a low tolerance amongst the general public for banjo, fiddle, and nasal vocals.  Well, anyhow.

Oh, right.  I also have a prized copy of Crispin Glover singing about automanipulation.  I consider that entire album that he did to be very weird, but I like it.  I was trying to upload it for your edification, but Vox has declined to accept it.  I'm guessing that once Vox got a whiff of the opening line ("Women are sweet and girls are honey, but beat your meat and save your money") it decided this was not something it wanted any part of.  Maybe I should have tried the classic "Clowny Clown Clown" instead (from the same CD), but I'm tired now and going to bed, because yes, dammit, I am old. 

I spent the entire time I was trying to upload that song listening to Jane's Addiction and rifling through a portion of my CD collection that is sitting on the floor in the bedroom gathering dust.  It's an interesting monument, really.  I think I'm going to get rid of most of them.  I mean, I can't really even remember when the last time I listened to Melt Banana was...ages ago.  That's one of the advantages of moving overseas and putting everything you own into storage; if you lived without it for 3 years in Japan, then you can probably live without it now.  Anyone want a Melt Banana CD?

We've been fishing a lot.  Or, rather, my menfolk fish while I gather berries and flowers.  It's very...1850s.  But, by Christ, we eat so well.  So very well.

My husband found some spot full of brook trout who are eager to jump right up onto our dinner plates.  Tonight we smoked 6 of them, and ...oh.  Oooooh.  Smoked trout.  We smoked with applewood, so the trout now taste remarkably like good bacon.  While the boys were fishing, I picked gooseberries and made muffins with some of them and froze some more.  There are few things that make winter palatable like warm berry muffins in the morning.

I also pick wildflowers and such to make herbal teas with.  I have already laid in enough goldenrod to suffice for the winter, I think.  I probably already have enough chamomile (after I had already planted mine I found that some grows wild around here, too), but can you ever really have enough chamomile tea?  I have yarrow for fevers, and next time we go out I'll get mullein, said to be good for lung congestion.  Not to mention the leaves of wild raspberries which, when dried, make a remarkably tasty tea that is apparently good for feminine complaints, if you get my drift. 

And, of course, we've been making jam and pickles and whatnot, too.  My best thing so far this year--and it is in serious contention for the best jam I've ever made--is a blackberry-mint jam.  I got the idea to make it from a Gourmet (yes, I subscribe) recipe by Dan Barber.  He has these minted blackberries on top of cheesecake.  I am not interested in the cheesecake (it is possible that his is a good cheesecake, but by and large I find most cheesecakes to be terribly overrated.  Which I realize puts me in a distinct minority.  When I do want/make cheesecake, I usually make them with some kind of combination of ricotta and goat cheeses rather than cream cheese.  I know, I know).  Anyway, the minted blackberry topping intrigued me, and as it happens I have quite a lot of apple mint.  So I tried his recipe, sans cheesecake, and was delighted to find that the amount of mint he uses is a sprightly underscore to the flavor of the blackberries.  Blackberries and marionberries are in season here now, so I picked up a flat (or two) and decided to forego (well, not entirely) my erstwhile favorite blackberry jam (a blackberry-lemon jam that I've made every year since my first year of jam-making).  And I made blackberry-marionberry-mint jam that also has lemon zest. 

This shit packs a punch.  The lemon and mint work in concert; neither overwhelms the flavor of the berries or each other.  It's like when Emmylou Harris sings backup vocals--you always know she's there, and you always know it's her, but she's still only in the background, harmonizing and blending seamlessly in with the lead singer.  This jam made me do little jigs of joy around my kitchen.  My sweltering kitchen.

Tomorrow, since I have half a case of peaches and half a case of apricots melting in said kitchen, I have to make a peach-apricot jam and an apricot butter (like apple butter...only apricots).  I think I will still have enough apricots left to make an apricot chutney, too, but I think I might blow that off and make apricot upside-down cake instead.  Wooooo--summertime!

The big news around here lately is that we have started ourselves a farmer's market.  I sell my excess Costata Romanesca zucchini now and get weird looks from the old men who don't understand why I don't just grow the normal kinds of zucchini.  These same old men (and a lot of other people besides) are big fans of my jams and pickles, though.  This one guy comes now and just scoops up whatever pickles I have on the table and buys them all, and word has already got around town (and back to me) that my dilly beans are some kind of awesome.  It's pretty cool.  Right now we still don't have a lot of vendors, but more of them are promising to start showing up.  There is widespread enthusiasm and support for this, although I really don't think any person shopping there would ever use a word like "locavore."  It feels sort of strange to think that, instead of just sitting in front of my computer being grumpy, I'm actually doing something to make a lasting positive change in the community.  Kind of gives ya the heebie-jeebies.

Oh, and I'm entering my chili in the county fair chili cook-off this Friday.  The public gets to the be the judges, though, and people here hate spicy food, so I don't know how good my chances are. 

Gah, between the community activities and the berry-picking and gardening and canning and freezing and smoking, I'm bushed.  I really need to go to bed.  Big day with stone fruits tomorrow...mmmmm...stone fruits....zzzzzzzz.

I need to get a few things off my chest, without going into whole big long spiels about any of them.

1.  I'm sick of hearing people under the guise of environmentalism claim that no one "needs" to have children or "needs" to have more than one or two children.  There are a lot of things wrong with this, but the most glaring is that we do and own a lot of shit that we don't "need."  Ninety percent of people who own and use a cell phone have no actual need for it, yet they expend great deals of energy charging them and replacing them when new, cooler models come out.  We don't "need" golf courses, yet we expend great amounts of water and energy maintaining them, including in the Sonoran desert.  We don't "need" clothes dryers, or at least most of us do not.  We don't "need" makeup or beauty salons or 10 pairs of shoes.  We have all those things, none of them contribute measurably to the health and well-being of society, yet we have them and more.  So, fuck off about whether or not we "need" children, eh.

2.  Bourdain, you fucker.  I used to like you, but your hypocritical anti-hunting stance is getting to be too much.  On the one hand, you eat meat, which means you have no principled anti-killing belief.  You also regularly chide vegetarians, vegans, raw foodies, and other people for being ungracious and elitist as regards other cultures and their culinary heritages.  I believe you gave it to Woody Harrelson pretty good for refusing a meal in Thailand, right?  So, you support the killing of animals for food and respect for cultural heritage as it appears at the dinner table.  Great.  But then you think hunting is immoral?  Um.  It's OK to depend on the death of animals for sustenance, as long as the blood is literally on someone else's hands, is that it?  Is hunting acceptable to you when it's done by the Bushmen of the Kalahari but not when it's done by an American, because you have some notion that the Bushmen need to hunt but Americans don't, since we can get nice, sanitized and irradiated, shrink-wrapped shit at the grocery store 24/7?  Is that your thinking?  You don't think that maybe for some Americans, the inhumanely raised, antibiotic laced freakshow meat that we could get at the supermarket is unacceptable?  You don't think maybe hunting is part of the cultural heritage of some Americans (distantly, it is the cultural heritage of nearly every people on earth; more distantly, it is everyone's cultural heritage, but for some of us, the ties to that culture still exist, yes, even in fucking America) and therefore is as worthy of respect as Thai food?  What the fuck are you thinking?  I can understand when vegans and vegetarians are anti-hunting because, although I disagree with them, they have a consistent and principled stand against the use of animals for food.  But not this, Bourdain.  No, this I cannot abide.

3.  Dude, no.  For one thing, this whole "Europeans are so much more evolved than Americans are..." shit is getting old.  YOU think Europeans are "more evolved" because whatever it is that they do is what you want to do, but that does not provide anything substantial.  So, Europeans are more tolerant of adultery?  Why is that morally superior to not tolerating adultery?  I think if you really took a hard look at some of what you're talking about, you would find that actually a lot of women in cultures that "tolerate" cheating are not that happy about it; they just tolerate it, no more.  I think you would also find that more Americans tolerate it than you currently think. 

Also, just because you have a poorly controlled desire to sleep around on your wife, that does not itself invalidate the principles of monogamous marriage.  That men, overall, have a more polyamorous libido than women has become a sort of stock reason why men should be forgiven their inability or unwillingness to remain faithful.  However, most men do, in fact, remain faithful, as do most women.  Most marriages do not end in divorce, and most married people would prefer to maintain their marriage even at the cost of unfettered sex.  In other words, while there may well be problems with monogamy and marriage, in this case, the problem is YOU, not the system.

4.  I have also become very tired of people talking about marriage, either hetero or homo, as being primarily about "love."  Love is nice, of course.  Who doesn't like love?  But the government doesn't give you tax breaks because you're in love.  The reason we sanction marriage--not just America, but human societies in general, across time and space, although certainly the forms marriage takes are not uniform across cultures and history--has nothing to do with being in love.  The way we think about the love aspect of marriage is new-ish and culturally bound.  The reasons human societies have usually sanctioned some type of marriage (and not others) is because of the good those relationships are thought to bring to society.  Marriage exists because more than one person sharing a single household conserves resources.  It exists because a stable two- or multiple-parent home is safer, more economically secure and viable, and more emotionally secure for the raising of children.  It exists because of the very human emotion of jealousy.  It is notable in the piece mentioned in #3, when his wife finally says, "OK, we'll have an open marriage.  And I will be spending the night elsewhere on Wednesday," he's all "nooooo!."  (The general distaste for adultery and polyamory also probably stems from the fact that, let's face it, even men who think they are only after casual sex sometimes end up getting emotionally attached to the sex partner, and those emotions can destabilize the marriage and home.)  Listen, it's fine, it's great, it's wonderful that you love your spouse, but if you don't couple with a sense of duty and commitment, it's not worth much.  We sanction marriage as a matter of public policy because of the duty and commitment part.  This is why I think liberals' standard arguments about gay marriage are stupid and less than compelling.  Conservatives are not won over by the appeal to love.  On the other hand, there is no compelling evidence that TEH GAYZ are unsuitable as parents or more likely to dissolve their marriages than heterosexuals (the evidence currently suggests that gay marriages are more likely to last than straight ones, but my suspicion is that this is because of the small sample pool; I am going to guess that once gay marriage is legal in all 54 states and gays start marrying at similar rates as heterosexuals and start making the fool mistakes heteros make by marrying at 19 or whatever, the divorce rates will be similar).  Since homosexual marriage can provide a stable and secure home for children, can conserve resources by joining two people under one roof, and so forth, I see no compelling reason to limit it.  I just want to make it clear to homos and heteros alike:  No one cares about the love part.  That's between you and the spouse, and not really a matter for the government to intervene in.

5.  Yes, 54 states.  I am ready for Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the Virgin Islands to become states.  I don't understand the current arrangement.  It vexes me.  So, make them states.

6.  The humidity in our house was 2% today.  That's not a typo.  I am shriveling up like a raising as I write this.  What the fucking fuck, weather?  Weather:  You are on notice.

7.  John--I would gladly trade one of my unnecessary organs to have had the pleasure of speaking with you today.  Would you prefer a spleen or an appendix?  As I understand you no longer have an appendix of your own, perhaps the appendix?  Goddamn.  I am so sorry I missed your call.

That is all.  Thanks for listening.  Good night.

Sorry, people.  I haven't had much to say lately.  I'm exhausted (new job, garden, super crap weather, son's been sick, etc.)  I used to be able to come online and get myself worked up about something and spout off--you know, back in the good old days of Gin and roses.  But I can't even do that anymore.  If there is indeed nothing new under the sun, then there is also no new illogic, no new stupidity, no new crap.  So it just doesn't bother me anymore.  I guess it does on some level, but not enough to make me want to tear open someone's jugular with my teeth, the way it used to. 

We did go to Texas over Memorial Day weekend, or at least the kid and I did (T stayed home and did manly things).  We went to Sea World and now our house has become a minor shrine to Shamu.  We spent time with the extended family.  For me, actually, the best part of the whole trip was watching my son totally hit it off with his cousins whom he hadn't seen in a couple of years.  He played basketball with Cousin Hunter, who is 14 and way too cool to be playing basketball with overexcited 3-year-olds.  He jumped on the trampoline with Cousin Conner--and that is nearly unbelievable considering Conner has fragile X syndrome and until recently had very limited social skills.  He cuddled with Cousin Lance who is also 14.  He let Uncle Pat take him to the potty, and yes this is a big deal, because he has a very well-defined potty ritual that he doesn't trust just anyone to execute properly (specifically, he is very concerned about the types of toilets, types of flushers, brands of soap, and whether or not the faucet and paper towels are automatic.  He likes Kohler and Crane toilets; he dislikes American Standard toilets because their flushes are too loud.  He likes when the flusher is present, not automatic, and shaped like a whale.  Seriously.  You can't just take him potty.  You have to remark on all these details.  It's odd).  Other than the extraordinary heat (I do so love it when the temperature and the humidity have the same numbers--90 and 90?  100 and 100?  How did I used to stand that shit?), it was a very good trip. 

I have to say, though, that I suffered without my T.  I have come to realize over the years that I need him.  His work schedule, as has probably been mentioned, is difficult, and we go for a couple of weeks with almost no family time, and by the end of that when he gets his 4 days off, I need the family time to bring me back to balance.  I get so out of whack without T around.  Anyway, it happened that we were in Texas and he was home during his 4 days off, so I never got that time with him to sort myself out, and I went off to Texas in a sour mood--a sour mood that existed mostly as a substrate.  That is to say, I had fun and was so glad to see my uncles and cousins, but at some deeper level, the mood never really improved.  Now T and I have made a pact that we're going to make better use of his limited days off so that I don't get so bent to start with.  Most of the married people I know are all about doing their own thing as individuals, getting their "me" time, getting time away from their spouses when they can.  We're not like that.  In our off time, we want to be together, we need to be together for what each of us gives to the other.  We're trying to get to a place, actually, where we'll both be working at home so that we'll be together even more.  It feels so strange to admit this, like we're the complete antimoderns.

Then again, I probably am the complete antimodern.  To hell with modernity.

I've also been thinking about Hegel.  And JS Mill a little.  It has always bugged me that Americans (and possibly people on other continents as well, but I'm not sure) get some kind of filter-down from philosophy (and lit theory to an extent) but don't actually know the source behind it and certainly don't understand it well enough to analyze and critique the ideas.  So, some half-assed version of Derrida-inspired postmodernism has filtered out into society and infected it like drug-resistant TB.  But much more insidious, to my mind, is the unquestioned Hegelian notion of progress.  Americans believe in progress.  It is a notion we have wholeheartedly bought into.  We tend to believe that the history of humanity is a progression toward something, a kind of ultimate, final humanity in which everything is (I guess) perfect.  Hegel posited the thesis-antithesis-synthesis paradigm, and while most people likely don't know what those three words mean, they mostly agree with the sentiment, and that is why anyone could take Francis Fukuyama seriously.  It has come to be--and Mill comes in here a bit--that a large segment of America thinks that any idea that is new and supported by a minority is a good idea and will constitute progress once accepted by everyone.  While I am sure hardly any Americans recognize the link between the American notion of progress and Hegel, I think that even fewer would want to know that one of the most important Hegelians is Karl Marx.  I keep asking people what they think is waiting at the end of history, the end of the rainbow, but the fact is that I reject the very idea of "progress."  I reject the idea that humanity is moving forward or even can move forward.  I was laughing at that QotD about how we can stop violence in the world, and while on some level Soup got it right when he suggested we could stop violence by just ceasing to be violent, on another level, humanity probably always will be violent.  We're animals.  That's what it comes down to.  We're animals, and animals are brutal.  I don't think that we can or should change that very fundamental fact of nature.  We don't make progress.  We go from one bad idea to another, not that anyone notices anymore now that everyone's on psychotropics of one kind or another.  We have no way at all to measure this "progress," except for money, and we take it for granted (despite all contrary evidence) that getting every people in the world on a monetary economy and getting them all into public education will be significant progress.  I guess then we can get them on Prozac, too, and the world will be supersweet.

So, I reject the idea of progress and I see no evidence that we are, as a species, making progress.  What I do see is that in the striving and the fighting to find the end of the rainbow, we're making life measurably worse on a microlevel.  Cultures and languages are dying at such a pace that it's laughable to even argue that they're worth saving.  People refuse to associate with neighbors and even family members because they hold differing political views or practice different religions or non-religions.  People are offended and angry all the damn time, about everything, even sometimes about kids who have the gall to, say, cry in public.  How has the world become better?  What is this progress? 

But of course our historical memory is so short now that we have no real way to measure what progress would be.  My husband and I think we are probably going to homeschool our son.  Most people's instant reaction is to express their concern that he won't receive proper socialization.  OK.  First, as recently as 100 years ago, hardly any kids went to public schools, and they mostly learned social skills anyway.  We seem to have forgotten that public education as the great socializing force is a new invention.  Second, and this is a big issue for me, do kids really need to be socialized to kids their own age?  Isn't the goal of education and child-rearing to teach them how to act like and someday become grown-ups?  Isn't the idea that someday they're supposed to not bicker and hit and throw sand and interrupt conversations but act the way grown-ups once acted?  How do they learn that from being around kids all day?  I'm at a loss as to how this works, even theoretically, because kids are going to mimic the behavior they see the most, and if that is childish behavior, they're going to act more childish and less mature.  I think back to when my grandma was a teenager and had her first kid when she was 15, and she was married then and for all intents and purposes, she was a grown-up.  She learned her social skills primarily from working with various generations together on farms; there were kids around, of course, but they were expected to be learning how to act like adults, and I'd say she did.  How does public school accomplish this?  I can't see, honestly, that it does.  I want my son to get a good education, one that challenges him and keeps him interested and on his toes, and I want him to learn how to be an adult.  And, really?  I'm supposed to think that somehow being around kids all day in a group where the focus is on the average is going to accomplish either of those goals?  Christ. 

I wonder if humans will ever get past the idea that we can do better than nature can and has for these millions of years.  We keep thinking that, whatever our knowledge of human and animal evolution teaches us, we can ignore that and do it the opposite way and it will be so much better.  If you're on the right, then you probably think big business can figure out better ways to subvert and control nature; if you're on the left, you think some combination of science and the government can.  This hubris is a kind of sickness, but that's alright because I'm sure Pfizer is working on a drug for it. 

Also, I want to say a few words about Libertarians because Colbert had Bob Barr on tonight.  I'm a libertarian (small 'l'--I'm not a party joiner), and we get a lot of flack for wanting to do away with the FDA or whatever and people are all, "But that's to protect our safety!"  To me, this is looking at the issue from the wrong starting point.  Why do we need the FDA to protect us?  Because we've allowed our lives to become ruled by centralized, unknowable corporations.  If we begin from a place where such centralization and lack of local control is a given, then the argument that we need bureaucracies like the FDA is persuasive.  But if we begin from a point where we get back to local control over education, land use, food sources and so forth, then we don't need big federal bureaucracies.  If you know the farmer who raised your food and slaughtered your chickens, do you really need a government inspector coming in to tell you it's safe?  Just go check out the operation, talk to people who eat the food from that farm, and figure it out for yourself. 

I'm always trying to teach my son that for every decision you make, whether it was the right one or the wrong one, you have to take responsibility for it.  You have to gather the information to make a decision, and then you make it, and you take what consequences come.  At his age, his decisions are mostly simple:  We can play for 10 more minutes, but then we won't have time to go to the library.  If you want to go to the library, we have to go now.  What do you want to do?  But he considers the information, and he has to live with the consequences, and that's what we want to teach him.  What we do not want to teach him is to just leave everything up to some faceless committee in Iowa and surely everything will be alright. 

Feh.  I hereby withdraw from society.  Does that mean I have to give back the economic stimulus check?

I just wrote several paragraphs flaying some idiotic bitch that I randomly saw on TV today, but then I lost interest.  Yes, she was an idiot.  She was an idiot of a variety that I have met very commonly, namely the idiot who thinks that having friends who are gay and/or Hispanic wins her the Tolerance Merit Badge, despite the fact that said friends grew up in similar conditions, were similarly educated, read the same books, and hold entirely the same political opinions as she does.  Because diversity is all about the skin color or sexual orientation.  Right.  Idiot. 

But then, as I said, I just lost interest.  Idiots are a dime a dozen.  She was certainly not an exceptional idiot--half the college students in Missoula think exactly the same way (and the other half are too drunk to notice such a subtlety as someone's race).  So.  Let's pass her over for more interesting and non-idiotic topics.

Namely!  The asparagus!  It hath risen!  So, fuck you, Californian asparagus!  It's nothing against California or its asparagus, but I'm so excited that the asparagus I tediously planted and laboriously tended last year is coming up this year.  As yet, the stalks are barely peeking above ground, but we will actually be able to harvest and eat some of this year's crop.  Sweet mother Mary!

Oh, and the radicchio overwintered very nicely, and we harvested our first radicchio today!  Hurrah for fresh greens (or reds, as the case may be).  They are calling out to me for some bacon and cream, because nothing enhances healthful greens like a giant dose of heart attack.  Yum.

I don't know if I told you, but I developed an elaborate garden plan this year to milk as many nutrients out of our backyard as possible.  First, there are the cool-weather, spring things like peas and fava beans and spinach.  We basically turned our entire garden space over to these things with the understanding that they will be mostly kaput by the time we need to begin insertion of nightshades (tomato, pepper, eggplant).  In other words, we expect to have approximately one gazillion peas.  The first couple of weeks after planting, we had terrible weather with snow and lots of freezing, and the peas refused to sprout, and I had begun to despair that, as so often in the past, all my plans had come to nought.  But they sure the hell are sprouting now.  We have rows and rows of peas (only two rows of favas, because we do love favas, but last year they failed miserably, and we couldn't see giving a lot of space to something that failed so completely).  We have Alaska bush peas, Green Arrow, Blue Pod Capucijner, and god knows what else--name a variety of pea, and we likely have it sprouting out there.  Some will get frozen.  Some will get dried.  Many will be eaten right there in the garden.  Yum.

The spinach is going nuts!  The kale!  The daikon!  I am so pleased.  Despite the batty weather, things are going according to plan. 

We did also get some tomatoes this year that are supposed to have some cold hardiness.  Specifically, we have Beaverlodge, Oregon Spring, and Stupice tomatoes.  All of those do need protection from frost but should otherwise be OK in the cold.  I'm a little skeptical.  I learned to garden primarily in Arkansas, and the heat and humidity down there just make this a much different ballgame.  We did bite the bullet and go ahead and plant the Oregon Spring seedlings, though, and so far they look fine.  We're also putting in the potatoes.  Ack!  The potatoes!  What a fiasco!

See, my parents have recently purchased 5 acres where they are building a new house, and I had received permission to plant my potatoes on their land, so I ordered....ohhhh...about 27 pounds of seed potatoes.  That's actually 27 different varieties, one pound each.  I got them from Ronniger's, a source I highly recommend.  I have every color of potato known to man, I'm fairly sure, and I believe we have three different varieties of purple potato (my favorite!).  As it turns out, the water is a long, long way from being hooked up at my parents' new house (the city is dragging their feet--long story), so if I planted the potatoes there, I'd have no way to water them and so would have to just pray for rain everyday.  So, we planted them here.  It's going to be tight to get everything in this year.

I thought earlier that I should list all the varieties of veggies that we're growing to give you a sense of the scale of the enterprise here, but I realized that that was a bad idea.  We have more than 20 varieties of tomatoes alone.  Hell, we probably have more than 40 varieties of tomato, and then there's the peppers and the eggplant and the potatoes and the brassicas!  The brassicas! 

Perhaps I can give you a sense of the stupid overreaching of my plan by telling you we have two different kinds of sesame (kin, which is tan, and kuro, which is black).  Four kinds of scallions, in addition to the chives, shallots, leeks, and onions.  Three types of kale.  Two types of salsify.  Salsify, for chrissakes! 

Lord, I cannot wait.  It's all so delicious. 

OH!  OH!  I have to tell you about this new book I got.  Obviously, since I do the home canning, I am always on the lookout for good cookbooks for that activity.  Canning is not a subject that gets a lot of play in contemporary cookbooks, as you can imagine.  I suppose it is out of style, but it's really something you need a good cookbook for since it is really one of the most scientific and potentially hazardous of all kitchen tasks.  You can't half-ass it when you're dealing with pH and pressure--it's serious business.  Anyway, so I happened upon this book called Pickles to Relish.  It was written by a scientist/home canner who apparently is inhabited by a semi-fictitious alter ego known as "Jamlady."  And both of them are serious.  The first part is a rant about the failures of modern education, the failures of modern society, and a call for a return to the art and science of home pickling.  It gave me goosebumps.  I mean, she is preaching to the converted, but I was so pleased to know that someone (anyone!  even a questionably mentally ill woman!) else thinks this way.  I have no named alter ego, yet I have long felt crazy and isolated by my pickle-making.  It isn't just a hobby, dammit.  It's a way of life!  God, I love crazy pickle-making ladies.  Maybe later this summer I'll have another contest to give away some pickles. 

Also, later this summer, I'm going to start getting with some recipes and processing and storage information for all the vegetables. 

I read, a little while ago, a post from Jack Yan about the new Vogue cover featuring LeBron James and the sort of irritating (to me) Gisele Bundchen (umlaut purposefully omitted).  I have seen the cover in the supermarkets and stuff and thought it was, whatever, LeBron looks kind of hot, Gisele looks like Gisele, but whatever.

I never once thought of King Kong or the threat white women face from big, bad, burly black men.  Not once.  At least, not until I read Jack Yan's post.  And see, that is why I am a racist I guess, because I am completely oblivious to the racist stereotypes being perpetrated at my local supermarket.  The blogosphere is apparently alive! with all kinds of people being offended by the presentation of LeBron as scary and gorilla-like.  They have taken umbrage!  I had no idea until I read Jack Yan's post, and then I dismissed it as another case of people who have an ideology that they then go around seeking evidence for--as the Great Tony Mattina used to say, let the data drive the theory, not the other way around.  If you want to find evidence of racism, you'll certainly find it, but the actual data would suggest a much more complex picture--complex and nuanced like Obama's speech (a speech, by the way, that I thought was fucking excellent.  Obama, I will vote for you.  Unless you do something really stupid, like have sex with rabbits on camera with that blind guy from New York.)

Then, because my job is totally sucking tonight (grrrrr--pulmonary function tests suck ass!), I perused some of the links Jack provides and even read what my old friends at Jezebel had to say*.  And now I have to add this:

If you look at that picture of LeBron and the G-bund and see King Kong and a scary black man--maybe even a criminal!  get out the chastity belts!--that says way more about you than it does about the rest of us who just looked at it and thought, "oh, wow, rich, famous people on the cover of a magazine.  fancy that.  maybe i'll get some altoids..."

I'm not going to say I'm colorblind--I can't, since about a year after I moved to Montana (by far the whitest place I ever lived, since I divided my childhood between Hispanic-majority New Mexico and a black-majority part of Arkansas) I caught myself thinking, as I saw a black man walking down the street, "Ooh, black dude.  Damn, I'll bet he's conscious of that all the time living here.  Or maybe not.  Maybe all the white people just pretend they don't notice, like I'm pretending not to notice.  I'm way overthinking this.  He's just a dude, walking down the street.  But why is he carrying a squeegee?  Eh, what the hell?  Why not carry a squeegee?"

But, honestly, when I looked at that Vogue cover I didn't see a "black man" let alone a "scary black man" and certainly not a gorilla-like black man.  I saw LeBron James, with a basketball and a Brazilian (model).  No umbrage necessary. 

Also, offense is regularly taken at the fact that Vogue so rarely features anything but white (assuming we count the Latins as white.  Yeah, I said "the Latins.") on its covers...so...I'm not sure exactly what the offended multitudes want. 

Days like this, and especially since the speech, I really think we need Obama at this point.  We have got to start getting past this shit, people.  In general, certain segments of the population are getting way too offended all the time (I have no idea how you even live that way--what is it like to be offended all the time?  It must particularly suck since you do not, in fact, have a right not to be offended). 

Or should we just keep fighting over the actions of our ancestors?  Mine, before coming to America, were sitting around in Ireland wondering if they should try to hold out during the Great Potato Famine (fortunately, we're stout people) or get on a boat to come to the promised land to be...wage slaves and sharecroppers.  By the time they got here, slavery was near its end in this country (though wage slavery continues unabated), and anyway they were far too freakin poor to own anyone.  And the Osage ancestors were, you know, chilling on the res after walking the Trail of Tears and all that (but they weren't slaves, right?  so that makes it all OK.  except that some of them were slaves, and anyway, like 95% of them died).  So, those are my oppressive white ancestors*.  How about yours?

Also, why don't African-American people in America seem more concerned, as a whole, about slavery that is still going on in Africa?  You'd think there would be a sympathy thing.  Feh.  (moderately related side note:  The entire reason I cannot stomach Chris Rock is that I once saw him doing stand-up and he was saying that white people are always complaining about everything, "Oh, I'm lactose intolerant" but you don't see starving Africans complaining about being lactose intolerant because they're just happy to get milk.  This left me speechless.  I'm just a cracker, but even I know that most Africans are in fact lactose intolerant, and so if they are being given milk, they aren't complaining about lactose intolerance mainly because they're too sick to do so.  As Public Enemy once said, "Read a book or something.  Learn about yourself, learn your culture."  WORD.  But, hey, with a bit of luck, the people who are in charge of sending Africans relief packages are also crackers who know about the racial and geographic lines of lactose intolerance.  Hmm, but now I'm reading through this collection of quotes and finding him kind of awesome.  Maybe I gave up on him too soon.  He should have just gone with the peanut allergy instead of lactose intolerance.) 

But that's just me.  I am white, and so that per force makes me a racist in the irrefutable logic of the offended.

*But on one of their many sister sites, Guanabee, I found this interesting tidbit:  "There’s been a long tradition of a “fight for white,” meaning that various ethnic groups over the years have had to struggle for the chance to be seen as normal and neutral. Irish-Americans, for example, who are today almost synonymous with the concept of what it means to be white (fevered dancing without the use of hips or shoulders, the consumption of potatoes), were very much “the other” for a very, very long time in America. Jewish and Italian Americans were also not always considered white folks here in the old U.S. of A. " 

**I also have Quapaw Indian ancestry.  And no, you cannot tell by just looking at me.  I pretty much look like a potato-eatin honky.

I've had the Mormons* over a few times now--you know, the earnest young men in suits who come around trying to convert you, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, only Mormon instead.  T thought I should have shooed them off a long time ago, but I like having company.  They've been putting my lack of faith to the test, and it's been interesting.

No, no, I'm not converting, not at all, but it was interesting trying to explain to people who clearly have a lot of faith in God what it means to have none at all and how you could come to be like that (to be honest, I don't know how I came to be like this--I just am and always have been, though certainly living with an archaeologist and a physical anthropologist has not helped). 

Anyway, it got me to thinking about atheism.  I've been an atheist as long as I can remember, but for me it means exactly what it says--a lack of belief.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It has never meant to me that I'm absolutely dead certain that no god exists or has ever existed.  It does not profess some alternate belief.  It does not define me or anything about me.  It only means I don't believe in God or any other god (and, OK, it also means that when confronted by that heinous song, "Our God is an Awesome God" I am prompted, unlike Christians, to ponder whether any of the other gods implied by the phrasing are more awesome or at least equally awesome--the song does not rule out such a possibility, which I think would really piss the Old Testament God off a lot.  Ahem.)

The point is that I was always somewhat confounded by the accusations occasionally hurled by Christians that atheism is a religion, too.  But looking around at other atheists, including but by no means limited to the Atheist group on Vox, I can kind of see their point.

Atheists, let me ask you this:  Whence the fucking moral superiority?  I understand you think people who believe are stupid and intellectually inferior because they have just not seen the light understood the wonders of science as deeply as you have.  Also, you think "religion kills" which is akin to saying "guns kill" or "silver hammers kill"--the point is that none of those things kill in the absence of people (and specifically, people named Maxwell). 

Let's start there.  The first point is obviously falsifiable.  Stupidity has plenty to go around and it does not spare those who do not believe in God.  Some of the smartest people I've ever known have been religious.  The rest of the smartest people I've ever known haven't been.  There has been no discernible difference in quantity or quality of intelligence between the two groups.  It seems to be true that more educated populations tend to be less religious, but that doesn't say anything about the intelligence of any given individuals, and even in less religious societies you will find intellectuals who believe in God. 

As to the second point, "religion" does not kill and cannot, being a concept rather than a concrete thing.  Certainly, all manner of craziness and slaughter has been perpetrated in the name of religion.  On the other hand, there has been all kinds of craziness and slaughter perpetrated by humans that had nothing to do with religion or had to do with religion in name only.  The current quagmire in Iraq would be a case in point, I believe.

Furthermore, just as we insist that you cannot prove the existence of God (and you can't--if St. Thomas Aquinas failed, if Descartes failed, then so, surely, will you), neither can we prove the nonexistence of God.  It is generally held to be logically impossible to prove nonexistence, but even if this were not the case--if nonexistence of a thing can be proven--and even if we thought we had proved that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist, this does not demonstrate that no other god or gods exist, and so the work of disproving "god" is not ever really going to be done, even if it were theoretically possible (with an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters...). 

There are good arguments that gods generally and God specifically are inventions of the human mind.  Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Julian Jaynes put forth a whole slew of direct and indirect arguments that this is so, enough that I find their logic compelling.  It is worth noting two things about that, though.  The first is that I was already a person lacking faith.  The second is that the fact that we invented god/God does not mean God didn't or doesn't exist.  Hear me out.

If the notion of "god" is a product of human imagination, this would have to mean that no god exists independently of humans, that the gods we usually think of, and certainly God as written in the Bible, do not exist in the absence of human consciousness.  But to say that something cannot exist if it is the mere product of our minds is, again, patently false.  We would have to say, then, that music does not exist, that language is not real, that consciousness itself is nothing.  It's true that there are differences between language and God or music and God, yes, but there are also similarities (not the way Christians think of God, as a being who created us and exists completely independently of us, no, but in the way that I think gods came to be).

To me, faith is a beautiful thing and belief in God is not essentially less worthwhile than sincere appreciation of music or linguistic art.  That's not to say that I believe in God or any god.  I don't.  While I do appreciate music and especially linguistic art, my faith component is missing.  I look to other sources to explain the same things that people who believe explain via gods (or I just don't explain them and let things be all cool and mysterious), but I don't think this makes me a better or smarter person than someone who has the faith that I don't.

Back in the grad school days, when I was taking a lit seminar called The Literature of American Imperialism (one of the best classes I ever took, by the way), I wrote for my seminar paper an essay about otherness.  Obviously, the class was permeated with opportunities to curse Privileged Dead White Men--it was an excellent survey of the peculiar sorts of horror that colonialism and even just the imperialist attitude can perpetrate.  "Other" was a term that got tossed around a lot, too, and in the wrong hands even such a simple word takes on an air of jargon, but generally speaking, it means someone who is not like you, but particularly someone who is oppressed in some way by you and people of your ilk.  The idea in such seminars is that the Other who was once objectified and silenced is now given space and respect and individuality and Thou-ness (to borrow somewhat obnoxiously from Buber). 

But apparently that meant that the former objectifier--the aforementioned Privileged Dead White Man--became the objectified, the vilified, the silenced.  Now I am not so silly as to have tried to argue that the Dead White Man was right in his opinions and actions--certainly not--but I was naive enough to venture the argument, just occasionally, that these Dead White Guys were Other to us now.  Even though we're white (we all were in that seminar, go figure) and think we are therefore similar, we are actually not.  Not only has the elapsed time made us think much differently than they did, the changes in religion vs secularism, changes in science and education about the world, et cetera, have made us so different from those guys (OK, sure, not the guys who perpetrated the Vietnam War, but from Columbus and Cortez?  Uh, yes) as to make them unknown and Other to us.  We think, because of our skin color, that we know them, but we don't and if we silence them, we never will--and that means not understanding our own history as well as the histories of the Others (because those histories are intertwined, see?).

It was a long essay, and I'm oversimplifying here (the actual essay was apparently so complicated, and so infused with Heidegger, that when I presented it at a conference, some of the audience confessed to me that they hadn't understood it at all--okayyyyyyyy), but the point is that it's become commonplace for atheists to denounce Christians as stupid bigots, and maybe you think that since they are the majority there can be no serious bigotry against them (which would mean you don't believe in "reverse racism" and so forth either, probably).  But I say that that is wrong--wrong and immoral.  The fact is that since everyone is Other to you in some way, everyone deserves identical respect as an individual and an equal, fair hearing.  Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what college it went to.  And I'm having no more of it.

Obviously, my general contempt for humans remains.  Sure, I can think we all suck equally and still provide everyone, no matter their race or creed, an equal opportunity to suck.  We suck as a species, and the general self-righteous bigotry from all sides just kind of supports that thesis.  A few days ago I was sad about William Buckley's death because I had a lot of respect and admiration for him, even though we obviously disagreed about many, many things.  Doesn't matter, see?  It isn't only the people who are like you already who are worth listening to.

*By the by, is anyone else surprised to hear that Mormons and Jews each constitute approximately 1.6 percent of the US population?  I would have thought there were many more Jews than that and certainly more than Mormons, but apparently it is the case. 

**A lot of this post probably needs further development to make it really coherent and sound.  But it's very late, and I'm getting tired, so it will have to wait.  No doubt my brilliant commenters will have things to add, too, that I never even thought of.  I hope so.  The era of my moderation is still in its infancy, and it could use some help growing up.