politics

You’ll all be glad to know I’ve decided to keep the comments. I might up the reply depth to two or three more. What I am going to dispense with: categories, tags.

I’m doing laundry right now. My life hasn’t been very exciting lately and nothing has irritated me enough for me to want to post about it. I’ve still got the part-time job, so I’m not as broke as I was. (I will be putting the Paypal link up just in case though.) The weather has improved over the past few days — it got up into the high forties today, which feels almost like summer now that I’ve acclimated. Still, there are just huge piles of snow everywhere, and it will probably be on the ground until Easter. Well, now I can say I have experienced snow. One of the few new experiences I actually wanted to have has been checked off. (Not on the list: skydiving, mountain-climbing — I find mountain driving scary enough thanks — bungee jumping, any of that nonsense.)

I’m disappointed in Glenn Beck. I don’t listen to/watch him, but I was still expecting better of him than “I’m tired of feeling like a freak in America.” Feeling like a freak has been my armor and strength my whole life — I’m tired of hearing that the be-all and end-all of existence is total acceptance by society. (Which is one of the many reasons I can’t get behind the whole gay marriage thing. Yearning to be “married” — how mundane and bourgeois can you get! I expect gays to be at the forefront of all that is different and interesting and eccentric, not whining and clawing at Middle America for love and acceptance. Gather ’round, children, and I’ll tell you about how in my day the very idea of being thought of as just another bunch of squares would have made any proud gay man or woman spit in disgust. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to rinse my dentures.) Anyway, I used to hear that Beck’s shtick was being a big crybaby, but he seemed to have moved away from that when it was made clear to him that it pissed off the manlier elements in conservative groups. Looks like he’s gone back into whine mode. It’s fitting that he did it in front of an audience of beta males at CPAC. Include me out. If I wanted to be “accepted” by the powers that be in the US today I’d slap an Obama sticker on my car and swear I loved Big Unicorn. That’s what it’s going to take to not be treated like a “freak” these days, at least in the big cities, so you might as well get used to it. (And living in semi-rural Virginia isn’t necessarily an escape — there are a lot of college towns in the Shenandoah Valley, and Staunton where I live is Obama central.)

In other news: I’m currently on my Windows computer. It’s slow, but the laptop was starting to piss me off. Even after completely wiping and reinstalling the operating system it still gets logy and overheats and so on. I don’t think it’s the operating system (it’s currently Kubuntu, which seems to have good memory management), I think it’s the brand. Dells just seem to have problems. Anyway, I’m giving it a rest. Oh — and I finally broke down and ordered two new memory chips (1 GB each) for the desktop, which right now is limping along at 256 KB of RAM. This will bring it up to its top speed (yes, I checked). Then I’m going to do a complete wipe and reinstall of everything. This will happen this coming weekend, as the RAM is due to be delivered on Friday (barring things like snowstorms, knock on wood…), and then I may be able to post a bit more frequently since, hopefully, I won’t spend most of my time swearing at the computer for being so slow.

That’s all for now. Later, mes amis. If you want to read the nonsense that I find even too ridiculous for this site, see me at my Tumblr blog. (I will not call it a “Tumblog.” Good grief.)

…Sarah Palin used crib notes she wrote on her hand during a post speech question/answer session at some place.

WE. ARE. SO. DOOMED.

Seriously, if you had any doubt that the United States has become a permanent high school in which we are all perpetually trapped, this should be the final proof. I haven’t seen people so upset about inked hands since… well, since I was in high school and some kid got caught looking at the test answers that he’d Bic’d onto his knees in Geometry I. I mean, I write stuff to jog my memory all the time onto the palm of my hand, though I have been informed that that is sloppy and I should carry around a pack of index cards at all times. Index cards that I can drop or forget. One thing about your own hand, it usually remains attached to your body.

Really, I can’t believe that people are freaking out at this. There is just something about Sarah that sends people off into the stratosphere that I just don’t get. Reagan apparently had the same thing. I recall at the time (when I was much, much more liberal than I am now) he sort of mildly irritated me and I still don’t get the adulation but I thought that many of the jokes at his expense (not to mention the masks and the puppets and so on) were in bad taste. There’s just something about people taking politics so personally that I don’t get. Somewhere someone is developing a fine case of acid reflux because they can’t stand the way Palin parts her hair. Anyway, if you want to get the full flavor of “Sarah Palin is going to lead us into DOOOOOOOM” paranoia, feel free to visit the Fark and Huffington Post threads. (Yeah, this all comes from those RELIABLE two sources.) And here is my tribute to palm-of-the-hand note-takers everywhere.

Update on another yet somehow related (as I am too lazy to write a new post) topic: get a load of the compassionate and concerned lefty side of the blogosphere as they basically accuse Jim Treacher, who is still being treated for his broken knee, of lying about what happened when he was hit by a van driven by a government employee. Yes, I really want my future in the hands of people like these.

The shocking thing about those incidents where some disaffected kid tries to blow up his high school isn’t the fact that such things can happen in these United States of America: it’s that it happens so rarely. When I think about how our our educational system has damaged our culture, I feel rather like gathering up some dynamite myself. Fortunately (for any Feds or other concerned people who might come across this website) I am a law-abiding citizen, and moreover, my own stint in Warehouse High wasn’t all that onerous. (After one more year of enduring stupid PE, I was able to mostly choose my own classes — which I stacked with useless foreign language and college-level English courses, which means I can watch a subtitled German movie about Goethe without too much eyestrain — and was able to shut out anything I didn’t care about by burying my face in science fiction paperbacks.)

Everywhere you go, everything you encounter, every attitude and platitude and political position, has its roots in the jocks-vs.-nerds, popular-vs.-unwanted, James-Spader-Molly-Ringwald-couples-don’t-exist-in-real-life dichotomy the nation’s citizenry experienced in high school. We are currently experiencing a revenge-of-the-nerds administration — with the sting in the tail being that Obama really isn’t a nerd, he’s just one of those people who would have been a jock but for having no athletic ability. There’s nothing worse than someone who can’t be what he is. We must all pay for his personality dysfunctions.

But enough of him. Let’s talk about Sarah Palin! Okay — I’ll just wait until some of you calm down and stop flapping about your cages like that. My my, look at all those loose feathers… Anyway, Sarah Palin is, obviously, a jock, and so all of us who fancy ourselves intellectuals whether artistic or scientific or both must be up in arms against her commonplace, shallow, brawn-not-brain, “get your nose out of that book and clean up your room!”, boys-who-won’t-play-football-are-fags, scratchy “nice” dress for church no you can’t sleep late, God wants you to stay a virgin! self. Or… do we?

It’s disappointing to see people fall into the “ew she’s icky because ordinary people like her they must be stoopid it can’t be because they are thinking for themselves” tarpit. Or as I put it in the comments here:

According to Answers.com, “populism” is:

A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.

Can someone tell me what exactly is wrong with this political philosophy, so much so that labeling Sarah Palin and her admirers with it is supposed to be an insult? Then again, if you’re one of the crowd who likes being led around by the nose by a slick, smooth-talking con-man and his crowd of grifters, because his skin color is “in” this year, and because he’s gone to all the “right” schools and knows all the cool people, then I can see why the idea of ordinary people trying to buck the trendy and powerful distresses you so. Or is it just that she doesn’t seem to have had a problem with pregnancy weight gain?

I admit I like Sarah Palin. She’s not at all like me. I’m bookish and introverted and in general the sort of person you’d expect to find in a coffee shop huddled in a corner with an extra large mocha latte reading her email on her iMac. But I have never been able to afford Apple’s products, and I am glad to say the process of removing my high-school prejudices against the “mundanes” was successful many years ago. I laughed in glee at the consternation Palin causes among the crowd of my once-fellow trendars. I don’t care if she ever runs for office: seeing the roaches scurry frantically across the floor whenever her light shines on them is good enough.

I forgot to add, it’s the faux definition of populism that Daphne uses that got Obama elected. George Bush, an authentic jock, was hated by the intellectuals, who voted in the shiny Official Black Man™ who made them feel speshul. When you asked any white person* why they were voting for Obama you got “we need a Change,” and when you asked them what the hell they meant by that, more often than not you got a long, rambling, anti-Bush rant that only tangentially had anything to do with the question. (If you based your vote on “he’s not Bush,” you’re even stupider, because Bush wasn’t running, and couldn’t run due to the fact he’d had his two terms.) As a matter of fact, Obama is an unabashed elitist and that fact turns on a lot of his fans, but he ran on a populist “me against the Big Bad Bush regime” ticket, and that was enough for our kneejerk grown-up high school student voters, who have never gotten over being stuffed into their lockers by the football team.

*Black people are much more honest about why they voted for Obama. It’s because he’s black, duh.