Friday, September 16, 2011

I Believe I Can Fly: Episode 2

I was actually sitting in the planning meeting for the Reno Air Show, and I have the transcript. 


"Hmmm...  Let me make sure that I understand what you're saying.  We're going to have 80-year old technology, and an 80-year old pilot.  Both flying at high speeds and low altitudes." 

"Exactly." 

"Great.  Let's make sure that we get the fans in the middle of the action.  There's no way anything bad could happen."



Yikes.

-Chairman

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

New Chapters

Seven years ago, way back in 2004, I put up an innocent little blurb.  Basically, I was explaining how indifference was the true winner in the 2004 presidential election, since Bush only got 59 million votes, which was more than Kerry's 55 million, but well less than the roughly 100 million non-votes. It went something like:

Ordinarily, I'm all for voting and the democratic process, but this time I stayed home. Why was that? My vote would not have mattered. I'm in Illinois. Kerry won by 11 points. He probably won Chicago by about 30 points. Chicago completely overshadows the rest of the state. My vote is negated by the huge mass that is Chicago. Does that speak for me? Not at all.


I also sort of explained my voting ethos, and confessed to how it was sort of the opposite of issues-based, informed voting:

How would I have voted has my vote mattered? Probably Bush, mainly because he seems likable and Kerry seems stiff. Probably because I'm used to Bush, and unfamiliar with Kerry. Probably because Bush is entertaining, and Kerry is the opposite of entertaining. 



But what is really interesting to me is what I had to say about the Democrats back in 2004:

But Kerry's party opens up a huge Pandora's Box. The Republicans have a good sense not to go too overboard to the right, lest they offend their slightly right-leaning base. However, the Democrats do not. They know that the majority of people stay in the central, yet their agenda seems overhwelmingly left. And that scares me. There are already enough people who don't share my views speaking for me. 



What intrigues me, is that now, as we look back at the 2010 elections, and look forward to the 2011 elections, is that if you were to do a find-and-replace on that last blurb, only focus on the overwhelming Tea Party movement in the Grand ol' Party, then you see this forced polarization.  A lot of this can be thought about in a Hotelling model, which I discussed back in early 2008, when I explained how Obama was going to hammer McCain.

As I think about the Democratic party, they made a brilliant play back in 2007.  They knew that if they fought the battle from the far-left end of the spectrum, it was going to be a crap-shoot at best.  Facts be damned, the perception of Hillary was that she was well left of center.  On the other hand, Obama was seen as a pragmatist, a more moderate Democrat.  So they put their efforts behind Obama, who was able to bring out independent voters in droves.

The Republicans had two things work against them.  First, they basically got unlucky.  They sent McCain up against him, and despite being relatively similar in terms of where they stood (moderate-left vs. moderate-right), got hammered because of Obama's charisma, speaking ability, and ability to win non-affiliated voters (and to bring out the black vote).  Against Hillary (who would be seen as being much more liberal than she probably was),  McCain would have had a legit fighting chance, because he could have claimed a lot of the space that Obama ended up winning.  Instead, McCain went toe-to-toe against Obama, with predictably poor results.

But the second thing was their own doing.  The Republicans got stupid, or more specifically, fragmented.  Basically, the far right tried to hold the rest of the party hostage.  They said that if they went with McCain (who was seen as too much of a centrist), that they'd hold their breaths until their faces turned blue, and that they wouldn't come out to vote (they then repeated this tactic by making filibuster a normal part of the arsenal, which was replicated by the Wisconsin Democrats who tried to duck votes by leaving the state).  They wanted to push the party forward with their own agenda.  When you have this sort of dissension within your own party, then things are likely to go poorly.

So flash forward.  How in the world did this whole Tea Party thing take off?  Tina Fey's caricature of Sarah Palin becomes a real-life thing, where Sarah Palin and the Tea Party became caricatures of caricatures.  Somehow the need to be a non-insider has devolved into the need to be a non-intellectual.  The Tea Party has taken the populism of a Bill Clinton, and raised the stakes so that the GOP is not represented by the thoughtful conservatism of George Will, but rather the moderate-IQ audaciousness of folks like Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann.  Somehow the Republican party has gone from the intellectual establishment, fighting off poorly thought out, radical ideology (think college students with Che Guevara t-shirts, talking about freedom), to being a different version of poorly thought out, radical ideology, lashing out at the intellectual establishment.


Charisma doesn't mean that you have to dumb down the speaker, simply because the audience has a moderate IQ.  The audacity of hope, thinking that, "This guy is a symbol that I can aspire to," should be preferred to thinking, "Hey, I like that dude because his grades were even worse than mine."  I certainly wish that the Republican party would have their own version of a Harvard Law magna cum laude, who was president of the law review as a grad student.  I certainly wish that they would have someone who was well-respected enough to be asked to teach law at University of Chicago.  Instead, the GOP icons are some dude who was a C student at Texas A&M, and some chick who transferred 6 times in 5 years (doing stints at 2 community colleges) before finally getting a communications degree.  All in all, the Republican Party holds it's membership in such low esteem that they trotted out a bunch of C students because they thought that these folks were the only ones that were charismatic enough for the audience. 


And perhaps more depressingly, the Republican party has gone from the moral high ground (think about how the GOP tried to hammer Clinton on his morality), into a party that embraces (or at least looks the other way at) a lot of ethically questionable activity.  Even for George W. Bush, for all of his failings, was able to hold a moral high ground, as someone who had shed drinking and immaturity, and embraced his faith.  Instead we get Perry, who fights against transparency, uses his office for personal benefit, and embraces the hiring of political contributors into public office as the frontrunner.


So for the first 33 years of my life, I've always identified myself as a Republican.  Dug Reagan, before I knew anything about anything (I may have gotten confused with the Max Hedroom-esque version in Back to the Future II).  Knew that Jimmy Carter was an awful president, despite only being 3 when he lost in the 1980 election.  I was all for George Herbert Walker Bush, and thought that he got ripped off against Clinton in 1992.  During his presidency, I thought that Clinton was slimy, and I was happy for W to beat Gore in 2000, and was for W's re-election in 2004.  I registered Republican, voted Republican (when I voted), and was generally good with the basic arguments behind conservative thinking.  I read Rush Limbaugh books in high school, and I still buy into the notion of rugged individualism.


But this party has been hijacked by folks that use tactics that are parallel to terrorism.  This party has moved from the intellectual high ground to a party that relies on brinksmanship for all of it's activities.  Ideology has usurped pragmatism, and the party is content to use outright threats and scorched earth sentiment, rather than hammer out effective solutions.  When it's a badge of honor that you would cut off your nose to spite your face (or to accept $1 in tax increases for every $10 in spending cuts), then you have a party that is relying on ideology.  This isn't rugged individualism.  This is a bunch of lemmings following the herd.  And when that ideology is being offered up by a bunch of C students, then at some point, I have to excuse myself from the party.


-Chairman

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Rememberance

Everywhere I go, people keep asking me how I'm going celebrate (or commemorate, I suppose) the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  Actually, that's not true.  I'm nowhere near important enough for anyone to care what I do any day.  And if you know that it's a Sunday, and that football's in season, then you know exactly how I'm going to commemorate that day.  By sleeping in, eating meat, and watching football.

And, despite many predictions, I'm not going to do this:


Jenga! 

Besides, if I'm going to demolish a double tower, you guys should all know by now that it would be more like this:



Never forget...
...this double tower of onion ring awesomeness.

But in all seriousness, I'm always amazed at our fondness for round numbers.  The 10th anniversary is clearly a much more important anniversary than the 7th or 8th.  Those were just lame.  So there's that.  But really what's got me a little riled up is the dim-witted folks that you hear on the radio, even more so than usual.  Don't get me wrong.  I spend like 12 minutes a day in the car (yeah, I've got a 6 minute commute, 4 if I can catch the light quickly).  So it's not like I'm listening to the radio all day.  But one of the promos they did was commentary from this guy asking how people were going to commemorate 9/11 (which is fine).  But then he continues on to describe how he feels that we should be spending more time remembering who did this to us, presumably so that we can continue to brand brown people as terrorists.  And I suppose the the amusing part is that this is a reasonably common sentiment.  For example, we can get a lot into the psyche of these folks when browse Facebook.  Here's one of my "likes," who is Facebook friend of one of my real-life friends.  So, we're blurring out the names of the stupid, to protect the names of the... uh. Yeah.

Shockingly, this guy likes NASCAR, and is from Michigan.  But wait, there's more...

How awesome is that?  But there's even more behind this guy.

Smart-ass book titles.  Check.  And no, this isn't my Facebook profile.

As you look through his Facebook "likes," you get all sorts of goodies.  First, he's into Mudvayne (modern, hard rock band) and also Third Day (Christian pop/adult contemporary band).  And he's into book titles that: a) mock Democrats (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Janet Reno) and black poeple (Mike Tyson), and b) love the Detroit and the Bible.  So, as you think of this fellow, images that come into your mind may include, moderate IQ, NRA, Tea Party, Fox News, Westboro, etc.  Let's see if this works...

Fox News.  Check.  Gun reality TV show. Check.  Restaurant: Impossible?  What? 

Sort of.  And of course, we see Charles Spurgeon and C.S. Lewis, both of who are probably rolling in their graves right now. 

Now, this is just one dude.  On Facebook.  So does it really mean anything?  Probably not, if you didn't see this sort of sentiment permeating conservative and Christian culture.  Think about the appeals that folks are making to the conservatives.  For example the big deal about Sharia law.  We've never drawn precedent from Sharia law in this country, and now we need to have specific laws that prevent that?  Or worrying about where mosques are built?

We're letting morons drive the bus.

Between the morons that are driving the bus in the Middle East, and the folks here in the U.S., you know who's winning?  Atheists.

Some folks coordinate something destructive, kill a bunch people, and as a public, we attribute it to their cause, not to the individuals.  Do we really want to go down that path?  If so, then clearly, the conservative, white, Christian behavior must be stopped.  After all, it blew up buildings, and targeted children in Norway this summer:

Ground Zero, or however you translate it in Norwegian (or whatever language they speak in Norway).
Love Twitter.  Let's everyone else speak w/out a filter, which makes for amusing blog content.

Or perhaps in OKC years ago.

Pop Quiz.  When did this happen?  Never forget... unless you do.

White, conservative, Christian, wanted smaller government.  Yep.  Check.  Let's start the profiling now.

Seriously.  The generalizations that are made are dumb.  And certainly, folks get defensive very quickly.  We saw how quickly Bill O'Reilly tried to distance Christianity from the Norway attacks this summer.  And yet, across the board, we see the moderate IQ, conservative sentiment toward Islam and 9/11 as being something different than what the attacks in Norway were. 

But seriously.  Even the Anti-Defamation League, a group that aims to stop the defamation of Jews, stepped up to say that it's dumb to discriminate against Arabs and Muslims because of 9/11.  But clearly, the voice of reason isn't one that's particularly appealing.  Especially if you're conservative and Christian.

As I'm looking for a new church, I should see if they've got one of those Westboro ones out here...

Their church activities seem to be pretty fun and energetic...


And they seem to have a vibrant children's ministry.

Okay.  So here's the thing.  When you make a really dumb generalization, and do it in all seriousness, then you welcome comparisons.  And if I identify as conservative and Christian, and all you see from "conservative Christians" is bombing Norway, protesting military funerals, and Michele Bachmann (check that - Michele Bachmann is awesome, I don't care what anyone says, including Michele Bachmann), then basically, people think that I'm the sort of person that may bomb Oslo, hold up rainbow signs at funerals, and dig Michele Bachmann.  And they may be right.  But still.  It's sort of dumb that you would assume that, isn't it?

Here's my major issue.  There are a bunch of jackasses out there.  Sure.  But what drives me nuts is when folks just sort of jump on the bandwagon because they're not smart and/or motivated enough to think for themselves.  What irks me even more is that so many people that have similar political/religious values as I do are content to simply repeat what someone else (who probably wasn't very well informed, and/or disingenuous in their intent) said.  Don't drink the kool-aid.  Don't let the jackasses win.  For me, 9/11 was about religious dogma, ideology, and what jackasses can do.  When you let religious dogma and ideology drive the discussion, you get dumb things like planes slamming into the side of buildings.  For me, the response to 9/11 is about thought, understanding, contemplation, being smarter, and being better.  It's about not going with the common memes that are prevalent.  It's about calling out those who should know better, but are too lazy to think about it and come up with a thoughtful position.  But most of all, it's about finding cool pictures on the internet and putting up goofy captions.

Never forget.

-Chairman