Policy Wonk for Beginners

In the February issue of GQ featuring a sultry Michelle Williams spread and accompanying article, the magazine lists the 50 Most Powerful People in Washington. This list includes liberal blogger Ezra Klein (no. 34) at the Washington Post with Wonkblog and neoconservative Charles Krauthammer's (no. 45) syndicated Post column. A sidebar listing the most powerful people of the campaign season includes New York Time's blogger Nate Silver (www.fivethirtyeight.com) for his use of statistics and The Daily Show's John Stewart for satire.

Anyway, I haven't been paying too much attention to politics lately, but these are the people I'll be reading and watching in hopes of better understanding what's happening in Washington and on the campaign trail.

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear

I recently learned about this essay by Wendell Berry available on Orion magazine's website. It is also one of three essays in his book In the Presence of Fear and Citizenship Papers which I will be reading posthaste. It is an incredibly thoughtful and prescient essay of 27 points regarding technology, the economy, the environment, education, politics, culture, society, and a way of life. I highly encourage everyone to read it in its entirety. Nevertheless, here are some highlights:

IV: The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

VIII: Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to “rogue nations”, dissident or fanatical groups and individuals - whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.

XII: Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.

XIV: This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. . . . But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.

XV: We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.

XXI: What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. . . . We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders.

XXIII: We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.

XXIV: Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live.

XXV: We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air.

XXVI: Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.

XXVII: The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. . . . An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

This and That

Hello readers!

It's been awhile. School has been punishing, but it's the penultimate week of the quarter, and the finish line is in sight. I cannot wait for spring break, even though that's when Heidi (my roommate) is leaving me. She decided to graduate a quarter early. Lame sauce. Speaking of spring, I hope it comes here soon. Last year, Seattle had the warmest January on record and it was spring all winter. This year winter has been (relatively) brutal--as it has been across the country, and I really shouldn't bitch since I haven't had to deal with massive blizzards. But I think we're all tired of the winter and are looking forward to warmer, sunnier days.

Oscar thoughts: I thought the intro video was really funny and well done. And then it all went downhill from there. James Franco was baked and had no idea where he was--he didn't even have facial expressions! I thought Anne Hathaway was adorable--she's a huge drama nerd but so charming. If you didn't fall in love with her in The Princess Diaries, I can see that she might be off-putting. And she did have to try a bit hard, but only because her co-host gave her nothing. There were no real surprise winners and no interesting speeches. (Do you know who always gives amazing acceptance speeches--Meryl Streep.) What to make of Melissa Leo though. That ad campaign was a mistake, and that speech was all over the place. She's kind of been turning me off lately. I think she took the whole thing a bit too seriously. It was a good performance though. Jacki Weaver also had an amazing performance, and I'm thoroughly delighted by her. I love Natalie, but I really wanted The Bening to win.

I was happy that The Social Network nabbed a few prizes including score, editing, and screenplay. I can't believe Tom Hooper won director--all of the shots in The King's Speech were good, but none of them were interesting. All the other directors were more deserving not only for camerawork but in all the ways they brought the story to life. All of the songs this year were terrible. You don't get Florence Welch to do 30 seconds of I don't even know what that was. Let her run around on stilettos and belt something fun. They should have nominated Cher--it would have made everything more interesting. Finally the most interesting part of the Oscars which sadly didn't make it to TV--Josh Brolin and Javiar Bardem soft-shoe and exchange a playful kiss:

image source

New Subject--Congress: So, I don't want to get into it too much because it makes me so angry, but is Congress declaring a war on the poor and women? A vicious, full-out attack to cut services (thank god we extended the Bush tax cuts) and regress a good 50+ years. Thoughts, comments? Stay classy, congress.

I hope to start blogging more this month as this awful quarter finally ends, and a hopefully better quarter begins.

These Precious Illusions

Last Saturday, Chloe and I went to the SPL book sale which was a complete madhouse. Still, we survived, and I got some lovely items for $1 a pop. I got Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth in hardback and a paperback of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. All are in pretty good condition. The Corrections and Song of Solomon are on my tentative summer reading list. If the book section of the sale was crazy, that was nothing compared to the audiovisual component which was in a separate building. Anyway, I figured if the CDs were only one buck, I might as well just grab anything that looked interesting. I got Spoon's Gimme Fiction, the soundtrack to Juno, M. Ward's Post-War, Kate Bush's The Sensual World, and Elliott Smith's From a Basement on the Hill. I think I made out pretty well.

On Sunday I pretty much had a breakdown as major projects were due while I had majorly procrastinated. I've taken to saying that my SUU professors should have known better that I don't have the managerial skills to handle grad school when they wrote my letters of recommendation, but whatcha gonna do? This week has gotten better, for the moment anyway. During semesters, you get to sort of semi-languorously make your way through the fifteen weeks. As least that is my experience. During ten-week quarters, my preferred languid pace doesn't work so well. There is always something due.

So what I really want to write about is this fairly provocative, polemical book I just finished. It's entitled Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges. It's pretty strong stuff. He comes from a working-class family, earned a BA in English from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard. He has worked as a correspondent from the NYT and earned a Pulitzer for his coverage of global terrorism. He is a socialist and a Christian, which is rarely explicit in the book though never far removed. He has previously written several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning--writing "war is a drug" that became the epigraph for The Hurt Locker--and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (a mouthful right there) wherein he argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement is a threat to American democracy. (See the current history textbook controversy going on in Texas.) This might also go on my summer reading list.

Hedges follows in the tradition of other Cassandras including Noam Chomsky, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jared Diamond, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, and Neil Postman, whose book Amusing Ourselves to Death is also on my list. He often comes off as a Debbie Downer and seems to alienate any possible reader taking on the left and the right, critiquing not only pornography, corporations, and pop psychology, but also The New York Times NPR, and our education system, especially our universities. As a polemic it's often rage making, and he doesn't offer any easy answers (because there are none) except the enduring power of love, which seems pretty flimsy.

The book is comprised of five chapters, each tacking a different illusion. The first is the Illusion of Literacy. Hedges begins, naturally enough, with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and argues that our society is functionally illiterate since even if we may know how to read and write, we are mesmerized by the shadow plays, unable to distinguish reality from illusion. He makes the analogy to Fahrenheit 451 where books are burned, but nobody seems to mind since they are enchanted by the parlor walls, an obvious metaphor for television. Our world is less 1984 and more Brave New World (also on my list). We don't need to censor people if we can endlessly amuse them. In this chapter, Hedges explores our cultural illiteracy through WWE, reality TV, and our celebrity culture. Today celebrity is everything, even if it's only the 15 minutes found on reality TV shows most of which, if not all, are puerile, voyeuristic, and morally reprehensible. Over the summer my family watched I Survived a Japanese Game Show and Wipeout, and even then I thought, what is the merit of this show? There is none intellectually or artistically.

Now I love television, scripted please, since reality TV has nothing in common with reality. Episodic television, at its best, can address complex ethical and moral issues, dysfunctional families, and serve as biting satires of pop culture, etc. Sometimes it's a little over-simplistic, that's the medium, but it can at least get you thinking. Shows that come to mind include The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, and The Simpsons. At it's worst, TV shows can be glitzy, showy, and glamorous distractions or even puerile and mind-numbingly stupid, but at the very least some artistic merit went into the work from the writing and acting to the directing and production. In this chapter, and through the rest of the book, Hedges seems in search of lost time, his own illusion of the good old days, the illusion of Norman Rockwell's America. Yet he also notes that historically kings led their courts in elaborate intrigues to distract everyone from the dirty business of governing. This isn't new. As I read this chapter Lily Allen's "The Fear" came to mind. I'm not sure Hedges would approve of reducing his book's ideas to pop songs, but "The Fear" really captures everything Hedges is saying--cultural programming, massive consumption, and the inability to separate reality from fantasy. MGMT's "Time to Pretend" also seems to apply.

The second chapter is the Illusion of Love. Here he discusses pornography, often with an unsettling, graphic frankness. I don't think anyone confuses pornography with love, but Hedges says it's not even about sex. It's the auto-erotic, masturbatory fantasy of the subjection of women by men. He discusses at length how far porn has gone since the advent of the home video and especially the Internet, continually pushing boundaries, becoming more extreme, violent, and deplorable. He attends a porn convention in Las Vegas calling the city our cultural capital--the ultimate simulacrum where nothing is real. He talks to current and ex porn stars, illustrating how they are treated not as people but as commodities. The producers and directors are pimps. I've often wondered why it's illegal to pay someone for sex, but not illegal to pay 2 (or 50) people to have sex with each other and film it.

In The West Wing Amy Gardner tells Josh that prostitution is about the subjugation of women by men for profit and dire economic needs are a form of coercion. Not to mention that being a prostitute is bad for you. I think that applies to pornography as well. This chapter reminded me of Tori Amos's songs "Amber Waves" and "Don't Make Me Come to Vegas" both from Scarlet's Walk. Actually most of Amos's road-tripping, agit-pop record of America serves well as a companion piece to the book including "Wednesday," "Crazy," "Pancake," and "Scarlet's Walk." I just want to quote Neil Gaiman's description of the album: "The CD's about America -- it's a story that's also a journey, that begins in LA and crosses the country, slowly heading east. America's in there, and specific places and things, Native American history and pornography and a girl on a plane who'll never get to New York, and Oliver Stone and Andrew Jackson and madness and a lot more. Not to mention a girl called Scarlet who may be the land and may be a person and may be a trail of blood."

The middle chapter is the Illusion of Wisdom, wherein he takes on our contemporary institutions of "higher" learning. I think he would have a friend in Harold Bloom who has little patience for today's university--media circuses and undead professors. Hedges notes that most of our multiple failures can be laid at the doors that educate our elite. He says our universities are owned by corporations and that our public institutions are high-security national laboratories. If we remember in Dollhouse, Rossum uses college laboratories for its experiments. Hedges tells us that universities focus on analytic intelligence and condition students to value success above all else through standardized test scores and GPAs. They teach increasingly specialized subjects, riddled with academic jargon, divorced from other disciplines and often from context and reality. Many of our liberal arts colleges have folded, and the large universities are politically silenced. Hedges writes, "The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive." Today they embrace a moral nihilism.

This led me to a fascinating article written by Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning" which argues for a return to the trivium: grammar, logic (dialectic), and rhetoric. These are not subjects, they are the raw tools of learning across subjects. The tools we need to be truly literate. Sayers was a Christian humanist in the first half of the 20th century. This article was presented in 1947. And while she wants to teach theology again, I would not agree except that I would not be opposed to teaching some type of (secular) morality. I have no songs for this, only the authentic wisdom of Oscar Wilde's maxims. Borges tells us that the Great Aesthete was almost always right.

"All bad poetry is sincere."
"In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
"One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers."
"Public opinion only exists where there are no ideas."
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."

The fourth chapter is the illusion of happiness. Here he tackles the pop psychology of positive thinking. Perhaps because I've grown up with the myth of choosing to be happy, this one got under my skin. I don't believe in New Age philosophy or in "The Secret" though I do think that at some level if you visualize what you want that can help you set a goal and provide the motivation to achieve it. But focusing on riches isn't going to make you wealthy, which I think is Hedges point. Choosing to make the best of bad circumstances is one thing, but creating positive illusions creates a delusional society that is disconnected from reality. He spends most of the chapter discussing how widely this idea is promoted by the media conglomerates and especially how ruthlessly it is used by corporations to mold compliant "happy" workers. "[Positive psychologists] condemn all social critics and iconoclasts, the dissidents and individualists, for failing to surrender and seek fulfillment in the collective lowing of the corporate herd. They strangle creativity and moral autonomy. The seek to mold and shape individual human beings into a compliant collective."
I definitely think we need more iconoclasts and subversives, and from my favorite iconoclast, Tori Amos, we have "Almost Rosey" and "Sweet Dreams."

In the final chapter, we have the Illusion of America. He admits that this country was never perfect, but that is used to be something. Today a very few companies and people control almost everything that we see, read, and hear. Corporations have sucked dry the blood of the working class and control the political landscape. Thank goodness they are recognized as "people" now. He chastises the Democratic Party and Clinton for selling out the working class for corporations--for ditching labor unions, for signing NAFTA, for crippling welfare with reform, for demolishing the Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the economic meltdown we are experiencing. Health care was/is still broken (dismantling the entire health care system is probably the only way to fix it), the environment is being destroyed, the press is controlled by media conglomerates, politics are controlled by corporations who are getting richer while people are getting poorer. He also notes that corporations exhibit six traits displayed by clinically defined psychopaths. If they're people now, can we do something about this? Listening to "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" by Tracy Chapman is appropriate here ("Fast Car" is also nice for showing the dark side of the American Dream). Hedges says none of this is sustainable. We are talking about a revolution. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Extreme stuff. So thank goodness, we have written him out of our history textbooks, the man only wrote the Declaration of Frickin' Independence.

Again, this is polemic, and I while I have argued in my head with him and quibbled with several points, in the end I agree with Hedges's thesis. It is definitely interesting, probably an important work, and I would recommend that you read it. You are free to argue with it, Chris Hedges would probably be disappointed if you didn't. I will leave you with one last quote:

This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debts into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth.

Thoughts: Part II

Today was the first day of spring quarter. (and there was much rejoicing...) But no, really, it wasn't too bad. I will probably talk about it more after this first week, but Mondays are going to be hard because I have five hours of class without a break--right during normal lunching hours!

I finished The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, a book with its own particular sadness. Wikipedia notes that Bender is known for her surreal plots, which, aside from Rose's ability to taste emotions, did not seem true of this novel, until *SPOILER ALERT* her brother turns into a chair! What?!? I had to read that chapter twice and was thoroughly confused. It began to make more sense towards the end of the novel, if that's possible. I think the sadness for me came from the depiction of a dysfunctional family (that, and that the characters weren't entirely fleshed-out). God knows my family is nowhere near functional, and yet I thought, my family is more real than this, my family is more happy than this. And so I wondered if there are families out there like this, just quietly sad.

I am now reading Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil. So far it's interesting, but the novel seems a bit like Martel on Martel--obsessed as it is with writing and animals, the protagonist being a Canadian writer. It is clever, and I mean that as a compliment and insult. Still, two passages stuck out to me that I like:
"If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left."
That has a certain come-what-may, life-goes-on practicality, and that everything will work out somehow simply because it has to.
"English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar--the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved."
That's often how I feel about English--a language I love for these same reasons and am thankful that I am a native speaker. I should note that these quotes come from the uncorrected proofs.

Anyway, I came across this op-ed piece in The New York Times entitled "The Rage Is Not About Health Care," which crystallized a lot of my thoughts about the health care debate, my thoughts less about the bill itself and more about our current political climate. It is clearly pro-Democrat and anti-Republican, but I still think it's important. I wanted to quote a few passages.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.
. . .
That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care.
. . .
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. . . . When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
. . .
Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Even Jim Nelson, editor of GQ (a liberal magazine), said very similar things back in September in his letter from the editor, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Race." His glib and provocative letter argues how race has trumped real political issues:

But it’s more than the birthers. Everywhere you look, people keep making batshit-crazy comments about race and ethnicity, stream-of-consciousness-style, as if the election had unleashed some Freudian anxiety in the cultural air.

Finally, here's a pro-liberal viral video that remixes Obama's slogan "Yes We Can" with John Boehner's "Hell no, you can't!" Time (magazine) says it pretty much sums up American politics in 2010 (so far, anyway).

Thoughts

I pretty much squandered last week, but that's okay because it was technically finals week. Oh, and I did finish my JavaScript project on Wednesday which only took like five hours. This is the end result--it's nothing fancy but it's done. This week is officially spring break, and I'm going to Portland tomorrow for the PLA conference. I will probably feel incredibly underdressed in khakis and whatever I wear with all those librarians. I need to do laundry today. I also need to go shopping--maybe in Portland where there's no sales tax!

Anyway, in what follows is a long, rambling, incoherent stream of thoughts about not just the health care bill, but about our nation's political health in general. Let me be clear--these are my own nascent thoughts. So the health care bill finally passed, and I actually don't know that much about it. When I still lived and worked in Utah I listened to NPR's Morning Edition every morning and Talk of the Nation on my way home every afternoon. I will admit that I think NPR generally, usually leans left of center although NPR denies it. Still, I think they embody journalistic integrity, and when listening to NPR, I felt well-informed. At work I listened to and Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!, This American Life, and TBTL. Since moving to Seattle I only occasionally listen to TBTL and never to NPR. I miss it a lot, but I hardly ever drive here (radio is so much better in the car!), and I'm months behind on the one podcast I semi-regularly listen to. All of this is to say that I have no idea, none whatsoever, what the current health care bill that we finally passed looks like. Still I'm excited since this means I will probably have health care one way or another, that Obama got to pass the pet issue he led and championed--otherwise he would already be a lame duck president--and also that the Democrats finally found the cojones to pass the bill.

In not knowing what the health bill comprises, I am sure I am not alone. I feel that the Republicans have been spreading a lot of misinformation and fear about the bill. Remember Death Panels? What a joke, except people actually fell for it. I respect Republicans who have a different vision for what's best for the country that differs from the Democrats' vision. However, I do not respect people, on either side of the political chasm, who participate in the xenophobic abuse we've largely seen from the conservatives: refusing to even participate in an open dialogue about issues, stonewalling every attempt, crying fowl whenever the Democrats engaged in the very same behavior that Republicans have used to their own advantage in previous Congresses, and spreading misinformation about the issues. The same tactics that have lead commentators, and the public, to believe the government is broken which stems from what? That the president is black? At one point, the health care bill looked very similar to a previous health care bill created by Republicans. Health care itself has been broken for years, so it seems only irresponsible to not try to fix it, but these tactics are even more irresponsible. If Obama and the Democrats could not pass health care, their platform issue, I think the Republicans believed they would take back Congress in the midterms and the White House in 2012. (And who knows, they still might.) So the Republicans refused to even be open to health care. It was not about responsible governing, it was about politics. It's really a shame that politics and governing go hand in hand since they're diametrically opposing forces.

Not to mention that Republicans receive a lot of money and support from big business and insurance companies. It's not the complete lack of bipartisan compromise in Washington, but also the obscene lobbying that leads me to believe our government is broken. It's going to take some serious and real campaign finance and lobbying reform in D.C. before we can have open and reasonable discourse again (so probably never). But maybe the Enlightenment principles that our country was built on, no longer work. They certainly don't apply when those in power disregard them. Perhaps the Constitution is a quaint document in the political malaise of our nuclear, information age and imperial presidency. All empires eventually fail--maybe this is the beginning of the end for us.

Still I find it bemusing, it would be more amusing if it wasn't so terrifying, that the Republicans are the populist party and the Democrats are the elite. Really? The Democrats who have been (or were, for some time) the party of women, minorities (blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, etc.), youth, the dispossessed, the educated, and so on. While the Republicans are the party of the upper-class white male. They claim to speak for the middle-class and Middle America, but I don't think that's really true. Maybe I'm wrong. When everyone was claiming the GOP was breaking apart, I thought that eventually we might have a Republican party worth voting for again. Perhaps the dissolution is taking longer than I thought, or maybe this is the party we will have to live with for some time.

But you have the Glenn Becks of the world (and the Bill O'Reillys, Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, Lyndon LaRouches, Anne Coulters, etc.) engaging in libertarian populism (are those two philosophies even compatible?) and demagoguery as opposed to rational discourse--remember the Enlightenment principles I was talking about? Anger is the easiest emotion to appeal to, and in Glenn Beck's case I think he is using it in a highly irresponsible manner. By the way, Glenn Beck as a libertarian does not belong to either party, but I don't remember him raising the pitchfork when W. was in office. Now Americans are angry; we're living in a Post-9/11 world where everything feels a little less safe, and we're just now (hopefully) getting out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Thanks Wall Street! Remember when the Democrats were angry at Wall Street? But Glenn Beck is angry at socialism, not unregulated capitalism. Yeah, that makes sense. I think my favorite Glenn Beck moment, covered by The Daily Show (an entertainment program that has a higher degree of journalistic integrity than FOX news), was when Beck declaimed the ills of progressivism after reading about it in books at the library, because the library is free. Of course John Stewart pointed out that libraries aren't free, they are a progressive institution paid for with tax money. Stewart goes on to note that the first public library was established in Boston in 1854. Statement of purpose? "Every citizen has the right to access community owned resources." Community owned? That sounds a lot like communism. Seriously, Glenn Beck! He makes me ashamed to be a Mormon (well ex-Mormon--my Mormonism is the subject of a whole other discussion [Also, the Mormons could really used more Brandon Flowers and fewer Glenn Becks]).

And then you have the LaRouche demagoguery comparing Obama to Hitler. If I wasn't so scared of talking to a rabid person, I would ask a LaRoucher to explain just how Obama is Hitler. Seriously! Democrats: next we need to fix that other progressive institution--public education--so we can educate our children about what Hitler was actually about and what the Nazis actually did. Painting a Hitler mustache on anyone is a cheap shot to start with, but it also lessens the actual atrocities committed by Nazis. Not cool. People hurl intellectual elitism at the liberals, and I'm sorry, isn't intellectualism a good thing? When did anti-intellectualism become chic?

So the Democrats finally passed a bill without Republican support (at least I don't think there was any Republican support), which frankly I didn't think the Democrats had in them. We've taken years of xenophobic abuse, and like an abused puppy we keep coming back for more, and to top it all off, we're scared to upset our Republican "allies." When the other party keeps bullying you, you can't just keep cowering and handing over your lunch money. Eventually you have to take a tough stand. I think politics would be much better if we could reach bipartisan compromise through rational discourse (pesky Enlightenment), but partisanship isn't always such a bad thing. I can't quite remember all the way back to my American history class, but I think the Federalists believed the Framers may have had partisanship in mind. Of course, I may be completely off. The Framers did believe in the educated elite governing the country. We also tend to forgot that America is not a democracy, it's a republic. We elect the people who govern, and who hopefully represent the people who elected them. Otherwise, we elect somebody else the next time, or if the elected abuse their power, we may impeach them. Still, in 2008 the people spoke choosing a Democratic president and a Democratic majority. And the elected have spoken in passing the health care bill. This year we will speak again in the midterm elections. Perhaps we have changed our minds.

In either case, if you haven't seen your Facebook home page today, go check it out. It's pretty funny, but also frightening in its implications. Those who have made a comment concerning health care are either 100% for or against it. And the comment sections are sometimes fraught. And these people are our Facebook friends! The country has been politically polarized and people are discussing politics in highly emotional states. I would hope at least are leaders could discuss politics in a more dispassionate manner. But after all the Enlightenment (logic) was succeeded by Romanticism (emotion). While this is a rant in its own way, I hope I'm open for a rational debate. I may have been harsh on conservatives, but I don't think I have been unfair. I certainly haven't compare anyone to Hitler. But if you disagree let me know. It's also on the Internet, a great shield for people to hide in anonymity and forget civility. You know who I am, you know I'm a liberal, and I hope I've been civil.

I think that's all I'm going to say on that for now, so if you want to jump straight to the comments, go ahead. However, in the meantime, I want to tell you how disgusting silver tequila is. My first experience with tequila was a bad one, and I've never really cared for it since. However, I do like a good margarita every now and then as well as a long island iced tea, two cocktails which use tequila. The only two cocktails in my mind that make a case for tequila's existence. So I was a caipirinha kick, and they are delicious, but then I started to make some long islands. The perfect long island iced tea recipe, courtesy of Dale DeGroff, is as follows:

1/2 oz vodka
12/oz gin
1/2 oz (white/light) rum
1/2 oz (silver) tequila
1/2 (triple sec) Cointreau
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
1/2 oz simple syrup
top with Coca-Cola (3-5 oz)
So you shake all the ingredient, except the cola, with ice, strain into a large glass filled 3/4 full of ice, top with Coke, and throw in a lemon wedge.

So basically it has four liquors and one liqueur, but is still delicious by combining them in small and equal portions, and surprisingly tastes a little bit like iced tea. So I had some 1800 reposado tequila, which is rested tequila. But all my cocktail books call for silver tequila in cocktails, which is not aged at all. And in the long island the vodka, gin, and Cointreau are clear, and so it calls for a white rum and a silver tequila to keep things equal. However, I was using my reposado and it worked just fine in margaritas and long islands. But then I used my last bit. So I went to the liquor store and decided to try silver tequila, buying 1800 brand 100% blue agave silver tequila. Huge mistake. The resting period of the reposado takes the edge off the silver tequila which is vegetal, peppery, and terrible. I made a silver margarita and it was the worst margarita I've ever had. So then I made a long island where you can't really taste any of the liquors since they're all mixed together. Except, through the vodka, gin, rum, Cointreau, lemon juice, simple syrup, and Coca-Cola, I could taste the 1/2 oz of silver tequila, and it almost ruined the long island--it's definitely not as good as with reposado. So here's my advice: avoid tequila always except for a margarita or long island, and then only use reposado tequila. I now have a big-ass bottle of silver tequila that I will probably have till the end of time.

Time to get ready for Portland!