Indignant Desert Birds

I’m a San Franciscan. It’s where my family landed when we hit North America, and it’s where I hope they bury my bones*. One thing everyone should understand about we San Franciscans: we don’t give a shit who you are. It takes a while for transplants to get this, but we’re pretty much anti-celebrity. That’s more of an “LA Thing”, and if there’s one thing San Franciscans hate more than celebrities, it’s LA**. So when a shop steward from a local SEIU union walks into my office, I’m going to call him “sir” and ask if he needs coffee.

The thing is, his English wasn’t great. I mean, yada yada, better than my Spanish. And yes, we could have had a nice conversation about the weather, or the Giants (assuming he’s into baseball to the same minimal extent I am). But the high-level, semi-technical political conversation that he wanted to have… I didn’t have the Spanish, and he didn’t have the English for.

I’m going to go ahead and make a supposition. The man is an SEIU shop steward. That means he’s most likely a US citizen. That means that roughly twice a year he’s going to get a ballot and be asked to make some decisions about the state constitution.*** As a citizen myself, one who is bound to live under whatever laws and constitution we mutually create, I want my fellow citizens to have as much knowledge and information as possible when helping guide our state. Therefore, I think it obvious that English-only laws are actively harmful to the ongoing project that we call American Democracy.

I don’t wish to lecture too much, but democracy is about the sense that all citizens are equal before the eyes of the law. If that means inconveniencing everyone by adding extra pages of government paperwork written in languages many people don’t read, that’s just the way it goes. Paper and ink are a very small price to pay to ensure that my fellow citizens know what they’re voting on, and what traffic laws are. Not to mention tax forms that can be filled out no matter how English-proficient the tax-payer is.

*Technically, we San Franciscans are not buried in town, but rather shipped off to rot in Colma. And, really, I’m hoping to be cremated.

** That, and calling our town “Frisco”. Seriously, don’t do that.

*** That’s how often we do this in California. Yes, it’s crazy.

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As many of my readers know, I spent some time in Central Ohio campaigning for a guy who was then a Senator. It was back in ’08 and you might have heard, we won that little dust up.

With me, I brought all of Brusts’ Taltos books*, and an iPod full of movies, music, and the first 3 episodes of Mad Men.

It turns out that talking to every Democrat in Franklin County Ohio is hard work. I didn’t get a chance to watch Mad Men until the plan ride home. On a tiny screen. I actually found the experience deeply satisfying, but…

For the next few days, I would experience some weird and intense flashbacks to the more pivotal moments of the campaign. My head was, in essence, fucked up. It cleared after a bit, but this show I spent a couple hours watching sort of got lost in the shuffle.

Anyway, I hear it’s pretty good, and I’ve got all of Season 1 on DVD. Guess who’s gonna watch that this week?

*This was in the pre-kindle days.

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Jay Leno. He has this recurring bit… ah hell. Watch one below. Warning: it’s seriously disgusting:

This seriously cuts at the fundamental tendons of our democracy. No, not the rank ignorance on display. Well, not directly. It’s the fact that Jay goes out and looks for people for his audience to feel smarter than. He’ll spend hours doing these interviews, and show only the dumbest.. what? 20%? And claim create the appearance that this is a representative sample. It’s even worse than that.

The questions themselves are sloppy. Take the Jay asks the audience about 20 seconds in. “we got our independence in what year?” The correct answer is 1783. Though a case could be made for 1784, or 1781. The really cheeky might say 1815.

We know what he means, though. He means “what year did America declare independence.” Am I being picky? Am I unfairly asking Jay to have correct information at the top of his head? Yes. Jay is leading his audience through an exercise of group schadenfreude. If he can’t be correct in a pre-written segment, then I get to call him on it.

I don’t simply mean to call Jay Leno a douche bag. After all, for those who need them, a douche bag serves a legitimate function. Jay is being actively harmful to American Democracy. Every time he airs a segment like this, carefully showing Americans at their worst, he tells his audience that they are smarter than everyone else. Over time, you end up thinking- in the words of my Leno-watching father- “people are stupid”.

Once someone stops believing that other people are capable of making good decisions– after all, Jay Leno showed me how much basic information everyone else lacks– representative democracy starts looking unpalatable. If “people are stupid”, then “We the People” have successfully become otherized. Keeping secrets from “them” starts looking like the smart idea. Asking for a Strong Man to use his own judgement about what budget items should be cut, or who should be indefinitely detained, or which Americans should be assassinated where.

Imagine a different segment. What if Jay spent his time going around to random people and asking them what physicist refer to as Magna Carta was signed, or who is the President of Burundi? (Bonus points for referencing Coffee in your answer). Imagine if Jay Leno awed and delighted his audience by showing them average people being smarter than they are.

Until that happens: here’s average people turning literal junk into working airplanes.

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I have a whole lot of stuff in my RSS reader. Much of it is fairly good. Every now and then I get a link and think “oh man, I should pass that link around to as many people as possible, because it is _awesome_.

Twitter is usually pretty good for that, but not always.

So, uh. Go get your coffee, come back, and read these links:

Willie Brown makes the obvious point that BART cops don’t need guns. I really really want to write more on this, so if anyone wants to yell at me to actually opine on this subject, I can be reached at: punningpundit -at- Gmail -dot- com

How can inheriting wealth be something ok in America? If the American story is that “with hard work and determination anyone can be anything in this country. So how can it be possible, or can anyone consider it beneficial, for people to inherit large sums of wealth?

Robert Skidelsky on why John Maynard Keynes was fucking brilliant. We ignore Keynes at our own peril.

Garland Grey on why it should be easy to be a queer-friendly, female friendly, geek– but still we geeks fail. Sad face

The Toilet Paper talks about toilet paper– that glows!

Lindsy G talks to us about what makes porn great. No, seriously.

Fidgit tells us about a great game you can start playing on your PC, right now. Looks like a ton of fun.

Gayle Force talks Vegas, Money, and the Patriarchy. And

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