Sunday Morning Reading Material: First Sunday in June 2011: The Old man is Snoring edition
This is basically what I see whenever I watch the 300.
It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for noticing typos in a comment you’ve just published. Sundays are for sleeping in, playing games, or heading off to work. Sundays are for enjoying the eponymous sun, nursing a bad back so you can nurse a child, or gearing up for the world’s largest video game expo. Sundays might just be for pancakes.
This week, the President of Yemen went to Saudi Arabia for “medical reasons”- apparently someone might put a bullet in his heart if he stays in Yemen. Also this week: Sony got hacked. Again. Also also: Cell phones were declared to be at least as cancerous as pickles.
Last Sunday America celebrated Memorial Day. I’d been previously told that Memorial Day was scheduled when it was so that Americans would have no easy way to celebrate May day- the international celebration of Labor. Delightfully, I find that I’m wrong. The story of the first Memorial Day is awesome, heartwarming, and sort of makes a body happy that the Union, rather than the Confederacy, won.
I have no love lost for cliches. They’re a tool used by lazy writers to sweep under the rug their own lack of skills. In the long run, no one is served by the use of such terrible devices. Granted, there are two sides to the cliche issue, and sometimes good writing can be more honored in the breech than the observance. Overthinking it is second to none when deconstruction popular culture.
When I first studied economics, we would make jokes about the elasticity curve of heroin being a vertical line. That joke is hilarious if you’re a boring person. Petroleum prices aren’t quite as inelastic as heroin- there is a point where America simply will not pay more. Saudi Arabia, quite naturally, wants us to never find that point.
Really rich people travel, and commit sex crimes against some of the poorest people in the first world. The fact that these crimes- from simple indecent exposure all the way up to rape- are incredibly common says some very bad things about how the very rich view the rest of us. Doing it to the very poor? Say it loud: class warfare.
I have always been against giving my labor away for free. The idea that it might be expected of me is, frankly, unamerican. Perhaps more to the point: I have never been in a position of so much affluence that I would be able to give my labor away and still eat. Oddly, giving away one’s labor for free (in the form of an internship) is an important stepping stone in many careers. Faster than you can say “class warfare”, the children of the rich are given a useful set of connections and experiences that the children of the non-rich cannot afford to match. Here are some ways to make the system work better.
The American political system is terrible. It has become inadequate to the problems faced by America as a whole, and is leading to a real decline in American quality of life. A radical change in the systems by which we vote is the only way we can solve our problems. I’m not sure that multi member districts are the best way to go, but they would certainly be a step up from what we currently have.
My ancestors have always been fishermen. Men, that is, and not fisherwomen. I’m fairly sure that my last name is Sicilian for “fisher”. My grandfather got out of the fishing business, and worked for a navel yard which build ships. From the Puget sound where my grandfather piloted ships on their maiden voyages, to Bangladesh where they will be stripped down, is a lifetime’s worth of journeying. It’s an amazing photo essay.
Shakespeare notwithstanding, Is there anything more fundamental to identity than a name? The whole history of a noun can be told by looking at what labels are attached to that noun. Even, perhaps especially, when that noun is a proper one. It does seem that African American naming conventions are more fluid than among other American ethnic groups, yet I’ve not seen any good data on the point. If this is true, I would love to see a good paper written about it- perhaps a book.
I am an unobservant fellow. Unless I’m specifically looking for something, I simply will not notice some things. This would make me a very bad artist or eye witness. That’s a long winded way of saying that I’m not sure why painting a white skin black makes for a bad video game avatar. Nevertheless, I’m told that it does. The fact that major games companies are hiring artists who are apparently as unobservant as I am is frightening.
When the Westboro Baptist Church goes head to head with the KKK, root for meteor strike.
The Republican party was founded as the party that fought for economic growth, and against slavery. Just before and after the Civil war, the Democratic party was the party of the white working man. LBJ made the Democratic Party into the party of the working man (Clinton did his best to make it the party of the working person). Between FDR and LBJ, the Democratic party was held in tension between (Southern) white supremacists and (Northern) workers. This was the glorious era of “bipartisanship”, when congress was able to look past party lines to screw black people and working people equally. Eventually Nixon seized the opportunity to make the Republicans the party of the (Southern) White man and big business, and we started to have partisanship again. There are many possible pairings to bring political power, but until America is a democratic nation, we’re going to have class warfare.
People who work hard and play by the rules can accomplish anything in America. A guy goes to school on a scholarship, excels in his chosen profession, makes millions, and starts to give it away. He has been named “a model citizen”, which shocked me- I thought that was a figure of speech. None of that matters. The cop was able to look right past the content of this man’s character and see the color of his skin. We’re truly living the dream.
Let me tell you about Py Korry. He taught me how to learn. Py Korry? That man taught me how to disagree with someone while admitting that there was room for me to be wrong. Py Korry? Before I took his introduction to Political Theory I was a “moderate” with some right-leaning tendencies. Turns out that I didn’t really share that worldview, I merely admired the attitude. Py Korry will be joining Funrainum on the faculty at Las Positas College. I am tempted to get another degree.
It was discovered that we could create partial to full immunity to diseases by using vaccinations. Childhood mortality plummeted. Disease rates plummeted. Human happiness and wellbeing jumped to all time highs. We got complacent. Some people got lied to. Many people stopped vaccinating. People are dying of diseases once thought extinct.
It’s amazing how much work a single word can do. For instance: The American/Canadian boarder is basically a 5000 mile straight line. By calling attention to that single word, I’m pointing out a fascinating lesson about American and Canadian history. With maps.
The tagline of this blog is “Class warfare and video games”. Obviously, I couldn’t pass that story up. The games industry is almost entirely devoid of unions, and also rife with tales of worker abuse and maltreatment. Probably just some post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, I’m sure.
America is able to borrow money incredibly inexpensively, and also has an enormous unemployment crisis. Fred Clark would like to put these things together, and start paying Americans do so stuff. Sunday mail delivery? Sure! How about more baseball? Done. Not mentioned: Let’s build a library for every thousand Americans. I’m not sure how much it would cost to build 3100 new libraries, stock them full of books, computers, CDs, DVDs, and ebook readers, but I bet it would educate the hell out of people.
If you read just one link:
As mediocre writer as I am, I love words. I love great writing, grand writing, writing that is like an airplane driving down a tarmac, seconds from taking flight into song. When I’m cuddled up with a girl, reading a book, I will often become so consumed by a passage that I will pause and just start reading out loud. A great game is much like great writing in a simple respect: they both require a sense of timing and rhythm. Perhaps that is more a commentary on the human condition than it is on any specific medium.
This week’s theme? Writing, writers, and doing right. In the comments, please leave an idea for something that would be useful, weird, and would employ lots of Americans.
Sundays are for:
Related posts:
- Sunday Morning Reading Material: Fourth Sunday in May 2011: And I feel fine edition
- Sunday Morning Reading Material: Fifth Sunday in May 2011: unPATRIOTic laws edition
- Sunday Morning Reading Material: Third Sunday in April 2011 – Playing the Game of Thrones to Either Win or Die edition
- Sunday Morning Reading Material: First Sunday in April 2011 – With Notably Rare Exceptions Edition
- Sunday Morning Reading Material: First Sunday in May 2011: Chemically Enhanced Edition
Thanks for the kind words! I’m looking forward to teaching again. Like I said in my blog post, it’s going to be a different vibe from when I was a teaching political science, but hey, I’ll be teaching again.
Re: the state of our political culture. You’re right about the consensus era being predicated on keeping black people “in their place.” Unions in the north could protect jobs of working class white racists of the Archie Bunker ilk, and the Democratic party would get their vote. It was only after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law did he make the famous remark (and I’m paraphrasing here): “There goes the South.” But he didn’t see that Civil Rights would also ignite the racism of northern whites who started the long tradition of voting against their economic interests by voting for corporate loving/union hating Republicans who filtered campaigns through the lens of race; a formula that’s worked really well for decades. As to why middle class and working class Americans aren’t more angry at the richest 1% getting a nice government safety net while they maybe get a couple of threads to hang on to, I think Bill Maher had a good answer: “That’s because these Americans think that they are millionaires in waiting, and when they finally “make it” they’ll get to live tax free and takes risks with the full faith and credit of the US government there to bail them out every time.”