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.
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?
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.
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
So: Alien is the Great Depression.
Aliens is the Great Recession Repossession.*
Let’s see: The marines do what they need to, when given leave to do so. But are almost never properly informed. They are ultimately overwhelmed by the scope of the problem, despite their best efforts. Obviously they the are House Democrats.
Carter Burke? Dick Cheney. He knows how badly things went last time, but still wants to try it again. There’s money to be made.
The face huggers? Economists who argue against Keynesian economic policy prescriptions.
Ripley is Paul Krugman, obviously.
Newt would be the American public.
Nuke the Neo-Hooverites from Orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
*Spell check took my original spelling of recession and turned it into Repossession. I like it so much that I’m keeping it.
Funny line of the day: A guy suggested that if any private company were run as badly as government, the CEO would be in jail. Dude, I haven’t noticed many wall street CEOs in prison. Perhaps I haven’t been reading the right newspapers, though.
Also: is there an implication in that statement that the government is run more poorly than Comcast? I have my doubts.
Once upon a time, a congressperson was asked about border security. The congressperson then made a comment to this questioner about the vigilante border security organization styling themselves as “minutemen”. Specifically, he called them “murderers”. This was not without some justification.
That’s when self described “rodeo clown” Glenn Beck gets involved.
Mr. Beck has a different point of view from myself, and from Congressperson Stark. This country was basically founded on trying to figure out how we could have a functional government, but still have wildly divergent ideas of what constitutes the good life. Some of Mr. Beck’s viewers, however, are not merely just a bit crazy. Rather they cross the line from crazy into violent. Yes, that last incident happened a few days ago, and in the backyard of Representative Stark.
Naturally, things were a bit on edge. The minutemen had activated their network, and the open carry people got their networks involved– and I naively thought that “open carry” was referring to a right to walk around with a bottle of beer. The Congressperson decided to go ahead with his regularly scheduled townhall meetings. Right after a minor terrorist attack* While the gun people got involved. With the vigilantes promising to be vigilant. And that’s when I got called in to volunteer.
I basically believe that one has a fundamental duty to be kind to those you hire– unless those people you hire are governmental representatives. In that case, they’re paid to take abuse, so flame on. This wasn’t shaping up to be the usual good natured “fix my potholes and my unemployment without raising taxes” sort of abuse, though. This was abuse by people advocating for the right to use guns to overthrow a government that proves itself incapable of fixing unemployment without raising taxes.
Not to sing my own praises here, but a large part of why you call me out is that you need someone capable of standing in front of an angry mob, smiling, and inviting them in for tea and cookies. It’s the smile that does it, really. People are wired to smile back. It works about 80% of the time**. I use this technique to ruthlessly cut down on hostility, and savagely force people into better moods.
It is possible to become a US Congressperson without being particularly savvy as a politician. I’ve met these people. Pete Stark is _not_ that guy. He knew that nothing he could say would cause these people to like him. He also knew that what they wanted more than anything else was the opportunity to be heard. So he sat there and took it.
Every insult and innuendo, every sling and arrow of outrageous rhetoric, he took it. And listened. And of the roughly 150 people who showed up to yell at him, about 20 were so disgusted by their fellow partisans, that they got up and left.
There are 3 incidents I’d like to relate.
The first one is just sort of funny. We had a simple policy: Signs are ok, signs on sticks are not. So this woman starts… she almost looked happy. She paused, messing up our line, and said “so I can’t bring in my flag? You’re saying I can’t bring in my flag?” Please, dear reader, remember that no one had said anything to her about her flag. We all paused for a moment, myself and a couple congressional staffers. After about a lifetime of thought, compressed into a heartbeat of actual time, I said “of course you can bring your flag into the meeting room!” She looked almost unhappy.
During the meeting, after we hit capacity (don’t tell the fire marshal, we might have gone over), a woman knocks on the door looking very distraught. She had been hoping to speak with the congressperson, you see– only he could help her. I flagged down one of his aids– looks like she had some work to do on this cheerful Saturday morning–an American citizen had issues with immigration. In my experience, congressional aides don’t complain about helping people with this stuff. It’s their basic function to do this shit and smile.
And that brings up incident number three. Some jackass decided to complain to me that the Representative isn’t very “accountable”. Excuse me? I didn’t say do you not see one of your fellow Americans out there crying because things in her life are so bad that only congress can help her? Do you not see the person out there being accountable to said fellow citizen by actually helping her at a time on Saturday morning when we’d all prefer to be in bed? I’m not there to judge the man, though, or lecture him. I’m there to listen to him.
I think more than anything else, the desire to be listened to is the the great human yearning. Plato called us “social animals”***, and I think most of that comes from wanting to be in close enough contact with other humans that we can yammer at them.
Anyway, this guy looks right at the security guard and said “I, a white guy, am going to say this to you, a black guy– and I think we’re all equal–” and that’s where he got unintelligible. I think he wanted white guys and black guys to make common cause against Mexicans. But I’m not really sure. I guess it’s progress that this white dude can look at a black guy and– even though he still sees all black guys reflected in this one black guy– see someone fundamentally the same as he is. I prefer racism the way I would any burn on the body politic: mild.
*stopped, by the way, by law enforcement. Seems that this can be an effective anti-terror tool. Despite what our friends across the isle will say
** I made up that number. But it really is extraordinarily high.
*** The word “politicon” can translate as “social”, as well as “political”
If there is a single fact about my existence, it’s books. I’ve planed vacations around hitting epic bookstores. I spent half a decade working at Barnes and Noble. Walking into my house can make one feel… overwhelmed by titles.
This is about 30% of the non-hallway/kitchen/bathroom wall space in my house. It’s about 800 books– 80% of the story was lost. Yet the world adapted, and wonderful stories like Tristram Shandy emerged to take advantage of this new medium.
I don’t know what we’ll lose and gain when we switch from paper to epaper. I do feel confident that our species will find something fantastic to do with the new tools.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some Doctor Who to watch…
Sarah Vowel is a genius. I know. It’s sort of weird to invoke Sarah Vowel in connection with sports. Her genius is not in connection with sports, per se, but in having coined the term Partly Cloudy Patriot.
I am an American Patriot. I watch 1776 every July 4th. I vote in every election– even the off-cycle primaries. I pay my taxes and don’t complain. When I see construction crews building impressive works of infrastructure, I feel the warm tingly sense of pride.
Then there’s the other thing. I’m just a little bit competitive. Most humans are. And the senses of competition and civic pride are as inevitable as lust and kissing. When a scandal hit some nowhere state capitol, people will come out to preen for the cameras to tell the world that their state is the most corrupt state in the country Crazy. We San Franciscans are proud of our awesome our weather is.* People in Chicago are just as proud of how awful theirs is.
As an American, therefore, I’d like to brag about what our country does well– war– and what our country does poorly– non-militarized responses to international relations. But as a partly cloudy patriot, and a human being, I don’t want to root for high body counts. And I really don’t want to swagger to Greece about how we could have bailed them out if our Senate weren’t so dysfunctional**
If I want to feel that warm glow of national pride at kicking someone else’s ass… that leaves sports. Sports may have complicated rules, but the feelings they bring are not complicated at all. We root root root for the home team. If they don’t win it’s a shame. I watch Soccer every 4 years. I don’t know the rules. I watch curling every 4 years. I don’t know the rules to that, either. I do know that I will root for America at every chance.
Rooting for the home team is awesome. Doing it in a crowd is exhilarating.
*It’s perfect. Seriously. Not even joking.
** I let the Germans feel pride about that.
Friend – This does say “capture or kill”. Not sure about the legal precedent of first or last resort on this, but I assume they would tend toward “capture” over “kill” if they could.
I feel like there are extenuating circumstances when dealing with somebody who has gone over to foreign soil and is actively working with foreign agencies to commit violence against the United States (not just it’s citizens, but the country as a whole). I have to admit, though, that I would feel a lot better about this had he sought some kind of legislative action to try him for treason (or whatever is appropriate) first.
Punning Pundit- I do understand those extenuation circumstance, and I think we need laws or agreements covering them. If a president wants sole authority do decide matters of life and death, he’s going to need to put himself at some personal risk– just to prove good faith.
Your suggestion is not without merit– but would qualify as a “Bill of Attainder” under the US Constitution. (article 1, section 9) As such it’s flatly unconstitutional– our founders saw too many English abuses of it.
Instead what I might propose is that the President ask Congress to grant the judicial branch the authority to issue “capture or kill” warrants when dealing with Americans who are out of the country. Congress has this authority under Article 3 section 2.
Alternately under Article 3 section 3 the Congress itself could try and convict someone of treason. It could then order the President to “capture or kill” the individual so convicted.
None of this even remotely resemble the president acting under his own authority to murder Americans
