If you haven't heard, you may be forgiven for not knowing President Obama is on vacation in Martha's Vineyard at the moment, because it's neither newsworthy nor surprising. Whether you invoke the "elitist" card or not, Obama is a rich, progressive liberal, and everyone knows rich, progressive liberals like to vacation on exclusive New England beaches, among other posh locations. (And at $20 million, the resort the Obamas picked had better qualify as posh.)
What is worth noting is the token, middle-America destination Obama chose to breeze through prior to his real vacation in order to head off those inevitable charges of elitism and snobbery. As a sort of footnote to several "townhall" meetings in western states to discuss the inescapable health care debate, the first family made a quick stopover in the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks. Quoth the LA Times:
"He'll spend the last week of August at a $20-million estate in one of the most private spots on the Vineyard. But this weekend, he'll balance out the imagery with a visit to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon."
Normally I might not even take note of the POTUS' comings and goings, but as it happens, I just spent the last week in one of those non-elite vacation spots: Yellowstone National Park, and its sister, Grand Teton. And having returned suffused with admiration and love for the natural splendor that is Yellowstone, I can't help bristling at the notion that the supposed leader of this country regards the 2,900 miles between the coasts as little more than a good photo op before his "real" vacation.
Now, I have nothing against Martha's Vineyard, which I've never visited. I have no doubt it's a lovely beach, as are most of the beaches between Maine and Florida. But no one goes to the Vineyard for surf and sun, which are available elsewhere for cheaper; they go because they can go, because they can afford tens of thousands of dollars for a week in the high season, or because they can afford tens of millions of dollars for some of the country's most sought-after real estate. They go to be amongst like-minded folk, mostly celebrities and movie stars and other millionaires.
You most definitely do not go to Yellowstone for those reasons. You go there to experience the last great unspoiled temperate wilderness left on earth. You go to see grizzly bears and bison and other beasts that once roamed a whole continent but have since retreated to this last holdout. You go to see glacier-crowned mountains that jut a mile and a half straight up into a clear, unpolluted blue sky. Martha's Vineyard, I imagine, makes you feel special; Yellowstone, I know, makes you feel lucky.
But after a brief lifetime of traveling west to places like Yellowstone at every opportunity, I've realized not many of my east-coast ilk share that feeling. I grew up outside New York City, and I now reside outside Washington, and I've known more than my share of smart, affluent, worldly people. I went to school with them, and I work with them. And almost without exception, nobody ever understood my desire to see America west of the Appalachians. Kids I knew who went out west did so to ski because the snow was good, and that was about it. A few social studies teachers seemed pleasantly surprised I'd been to some of the places in our textbook.
The adults I work with now mostly express a certain enthusiasm that I just spent a week in Wyoming, but with one exception, they yearn to lounge at the beach or cavort through bohemian Europe. When the Cosmopolitan in Chief jets off to Manhattan or Paris for "date night" with his First Lady, they gush in approval tinged with envy.
So it was difficult for me, taking in a sweeping Wyoming vista or learning about the rich, bloody, tragic history of the west at the (incredibly good) Buffalo Bill museum in Cody, to consider how little so many Americans care to explore their own patrimony and past. Between the coasts lies a whole continent, as diverse and awesome as any other, ranging from burning desert, to old-growth rain forest, to rolling savannah, to ice-capped mountain ranges.
And within that array of landscapes, a thousand different human cultures lived and died over the course of a hundred centuries, culminating in a final blaze of glory and cruelty and sadness when a European culture arrived like a landslide and wiped them all out. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody played a starring role in that fleeting moment of history between 1865 and 1885 or so, when whites warred with Indians on the Great Plains, and no lesser personage than a prince of Imperial Russia traveled halfway around the world to witness Cody's performance in a wild, unique human drama that will never come again.
When the frontiers were closed, and the wars all settled in favor of white America, Cody, that slaughterer of the buffalo herds and rare friend of many Indian tribes, took his Wild West shows to civilized, worldly Europe, for what now seems like an amazing purpose: to satisfy the veracious desire of Europeans to experience the Old West, as presented by the man most singly responsible for bringing it to an end. Can you imagine, in the year 2009, European audiences, from kings and queens and prime ministers on down, paying good money to experience American culture? For that matter, do the coastal Americans who all too often eschew the interior of their country in favor of foreign lands even acknowledge such a thing as "American culture?" Isn't it all just flyover country full of Wal-Marts and strip malls and rednecks?
Perhaps I shouldn't complain that more easterners don't go west. After all, certain parking lots in Yellowstone were already sufficiently crowded with RVs bearing licence plates from Utah and Minnesota and Alabama that the charm of the place was threatened. But the west is vast, above all else. There's room to spare, discoveries to make, history to feel and freedom to roam: the same qualities that brought settlers there in the first place.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know I'll be back.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
The Case Against Public Health Insurance, in Five Minutes or Your Money Back
Of the many problems of living within sight of the U.S. Capitol and the seat of federal power, perhaps the worst is the tendency for serious, philosophical public policy debates to turn into wonkish statistics battles and scare-mongering. And nowhere in this town of wonks, wags and pols is this phenomenon more egregious than the fight over health care reform, and whether to create a "public option" to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. Given that this argument concerns a fairly momentous crossroads for our country, it would be nice to hear the opposing sides make their cases in clear-cut, conceptual terms that everyone can understand and evaluate. Right?
But alas. Where we need simple, objective facts, we get bewildering, and often contradictory, statistics, which can be distorted in any number of ways. Where we need broad, guiding principles, we get anecdotal horror stories intended to curtail debate.
But alas. Where we need simple, objective facts, we get bewildering, and often contradictory, statistics, which can be distorted in any number of ways. Where we need broad, guiding principles, we get anecdotal horror stories intended to curtail debate.
And the problem is, none of these anecdotes are false. None of the statistics are bogus. But they exist as individual trees in a vast forest, forever obscuring our view of What Really Matters. We could use a Health Insurance 101 curriculum, to serve as a starting point and a reality check for the politicians in Congress who, even as you read this, are busy debating how much control the government should exert over your physical well-being. Since no such remedial class seems to exist, I humbly offer the following as food for thought.
In plain economic terms, "insurance" is a means of lowering risk. You insure yourself against things you hope won't happen, such as car crashes, house fires and sudden death. Insurance allows people to protect themselves from unlikely, but unpredictable, events that could very well ruin them financially. And insurers provide this protection when they judge that the premiums their customers pay will outweigh the costs of cleaning up after the rare but disastrous events they promise to insure against.
The key here is that insurance is something that both you and your insurer hope you'll never need. Drivers with car insurance don't run red lights at 120 miles per hour, because they know insurance won't do them much good if they're dead. Thus arises another important feature of insurance: It should encourage people to avoid doing stupid things. This is the reason good drivers pay less for car insurance, and why nonsmokers pay less for life insurance. Insurers reward their customers in return for acting responsibly and lowering the risk of events the insurer doesn't want to pay for.
So we have a health care system in which people ruin their health, because they have been given a blank check to do so. The negative effects of Marlboroughs, Big Macs and La-Z-Boy recliners are small, incremental, and difficult to see, so many Americans indulge in one or more of them with reckless abandon. When they need to see a doctor because of a lifestyle-related condition (think lung cancer, heart disease, Type II diabetes), they incur only a fraction of the cost, if they have insurance (with the notable exception of bogus policies that don't cover what they're supposed to cover).
Unfortunately, the healthy still need insurance, to do what insurance is supposed to do: avoid the costs of unpredictable disasters, such as getting run over by a bus and needing expensive surgery. In the process, they pick up the tab for the avoidable expenses regularly incurred by the people who eat too much, drink too much and smoke too much. This is nothing more than a legalized protection racket that preys on anyone who pays more in premiums than they receive in needed health care.
Somehow, health insurance has morphed from "protection against things I try to avoid anyway" to "the way I get someone else to pay for the consequences of my bad decisions." Remember this as liberals in Congress, along with our president, lobby to expand this perverse system further and put government more fully in charge of it.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Dude, Where's My Objectivity?
Last week, an 88-year-old anti-semite made headlines by walking into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle, apparently intent on violently protesting a museum dedicated to an event he maintains didn't happen, and ended up gunning down a black museum guard who challenged him at the door. Given the short-term memory of the media, I imagine the news cycle will linger on this ugly story for another day or two, and then move on to the next episode of public bloodshed, be it airline crash, school shooting or another such tragedy.
For me, the impact of the shooting will linger a bit longer, if for no other reason than its proximity to my office building in Washington. I pass the Holocaust Museum every morning and evening; the day after the attack, I saw the FBI trucks and agents fanned out around the taped-off building, presumably performing post-shooting ballistics analysis, to figure out exactly where each shot was fired, and more chillingly, perhaps checking for bombs (the shooter, James von Brunn, apparently had drawn up a list of other "targets" in the DC area shortly before his attack).
The natural reaction to this fizzled attempt at mass murder, the one I've heard most people express, is simple disgust: disgust at an angry, demented old man brimming with racial hatred taking the life of a young security guard with a wife and son, whom acquaintances roundly described as a class-act, and doing so in a place created to preserve the memory of millions of other victims of that same hatred.
But for a certain, enlightened, moralizing faction of the left-wing punditry, this isn't enough. Von Brunn's lunacy can't be abominated in isolation; rather, it must be seen in a larger context. For you see, this ugly episode is the product of the "hate" spewed by right-wing ideologues in the media. Sound like cheap political opportunism? Judge for yourself.
Intones the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson:
"What we don't know is whether all the blast-furnace rhetoric coming from the right is giving validation and encouragement to some confused, angry man or woman with a rifle or a truck full of fertilizer -- the next 'lone wolf,' preparing to howl."
Quoth The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who deviated from his usual columns extolling the virtues of Keynesian economics and massive government deficits with this sermon on political ethics:
"Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment."
Both these and other liberal pontificators have seized on a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, warning that domestic terrorist groups motivated by neo-Nazism and other charming fringe dogmas pose a real threat. Further, DHS noted that the election of an African-American president is sure to rile this motley claque, potentially leading to more violence.
So along comes octogenarian loon von Brunn, hot on the heels of the murder of noted Kansas abortionist George Tiller only a few weeks ago, and now the Paul Krugmans of the world are connecting the dots and tracing them back to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other perfidious sources of murder-inducing rhetoric. Writing in this week's Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank (who failed to return my e-mail to him on an unrelated column) even goes so far as to suggest that "maybe [certain pro-lifers] deserved some of the blame for [Tiller's] murder," because they had the audacity to protest and condemn his practice of performing late-term abortions that almost no other doctor in the country will touch, thereby inciting a crazed gunman to take him out.
That such arguments imply a bizarre transfer of responsibility for acts of violence from the people who actually commit them to the politically influential right-wing media outlets that Krugman, et al, detest is bad enough. But there is a larger issue at play here: namely, the left's utter myopia regarding extremist, irrational language creeping into political discourse. And as if he knew all about my humble little blog and wanted to give me a helping hand, Times columnist Frank Rich kindly bloviated on this very issue last Sunday, perfectly demonstrating the one-way street that he and his ilk apparently live on. In regard to an obscure Michigan Republican party figure who has criticized Obama as a fascist, Rich huffily announced:
"He didn’t seem to grasp that 'fascism' is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find 'bad' because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler."
Really, Frank? We shouldn't "slur" a sitting president by likening him to Hitler? Then where exactly were you when liberal protesters routinely toted "Bush = Hitler" placards at anti-war rallies? For that matter, where were any of these champions of fair-minded, dispassionate political discourse for the last eight years, when Bush was accused of letting 9/11 happen to serve as a pretext for war in the Middle East, or when Bush was accused of botching the post-Katrina rescue operations in New Orleans because he "doesn't like black people"? Or how about the 10 billion other mindless rants spewed by the left blaming Bush for anything that happened to make them unhappy?
I didn't vote for George Bush. Nor do I listen to a minute of Rush Limbaugh, or watch a minute of Fox News, largely because I don't care for sensationalized news; but last I checked, none of these blowhards has harmed anybody, or called for the harming of anyone. Meanwhile, liberal audiences guffaw at Wanda Sykes' cheerful hope for Rush's kidneys to fail, rap artists glorify urban gang violence, and liberals in Congress drag bankers into show-trials and browbeat them on national television for supposedly wrecking the economy to arouse populist anger. The Times doesn't bat an eye. Apparently all speech is free, but only right-wing speech can be condemned as hateful or inflammatory.
The left's sudden rediscovery that nasty political rhetoric is, well, nasty, reminds me distinctly of the last time we had a Democrat in the White House whom Republicans dared to attack. I will never forget watching a clip of Alec Baldwin on the Conan O'Brien show in 1998, at the height of the impeachment frenzy resulting from Bill Clinton's dalliance with a White House intern. Working himself into a genuine lather, warm, fuzzy liberal Baldwin ranted in regard to Republican Henry Hyde, the Representative who led the impeachment hearings in the House:
"If we were living in another country, what we, all of us together, would go down to Washington and stone Henry Hyde to death, stone him to death, stone him to death! Then we would go to their house and we'd kill the family, kill the children."
Not to be outdone, alleged comedian Chris Rock announced, in 1999, "If Clinton would pardon me, I would whip [Independent Counsel Ken] Starr's ass right now. I will get a crew from Brooklyn and we will stomp him."
Apparently, liberals are authorized to call for acts of violence against specific politicians; they are permitted to traffic in nonsensical conspiracy theories and histrionic accusations of sitting presidents; and when their party wins an election, they acquire the moral authority to abjure these self-same antics as "hateful." Thus can an unhinged old man's act of violence be hung around the neck of anyone who dares to oppose the new administration's agenda. A new syllogism is emerging: "If you're not part of the Obama solution, you're part of the problem."
For me, the impact of the shooting will linger a bit longer, if for no other reason than its proximity to my office building in Washington. I pass the Holocaust Museum every morning and evening; the day after the attack, I saw the FBI trucks and agents fanned out around the taped-off building, presumably performing post-shooting ballistics analysis, to figure out exactly where each shot was fired, and more chillingly, perhaps checking for bombs (the shooter, James von Brunn, apparently had drawn up a list of other "targets" in the DC area shortly before his attack).
The natural reaction to this fizzled attempt at mass murder, the one I've heard most people express, is simple disgust: disgust at an angry, demented old man brimming with racial hatred taking the life of a young security guard with a wife and son, whom acquaintances roundly described as a class-act, and doing so in a place created to preserve the memory of millions of other victims of that same hatred.
But for a certain, enlightened, moralizing faction of the left-wing punditry, this isn't enough. Von Brunn's lunacy can't be abominated in isolation; rather, it must be seen in a larger context. For you see, this ugly episode is the product of the "hate" spewed by right-wing ideologues in the media. Sound like cheap political opportunism? Judge for yourself.
Intones the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson:
"What we don't know is whether all the blast-furnace rhetoric coming from the right is giving validation and encouragement to some confused, angry man or woman with a rifle or a truck full of fertilizer -- the next 'lone wolf,' preparing to howl."
Quoth The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who deviated from his usual columns extolling the virtues of Keynesian economics and massive government deficits with this sermon on political ethics:
"Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment."
Both these and other liberal pontificators have seized on a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, warning that domestic terrorist groups motivated by neo-Nazism and other charming fringe dogmas pose a real threat. Further, DHS noted that the election of an African-American president is sure to rile this motley claque, potentially leading to more violence.
So along comes octogenarian loon von Brunn, hot on the heels of the murder of noted Kansas abortionist George Tiller only a few weeks ago, and now the Paul Krugmans of the world are connecting the dots and tracing them back to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other perfidious sources of murder-inducing rhetoric. Writing in this week's Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank (who failed to return my e-mail to him on an unrelated column) even goes so far as to suggest that "maybe [certain pro-lifers] deserved some of the blame for [Tiller's] murder," because they had the audacity to protest and condemn his practice of performing late-term abortions that almost no other doctor in the country will touch, thereby inciting a crazed gunman to take him out.
That such arguments imply a bizarre transfer of responsibility for acts of violence from the people who actually commit them to the politically influential right-wing media outlets that Krugman, et al, detest is bad enough. But there is a larger issue at play here: namely, the left's utter myopia regarding extremist, irrational language creeping into political discourse. And as if he knew all about my humble little blog and wanted to give me a helping hand, Times columnist Frank Rich kindly bloviated on this very issue last Sunday, perfectly demonstrating the one-way street that he and his ilk apparently live on. In regard to an obscure Michigan Republican party figure who has criticized Obama as a fascist, Rich huffily announced:
"He didn’t seem to grasp that 'fascism' is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find 'bad' because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler."
Really, Frank? We shouldn't "slur" a sitting president by likening him to Hitler? Then where exactly were you when liberal protesters routinely toted "Bush = Hitler" placards at anti-war rallies? For that matter, where were any of these champions of fair-minded, dispassionate political discourse for the last eight years, when Bush was accused of letting 9/11 happen to serve as a pretext for war in the Middle East, or when Bush was accused of botching the post-Katrina rescue operations in New Orleans because he "doesn't like black people"? Or how about the 10 billion other mindless rants spewed by the left blaming Bush for anything that happened to make them unhappy?
I didn't vote for George Bush. Nor do I listen to a minute of Rush Limbaugh, or watch a minute of Fox News, largely because I don't care for sensationalized news; but last I checked, none of these blowhards has harmed anybody, or called for the harming of anyone. Meanwhile, liberal audiences guffaw at Wanda Sykes' cheerful hope for Rush's kidneys to fail, rap artists glorify urban gang violence, and liberals in Congress drag bankers into show-trials and browbeat them on national television for supposedly wrecking the economy to arouse populist anger. The Times doesn't bat an eye. Apparently all speech is free, but only right-wing speech can be condemned as hateful or inflammatory.
The left's sudden rediscovery that nasty political rhetoric is, well, nasty, reminds me distinctly of the last time we had a Democrat in the White House whom Republicans dared to attack. I will never forget watching a clip of Alec Baldwin on the Conan O'Brien show in 1998, at the height of the impeachment frenzy resulting from Bill Clinton's dalliance with a White House intern. Working himself into a genuine lather, warm, fuzzy liberal Baldwin ranted in regard to Republican Henry Hyde, the Representative who led the impeachment hearings in the House:
"If we were living in another country, what we, all of us together, would go down to Washington and stone Henry Hyde to death, stone him to death, stone him to death! Then we would go to their house and we'd kill the family, kill the children."
Not to be outdone, alleged comedian Chris Rock announced, in 1999, "If Clinton would pardon me, I would whip [Independent Counsel Ken] Starr's ass right now. I will get a crew from Brooklyn and we will stomp him."
Apparently, liberals are authorized to call for acts of violence against specific politicians; they are permitted to traffic in nonsensical conspiracy theories and histrionic accusations of sitting presidents; and when their party wins an election, they acquire the moral authority to abjure these self-same antics as "hateful." Thus can an unhinged old man's act of violence be hung around the neck of anyone who dares to oppose the new administration's agenda. A new syllogism is emerging: "If you're not part of the Obama solution, you're part of the problem."
Monday, June 1, 2009
iPod, Real Headphones Obviate Need for Bus Suicide
When it comes to technological gizmos, I'm not much of an enthusiast. I have a computer with Internet because modern life is too inconvenient to navigate without one; I have a cellphone, grudgingly, because it's the cheapest way I can make and get the calls I need; and I will sooner take up scrimshaw than shackle myself with a goddamned Blackberry or iPhone like every other DC office chattel who cherishes these electronic yokes.
But when Apple came out with its teeny, tiny iPod shuffle a couple years ago, I caved. Something the size of a matchbook that can hold a dozen albums worth of music? For $79? Where do I sign up?
So I put in my order before the new shuffle even came out. And for a while, I loved the novelty of so much music in such a handy little device. But then physical reality reasserted itself.
Because the ear pieces that come standard with an iPod almost negate the very concept of music as a pleasurable experience. They emit a tinny, buzzy tone, with no bass, and not very much treble either. Apparently Apple developed them to produce frequencies that only dogs can hear, except when you turn the volume up all the way, when they become all too audible to human ears. I heard that when water-boarding was outlawed at Guantanamo, the CIA switched over to interrogating terrorists by forcing them to listen to Kelly Clarkson on a maxed out iPod Touch with standard Apple ear buds.
And -- here the fault is mine -- I have never owned a decent pair of real headphones to pair with something like my oh-so-carryable iPod. This was a glaring oversight on my part, which I only very recently rectified with a pair of low-end Sony studio-quality phones, for the princely sum of $25. And suddenly, my iPod is worth owning. Not a moment too soon, either; if I hadn't dropped that $25 at Best Buy and dug my iPod out of storage this morning, I would not be here right now now to tell you about it. I would have killed myself while waiting for the 8:14 express bus to work this morning.
I ride the same bus to and from work every day, especially now that I've moved to an apartment located conveniently across the street from the bus stop. Because this is an express line with only a handful of buses during morning and evening rush hour, you tend to see the same faces every day. And mostly these faces belong to placid, mild-mannered commuters such as myself, who really like the fact that the bus requires half the time that the Metro ride would take, for about ten cents extra. We are mostly a quiet, unobtrusive lot. We smile and nod to one another; the more gregarious even carry on quiet conversations. In short, a bunch of decent office-bound creatures trying to get to and from our boring jobs as humanely as possible.
All of us, except one strident, shrill, oblivious wretch of a middle-aged woman who sometimes rides my bus. Without putting too fine a point on it, I hate this woman with unabashed passion. She is, without question, the most horrid human being I encounter in my day-to-day life, bar none.
She is the sort of person who must complain, loudly, about EVERYTHING, to ANYBODY who happens to be within earshot, myself included. If I encounter her at the bus stop in the summer, she tries to bitch to me about how hot it is; in the winter, how cold it is. She has demanded of me no fewer than 11 million times, in her harsh, nasal voice, "Are you waiting for the 11Y!?" You would think, after seeing me get on the 11Y bus 11 million times after seeing me waiting at a bus stop that says "11Y" she might put two and two together, but apparently she is too oblivious and self-centered to remember another human being for more than three consecutive seconds. On one of these occasions, after I affirmed that, Yes, just like every other 10,999,999 times you've asked me this, I am in fact waiting for the 11Y, she had the temerity to intone, in her sniveling, needy way, "It should come soon, right?" To which I calmly responded, "I'm sorry, but how in the name of Zeus' butthole do I know where, in this city of 45,000 motor vehicles, when accidents and presidential motorcades routinely stop traffic, the bus is?"
Last Friday after work, this woman, whom for convenience' sale I'll call Satan, clambered on to my bus just as I was thinking "Yes, Satan must have gotten the 5:05 today!" And for five solid minutes, she proceeded to badger the driver, and every single passenger, as to "Which bus this is." As in, "Is this the 5:05, or the 5:25, or the 5:40?" Never mind that this was the 5:25, right on time. Never mind that this woman rides these buses every day of her hideous life and should know the schedule. Never mind that the schedule is conveniently posted online. Never mind that SHE'S ALREADY ON THE BUS, WHICH IS ALL THAT MATTERS! For reasons of her own obsessive edification, Satan must know, NOW, which particular bus she is on, and she will not rest until she has withered the soul of every single occupant with her insipid prattle.
Suffice to say, this is not the sort of person whom Anton Chigurh would have offered a coin flip before deciding whether to kill her with his cattle gun.
So you can well imagine my reaction this morning, when who should saunter up to the stop, but Satan in all her frazzled, Monday morning glory. And when she proceeded to commence telling a fellow rider about some infraction that some occupant of her condo building had committed in the building's laundry room, in painstaking detail (among her other charming qualities, this woman despises everyone), I started reaching for my cyanide pill. On a beautiful Monday morning such as this, with the sun shining, the cool breeze blowing, and a long day of cubicle time ahead of me, this outpouring of petty, strident bile was just too much to bear. I was just putting the finishing mental touches on my epitaph, when I remembered: "My headphones! My iPod! Salvation!" Moments later, the soothing, dulcet tones of "Anything But This" blared in my ears, obliterating all other sound. And so I could go on living.
Thank you, Apple. Thank you, Sony.
And lest anyone think the hot, blinding rage Satan inspires in me is just a sign of what a crank I am, I received the following e-mail from my girlfriend, who rides the bus every morning with me, while I was writing this:
"That lady is horrible. Having had to listen/observe her nonsense for 25 minutes, I can say that I hate her. I left my stupid Ipod in my drawer here and I'm still mad at myself for it."
But when Apple came out with its teeny, tiny iPod shuffle a couple years ago, I caved. Something the size of a matchbook that can hold a dozen albums worth of music? For $79? Where do I sign up?
So I put in my order before the new shuffle even came out. And for a while, I loved the novelty of so much music in such a handy little device. But then physical reality reasserted itself.
Because the ear pieces that come standard with an iPod almost negate the very concept of music as a pleasurable experience. They emit a tinny, buzzy tone, with no bass, and not very much treble either. Apparently Apple developed them to produce frequencies that only dogs can hear, except when you turn the volume up all the way, when they become all too audible to human ears. I heard that when water-boarding was outlawed at Guantanamo, the CIA switched over to interrogating terrorists by forcing them to listen to Kelly Clarkson on a maxed out iPod Touch with standard Apple ear buds.
And -- here the fault is mine -- I have never owned a decent pair of real headphones to pair with something like my oh-so-carryable iPod. This was a glaring oversight on my part, which I only very recently rectified with a pair of low-end Sony studio-quality phones, for the princely sum of $25. And suddenly, my iPod is worth owning. Not a moment too soon, either; if I hadn't dropped that $25 at Best Buy and dug my iPod out of storage this morning, I would not be here right now now to tell you about it. I would have killed myself while waiting for the 8:14 express bus to work this morning.
I ride the same bus to and from work every day, especially now that I've moved to an apartment located conveniently across the street from the bus stop. Because this is an express line with only a handful of buses during morning and evening rush hour, you tend to see the same faces every day. And mostly these faces belong to placid, mild-mannered commuters such as myself, who really like the fact that the bus requires half the time that the Metro ride would take, for about ten cents extra. We are mostly a quiet, unobtrusive lot. We smile and nod to one another; the more gregarious even carry on quiet conversations. In short, a bunch of decent office-bound creatures trying to get to and from our boring jobs as humanely as possible.
All of us, except one strident, shrill, oblivious wretch of a middle-aged woman who sometimes rides my bus. Without putting too fine a point on it, I hate this woman with unabashed passion. She is, without question, the most horrid human being I encounter in my day-to-day life, bar none.
She is the sort of person who must complain, loudly, about EVERYTHING, to ANYBODY who happens to be within earshot, myself included. If I encounter her at the bus stop in the summer, she tries to bitch to me about how hot it is; in the winter, how cold it is. She has demanded of me no fewer than 11 million times, in her harsh, nasal voice, "Are you waiting for the 11Y!?" You would think, after seeing me get on the 11Y bus 11 million times after seeing me waiting at a bus stop that says "11Y" she might put two and two together, but apparently she is too oblivious and self-centered to remember another human being for more than three consecutive seconds. On one of these occasions, after I affirmed that, Yes, just like every other 10,999,999 times you've asked me this, I am in fact waiting for the 11Y, she had the temerity to intone, in her sniveling, needy way, "It should come soon, right?" To which I calmly responded, "I'm sorry, but how in the name of Zeus' butthole do I know where, in this city of 45,000 motor vehicles, when accidents and presidential motorcades routinely stop traffic, the bus is?"
Last Friday after work, this woman, whom for convenience' sale I'll call Satan, clambered on to my bus just as I was thinking "Yes, Satan must have gotten the 5:05 today!" And for five solid minutes, she proceeded to badger the driver, and every single passenger, as to "Which bus this is." As in, "Is this the 5:05, or the 5:25, or the 5:40?" Never mind that this was the 5:25, right on time. Never mind that this woman rides these buses every day of her hideous life and should know the schedule. Never mind that the schedule is conveniently posted online. Never mind that SHE'S ALREADY ON THE BUS, WHICH IS ALL THAT MATTERS! For reasons of her own obsessive edification, Satan must know, NOW, which particular bus she is on, and she will not rest until she has withered the soul of every single occupant with her insipid prattle.
Suffice to say, this is not the sort of person whom Anton Chigurh would have offered a coin flip before deciding whether to kill her with his cattle gun.
So you can well imagine my reaction this morning, when who should saunter up to the stop, but Satan in all her frazzled, Monday morning glory. And when she proceeded to commence telling a fellow rider about some infraction that some occupant of her condo building had committed in the building's laundry room, in painstaking detail (among her other charming qualities, this woman despises everyone), I started reaching for my cyanide pill. On a beautiful Monday morning such as this, with the sun shining, the cool breeze blowing, and a long day of cubicle time ahead of me, this outpouring of petty, strident bile was just too much to bear. I was just putting the finishing mental touches on my epitaph, when I remembered: "My headphones! My iPod! Salvation!" Moments later, the soothing, dulcet tones of "Anything But This" blared in my ears, obliterating all other sound. And so I could go on living.
Thank you, Apple. Thank you, Sony.
And lest anyone think the hot, blinding rage Satan inspires in me is just a sign of what a crank I am, I received the following e-mail from my girlfriend, who rides the bus every morning with me, while I was writing this:
"That lady is horrible. Having had to listen/observe her nonsense for 25 minutes, I can say that I hate her. I left my stupid Ipod in my drawer here and I'm still mad at myself for it."
Friday, May 29, 2009
Judicial Nomination Guide: The Obama Calculus
Note: The following is meant purely as a helpful guide to selecting nominees to the highest court in the land. A minimum of 10 points is required before you can declare a winning nominee.
If the candidate you are considering came from very humble economic origins, but went on to attend Ivy League universities, add two points.
If the candidate you are considering grew up in a single-parent household, add two points.
If the candidate's ethnicity coincides with an important ethnic demographic within your political party, add three points.
If the candidate possesses significant experience in the legal profession, add three points.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor's score of 10 points (2+2+3+3) thus qualifies her for nomination to the Supreme Court. Of course, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also would score a 10 according to this rubric, as Kimberly Strassel notes in today's Wall Street Journal:
"Justice Thomas ... lost his father, and was raised by his mother in a rural Georgia town, in a shack without running water, until he was sent to his grandfather. The same Justice Thomas who had to work every day after school, though he was not allowed to study at the Savannah Public Library because he was black. The same Justice Thomas who became the first in his family to go to college and receive a law degree from Yale."
But then-candidate Obama had the following to say about Thomas last year:
"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation."
But bear in mind one final rule of the nomination calculus:
If the candidate in question satisfies all of the foregoing criteria but happens to believe that justice should be administered blindly, without "empathy" for particular litigants, based only on strict and narrow interpretations of the Constitution, subtract 11 points.
If the candidate you are considering came from very humble economic origins, but went on to attend Ivy League universities, add two points.
If the candidate you are considering grew up in a single-parent household, add two points.
If the candidate's ethnicity coincides with an important ethnic demographic within your political party, add three points.
If the candidate possesses significant experience in the legal profession, add three points.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor's score of 10 points (2+2+3+3) thus qualifies her for nomination to the Supreme Court. Of course, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also would score a 10 according to this rubric, as Kimberly Strassel notes in today's Wall Street Journal:
"Justice Thomas ... lost his father, and was raised by his mother in a rural Georgia town, in a shack without running water, until he was sent to his grandfather. The same Justice Thomas who had to work every day after school, though he was not allowed to study at the Savannah Public Library because he was black. The same Justice Thomas who became the first in his family to go to college and receive a law degree from Yale."
But then-candidate Obama had the following to say about Thomas last year:
"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation."
But bear in mind one final rule of the nomination calculus:
If the candidate in question satisfies all of the foregoing criteria but happens to believe that justice should be administered blindly, without "empathy" for particular litigants, based only on strict and narrow interpretations of the Constitution, subtract 11 points.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Thoughts on Bill Bryson
This is apropos of nothing in particular, except that I just finished what I believe may be the last book by humorist-cum-travel writer Bill Bryson that I'd never read, except for one. And since the man has been entertaining me off and on for a goodly portion of my reading life, I feel like some sort of summing up is in order, if only for my own satisfaction.
Beginning with his account of a rambling trip around the Australian outback ("In a Sunburnt Country"), I've followed Bryson across three continents, plus an entire journey dedicated to Great Britain, and another that traversed much of the Appalachian Trail.
But he's considerably more than just a travel writer; perhaps his best work is "A Brief History of Nearly Everything," an ambitious and, overall, hugely successful attempt by a scientific layman to recount the history of almost all major scientific knowledge for a layperson audience, interspersed with biographical sketches of all the great, often bizarre, thinkers who made the most momentous contributions to science. (My personal favorite is his account of Sir Isaac Newton, who probed the bones in his skull behind his eyeball with a sharp knife with clinical detachment, but suffered no pain.)
I read Bryson's works largely out of order, but there's no particular reason not to do that. His account of a whirlwind tour across Europe from northernmost Scandanavia to Istanbul ("Neither Here nor There") was written a decade before the much more popular "A Walk in the Woods," but no matter. If anything, I've enjoyed picking up the various threads of an interesting man's life at different, haphazard intervals, skipping forwards and backwards in time. At any age and on any subject, Bryson is an engaging writer, and since he'd completed most of his work before I became aware of him, I've had the luxury of picking and choosing from a wide repertoire.
But whatever his subject matter, I ultimately read Bill Bryson because the man is a hoot. He has the wonderful ability both to find his way into absurd situations, particularly when traveling, and to appreciate the humor in those situations, even when at his own expense. For instance, in one memorable passage of his European tale, he blunders into an exorbitantly priced hotel in Gothenberg, but because he's too embarrassed to simply walk out upon hearing the outrageous rates, tries to seize on some supposed deficiency of the hotel as an excuse to find it unacceptable. Grilling the desk clerk, he inquires, "'I assume it has a private bath and color TV?'
'Of course.'
'Free shower cap?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Assortment of complimentary bath gels and unguents in a little wicker basket by the sink?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'Sewing kit? Trouser press?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Hair dryer?'
'Yes, sir.'
I played my trump card. 'Magic-wipe disposable shoe sponge?'
'Yes, sir.'
Shit."
Stymied, he took the room.
But this wouldn't be Jim Unfiltered if I didn't have bones to pick, and even a writer I enjoy as much as Bill Bryson has a flaw or two.
Actually, Bryson' s flaws really are few and far between, and I write this humble criticism largely as a genuflection to a writer I admire a great deal. But I will say this: After reading a small stack of his travel books, I cannot help but grow weary of a fair constantly stream of griping about the expensiveness of the hotels he stays in and the restaurants where he dines. Granted, in a pure travel guide, notes about logistical costs of a given destination figure prominently; vacations are always an exercise in cost/benefit analysis, and so readers need a Fodors or similar guidebook to plan ahead.
But Bryson isn't Fodors. He doesn't write to advise readers where to stay or what restaurant to avoid. He writes to describe the places he visits, so that a job-bound reader with no prospect of going on his own grand tour of Europe can at least get a flavor of the experience and understand why it's worthwhile. So to have a very amusing writer forever interrupting his own amusing narrative with complaints about the high costs of traveling wears a bit thin after a while. To be able to travel widely and then get complete strangers to pay to read your descriptions afterwards is something of a luxury, one that Bryson doesn't seem to fully appreciate. At some point reading "Neither Here nor There" on a commuter train on the way to my office cubicle, I remember thinking, "Yes, too bad you had to buy all those expensive beers in Copenhagen before flying off to Italy. I feel for you."
Occasionally, this lack of awareness translates into a certain political myopia. Bryson forever laments the demise of old, medieval architecture in Europe and its replacement by ugly modernity. While I sympathize on aesthetic grounds, I can't help but notice a certain latent, "There ought to be a law against things I don't like" sort of authoritarianism lurking between the lines. For a man clearly well-versed in history, he doesn't seem to have gathered that human beings have been building things and tearing them down to build new things for about as long as we've been walking on our hind legs.
And it was with a certain amount of shock that I read this commentary on the fall of Communism in Europe, at the end of his chapter on Bulgaria, which he visited in 1990:
"[I]t seemed strange to me that in all the words written about the fall of Iron Curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked, and I would have disliked living under it myself, but nonetheless it seemed there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self-interest and greed."
An intelligent, learned man ought to know better than to call the Soviet empire, which killed or impoverished countless millions, a "noble experiment."
But I'll forgive him these foibles, because for the most part, Bill Bryson is a lively, hugely informative writer with a great eye for detail and at least one good laugh per page. It is with real sadness that I realize how the bulk of his writing is no longer new to me, though rereading most of it will probably prove a solid consolation.
Beginning with his account of a rambling trip around the Australian outback ("In a Sunburnt Country"), I've followed Bryson across three continents, plus an entire journey dedicated to Great Britain, and another that traversed much of the Appalachian Trail.
But he's considerably more than just a travel writer; perhaps his best work is "A Brief History of Nearly Everything," an ambitious and, overall, hugely successful attempt by a scientific layman to recount the history of almost all major scientific knowledge for a layperson audience, interspersed with biographical sketches of all the great, often bizarre, thinkers who made the most momentous contributions to science. (My personal favorite is his account of Sir Isaac Newton, who probed the bones in his skull behind his eyeball with a sharp knife with clinical detachment, but suffered no pain.)
I read Bryson's works largely out of order, but there's no particular reason not to do that. His account of a whirlwind tour across Europe from northernmost Scandanavia to Istanbul ("Neither Here nor There") was written a decade before the much more popular "A Walk in the Woods," but no matter. If anything, I've enjoyed picking up the various threads of an interesting man's life at different, haphazard intervals, skipping forwards and backwards in time. At any age and on any subject, Bryson is an engaging writer, and since he'd completed most of his work before I became aware of him, I've had the luxury of picking and choosing from a wide repertoire.
But whatever his subject matter, I ultimately read Bill Bryson because the man is a hoot. He has the wonderful ability both to find his way into absurd situations, particularly when traveling, and to appreciate the humor in those situations, even when at his own expense. For instance, in one memorable passage of his European tale, he blunders into an exorbitantly priced hotel in Gothenberg, but because he's too embarrassed to simply walk out upon hearing the outrageous rates, tries to seize on some supposed deficiency of the hotel as an excuse to find it unacceptable. Grilling the desk clerk, he inquires, "'I assume it has a private bath and color TV?'
'Of course.'
'Free shower cap?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Assortment of complimentary bath gels and unguents in a little wicker basket by the sink?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'Sewing kit? Trouser press?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Hair dryer?'
'Yes, sir.'
I played my trump card. 'Magic-wipe disposable shoe sponge?'
'Yes, sir.'
Shit."
Stymied, he took the room.
But this wouldn't be Jim Unfiltered if I didn't have bones to pick, and even a writer I enjoy as much as Bill Bryson has a flaw or two.
Actually, Bryson' s flaws really are few and far between, and I write this humble criticism largely as a genuflection to a writer I admire a great deal. But I will say this: After reading a small stack of his travel books, I cannot help but grow weary of a fair constantly stream of griping about the expensiveness of the hotels he stays in and the restaurants where he dines. Granted, in a pure travel guide, notes about logistical costs of a given destination figure prominently; vacations are always an exercise in cost/benefit analysis, and so readers need a Fodors or similar guidebook to plan ahead.
But Bryson isn't Fodors. He doesn't write to advise readers where to stay or what restaurant to avoid. He writes to describe the places he visits, so that a job-bound reader with no prospect of going on his own grand tour of Europe can at least get a flavor of the experience and understand why it's worthwhile. So to have a very amusing writer forever interrupting his own amusing narrative with complaints about the high costs of traveling wears a bit thin after a while. To be able to travel widely and then get complete strangers to pay to read your descriptions afterwards is something of a luxury, one that Bryson doesn't seem to fully appreciate. At some point reading "Neither Here nor There" on a commuter train on the way to my office cubicle, I remember thinking, "Yes, too bad you had to buy all those expensive beers in Copenhagen before flying off to Italy. I feel for you."
Occasionally, this lack of awareness translates into a certain political myopia. Bryson forever laments the demise of old, medieval architecture in Europe and its replacement by ugly modernity. While I sympathize on aesthetic grounds, I can't help but notice a certain latent, "There ought to be a law against things I don't like" sort of authoritarianism lurking between the lines. For a man clearly well-versed in history, he doesn't seem to have gathered that human beings have been building things and tearing them down to build new things for about as long as we've been walking on our hind legs.
And it was with a certain amount of shock that I read this commentary on the fall of Communism in Europe, at the end of his chapter on Bulgaria, which he visited in 1990:
"[I]t seemed strange to me that in all the words written about the fall of Iron Curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked, and I would have disliked living under it myself, but nonetheless it seemed there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self-interest and greed."
An intelligent, learned man ought to know better than to call the Soviet empire, which killed or impoverished countless millions, a "noble experiment."
But I'll forgive him these foibles, because for the most part, Bill Bryson is a lively, hugely informative writer with a great eye for detail and at least one good laugh per page. It is with real sadness that I realize how the bulk of his writing is no longer new to me, though rereading most of it will probably prove a solid consolation.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
In Which I Defeat Lyndon LaRouche by Default
Perhaps this anecdote is amusing. Or maybe it's just lurid.
Yesterday afternoon found me not at work, but at the Virginia Motor Vehicles service center in Alexandria, replacing my drivers license after an unfortunate mishap permanently separated me from my wallet. Though I rushed in 40 minutes before closing time with visions of stony-faced, callous DMV staffers explaining in excruciating detail why my seven alternate forms of identification were insufficient to replace my license, I met with the pleasant surprise of actually receiving a new one with astonishing speed and efficiency. Government bureaucracies everywhere, take note: The Alexandria, VA DMV has shown you the way.
So, walking out, I can perhaps be forgiven for feeling light-hearted, a tad giddy, and even charitable. Charitable enough that when a middle-aged man in geeky aviator glasses who was handing out some sort of political pamphlet outside the DMV exit collared me and launched into his inevitable diatribe against somebody or other, I indulged him and listened.
Try as I might, I can't help feeling sorry for these people, whom you see all too often in the DC area; they're just so earnest and dedicated, they'll actually attempt to get perfect strangers to join their righteous cause. They just have a certain lonely, pathetic air about them that makes it difficult to not feel a slight twinge of pity. And this particular speciman had clearly been standing there all day in the cold wind with no success.
About 20 seconds into his canned speech, I gathered that the guy was raising money for Lyndon LaRouche. The same Lyndon LaRouche who's been running for president in every election since before I was born; the same Lyndon LaRouche who espouses an ambiguous blend of FDR-style big government but has incurred accusations of anti-semitism, Soviet-backed treason and all sorts of other weird charges. Prior to yesterday, I knew the following about LaRouche: He's a perennial feature of fringe American politics, he's sort of a crank with a cult following, and he's not to be taken seriously.
So I listened politely for five minutes, nodded sympatheticly, and even accepted a profferred sheaf of LaRouche screeds. But when the punchline came -- "How much would you like to donate?" -- I had to demur. Sorry, I said, but I just don't think LaRouche's political positions mesh with mine very well (though apparently we both think western civilization is in mortal danger at the moment).
And that's when my interlocutor lost the argument I didn't know I was having. In a classic case of Godwin's law, he called me a Nazi, thus, according to one popular formulation of the law, forfeiting any claim to a reasonable position by virtue of rhetorical name-calling. And all because I disagreed with his, and Lyndon LaRouche's, ardent demand for a new New Deal, which apparently anyone who's not a Nazi knows is exactly what our country needs right now. Had he accused me of KKK membership, I would have been no less astounded.
Perhaps he was just a coherent lunatic whom I made the mistake of listening to. Or perhaps there is a running tide of political polarization sweeping this country, one that teaches people to reflexively hate any opponent without regard for rational thought, and this was merely the first wave lapping at my feet. Optimist that I am, I'm going to assume the former. At least until my socks feel wet.
Yesterday afternoon found me not at work, but at the Virginia Motor Vehicles service center in Alexandria, replacing my drivers license after an unfortunate mishap permanently separated me from my wallet. Though I rushed in 40 minutes before closing time with visions of stony-faced, callous DMV staffers explaining in excruciating detail why my seven alternate forms of identification were insufficient to replace my license, I met with the pleasant surprise of actually receiving a new one with astonishing speed and efficiency. Government bureaucracies everywhere, take note: The Alexandria, VA DMV has shown you the way.
So, walking out, I can perhaps be forgiven for feeling light-hearted, a tad giddy, and even charitable. Charitable enough that when a middle-aged man in geeky aviator glasses who was handing out some sort of political pamphlet outside the DMV exit collared me and launched into his inevitable diatribe against somebody or other, I indulged him and listened.
Try as I might, I can't help feeling sorry for these people, whom you see all too often in the DC area; they're just so earnest and dedicated, they'll actually attempt to get perfect strangers to join their righteous cause. They just have a certain lonely, pathetic air about them that makes it difficult to not feel a slight twinge of pity. And this particular speciman had clearly been standing there all day in the cold wind with no success.
About 20 seconds into his canned speech, I gathered that the guy was raising money for Lyndon LaRouche. The same Lyndon LaRouche who's been running for president in every election since before I was born; the same Lyndon LaRouche who espouses an ambiguous blend of FDR-style big government but has incurred accusations of anti-semitism, Soviet-backed treason and all sorts of other weird charges. Prior to yesterday, I knew the following about LaRouche: He's a perennial feature of fringe American politics, he's sort of a crank with a cult following, and he's not to be taken seriously.
So I listened politely for five minutes, nodded sympatheticly, and even accepted a profferred sheaf of LaRouche screeds. But when the punchline came -- "How much would you like to donate?" -- I had to demur. Sorry, I said, but I just don't think LaRouche's political positions mesh with mine very well (though apparently we both think western civilization is in mortal danger at the moment).
And that's when my interlocutor lost the argument I didn't know I was having. In a classic case of Godwin's law, he called me a Nazi, thus, according to one popular formulation of the law, forfeiting any claim to a reasonable position by virtue of rhetorical name-calling. And all because I disagreed with his, and Lyndon LaRouche's, ardent demand for a new New Deal, which apparently anyone who's not a Nazi knows is exactly what our country needs right now. Had he accused me of KKK membership, I would have been no less astounded.
Perhaps he was just a coherent lunatic whom I made the mistake of listening to. Or perhaps there is a running tide of political polarization sweeping this country, one that teaches people to reflexively hate any opponent without regard for rational thought, and this was merely the first wave lapping at my feet. Optimist that I am, I'm going to assume the former. At least until my socks feel wet.
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