Archive for July, 2007

So I’m here in beautiful Columbia South Carolina at the annual College Democrats of America (CDA) Convention. Yes, this is the first I’ve written about it, but yesterday sucked (for me at least) so there wasn’t much to talk about. The CDA is an organization nested within the Democratic National Committee that supports and organizes local chapters to support and promote Democratic candidates in local, state, and national races.

Today was really quite something. From rumors of RNC trackers to using the popcorn machine to make freshly popped popcorn it was a ride. The highlight of the day was actually at the end. John Edwards, native son of South Carolina gave the keynote speech of the day and he blew me away. I’ve never seen him speak in person before and he honestly gets shafted by the MSM while they fawn over Obama or talk about how Hillary can’t win. He’s the third wheel of the Democratic presidential nomination and really doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Whether he wins or loses John Edwards is probably the most important candidate in the race in my mind.

Why? you might ask. He’s not a woman. He’s not black. In fact, he’s a WASP. The reason is really simple actually: he’s an old school populist liberal. He’s the trend setter and the issue spotter in the field. He’s the man with the vision and the plan that the other campaigns sort of rush to catch up with and overshadow. He was the first one to come up with a credible system for universal healthcare coverage. He’s also got the most realistic plan apparently. Not that these things matter all that much, because no one reads 20 page position papers, hell even I don’t usually. But he’s got it.

Back to the populism. Granted, a chunk of it is message, but the message is generally crafted based on ideas and views the candidate holds to a greater or lesser extent. I’m not sure what it was exactly. He didn’t bound onto the stage like Obama giving rushed handshakes to a few people and high fiving the rest as he plowed through the ropelines. He walked slowly and deliberately taking time to shake hands, squeeze hands, take pictures, and look at people. We hear a lot about how he’s fake and it’s a sham, but looking at that man as he walked up to the stage made me wonder if he wasn’t really quite genuine.

He took the stage and was absolutely electrifying. He didn’t have some high-minded idealistic speech about how we need consensus or hope. No. He cut the bullshit and talked like a man with a master plan. Don’t get me wrong, the man is sharp, he just doesn’t talk in vague language. He’s concrete. He looked tired and his voice croaked a few times from strain or exhaustion, but his eyes blazed with an intensity and fire that I have seen in few others. His main focus was economic issues and he spoke eloquently and passionately about economic inequality, universal healthcare and the programs he had in mind to address these things. He talked about a genuine social safety net and human capital building infrastructure including: reduced cost or free college tuition for all qualified students (regardless of income); creating 1 million transition jobs to help young people get on their feet, gain experience and look for something else; expanding section 8 housing; and humanitarian assistance both at home and abroad. It was electrifying. He didn’t have any moment in which the crowd overshot him like Obama often gets, but there were a lot of nodding heads around me as he spoke of the world in economic terms that hit close to home. He didn’t mention culture issues, he didn’t talk about abortion or gay marriage. He talked bread and butter and I respect him for that. He took stands on tricky issues and let his opinions be heard and heard loud and clear. There’s little ambiguity in what he wants.

To be honest before today I had never thought of him in any serious way. I knew he was a candidate. I knew he was sort of popular. But I didn’t really like him. I watched him in 2004 and was turned off by some of his somewhat conservative social positions. Since then I’ve come to realize that voting on culture issues is really a bad investment because we wind up electing the same plutocrats who only advance the agenda of the wealthy and powerful. Sure candidate X may be anti-death penalty, but if he’s going to enact an economic policy that will destroy the livelihoods of millions he’s probably going to push more people into crime and jails.

As he left the stage he took about twenty minutes to mingle with the crowd. He took pictures, shook hands, spoke brief words. He looked exhausted, but he never rushed. Even with his staff tugging at his sleeve urging him to hurry, he took his time and went out of his way to make sure he connected with everyone he could. Getting back to the title of the post and it’s original intention. Today I saw a man much deeper than a $400 haircut (which flaps in the breeze just fabulously by the way), I saw the man who in my opinion at least is the most important candidate of the 2008 election cycle. Like I said in the beginning, he’s the opinion leader. When he focuses on an issue, the others follow. Even if he doesn’t win, which it looks like he won’t, he’s forcing the other candidates to really address tough issues that the Democratic party has run from for the last twenty years. He’s pushing the party back to its base as the party of, yes, liberals. No more of this bullshit conservative economics with liberal social values. It’s all about the economy stupid!

If the Democratic party wants to win in the future, it must distinguish itself from the Republicans by showing that it is unafraid of taking on large corporations, the wealthy and the powerful and push for the economic security and wellbeing of the vast majority of Americans. Centrist Democrats are wrong about triangulation. It’s a fucking disaster. Once you strip the economics out of politics you are left with hot button culture issues and the ones who will turn out to vote on them will be whoever is most indignant and pissed off which usually happens to be blue-collar religious conservatives who have become the great butt of the culture industry’s jokes. They lash out at the “liberal elite” that shadowy slinky crowd who somehow manage to rule the world while consistently losing elections. When your economic platforms are that similar the choice is simple: vote for the bastards who seem to be the more moral people rather than the bastards who like all sorts of strange things you couldn’t possibly imagine doing.

From CNN–Sabotage at NASA

You know, I was willing to give Griffin the benefit of the doubt on the strength of his speech at the Heinlein Centennial. I absolutely understand that no matter what you want to do, you’re hamstrung by budgets.

However, let’s go down the list:

1) Jealous astronaut goes psycho and stalks romantic rival after driving across country.

2) Laptop missing from NASA inventory found to have been sent to the space station, but tossed overboard to burn up when the laptop malfunctioned.

3) Two astronauts fly in spite of violation of 12-hour drinking rule and the objections of the other crewmembers.

4) Disgruntled contractor murders rival and holes up inside of NASA building with loaded weapon, requiring the intervention of police.

5) Worker sabotages computer heading for space station (as above).

Now, I’ve BEEN a DOE contractor. I’ve worked, not for NASA, but for Fermilab and URA. If even ONE of those types of things had happened on my watch, I would have been hauled before an inquiry board and would have been roasted, and, if I was lucky, been given a second chance.

In engineering school they teach you that when something fails catastrophically, it’s usually because three or so things have gone wrong simultaneously. (They actually teach a Chem Engineering course in real-world fuck-ups to slap the kids around about this.) It is the duty of any competent administrator to minimize the human element in that set of three.

If Administrator Griffin has any sense of responsibility whatsoever, he needs to resign by the end of the day.

UPDATE–The news conference Friday noon was, in my opinion, a typical case of “covering one’s ass.” My condemnation stands. (Watch it yourself, there’s a link on the CNN site.)

In addition, we have another news story out of Florida. Sorry, Augur, it looks like the problems are endemic.

Tom

I was recently in Washington D.C. for the second time in my life. The first time, as with this time, the most pristine memories flew to me when standing in the Jefferson Monument. His words are powerful and beautiful, he is inspired by Heaven and optimism. The monument is a bit of a walk from the main Mall, the distance is a small test, Jefferson only wants guests, not tourists. I stood at his feet around midnight and alone, at least in my mind, and I looked up to see a giant. Only a statue of those proportions could express and communicate his genius. I stood there with my neck painfully, yet pleasantly, crooked on high…I stood there as a child, I am a child before him. I read his words on the four surrounding walls with slow meter, admiration, wonder, inspiration, and jealousy. The color of the lights in his great hall are a soft orange, eerie as the color of ghosts, & the perfect shade to express his ideas, an enduring burning and not too brightly such that they could not be understood by every human being, alive or dead.

Even if America is someday supplanted as the world’s greatest nation and its physical reign is only 300 or so years, our intellectual reign will be infinite. The influence and courage of our ideas, of Jefferson’s enkindling, will ripple on and improve humanity’s plot in the universe. America embodies liberty, but we do not own liberty, it is a human idea owned only by God. We have and will share liberty and that will be America’s enduring empire.

Here is one random, yet clarifying quote from him and about him:

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens….There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends & books.

~Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Melish, 13 January 1813)

Have you ever seen Patton? George C. Scott’s portrayal of General George S. Patton, Jr. is one of my all time favorite performances. One of the most memorable parts of the movie is a curt, obscene and inspiring speech by the General to his men.

This speech led my buddy Gordon the Gnome at America Versus the World to write a fictional speech by President Bush inspired by the Patton speech.

This evening I was forwarded the YouTube clip below in which a voice actor does a modern version of the Patton speech discussing the War on Terror, Iraq, and the Modern World. While I certainly don’t agree with the creator of this video’s message, I admit that his interpretation might not be that far off, and I absolutely loved his creation.

Back about twenty years or so ago, during the middle of the Urban Cowboy craze, Barbara Mandrell and George Jones had a song called, I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.

I’ve been humming that a lot lately.

The phenomenon kinda snuck up on me, to tell the truth, since I avoid television (with the exception of a couple shows featuring teleporting geeks or mystical islands) like the plague. It’s not snobbery as much as it is a mistrust of the networks’ fact-gathering and their renewed reliance on reality and game shows which too closely resembles television during my boyhood in the 50s.

I knew, for example, that The Sopranos had gone off the air with a whimper, rather than a bang. That was the subject of much water-cooler conversation for a bit. I wasn’t however, prepared for what was going to replace that conversation….

A TV show about polygamy. Oh crap.

Now I am sure that virtually all of my readers in Urbanagora know that I’ve been a believer in polyamory in one form or another since the mid-1970s. [If you're a new reader, you can get the surprisingly mundane details if you go back to the January 2007 archives and read through them--I did a four-part series talking about it.] I’ve been with the family that kitten and I started since 1984.

For the first season of the program, I had studiously avoided it, since I knew that many of the people from the FLDS sects that they were portraying were fairly unpleasant. Kitten and Elderwife were insistent on the subject of watching it, to the point that we actually subscribed to HBO in order to do so. I learned from the two of them that the family involved had been a member of one of the sects, but was currently trying to live independently from the compound where they had been raised.

By the end of the first season, I was starting to get an occasional look from co-workers (at least the ones who had run into me and the three wives at the Station Theatre). At the beginning of the second season, people I knew just a bit finally got the nerve to bend close to me and say, in a guarded whisper, “So, what do you think of Big Love?”

So, the purpose of this piece today is to answer the question publicly so that no one has to ask me again:

I like it.

When I was up in Northern Illinois tending to my mother last week, we spent the night at a motel with HBO. I was bored to death with none of my other diversions present, so I watched an episode with kitten. (Over the last year, I had occasionally peeked in from the ManCave so that I could at least identify the husband and get an idea of the three wives’ order.) This, however, was watching it with intent–I was interested in how the characters related to each other.

It got a surprising number of things right. The ability of the wives to lean on each other when there was a problem, the rotating of sleep/date nights, and the pride in Bill’s eyes when he looks at his family are all familiar parts of my life. Occasionally, a line would be spoken by one of the wives and I’d turn to kitten and just chuckle, since I had heard it myself in the past week. I was also very familiar with the need to keep our way of life very, very quiet to stay out of trouble.

The were, of course, major differences, also. We don’t have the “Mormon mafia” breathing down our necks, and we have a husband so we’re not polygynists like the characters, but more general polyamorists. The Holy Spirit didn’t guide my selection of second and third wives. A show about my family’s life would not win any awards or many viewers on HBO unless it was written by Roseanne Barr.

Afterwards, I got to wondering about the show. Why now? Why has this show suddenly picked up in popularity? Why, as my Sicilian co-worker said about The Sopranos, is “someone making a show about what they think my life is like?” Are all of the 5.5 million viewers suddenly my long-lost friends?

I think it’s about gay marriage. I know that both of the writers are gay, and that one of them is a lawyer. Kitten tells me that their aim is to show that “any group of people should be able to get married legally” by making the polygamists in the show so sympathetic. I tend to agree.

Over the past thirty years, I’ve had a lot of opposition from gay rights advocates when I promoted polygamy at radical events. I think that I’ve finally figured out why, though. What a lot of the gay marriage advocates want has been to extend their relationships into the mainstream, gaining the benefits afforded for so long to straight couples. What I’ve been advocating instead is establishing a new mainstream in which the individual polygamist (whether they be polygynist, polyandrist or line marriage) families have so much of an advantage (by their very nature) over a two-person marriage that they don’t need any benefits.

Personally, in the interim, I don’t have any problems with gays getting the benefits, as long as they realize that they’ll be gone when the libertarians finally win. *chuckle*

So, there you have it–what I think of the show. You don’t have to ask me now, just nod and smile as I walk by with that extra little spring in my step.

Oh, and no, I don’t need Viagra–and neither does Sean.

With apologies to Barbara and George:

I remember kitten marryin’ me and
our Sean even when it weren’t in style.
I remember cuddling with my Cheron
at the movies and how Elderwife was really wild.

I was Poly, when Poly wasn’t cool.
I was Poly, from my hat down to my shoes.
I still act, and look the same
What you see ain’t nothin’ new

I was Poly, when Poly wasn’t cool

Tom