Featured

Obama gives me hope and he gives me fright.

Over the past few years, I have endured the common process of maturing from a naive, excessively optimistic youth into a more realistic, but still confidently optimistic young adult. Obama must now endure the same metamorphosis. He must convert his naive, excessively optimistic rhetoric into real, politically muddy pragmatism and results. An unfortunate reality of human nature is that politicians cannot obtain results without muddy pragmatism.

I find it difficult to recall a time in Obama’s career when he has used muddy pragmatism to push the world toward his idealized vision of it. This does not mean that he lacks the ability to do so, but knowing that he has little or no experience doing so disturbs and disquiets me. His optimism for a post-partisan world will be counteracted by the reality of his personal views being far to the left of what most Americans, even most Democrats, want their policies to look like. If he does not adopt a Bill Clintonesque moderate liberal approach, his bedtime fantasies of being the savior who leads us into a beautiful post-partisan world will transform into nightmares of Congressional gridlock. He made many promises to many constituencies, now he needs the courage and the maturity to tell some of those groups, “No, I Can’t. Sorry, but I cannot do it all. I must govern and prioritize as a pragmatist.” Read more…

The New York Times reported today that the Bush administration has since 2004 secretly given broad authority to the military to carry out attacks on al-Qaeda in 15 to 20 countries including Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and others. Some thoughts on the implications on American foreign policy follow.

Read more…

Author’s Note: This post was written October 31st, before the election happened and any appointments were made. Already, I’m looking partly stupid and partly prophetic: I did not predict Rahm Emanuel as CoS, but I did predict Robert Gibbs as Press Secretary. Anyway, consider this an open thread on transition predictions.

Read more…

For the past week or so, contributors, readers, and friends of Urbanagora have been compiling our Official 2008 Election Predictions. We put swing states, close senate races, and more into the mix. Now that the campaigning is over, go out and VOTE, then come back and check how we think it will all turn out.

Read more…

I received a letter in the mail today from the University of Illinois thanking me for donating to the “Wildlife Medical Clinic.” After assuming the letter was the act of my pal Josh fulfilling his long standing promise to donate to “liberal” causes under my name, I was astonished to recall that I had made the donation.

I made the donation because I found a bird violently rasping his wings against the pavement of a parking lot in downtown Champaign. He could not fly. His flight had become suspended by either a physical or a neurological malady. I took the bird to the only 24 hour emergency wildlife clinic in the state of Illinois, which fortunately happened to be just a 15 minute drive from the rasping parking lot. I donated $10 to the clinic and left the bird to the volunteer hands of the Vet-Med students.

Now I have questions for myself and for you. Did I help this bird because of a sense of pure altruism? Did I help her to avoid feeling guilty for not helping her? Did I help her to later impress people with the story? Is any human being capable of doing something for purely altruistic reasons, i.e. they expect no notoriety and they are not motivated by an expectation of guilt? Am I writing this blog post simply to influence readers to believe that I am a caring and a tender and an altruistic person or am I writing it for purer reasons? Do the accumulated ancient pressures of evolution and the human genetic constellation prevent us from acting in a purely altruistic way? How do the answers to these questions relate to how we organize society, i.e. do selfish human genetics prevent socialistic governments and economies from succeeding? Who the heck are we?

Before answering these questions, it will help you to read the “poem” that is below. It is completely unedited and embarrassingly rough. During the day of the donation, I wrote on my blackberry about my encounters with nature and the array of human dispositions toward nature. Words that are in parentheses represent questions I have about how it should be written – they are not meant to be read as part of the “poem.” There is something honest about unedited poetry that I hesitate to scrub away…

The Assassination of Notorious B.I.G.

A poor greenback spider
Built a beautiful web outside my
Glass porch door
I considered killing him at first
But was persuaded to be human
I enjoyed his craft everyday
The flies, the beetles and the ladybugs
were his prey
He was large for Illinois so
I named him and posted a sticky note
Beware Notorious B.I.G. – Deadly
And said hello to him everyday
He had terrible eyes and fangs
His legs patterned yellow and black
Fake white eyes on his back
Before we became friends
I hated spiders and killed everyone that I could catch
One night I came home around 2 in the morning
He was still awake having recycled his day old web
He delicately assembled, branch by branch, a new bed
Few friends are awake at such reliable hours
and in accord with my daily whims
I sat with him for a half hour
His art is beautiful and perfect
Though I have played for years
longer than him
I could not criticize any of his chess strategies
With a valuable camera given to me by my first lover
I took pictures of him floating next to the distant half moon
I promised him than I would never ruin his room

A few days passed
And I introduced him to my friend
Paul (find a historical or Biblical name of someone who enjoys destroying beauty. Tyler could be paul’s name because of fight club “i felt like destroying something beautiful”)
Who abruptly opened the door
And pulled out his cheap and bland
gas station lighter
And burned the hairy green belly
and the incredible silk organs of Notorious BIG
He tried pathetically to escape by
jetting down, his web was thick as it exited his abdomen
Its intricacy his dying expression for the world to note
I tried to persuade Paul to stop
But he did not hear me and I did not
physically prevent his unprovoked terror
BIG’s web began to fray and tear from the flame
He stopped from exhaustion
And Paul finished his emotion
He reminded me of Tyler’s desire to destroy something beautiful
The cruelty of the moment
Pushed sadness on me for an hour
I’m sitting next to Paul now on the couch as I
write this poem
In a minute I plan to crush a fly who
buzzes inside my apartment
with a crappy magazine

Now 2 hours later I see a spider’s web
linking my side mirror to my car door, perhaps a farewell, and I realize tthen that
I let the fly live (be)
5 hours later a decaying butterfly on the driveway of my
singing teacher

6 hours later I heard frantic rasping and uneven whipping against parking lot pavement
I discovered a struggling (pigeon bird?) bird
writhing round miserably and violently beating his broken wings on the cement
I am sitting on the curb watching his desperation (rhyme bird and curb)
and writing this poem
(should this be in present tense or in past tense? I think it should be in present tense to put the person right there)
I don’t know of anyway that I can help him aside from
letting him know that I do care
He is convulsing and shivering
But not from cold
A goth girl stopped to help
and put him in a cardboard box that had
“Books” written on it with a black Sharpie
I called around
It so happens that there is only one emergency animal clinic
in the entire state of Illinois that will handle this kind of thing
and it so happens to be on the campus of my college
wonderful, as it is
In the car, he danced in his box to the Bach
played by FM 101.1
He was calm with the music
and madly frantic with the music
When I looked into his small red eyes
He seemed hopeful and to understand
That I came to help him
I filled out the usual paperwork at the clinic
Left the animated box and a 10 dollar donation on the ledge
8 hours later, I ate meatballs made by my Italian mother
and resumed my contradictions
The assassination of Notorious BIG
From the falltops to the trees
I may not have saved the bird
If Paul had not killed BIG