Entertainment, Who Needs It?

One thing I don’t want the media doing, any of the media, is yapping about whether or not the president’s speech, news conference, whatever is or is not entertaining enough. It’s a press conference to convey information and take questions about policy, not a variety show (and Cramer, for the record, The Daily Show isn’t a variety show either). The economy is a big, boring, complex, and scary thing and I don’t need to be entertained when I’m hearing what the guy is doing to fix it. Isn’t that what got CNBC in Stewart’s cross hairs to begin with? Focusing more on entertaining than informing their audience? I need information so I can go to the White House web site and ask my own questions that address my concerns.

I had a very good argument with a conservative friend of mine the other weekend and the one thing we could agree on totally was that it was time for the American people to sit up and pay attention. Now she and I definitely have different ideas about what conclusions should be drawn by this newfound attention, but in all, I think most people can agree is that the majority hasn’t been paying attention to the overall economy for a long time. As long as the Dow kept going up and people had their latest bling, no one cared how the country overall was getting their. That our supposed wealth was based on unsustainable bubbles, speculation, and financial trading, not on actual durable goods and services. I’m no economist, but I do recall when I was buying a house six years ago how hard everyone tried to get us to do exotic crazy mortgages even when we were demanding a 30 year fixed. That I even had to argue with anyone about the sensibility of doing a 20% down 30-year fixed mortgage made me sit up and take notice of what was going on. And if I could sit back on my arrogant laurels and be justifiably proud that I didn’t play in that mess and be confident that rest of the country crashing down around me wasn’t going to affect me, I would. But I can’t. Because despite making all the sensible decisions, I still will have a hard time getting credit, finding a job, selling my home (if I wished to), or paying for a medical catastrophe if my fiancé were to (gods forbid) lose his job.

See, the way capitalism is supposed to work is that only those who fail pay the price. All those new devotees to Ayn Rand that I’m hearing about should read her very carefully. In her idealized capitalistic good vs. evil world, no one pays the price without conscience choice and the good guys get to fly off to Galt’s Gulch and let all the bad and weak people (even those ideologically loyal to Dagny herself) to a world destroyed. Well, if I could book a ticket to Galt’s Gulch maybe I would. Even if the whole idea is undermined by the fact that every last one of them in some way was subsidized by Franisco D’Ancona’s fortune.

I’ve been studying Ayn Rand since I first picked up her books in 1986. I’ve read every book she’s ever written and while I love them the way I love a fairy tale, I don’t turn a blind eye to what she conveniently ignores. But now I hear conservatives all over (including a conservative guest on Bill Maher) touting gleefully that Ayn Rand is “flying off the shelves” and is the biggest seller on Amazon. When I hear those same people argue to continue her entire philosophy throughout all aspects of culture, maybe I’ll take them seriously. But I doubt they’ve read The Virtue of Selfishness and have only highlighted those sentences in Atlas Shrugged they can roll out at cocktail parties and in blog comments. If anyone tries to quote Ayn Rand to me, they’d better get the reference of this post’s title first (without Googling).

Actually, now that I think about it, it’s been a few years since I pulled her off the shelves. Maybe I’ll reread one, just so I can keep up at cocktail parties.

Fair’s Fair and Random Comments

I have absolutely no problem with Obama taking his licks over his very un-P.C. joke about the Special Olympics on the Jay Leno show the other night. It was thoughtless and crass and it's absolutely something my side would have eviscerated George W. Bush over. Any Obama supporter or liberal who is defending or minimizing the joke is a bloody hypocrite. For punishment, find a blackboard, whiteboard, or loose leaf sheet of paper and write 150 times "Obama's joke was insensitive and stupid and he needs to watch his mouth and I'm being a hypocrite by defending him."

On a somewhat related note, I got an anonymous comment on my last blog post. It was in reference to this phrase: "Make this Joe the Plumber 'tard GO AWAY!!!!" and the comment, titled 'tard, was: "It would be great if this word or its full form (retard) could be dropped from the vernacular … Thanks for thinking about this."

What precisely is wrong with the word retarded? I would understand if the commenter had objected to my slang use of 'tard in not referring to someone who is by definition retarded, but I saw another argument against the word retarded in a different post. Where the poster specifically meant to use the term in reference to a mentally/developmentally disabled individual. But of all the words that have fallen to the PC police (and in many cases thank gods for the PC police), why is retarded one of them when it is used in a dictionary sense (from Merriam-Webster: slow or limited in intellectual or emotional development or academic progress). So my use of it was improper and insensitive, but this person wants to not use the word at all and that I don't understand.

That doesn't mean Obama wasn't insensitive by his joke. Bad bad Obama! It's just a semantic argument that's always kind of bothered me. Though I certainly think that Joe the Plumber announcing to the conservative glitterati that they make him horny will certainly retard his upward mobility in the movement. Oh and apparently I also misspelled turgidity. I'm leaving the misspelling in there, along with my un-P.C. use of the word 'tard because that's what I wrote and I'll take my licks.

 

 

 

My Eyes! My Eyes!

My conservative friends, I have a favor to ask of you. No, it's not a favor, I'll pay for it somehow. I'll write a nasty critical something or other about Obama. I will vote for a Republican in the next Congressional election. I will listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity for a week without puking. I will do some or all of these things plus many more if you can do one thing in return for me.

Make this Joe the Plumber 'tard GO AWAY!!!!

"God, all this love and everything in the room -- I'm horny," declared Joe.

Please, please please! I had a hard time taking it initially. It's really unfair to keep foisting him on us. Yes, we make you endure Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, but at least they don't announce their turgiditity to continue their 15 minutes of fame. This is way too much and has been from the day he entered the scene. Bad enough you all have to cow tow to Rush Limbaugh, but I can't believe you are keeping this guy in the tent.

At this point I'm reduced to shameful bribery. What do I have to do to convince you all to take this guy behind the woodshed and pants him!

I shudder to think how that would make him react. Just get rid of him, I beg of you.

Sincerely,

Me

Where do I sign on the dotted line?

UPDATE: See WTFWJD post on this subject. As a follow up to my latest post, even a Christian agrees with me!! Of course I don't know how many Christians agree with her, but at least she loves Jesus! (of course maybe she drinks a little*).

*For those who don't get that last bit, go here.

For my excommunication that is. Because any church that would do this isn't one I want to be counted as part of. As far as I know, because I was baptized Catholic and am therefore counted when the Church says there are X million Catholics in America. So how do I go about getting excommunicated? I don't want to be counted as part of this flock in any way.

The story:

A senior Vatican cleric on Saturday defended the excommunication of the mother and doctors of a 9-year-old girl who had an abortion in Brazil after being raped … He also excommunicated the doctors, who carried out the operation for fear that the 80-pound girl would not survive a full-term pregnancy.

And from here:

"He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus's life."

Seriously? Really? Are these people for real? Oh, I get it. If you excommunicate child rape where are you going to find more priests? I realize that's nasty and there are supposedly wonderful priests out there and all that. But when this kind of thing goes down, what am I supposed to think of the church I heartily abandoned over 20 years ago?

I think I'm relieved and validated that I left it. And this isn't some edge case, the Vatican backs it. Welcome an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier back into the fold, but god forbid a child be spared abject horror and a potentially life threatening pregnancy in favor of a fetus. Which frankly proves what I've always thought about the church. The life of a woman (and now obviously a child) is worth nothing. We are just baby machines no matter how young or old. And child rapists are more welcome in their kingdom of heaven than a woman caring for her child.

This is exactly an illustrative example of why we who are so derided cling to a certain degree of moral relativism. Since we cannot empirically know God's law (or even that there is a God) how can there be no subjectivity? Certainly the Catholic Church for years showed such subjective judgment regarding their own. But far be it from showing it to a mother caring for her child, or the child herself. Who is this subjectivity reserved for? The so-called princes of the Church and no one else.

Moral relativism is also why I support overturning the federal ban on funding embryonic stem cell research. This guy claims it's a distraction and is going to lead to embryo harvesting. There are many ways to prevent that, but in the end, I don't think there should be anything illegal about me choosing to create an embryo of my own body to harvest stem cells to save or better my life. I can't say that I would or wouldn't do that, but in the end, it's again about my body, my family, my decision.

Moral relativism gets sneered at and derided by those who claim it means an anything goes attitude. It doesn't. It means questions of morality should be decided within human societal and cultural contexts and there isn't a one size fits all policy for every moral decision. It does not mean a degraded morality, it means we are rational humans who can assess a situation within a context and make informed decisions about it. The people who think that any "moral" freedom will automatically lead to deprivation are cynics or fearful. Either they are cynics about humanity in general, or they are fearful of what they themselves don't like and therefore don't want others to do.

But within the light of the above story, I will take moral relativism any day of the week. Including Sundays.

Reprieve

Update to previous post is that my sabbatical is not yet coming to a screeching halt. Deal fell through. Not going to go into the boring details because they really don't matter in the long run. There are a million myriad reasons and factors that go into any decision about anything. Whether you are consciously aware of or able to influence or even know all those factors is irrelevant. They are there. You influence and control what is within your sphere of impact, past that, there's not a damn thing you can do.

Now I'm in the midst of taking the GRE course I signed up for last year. My first class left me equal parts terrified (I couldn't even remember 2πr!) and confident that it's ¼ what you know and ¾ knowing how to beat the test. Which pisses me off in that there's this monopolistic company with its sycophantic colleges and test preparation companies colluding to create a test that doesn't in any meaningful way predict whether you will be a good graduate student or not. But as I told one of the other class members, I'm giving myself a few days to be pissed off at that before getting over it in time for the next class.

In other ramblings:

• For all those people ranting about honey bee money and the like in the stimulus package and other things that keep you up at night, please note these things are not in the actual stimulus bill, they are what the states are going to use the stimulus money for. Be mad at your governors and state legislators and get your facts straight.
  
• Rush Limbaugh has been and always will be a big fat idiot. Right now he's the natural leader of the Republican Party even if that does mean I have to see his fat face on magazine covers.
  
• There is such a thing as being too true to the original. After watching The Watchmen (which I did enjoy) I have a new appreciation for the Oscar category Best Adapted Screenplay. This screenplay (no offense to original author Alan Moore) could have used a bit more adaptation.
  
• And speaking of comics, no female superhero should wear her hair that long while suited up. It's only a weapon to be used against you. I don't care about the high heels, those can be used as weapons, but all that hair flying around and no one's grabbing it to pull her off balance?
  
• I'm actually looking forward to my math class on Wednesday. I'd like to remember what I actually used to be kind of good at before four years of craptastic math teachers drummed the understanding out of me. My last good math teacher was in my junior year of high school.
  
• I have forgotten how much I really like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because of the movie, his Jazz Age short stories are back in vogue (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories) and highly enjoyable. Didn't see the movie, but might depending on how I like the short story.
  

Fingers crossed on a new job lead I found Friday. This time I won't jinx it until it's signed, sealed, delivered and I actually start!

Time Flies

My sabbatical is coming to a screeching halt and I'm coming full circle. 9 ½ years ago I was dying to go from contractor to full time at my company and now I'm returning to that company—after 9 years of salaried employment—as a contractor. It's been a fabulous 8 ½ months off. I did some of the things I wanted to, didn't get around to some of the things I did, but overall got a good mental rest and restart.

Why am I returning to work? Technically speaking, I don't have to. But to not work would require certain sacrifices I'm not ready to make. I don't care how inane or vain those reasons sound, they still exist. Despite cutting back significantly in spending and being OK with that, there are things I'm not quite ready to give up unless I have to. Such as:

• I hate yard work. To be able to hire someone to do what I hate is the ultimate luxury and a reason—at least right now—to return to work.
  
• Despite its many wonders (and more of that to come), Costco cannot supply a good body wash to save its life. I want my Kiehl's body wash and I will not do without!
  
• Over five hundred channels and there's nothing to watch? There's always Law & Order and there's always a rerun of Big Love. I will not give up my massive cable or Tivo.
  
• Organic food. Yes, today I spent $3.99 today for a yellow bell pepper vs. $1.49 for a conventionally grown one. But I'd rather not poison myself with god knows what when I don't have to. I may choose to poison myself with cigarettes, but food should never be poison and I'm bound and determined to support the organic food movement regardless. Again, more on Costco later as I love rewarding them by buying whatever new organic product they stock.
  
• In Vino Veritas: Not that I ever gave up wine, but I'd like the occasional splurge on a bottle over $10, something I've denied myself these past eight months. There are great bargains for under $10 and I intend to continue to patronize those, but there are amazing wines out there for more that I want to treat myself with now and again.
  
• Not caring about the dry cleaning bill! There's no point in dry cleaning when you aren't working to justify wearing those types of clothes. But when fashion is something that makes your mornings creative, having to care about how much it costs to clean vs. the value of wearing said item becomes annoying. I want to wear what I want!
  

But in addition to gaining these little luxuries back when I return to work, I'll have to give up some things as well:

• Privacy: For eight months I've seen who I want, when I want and have been able to spend as much time alone as I want. In going back not only do I have to interact with many people on a daily basis, I have to carpool. Yes, I realize I'm a liberal and I'm supposed to embrace such green living, but I hate carpooling. I adore the privacy of my car and my NPR or CD and singing badly at the top of my lungs. Because of the location of the office and new parking costs, we all have to carpool which puts restrictions I'm not used to on my time and privacy. Plus the new office has open space rather than offices. I'm OK with that, but will take adjustment given I've spent eight months spending the majority of my time alone. Time to finally invest in an iPod I guess.
  
• Freedom to spend my days as I like. Regardless of what anyone thinks I've done or not done well during my time off, it was still all MY time. Now my time during the work day belongs to someone else (though they are paying me well for that). I don't see a problem in transitioning to that, but it is a loss of something I've enjoyed quite a lot.
  
• Managing my household: I don't care how Desperate Housewives it sounds, or how much you might want to make fun of me for it, I've enjoyed being a "housewife." I've enjoyed having the chores get done and not pile up into mountainous problems; I've enjoyed cooking every night; I've enjoyed doing little household projects like painting a wall or installing new switch plates or putting in a new kitchen floor. I like channeling my inner Bree (except for the aforementioned yard work). There simply won't be time—despite how well I've set up the systems—to do it all as well as I did while not working.
  
• Make up free: I love make up, I really do. But it's been wonderful to go days, even weeks, without any on my face because there simply was no reason to. I've grown used to a face without makeup. You might say then why start putting it on just because you're returning to work? Don't you work in an uber casual environment anyway? You would be right, but it still isn't going to happen. I go to work, I wear makeup. It's just my way.
  
• Spending hours in a day delving into a single issue in the world (economic, political, social, etc.). Not just reading one story, but reading ten or twenty to figure out exactly what happened and what it really means. That takes a lot of time and the average person's inability to do so is a detriment to society.
  

Don't judge my sabbatical on the above (or do, I don't care). I've had plenty of deeper philosophical insights than the relative merits of body wash or dry cleaning. But those are going to take time to internalize and articulate and in many ways, I need to return to the structure of a working world in order to do so. At least for a time. In the meantime, I relish not feeling guilty about buying skin care products and I relish that I don't really care so much about shopping anymore.

More to come …