I couldn’t help but click, but I was anxious about what I would find. It’s been seven years since that dreadful morning, which seems both an eternity ago, and and also like only yesterday.
This of course may leave many of you surprised, shocked, and perhaps even offended by our implication that such events could ever be a cause for celebration. Many of you may have seen the title of this news post and instantly assumed that we meant to poke a sore spot.
Certainly, that site is known for poking sore spots.
I can’t say I agree with all of it. But it gave me something to think about.
There is nothing to celebrate in the devastation that murdered thousands of our citizens and traumatized millions more. But the determination that rose from those ashes…the people on United flight 93 who fought back in the first battle of this war…the millions of Iraqis and Afghanis who no longer live under tyranny, struggling and not yet safe, but free…the members of our armed services and their families who have endured great hardships for tour after tour of duty, but so often reporting for hard duty with a genuine commitment to the mission and the people who depend upon it…
For too many, that day is a dim memory. Too many have twisted it to fit their warped concept of the country and its place in the world.
But there is indeed, much to celebrate. In our sorrow, there remains much to be grateful for. In our remembrance of that day, may we remember the things that gave us comfort: family, friends, faith, freedom. Remembering our national heritage of wiping away the blood, standing fast, and pressing forward when we have been knocked down. Remembering a brief, shining moment when much of the world rose and said, “today we are all Americans.” Some have not backed down from that, and we have discovered and rediscovered friends the world over.
The day after Super Tuesday, which now seems a lifetime ago, it was obvious that John McCain would be the GOP nominee. There were a couple of folks who didn’t get the memo: Ron Paul, who has since completely left the reservation; and Mike Huckabee, who apparently never got the memo that Mitt Romney had dropped out in February, and kept campaigning against him right up to (and during) the GOP convention.
The “race” for the vice presidency began almost immediately. When Huckabee finally conceded to McCain about five weeks after Super Tuesday, he had more delegates than Romney, but hadn’t caught up to him in the popular vote. Why did this matter? Because there were fans of both candidates who spent months pressing for their guy’s “right” to the vice-presidency, and laughing at the other guy’s “pitiful claims” to same. Not surprisingly, there were other names floated as well: Rudy Giuliani, who had appeared with McCain on the Tonight Show after the Florida primary; Tim Pawlenty, the Evangelical governor of a battleground state who lacked Huckabee’s charisma but also his negatives; Tom Ridge, former governor and Homeland Security secretary; Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s running mate turned 9/11 Independent. Other names occasionally popped up, like Florida governor Charlie Crist, Fred! Thompson, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, football star turned congressman Lyn Swann, former Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, McCain’s own ninety-something mother (to defuse the “he’s so ooooold!” charge), Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and…
Anyone else I missed? Well, I did get a few feelers, but I think Maverick was just buttering me up for a donation. (Note to self: if the sucking-up comes Bulk Rate, don’t get your hopes up.)
For months there was noisy, sometimes entertaining but more often tedious, debate about the best person for the job. Romney seemed to gather more interest as the months wore on, but the opposition to him was loud and implacable. Trial balloons were floated almost daily, and most were shot down with extreme prejudice. When Obama picked Joe Biden, the question boiled down to “safe pick” or “risky pick”. The safe pick seemed to be Tim Pawlenty, boring but stable. The risky pick – and McCain’s preference – was Lieberman, his longtime friend.
There was one other name that kept popping up, but was considered a longshot. The young governor of a small, non-battleground state; evangelical; a bit of a maverick. High school sports star, avid hunter, demonstrably pro-life. Married 20 years, telegenic kids, oldest son in the Army about to deploy to Iraq. Cheerful disposition, but with a fierce side that often left adversaries, including those in her own party, wondering what hit them.
The final list always included this governor, a favorite among many of the grass roots folks and online political addicts, but almost completely unknown to the country at large.
So, the morning after the Democratic National Convention and Senator Obama’s Olympian performance, it was a bit of a bombshell when John McCain appeared on the big stage in Dayton Ohio with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee (the Israel and Palestine of the GOP)…and introduced his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska – a moose-hunting “naughty librarian” with a stiletto tongue and an aversion to Hillary-esque pantsuits.
Prior to this announcement, a whole lot of Republicans were already maneuvering for the 2012 election, because 2008 looked hopeless: Old and Busted on the right versus New Hotness on the far, far left. But a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation: John McCain’s pick was so unexpected, such a “maverick” move that nonetheless appealed to the GOP base, that the entire tone of the general election changed in a heartbeat.
I’m young enough still that I was hoping it would be a while before I saw a candidate for President who could have been in my high school yearbook. Now, one way or the other, I’m almost guaranteed it. The race to November still has a lot of potential twists and turns, but after months of electoral malaise, the race is exciting again.
Governors Palin and Jindal represent the future of the GOP – a future that came sooner than I expected. The last time the Republicans put up someone this young and unknown was Dan Quayle in 1988…and it basically ruined his career. A promising young senator became “no Jack Kennedy” and the guy who couldn’t spell POTATO but could make Murphy Brown a political issue. He was the proto-Dubya, without the Texas twang or the quick and self-deprecating wit…and it cost him in the long run.
I had similar concerns about Palin, but so far I’ve been impressed by her resilience (of which more in a future post). Whether or not McCain wins in November, Palin’s looking good as a long-term presence in Republican politics.
You ever have that kind of summer where you forget your passwords, and your password manager went bye-bye in the hard disk crash? (at least the music library was backed up…)
Yeeeeeah. Been one of those.
Now that I can access my own blog again, I’ll play a bit of catch-up with one or more (brief) posts about where we are now and how we got here, my thoughts on the nominees and their VP picks, and my projections for November.
Because I know that the conversation can’t really begin until I have spoken…and once I’ve spoken, there is little left to say.
Being the Final Word has its advantages, but it stinks for carrying on a conversation. I’ll try not to be quite so profound and wise.
It may be a matter of kicking the Clintons when they’re down, but I think this video points out a flaw in the Clinton rhetoric that the Clintons have never, EVER been called on…until this year. That they got away with it for so long but no longer are is more a function of the party’s “new hotness” in the form of Barack Obama.
Here’s Clinton at a rally, taking on an Obama supporter over Hillary’s health care debacle:
Note the contrasting messages. Bill throws his usual “shame on you” at the individual, and then launches into his boilerplate about how HARD Hillary worked on healthcare. Months and months, meetings upon meetings, thousands of pages of notes and documentation…no doubt, Hillary worked hard. Then when she unveiled her unflushed steaming pile of proposed legislation on her nationwide bus tour, she dealt with sleepless nights, speech upon speech, and that patented Hillary charm (“non-negotiable”).
Yep, she worked hard. No question about that. But … to what end? The voter’s comments at the end sum up the problem. Doesn’t matter how hard you work: it’s what you accomplish. What Hillary accomplished was NOT reform of America’s health care system, but rather an overwhelming, crushing defeat of her non-negotiable, closed-door hubris.
The Clintons never want to talk about results. They want to talk about how hard they worked. Fine; give them a gold star for effort, then put their underachieving carcasses in remedial governance.
Granted, as a conservative, and one who believes that government governs best when it governs least, a hard-working liberal who achieves little is preferable to a liberal who achieves a lot. Jimmy Carter got a whole lot done…and look how the 1970s turned out.
I shudder to read through my previous post….it is indicative of a hyper-active, unfocused state of mind. And yet, it contains nuggets of thought I think, “now that would be fun to dig into some more.”
There’s a certain not-to-be-named blogtroll whose online presence can be summed up as “drink, post, sober up, delete.” Thing is, deleting goes against blog etiquette; we tend to leave our mistakes in place except in extreme cases (and granted, “404″ is Extreme Case personified). Those who post in haste and delete at leisure are often nailed harder for the attempted “cover up” than for the initial offense; traditional-media types are often the hardest hit by the mores of this new medium. You post, you take your lumps, you respond, but the whole exchange is chiseled in stone for those who care to excavate.
The irony is that what prompted me to post in the first place was to become less hesitant to post what I wrote…to “publish” on a schedule, rather than when I thought it was worth reading (because I NEVER thought it was ready, and thus never got published). Dean Wesley Smith had spoken at a conference I attended, and he pointed out that consistently fast writers get the most work, because they could be relied on to FINISH. A Pynchon or Heller might write classics…but how many? If you want to make a living writing, he said – and you can – then learn to write quickly. As you do so, you’ll learn to write WELL, or at least better, quickly.
Well, it takes practice, and consistent effort. And the rules have changed – where once I thought I was doing well to post a thing a week, the better blogs are updated multiple times per day…and each post has a horde of readers/commenters giving you something new every bloody second.
It leads to different types of reading. I can plow through 1-2 thousand articles a day for “getting my news”, though many of those don’t get more attention than the headline. Other things I read a bit more slowly, so I can comment with something approaching relevance.
And then there’s the kind of reading I do with my wife, when we were on vacation. I read the novel aloud, slowly and with feeling. Even after a full week of driving 6-8 hours a day, we didn’t get through it all. But that was some leisurely, meaty-juicy word feasting.
It takes time to put together a good piece of fiction. I can churn out a couple thousand words a day in first draft…of which, maybe a few dozen are of any worth. A phrase here, a concept there. Internet writing doesn’t necessarily mean low quality, but it’s an odd combination of eternal (archived, indexed, discussed to death) and ephemeral (instant reaction, first draft).
Sometimes it makes sense to “drink, post, sober-up, face the consequences.” or even to “post, sleep, wake up, edit.” Sometimes we want that instant analysis, which gives us a chance to offer some of our own. For that kind of conversation, I’m no more or less relevant than, say, Greta van Sustren. But we still crave the more thoughtful, reasoned, slept-on, edited, argued-over, THEN posted material, which takes the time to digest, time to mull, time to react to appropriately. Room for blog posts, AND for the books that take years to go from first draft to hardcover goodness.
I’d like to write a bit of both.
I need to learn to distinguish between the two.
or not. It wasn’t until I started posting, “ready or not,” that I got the kind of feedback that led to the other kind of writing.
I caught a post on the Crave gadget blog that asked what we’ve gained, and sacrificed, in the drive toward digital music. The first MP3 players arrived in 1998; it was a year or so before I got my first player, but I was listening to music on my computer long before that. The article raises some interesting points about the pre-digital culture of music, such as this:
I miss borrowing CDs from friends. Like lending out a good book, lending music used to mean the lender actually gave up something, and that sacrifice imbued the music with personal meaning. Borrowing physical media also involves face-to-face interaction, oftentimes leading to great conversations. The modern age of copying, uploading, and linking to music has allowed me to discover new music at a much faster rate, but those discoveries seem much less personal.
I recall the days of lending and borrowing albums/cassettes/CDs, of making mixtapes, of recording radio shows off the air (1970s-era Dr. Demento) in all their static-laced glory. The frontier days of MP3s were not far off – my hard drives of the time were lucky to be over a gigabyte, so I was ripping my music down to 32kbps – great for audiobooks, terrible for music – to 96kbps. My early Audible downloads were even more compressed, to 8kbps [Ma Bell quality] and even lower; anyone still have “format 1″ titles? Barely better than two tin cans and a length of string – yet another relic of my childhood that probably doesn’t get used much in a decade where even infants have cell phones. I can’t stand to listen to Format 1, and yet it’s hard to part with those old lectures – it’s like having an Edison wax cylinder. Which, in a sense, it is – it’s a relic of streaming digital audio’s earliest generation. Somewhere I may even have one of the Real Audio (version 1 and 2) files, which were designed to stream over a 28.8kbps dial-up connection, and the first-generation internet voice chat application i worked on in the mid 1990s. The quality stank, but it paved the way for today’s Pandora, Hulu (streaming HDTV), Skype, etc.
Those early efforts to digitize my music collection were repeated, again and again, as I upgraded my computer hardware. I bought into Microsoft’s “WMA-96 beats MP3-128″ for a while, and reripped everything…which was fine, until I got my first iPod. When I finally had more disk space than I could fill, I settled on 192 with variable bitrate – beyond which I couldn’t tell any difference – and went to town yet again. I did some experimenting with WMA lossless, Apple lossless, and FLAC, but for the most part I’m happy with MP3 at 192VBR – it will play on anything I copy it to, and it sounds plenty good enough, where those earlier rips at 64-96 do not. Unless I’m really paying attention, even the MP3-128 files are perfectly adequate, especially for playing at the gym; when it’s competing with the crappy adrenaline mix blaring through the loudspeakers, the noise of the treadmills and stair climbers, and the beating of my own hyperventilating heart, all I care is that it’s loud enough.
My biggest issue with digital music is…proliferation. Too many hard drives, each of which has full or partial copies of my music folders…and some content unique to it. When I had so little space I had to rip at low bit rates, I had the advantage of knowing everything on the drive, and what I’d have to burn to CD to free up space for something else. Now? Meh. I still try to clean up the collection from time to time on whichever drives are connected, but when iTunes, Media Monkey and FooBar2000 can’t handle the umpteen-thousand entries in order to whittle theem down, it’s easy to just give up.
So…I often find myself skipping my collection entirely. I have a Rhapsody subscription, so most of what I feel in the mood for I can search for and download (or stream) faster than it would take to search my own stash – usually at better quality. Rhapsody’s channels feature also has the advantage of discovery: “here’s the style I want, but as to the details? surprise me.” And sharable playlists offers a similar benefit, along with a bit of fantasy networking. “this? Oh, just a mixtape I got from Dave Navarro…”
And let us not forget YouTube, the archive of all the memorable (and forgettable) things ever committed to video, ever, by anyone. 99.999% may be absolute crap, but that still leaves more actual entertainment than you’ll have time to view in your lifetime. 80s music videos (“Rick rollll!”), classic TV moments, Broadway bootlegs, Jonathan Coulton’s twisted (and Creative-Commons friendly) genius, sneezing pandas, Flight of the Conchords’ “Business Time”, Chocolate Rain, British sitcoms, silly Ikea commercials, that unspeakable Jimmy Kimmel/Ben Affleck “love” song…I’m listening to – in many cases viewing – more music than ever, and sharing it with friends on five continents.
This is not a medium for the audiophile purist, but for the folks eager to take their place at the global water cooler. We’ve democratized content (not always legally, granted) to the point that when the TV writers strike hit, many of us didn’t even notice; we were too busy entertaining ourselves. It may not LOOK like the Gay Nineties with folks hovering around a piano, singing along to old standards–but Guitar Hero and Wii Bowling and Rock Band console games aren’t that far removed. What we’re playing may be different, but THAT we’re playing, together, is a healthy trend….and much needed in the parallel and less healthy age of people perpetually plugged into their iPods, cut off from those around them. (Though that beats the heck out of the angry dork on the bus with the angry-music boombox.)
Technology – making us more, and less, social. More, and less, socially adept. More, and less, participators v. mere spectators. More than ever, it’s our choice…and more than ever, the choices we make matter, because the hours available to us haven’t changed. Sometimes, you want to increase the rate at which you absorb the same information…and sometimes, you just want to shut it all down, take a few deep breaths, and enjoy the silence.
James Wierzbicki wrote, “Silence is a prime ingredient of music; it always has been, and presumably it always will be….If music is indeed organized sound, then silence is the necessary absence of sound that surrounds it. Like a frame around a painting, silence marks music’s edges.” In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis makes a similar point, that the Dark Lord would love to fill the world with noise, leaving no room for silence and the contemplation it invites. We could choose to fill our waking hours with wall-to-wall noise…but in silence, that which resonates has the TIME and SPACE to resonate.
In this, the author of the Crave post has a point. We have lost the (forced) pace of the past in Internet Time. I remember spending hours at Tower Records, wondering how to spend that fifteen bucks from my paper route. Two newer albums? A half-dozen K-Tel compilations? Some 45 singles? One record and an Orange Julius in the food court? The search was half the fun – having to choose, but getting to choose, which is the first tentative step from childhood to maturity. The decisions aren’t earth-shattering, but learning to choose wisely…that was. The choices kids must make these days are far different: the limit is only in the space available in flash memory, and even that is vast. Dealing with scarcity is an almost alien concept.
Okay, this has rambled like crazy. Time to deal with a scarcity of caffeine for a while.
You know, that Rev. Wright makes some compelling points. And my grandmother – who is one-eighth black – always encouraged me to take my heritage more seriously. I’ve passed for white for so long, though, that I may be stuck with it. Which stinks, because that’s one group that seems to be on its way out in the 21st century (less like the Dodo and bearded arizona lake lobster, more like “auf Wiedersehen” on Project Runway.)
But I need help. Knowing what white people like doesn’t come naturally to me. (Like Project Runway.)
Fortunately, I’ve found a site that provides helpful insight into that most curious demographic, with handy tips on how to establish rapport with white people under a variety of circumstances.
The Jane Goodall of Pallid America goes beyond the obvious quirks – mayonnaise, DIE HARD movies – into the truly useful. For example:
Obviously, whites want black friends so as not to appear racist (see earlier Obama post). However, if we dig deeper what we notice about white people is not if they have black friends but in fact, how many black friends they have. White people like numbers. They like to count things like stars in the sky and the death toll at Mt. Everest and the number of times they’ve seen Tori Amos and/or Phish in concert. Counting the number of black friends is then clearly a divine imperative. (“#14 Having Black Friends“)
That would explain why The Count always flummoxed me on Sesame Street. I’ve always wondered…
My next sock-rattling epiphany came when I read entry #40, on Apple Products:
When you ask white people about Mac’s they will say “oh, it’s so much better than Windows,” “it’s just easier to use,” “they are so cutting edge,” and so forth. What’s amazing is that white people NEED to meet people who use Windows to justify themselves spending an extra $500 for a pretty looking machine. [...]
Apple products also come with stickers. Some people put them on their computer, some people put them on windows, but to take it to the pinnacle of whiteness, you need to put the Apple sticker in the rear window of your Prius, Jetta, BMW, Subaru 4WD Station Wagon or Audi. You then need to drive to a local coffee shop (Starbucks will do in a pinch) and set up your apple for the world to see. Thankfully, the Apple logo on the back will light up! So even in a dark place, people can see how unique and creative you (and the five other people doing the exact same thing) truly are!
Suddenly, my six years in Seattle make sense.
Before you let white people confuse and offend you, it may be worth a visit to this helpful site. Their actions may not be intentional; it may simply be part of their culture. And a rich and varied culture it is…if a bit shallow. The comments on each entry range from helpful to angry. Some believe this must be a joke, but … after just one day of applying what I’ve learned, I’ve become much more welcome in my white circles.
Soren Dayton, linked to a YouTube video casting Sen. Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright in an unfavorable light, has been suspended by the McCain campaign.
McCain, you see, doesn’t want his campaign associated with tactics such as Dayton employed.
Funny…it’s those very tactics, against Mitt Romney, that got Dayton the job in the first place.
I have to keep reminding myself that McCain is the least objectionable of the three remaining major candidates. His trip to Iraq and Israel, for example, was a good move, sending a strong message to our allies. But on days like this, the Dem-lovin’ side of Maverick reminds me of the sleazy crap he’s pulled against my man Mitt, and his above-the-fray “statesmanship” rings awfully hollow.
He may be jettisoning dirtbags this week, but there was a time when that was how you got offered a job on Team McCain.