Here’s my bad advice, timed to the best of my imitation at ninety seconds (I can’t remember what their time blocks are in this round):

Idiotic and fictional Obama counterpart who takes advice from random bloggers: You are upset that I’ve somehow hid my connection with William Ayers. I haven’t. I was on a couple of non-profit boards with him. Mr. Ayers and I have worked together on educational issues. We have both taught at Universities in Chicago, where we live in the same neighborhood. I used to see him now and then on his bike, John, before I got so busy with this campaign. Is that honest enough for you? Can we move on, now, to perhaps discuss people who really do influence my thinking, and maybe people who influence yours?

But I do want to say one more thing about William Ayers. I do. Before we move on. I want to say that I condemn, utterly condemn, his acts of violence. I have said that to his face, John, and I say it to yours, now. But twenty years later, long after he turned himself in for the crimes he committed when I was a child, now and in the nineties he is doing a lot of work on educating children in the inner cities. And I do not regret working with him on those issues. I am willing to work with him, despite—I’ll say it again—despite condemning the acts of violence.

You see, I wanted to get something done for our children and for our schools. And I was willing to sit down with the people who were working on that issue, including Mr. Ayers, who was widely recognized as a leader in that field in my city. I was willing to do that. I was willing to sit down with him because I recognize that sometimes you have to work with people, even with people you don’t like, even with people who have done things you don’t like, because the work is more important. You’ve given me a lot of grief, John, about your interpretation of my willingness to work with foreign leaders that I don’t like. It’s not naïveté. I know that sometimes bad things happen. But I do think it’s naïve to believe you can get the important things done without ever sitting down at a table with someone who has done something bad.

But if you want to know what I really think, if you want to know who I listen to, if you want to know my actual policies, well, I hope, now we’ve got that out of the way, we can talk about that.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Overvoting is not as big a deal as undervoting, and our Party will stand up for citizens who want to vote. Their Party is more worried about false voting because democracy just smells bad to them, and they want to keep it as clean as possible. We don’t think that democracy smells bad. We want people to vote. We love participation. We want to register as many voters as we can, and we want all those people to actually vote, and if that means that we have to take some resources off the voter-fraud beat, then that’s fine.

See, we in Left Blogovia are, or present ourselves as being, on the Left. I hope that means something. I hope it means that Walt Whitman would blog on our side, not on theirs. What I think that Mr. Whitman would say, what I am saying here, and what I would like us all to say is that we want every single person who has citizenship in our country to come and vote in our elections and make all the voices heard. If one—one—voter has been turned away from a polling place by the Party opposite then shame on them, shame on our nation, shame on our Constitution and our democracy. And if they want to be the Party of turning away voters, if they want to be the Party of not counting ballots, if they want to be the Party that spends our national resources on preventing ballots rather than encouraging them, if they want to be the Party that faints at the stench of democracy, then we should stick it down their fucking throats.

With civility.

Do you want to know, Gentle Reader, why I am a Democrat and not a Republican? Do you want to tell some brother-in-law, some neighbor, some co-worker or cousin or carpool buddy, the difference between the two parties? Let it be this.

I know, I know, how incredibly arrogant to blockquote myself. But it’s how it is, isn’t it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

So the Beach Boys and all of those other bands that covered this novelty song called Alley Oop a mean motherfucker (at least notionally) on commercial radio? Alley Oop? The Beach Boys?

Sometimes I wonder about that whole parallel universe thing that sometimes leaks through.

Oh, and yes, I discovered this whilst listening to a collection of 50s novelty tunes that was packaged specifically for youngsters.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

And David spake unto the LORD the words of this song in the day [that] the LORD had delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies, and out of the hand of Saul: And he said, The LORD [is] my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; The God of my rock; in him will I trust: [he is] my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my saviour; thou savest me from violence.

I will call on the LORD, [who is] worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies. When the waves of death compassed me, the floods of ungodly men made me afraid; The sorrows of hell compassed me about; the snares of death prevented me; In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried to my God: and he did hear my voice out of his temple, and my cry [did enter] into his ears.

Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of heaven moved and shook, because he was wroth. There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness [was] under his feet. And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: and he was seen upon the wings of the wind. And he made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, [and] thick clouds of the skies. Through the brightness before him were coals of fire kindled. The LORD thundered from heaven, and the most High uttered his voice. And he sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning, and discomfited them. And the channels of the sea appeared, the foundations of the world were discovered, at the rebuking of the LORD, at the blast of the breath of his nostrils. He sent from above, he took me; he drew me out of many waters; He delivered me from my strong enemy, [and] from them that hated me: for they were too strong for me. They prevented me in the day of my calamity: but the LORD was my stay.

He brought me forth also into a large place: he delivered me, because he delighted in me. The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness: according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me. For I have kept the ways of the LORD, and have not wickedly departed from my God. For all his judgments [were] before me: and [as for] his statutes, I did not depart from them. I was also upright before him, and have kept myself from mine iniquity. Therefore the LORD hath recompensed me according to my righteousness; according to my cleanness in his eye sight. With the merciful thou wilt shew thyself merciful, [and] with the upright man thou wilt shew thyself upright. With the pure thou wilt shew thyself pure; and with the froward thou wilt shew thyself unsavoury. And the afflicted people thou wilt save: but thine eyes [are] upon the haughty, [that] thou mayest bring [them] down. For thou [art] my lamp, O LORD: and the LORD will lighten my darkness. For by thee I have run through a troop: by my God have I leaped over a wall.

[As for] God, his way [is] perfect; the word of the LORD [is] tried: he [is] a buckler to all them that trust in him. For who [is] God, save the LORD? and who [is] a rock, save our God? God [is] my strength [and] power: and he maketh my way perfect. He maketh my feet like hinds’ [feet]: and setteth me upon my high places. He teacheth my hands to war; so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms. Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy gentleness hath made me great. Thou hast enlarged my steps under me; so that my feet did not slip. I have pursued mine enemies, and destroyed them; and turned not again until I had consumed them. And I have consumed them, and wounded them, that they could not arise: yea, they are fallen under my feet. For thou hast girded me with strength to battle: them that rose up against me hast thou subdued under me. Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies, that I might destroy them that hate me. They looked, but [there was] none to save; [even] unto the LORD, but he answered them not. Then did I beat them as small as the dust of the earth, I did stamp them as the mire of the street, [and] did spread them abroad.

Thou also hast delivered me from the strivings of my people, thou hast kept me [to be] head of the heathen: a people [which] I knew not shall serve me. Strangers shall submit themselves unto me: as soon as they hear, they shall be obedient unto me. Strangers shall fade away, and they shall be afraid out of their close places.

The LORD liveth; and blessed [be] my rock; and exalted be the God of the rock of my salvation. It [is] God that avengeth me, and that bringeth down the people under me, And that bringeth me forth from mine enemies: thou also hast lifted me up on high above them that rose up against me: thou hast delivered me from the violent man. Therefore I will give thanks unto thee, O LORD, among the heathen, and I will sing praises unto thy name. [He is] the tower of salvation for his king: and sheweth mercy to his anointed, unto David, and to his seed for evermore.

The text is quite close to Psalm 18; I’m not sure why it’s in twice. It’s what I think of as typical David braggadocio: I’m the best, I’m the most ut, I killed the most bad guys, I was in the worst catastrophe and came out on top, I’m the humblest and the meekest and the mildest, and don’t nobody ever forget it. I’m not a big fan of David.

One thing that is interesting about the Samuel version is that when David is on about how clean his hands are, it’s in the middle of Samuel. I mean, a couple of chapters later, David is on about having sinned greatly and done foolishly (2 Samuel 24:10. Not to mention 12:13, where David says to Nathan I have sinned against the Lord. It’s different in Psalms, where it’s in amongst a bunch of, well, a bunch of Psalms. Here in Samuel, when David boasts of clean hands and uprightness and righteousness, the reader has to stop a minute and think whoah, Nellie, just a minute, here.

So what are we left with, in this Song of David? How should we react to his boasts about being righteous and upright? Well, I imagine a current political and military leader, a General Petreaus or a Robert Mugabe or a Hu Jintao, claiming after some victory that the Divine rewarded him according to his righteousness. Scary. The only way for me to make this less scary when applied to David is to take David into an entirely different category. Alternately, I can take his boasting as a combination of his flawed nature (part and parcel of the reason he isn’t allowed to take those stockpiles and build the Temple) and as a sort of wish-fulfillment, where he is holding himself up as an ideal for himself as well as for others to live up to. Does that work? At all?

Well, I try.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

The quick read this time was Al Capone does my Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko. It’s a YA novel about a family that lives on Alcatraz. The father is working as a security guard and electrician, the mother gives piano lessons on the mainland, the daughter is autistic and the son is the main character. There isn’t much to him other than being the main character. Oh, he has some minor preferences (he likes to play baseball and is a good fielder), but mostly he’s just the guy in the situation. And it’s a depressing situation. The family is poor, his mother is emotionally unstable, and the Alcatraz life ain’t so hot. About halfway through, I nearly gave up the book altogether, as the depressing and dispiriting bits were true enough and well-written enough to depress me and get my spirits down, and there wasn’t anything else in the book.

I persevered, though, and things improved. There was some, well, not redemption as such, but something positive, at any rate, reconciliation. I didn’t much like the actual ending, the last few pages, but the last quarter or so of the book before that was quite nice.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Now, that’s not such a problem, really. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It is, because we’ve essentially hooked our economy basket to a big hot-air balloon and launched ourselves over the cliff. The discovery that there’s nothing in the balloon but air is one thing, but if we can’t keep that air hot, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

On the other hand, the sudden discovery that the houses that were sold for $500,000 aren’t worth half a million dollars, and were never actually worth half a million dollars in the sense that the person who bought the house didn’t have half a million dollars and couldn’t have borrowed the money to buy it if the banks hadn’t been bugnuts crazy, well, the house is still there, the roof still keeps the rain off your head, the deck is still sunny and the windows are still double-glazed. There’s a sense of wealth that doesn’t have much to do with money, and that stuff is mostly still around.

I found Paul Krugman’s mention of Two Kinds of Problem convincing. The problem that I care about the most—people losing their houses, their jobs, and their health insurance, their social security, if you don’t mind my calling it that—is bad, but not the sort of thing we have to address over the weekend. In fact, it’s probably not a good idea to address that sort of thing with any fundamental policy changes four weeks before an election. On the other hand, the financial crisis, which indirectly affects all that stuff I actually care about, is the sort of thing that we really do risk chaos if we lose our moment, and that moment may be this weekend. Or last weekend.

There’s another problem, which is how the fuck did we let ourselves get into this mess, but sadly, answering that doesn’t get us much closer to getting us out of it. I’ll just say that there was a nice little NPR story this morning about Bank-to-Bank loans, and all I could think of was that in corporate capitalism, the fact that the whole system is dependent on short-term loans of billions of dollars from one bank to another is considered a feature.

Corporate capitalism is some fucked-up shit, ain’t it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Anyway, Strange Angels came out in 1989, when I was a sophomore, and my roommate bought it (on CD!) and we listened to it a lot. I mean, a lot. It’s a terrific album, just taken as a pop album. I mean, for a pop album it’s a bit arty, but it’s no artier than, say, Remain in Light. There are melodies, and the songs are more or less the length of songs, at least within the college alternative music sense of songs, where four or five minutes seems like a perfectly reasonable song length.

“Monkey’s Paw” is a fantastic song riffing off the old story and plastic surgery. “The Day the Devil” is a fantastic song about, well, the day the Devil comes to get you. “Beautiful Red Dress” is probably the best pop song there is about menstruation, and “Hiawatha” is probably the best pop song there is about Longfellow poetry. But my favorite, for some reason, is “Baby Doll”, which is about the relationships between people and their brains.

I don’t know about your brain, she says, but mine is really… bossy. It’s bossy, but also condescending, and definitely male. Baby Doll, he calls her, and he interested in what he wants, and not particularly interested in what she wants. The offhand manner in which he comes to her assistance in the letter-writing. The wrinkled little scraps of paper with insulting comments. And striking closest for me is the way that her brain goes away and comes back, without warning, without sticking to a schedule.

And it’s danceable. Well, funkable. The beat is driving, with just a tad of swing and odd sounding percussion like synapses snapping. Yes, eighties synthesizer.

Oh, one more thing: When she says Do you mean… George?, she’s referring to Our Only President’s father. At some point in 2001, I must have heard the song and griped about how it came back. Nice to think that soon we will have a President with a different name.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Just wanted to share the news.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Anyway, the thing that really stood out for me was John McCain’s hectoring insistence that he knows everything.

And we’ve got to give some trust and confidence back to America. I know how to do that, my friends. And it’s my proposal, it’s not Senator Obama’s proposal, it’s not President Bush’s proposal. But I know how to get America working again, restore our economy and take care of working Americans. Thank you.

Twice there.

You’re going to be examining our proposals tonight and in the future, and energy independence is a way to do that, is one of them. And drilling offshore and nuclear power are two vital elements of that. And I’ve been supporting those and I know how to fix this economy, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, and stop sending $700 billion a year overseas.

That’s three.

We’re going to have to sit down across the table, Republican and Democrat, as we did in 1983 between Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. I know how to do that.

Four.

Look, I—I was on Navy ships that had nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is safe, and it’s clean, and it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. And—and I know that we can reprocess the spent nuclear fuel.

Five.

By the way, my friends, I know you grow a little weary with this back-and-forth.

I’m not going to count that one, although I probably should; it isn’t a claim of special knowledge like the others, but it does convey the omniscience that was getting up my nose.

So you have to temper your decisions with the ability to beneficially affect the situation and realize you’re sending America’s most precious asset, American blood, into harm’s way. And, again, I know those situations. I’ve been in them all my life.

Six.

But the point is that I know how to handle these crises. And Senator Obama, by saying that he would attack Pakistan, look at the context of his words. I’ll get Osama bin Laden, my friends. I’ll get him. I know how to get him. I’ll get him no matter what and I know how to do it.

Three more. That’s nine, all before the pseudo-zen question of what he doesn’t know, which of course brings out all the stuff he does know, like, everything.

I know what it’s like in dark times. I know what it’s like to have to fight to keep one’s hope going through difficult times. I know what it’s like to rely on others for support and courage and love in tough times. I know what it’s like to have your comrades reach out to you and your neighbors and your fellow citizens and pick you up and put you back in the fight.

This might be rhetorically convincing if, in fact, Senator McCain actually knew some stuff. The idea that he knows how to fix the economy is preposterous. The idea that he knows how to ‘get’ Osaba bin Laden is not only preposterous but, coupled with his obvious refusal to share that knowledge with Our Only President, offensive. The idea that he knows anything at all about the technical aspects of nuclear power is beyond preposterous, and the idea that he knows it because he has been on nuclear powered submarines is like claiming you know something about international relations because you live near an international border. Or, I suppose, claiming you know how to win wars because you were once taken prisoner in one.

But the connection I made in my own imagination, actually, was with the middle-aged middle manager who strides to the copy machine, shouldering the secretary out of the way, saying “I know how to make copies!” In my office experience, that ends with a paper jam, and sometimes with a call to the service guy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

And an obvious lie. I mean, aside from everything else, it isn’t even plausible that anybody came up with all the pork-barrel crap in that bill between the House vote and the Senate vote. Seriously, is it within the realm of imagination that a tax break for children’s wooden arrows was negotiated with the Senators from Oregon and inserted into the bill in order to get their votes? And if it was, why did they only get one Senator to vote yes? Was the other Senator holding out for another ten bucks an arrow?

No, look. What happened was this: it is blatantly unconstitutional for the Senate to pass a financial rescue plan that hasn’t already passed the House. All money bills must start in the House. That’s the rule. But the House wouldn’t pass it, and the Senate would. So they cheated.

They took the hundred billion dollars in tax breaks that they already had sitting there and stapled the seven hundred billion dollars onto the back of it, and pretended that it meant that it wasn’t a new bill at all, just a little change in the old one. That’s pretty sleazy. And of course as a result instead of the tax break stuff getting passed on its own, or getting rejected, it was held hostage to the so-called rescue plan (one of those interesting grammatical structures in that it wasn’t a rescue, and it wasn’t a plan, but it sure was a rescue plan) so that anybody who wanted to vote for the pork-barrel stuff had to vote for the plan, and veezy verzy. That’s pretty sleazy, too. And yes, the Senate did just happen to have sitting around a bill for hundred billion dollars in tax breaks for exporters of wooden arrows for toy bows and other worthwhile causes, just in case some controversial bill or other needed to be attached to something nice and porky. That’s pretty sleazy as well. But it’s how the Senate works, and none of it’s a particular surprise.

And I’d also like to say this: if this business of “larding up” the seven hundred billion dollar pork roast is that contemptible, surely the two groups who escape such contempt are (a) Representatives who voted for the bill without the added lard, and (2) Representatives who voted against the bill with the added lard. In other words, there are about twenty people who could seriously be identified as having voted to pass the bill because of the sweeteners. They mostly belong to one political Party, I can’t remember its name, something associated with unpopularity and failure, though.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Score: For each word on the list, YHB has in mind one and only one song that contains the word. Gentle Readers (as a team) get one Bragging Unit for each time y’all come up with the song I thought of, but you get two Bragging Units each time you come up with a song I didn’t think of. Up to a maximum of five Bragging Units per word. YHB gets two Bragging Units for having come up with the list. For every word on the list that y’all blank on, I get two more Bragging Units. For any word that y’all can’t come up with any other song than the one I had in mind, I get one Braggin Unit. Any Gentle Reader who posts his or her own list gets two Bragging Units. Jed gets two Bragging Units for having come up with the game. Any Gentle Reader who posts for the first time with a guess gets one extra Bragging Unit. Any Gentle Reader who is able to identify an instance where YHB has screwed up the lyrics again gets one Bragging Unit.

MFQ Rules: Don’t look stuff up and then post it. You don’t have to know the name of the song, but you have to be able to sing (or in this case type) a chunk of the lyric containing the word. It’s better if you sing that chunk of lyric out loud, though, whilst typing. Eight words is the canonical minimum chunk for the Encore parlor game. If you get the lyrics wrong from memory (as I did four of my guesses over yonder), there will be Scorn and Derision, but not so bad as if you looked the lyric up before posting. Don’t just make up shit up, please, and if you do, make it worthwhile. Within that construct, I’m going to rule that songs written by Gentle Readers are not eligible, even if you realio trulio wrote a song with that word in the lyric five years ago. I mean, if you did, let me know, because that’s a whole separate set of Bragging Units. All the songs are primarily in the English Language; no score for translations and multilingual puns, except, you know, anyone who does something really clever gets one Bragging Unit and one S&D unit.

The List: I'll try to keep this up-to-date. If a word is in bold, nobody has come up with nothing. If a word is in italics, at least one Gentle Reader has come up with at least one song containing it. If a word is struck through, some Gentle Reader has come up with the song that YHB was thinking of. If a word is both italicized and struck through, then y'all have maxed out the five BUs available.

• astonished
• captivate
• ghettology
• Jeddah
• laceration
• Occidental
• revenue
• Sorbonne
• yardstick
• zooming
• bathing
• distributor
• elevation
• housewife
• ichthyosaur
• kindling
• narwhal
• monkish
• parquet
• quintessence
• tax-deductible
• unemployment
• vichysoisse
• wheelchair
• X-Files

At the end of the game, we can all take our Bragging Units and exchange them for valuable… er… Look! Isn’t that John McCain over there?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.]]> tag:www.kith.org,2008:/journals/vardibidian//2.11519 2008-10-06T16:55:22Z 2008-10-06T17:05:44Z

I read a ton of Mr. Vonnegut’s stuff when I was in high school, and perhaps in college as well. Loved it. It was among the first stuff I read to be merciless in calling much of the world’s society bullshit, to say that the ideals we proclaimed were not the ones we lived by, and that the world could be set up on entirely different principles than it is and be no less virtuous and ethical. As I got older, I liked his stuff less well. It’s still funny stuff, and I enjoy the structural wildness more than I probably did as a teenager, but I have found that much of society’s bullshit is not, in fact, bullshit, and that a merciless bullshit-caller is not necessarily wiser than a deluded conformist.

Part of that is connected with my adult choice to believe in the Divine, and to connect myself with my religious tradition. I appreciate the ridiculousness of that choice, and of much of the tradition, and yet I made it because there is more to it than the ridiculousness. By doing so, I let myself in for Mr. Vonnegut’s contempt. It’s easier to read his stuff when you are going through an atheist period. I suspect that for people who go through their atheist period and come out atheists, his stuff is still better when they are going through their atheist periods. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think everyone should probably go through an atheist period, and that reading Kurt Vonnegut books to spark that period or make it brighter is a pretty good thing, actually.

I suppose I don’t mean that everyone should go through an atheist period, in the sense that people who don’t go through an atheist period are in worse shape for some reason. But I think an atheist period is a good experience for a person to have been through; it prepares you to think about religion seriously. A passionately anti-clerical but theistic period might do the same thing, I suppose. Hard to compare notes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Then, last night, there was the following exchange:

BIDEN: Yes, well, you know, until two weeks ago—it was two Mondays ago John McCain said at 9 o’clock in the morning that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Two weeks before that, he said George—we’ve made great economic progress under George Bush’s policies. Nine o’clock, the economy was strong. Eleven o’clock that same day, two Mondays ago, John McCain said that we have an economic crisis. That doesn’t make John McCain a bad guy, but it does point out he’s out of touch. Those folks on the sidelines knew that two months ago.

IFILL: Gov. Palin, you may respond.

PALIN: John McCain, in referring to the fundamental of our economy being strong, he was talking to and he was talking about the American workforce. And the American workforce is the greatest in this world, with the ingenuity and the work ethic that is just entrenched in our workforce. That’s a positive. That’s encouragement. And that’s what John McCain meant.

Now, is the disagreement about fundamentals the same as the one about preconditions? In both cases, the candidate said something that was widely understood to be a gaffe, or at least a statement worth mocking. In both cases, the candidate now claims that the word he used is now being misunderstood by the mockers. So is it the same?

I honestly don’t know. I am inclined to think that they aren’t. I have a sense that the term precondition in the context of diplomacy did have the meaning that Barack Obama now claims. The other interpretation requires the interpreter to believe that Barack Obama is has a policy that doesn’t jibe with his written policies, nor with common sense. But perhaps that interpretation only requires it to have been a misstatement, or perhaps the sort of slip that reveals a deeper disorientation with the topic. Certainly, my interpretation of his meaning is going to be charitable. I like the man.

On the other side, I don’t actually know what the fundamentals of the economy are. The GDP? The labor market? Productivity? Per capita savings and debt? I don’t think there’s any wide agreement about the term. So in that sense, when John McCain said the fundamentals of the economy were strong, he wasn’t really committing himself to any actual meaning that could be empirically checked. Maybe he did mean what Sarah Palin says he meant. Certainly, my interpretation of his meaning is going to be uncharitable. I don’t like the man.

See, I think there’s a difference, and here’s what I think it is: If you accept Barack Obama’s explanation after the fact, it means something. It’s a policy you can agree with or disagree with, and it is connected with his other foreign policy positions. If you accept John McCain’s explanation (via his running mate) after the fact, it means nothing.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.