Steven Rubio's Online Life

stfu, mr. president

With the passing of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty … many of us will never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan … we carry on the work to which she dedicated her life.

the wall

[I was playing with the Wayback Machine, and found a paper I’d thought was lost long ago. I wrote it for a California American Studies Association conference in May of 1997. The audience for the paper was small, but I think I did right by the words I had written, and more than one person told me it was a strong piece. I hadn’t read this in 15 years; in 2013, it still seems good enough to post here. I present it, unchanged.]

 

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, popularly referred to as "The Wall," stands between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.. The decision to locate it between these two enduring testaments to America was a conscious one, and the design of the Wall reflects the importance of its presence in such honored company; the instructions for the original design competition which resulted in the wall required that it "harmonize with its surroundings, especially the nearby Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial." Maya Lin's final design is a two-winged wall, with each wing pointing to one of the other monuments. However, despite the intentions to connect the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial to Washington and Lincoln, a visitor is quickly aware of key differences between this memorial and the others.

Most obviously, the Wall is a testament to death, a list of 57,709 Americans dead or missing in action in the Vietnam War. There is little celebratory about the Wall; one does not experience it and think fondly of "The Father Of Our Country" or "The Man Who Ended Slavery." Instead, one enters into a personal relationship with Americans who died in the service of that country. The Wall invites us to contemplate the awfulness of all those deaths, to wonder what lives were lived by the tens of thousands named on the Wall, to wonder as well how our own lives are different because of the presence of so many dead.

While the Wall is a public memorial, to be visited alongside other people, it evokes many private feelings. For all the seeming endlessness of the names, there is nothing expansive about the Wall. Visitors turn inwards, alone with their thoughts and memories. The interactions are personal, not necessarily communal. The Wall does encourage interaction, in a way the monuments to Washington and Lincoln do not; one listens to tour guides at the Lincoln Memorial, but tour guides seem out of place at the Wall.

However, the Wall also draws individuals out of their shells. Your experience with the Wall might be private, but the presence of so many gifts, trinkets, war memories, letters, flowers, all left by visitors to the Wall, presents for the dead to be sure, but also presents for the living, are a way for us as individual visitors to be a part of the Wall community. When we leave something at the Wall, we are becoming co-creators of the work of art (and the Wall is, among other things, very much a work of art). In her competition submission, Maya Lin wrote, "The Memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition to be understood as we move into and out of it."

We come to the Wall as individuals or as families; we experience it in private, inwardly; yet we leave it as part of the community of America. The Wall has a tremendous, mysterious ability to make us feel part of something larger than ourselves, even as we confront it with our silent thoughts. The Wall brings us together. Bill Clinton, speaking at the Wall, once said, "Let us continue to disagree if we must about the war, but let us not let it divide us as a people any longer.... At this monument, can any American be out of place ... ? I think not."

One often hears talk about "healing" when the Wall is discussed. A particular, specific, example of this came recently when a half-size replica of the Wall came to Berkeley as part of a nationwide tour. Longtime Berkeley resident, anti-war activist, and veteran Country Joe McDonald was one of the organizers involved in bringing the mini-Wall to Berkeley, and his participation emphasized the contradictions many found in the appearance of this memorial in such a leftist hotbed as Berkeley. This "Wall of Healing," like the original Wall, marks a new era in America's relationship to the Vietnam War, one where we reach the time of healing. (Jan Scruggs, the veteran who came up with the idea for a Vietnam veterans' memorial after watching The Deer Hunter in 1979, said that his hope was that it could "bring about some healing for the country.") This awful national nightmare, to borrow a phrase Gerald Ford used in a different context, needs to be over; we as a community must move beyond partisanship and recognize our common losses. The war itself was bad enough; what it did to the U.S. was frustratingly inescapable. We should not have to sustain our agony forever. We should finally be able to accept that time moves on, that in allowing the war to retain its power to fragment our society, we are still in effect "losing the war." As long as we let the old feelings gnaw at our national psyche, we will remain "losers." And so we move on, and the symbolism of the Wall's presence in Berkeley seemed to be an especially useful version of this needed reconciliation with our past. If a city of so much anti-war activism could finally open its arms to the Wall of Healing, then surely we have moved to a new and better place.

If, indeed, that is what is involved. We do desire closure, we do need to move on, we do need in some ways to bury the hatchets. There is something heartbreakingly human about these needs. However human those needs seem, though, they should not be accepted uncritically. We should not be too eager to buy into this latest attempt to corral us as a culture into believing the version of events presented to us, just because it makes it feel better. Feeling better may have everything to do with being human; it is unclear how much feeling better has to do with history, or with our future.

The design for the memorial was chosen via a competition, the rules of which were fairly simple. Contestants were told that the design must be "apolitical," to heal, not reopen old wounds. From the beginning, the memorial was seen as a monument to reconciliation. Again, the need for such a reconciliation is understandable, but the assumption that healing could be "apolitical" is problematic, since the desire to remove political content from the memorial was in itself a political move. The question becomes, what political purpose could it serve to insist upon apolitical meaning to a memorial to the Vietnam War?

An important part of this process of "healing" is the manner in which a memorial designed to honor the memory of valiant Americans is used to help us forget some of the essential reasons for the existence of the war that killed those Americans in the first place. The Wall eloquently asks us to remember all 57,709 dead or missing Americans, but the intentions of those who put together the Wall is that it be "apolitical," that is, to forget the past, rather than remember it. It places the thousands of forgotten soldiers at the front of our consciousness, and surely this is a good thing. It reminds us that every life is important, that we should never forget those who gave their lives in the name of us as Americans, and surely this is a good thing. It intentionally forgets the "politics" that placed Americans in this war to begin with, though, because this memorial is not only about remembering, but also about healing, and anyone who remembers the terrible turmoil which engulfed the nation during the war knows very well that such turmoil is not conducive to reconciliation, is not a good way to help heal a country and its people, and so the memorial is "apolitical." It brings individual mourners together as a community of healed Americans, with its wings pointing to Washington and Jefferson and our hearts and minds directed away from the disturbing "political" ramifications of the war.

The databases associated with the Wall, which make for easy searching through the 57,709 names, are magnificent tools for individuals obsessing about the Wall, its meanings, the names and the lives and deaths of those listed on it. Our attention may be directed away from the "political" aspects of the Wall and the war, but that attention must go somewhere, and these databases do an excellent job of collating information about all of the names. There are catalogs at the memorial site, where visitors can look up specific names and find their location on the Wall. The combined effect of all these databases is to allow us to bring individual soldiers to our consciousness. The physical and emotional immenseness of the Wall can overpower visitors; the sheer numbers can make it difficult to focus on individual people. ("These names," Maya Lin wrote, "seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.") But the database focuses our attention. Let us stop for a second and consider some of the people whose names appear on the Wall.

Private First Class James C. Ward of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was born on January 26, 1948, coincidentally the date of my mother's 20^th birthday. (The databases encourage this kind of random personal connection to the names, as if we might better know the lives of the dead if we can just attach them to events in our own lives.) On October 11, 1965, PFC Ward died. You can find his name on the East panel. At his death, he was 17 years, 8 months, and 16 days old. He was the youngest American casualty of the war. Eleven other Americans died in the war at the age of 17.

Kenna C. Taylor died at 62, the oldest American casualty.

Five thousand, five hundred and seventy-seven Californians died in the war. Three hundred thiry-eight men named "Steven" (with a "v") died in the war. Four people named Rubio died in the war. Seventeen Americans from Berkeley died in the war. Seven Americans from my home town, Antioch, California, died in the war. On September 28, 1968, the night of which I first kissed the woman who later became my wife, eighteen Americans died in the war.

You can do this kind of thing forever when poring through the databases. You can get lost in the numbers, the names, the dates, the minutiae. You're drawn in, much as you're drawn in to the memorial itself when you first arrive at the top of one of the two wings. In every case, the haze into which your mind enters insulates you momentarily from the "real world." This is yet another way in which the Wall elicits personal, private responses. This most public of all events, an unpopular war played out nightly on the teevee news, is recalled in solitary, away from the tumult which accompanied the war when it actually happened.

And perhaps this is part of the healing process, as well, although the databases, obviously, are not the Wall. Still, the Wall puts the names into granite, gives them substance, unifies them, in Lin's words, into a whole. The databases, many of them online, at least one, "Beyond the Wall: Stories Behind the Vietnam War," on CD-ROM, allow us to peruse the names at our leisure, to relive our experience of the Wall as the Wall allows us to relive our experience of the war. To the extent these experiences allow us the opportunity to re-examine our ideas about the war, they are fruitful beyond mere healing (although healing is anything but mere, and my intention is not to belittle the need for healing and reconciliation). The problem arises, though, that any honest re-examination of the Vietnam War would necessarily include an appraisal of the political roots of that war, a war that people on all sides seemed to agree was a disaster, although their reasons for thinking it a disaster varied considerably. And once we move to an appraisal of the political ramifications of the war, we've moved beyond the healing process, we're right back where we started, grumbling and fuming and suffering, reliving the antagonisms and the hatreds. It's easy to see why this would be counter-productive to the process of healing. But it should also be clear at this point that we can not just choose to forget the parts of our past that make us uncomfortable, that we can not allow our desire for reconciliation to change how history is written.

The Vietnam war was a terrible thing. This trite statement needs to be said. It was a terrible thing because 57,709 Americans died in it. It was a terrible thing because many, many more Vietnamese died in it. It was a terrible thing because imperialism is a terrible thing, it was a terrible thing because we, as a nation, made some hugely regrettable political decisions about our place in the world and our role in Southeast Asia. Many Americans thought this war was a terrible thing while it was happening, and their public expression of their despair, their attempts to change the political climate of the United States of America, led to near-cataclysmic upheaval in American society. Among the victims of this upheaval were those veterans who returned home from a bad war to find they were underappreciated by their countrymen. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial does its part towards re-integrating those veterans, and the 57,709 who were left behind, into our society once again, and we must welcome them back with open arms.

But we must be vigilant; we must remember. We must remember it all. We can not let the healing process blind us to the political ramifications of our presence in Vietnam. A memorial helps us to remember; we honor the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when we refuse to forget.

One recurring aspect of the various presentations of the Wall is the reading of the names. Speakers working in shifts read the names off the Wall, one by one, from first to last. This marathon of name-reading reminds us, almost as much as the Wall itself, of the enormity of lives lost. In the spirit of those readings, and in honor of all who died in Vietnam, I would like to read here, on May 2^nd 1997, as part of the California American Studies Association convention, the names of the 37 Californians who died in Vietnam on May 2^nd.

Paul L. Abraham
Terry J. Allen
Jose C. Alvarez
O.D. Brunner
Steve Butorovic
Daniel Carrasco
Willie C. Clark
Frank R. Corona
Michael D. Craig
Thomas E. Diefenderfer
Lawrence J. Englander
Edward A. Escobar
John A. Frick
Eugene Gastelum
John M. Henderson
Larry Herrera
Nathaniel H. Jackson
Daniel C. Johnson
Richard R. Landers
Michael D. Lee
Thomas W. Mallon
William A. Mansergh
Glenn R. Mearns
Jon L. Messer
Otto P. Meyer
Willie L. Moses
Lloyd F. Mousseau
Douglas E. Partridge
Dale K. Porterfield
Robert A. Romo
Leopoldo P. Serna
John C. Sherman
Geoffrey R. Taylor
Ismael J. Valdez
Clyde J. Valstad
Thomas M. Walker
Alonzo D. Woods

good thing it's different now

Ten years ago today, I had this post, titled “hating bush #12232”:

The other day, Robin asked me what it was that finally pushed me over the edge with Bush. Didn't have an easy answer ... part of it is just visceral, the fear that comes when I realize these people don't even feel the need to hide what they're doing anymore ... Reagan was terrible, but at least he'd smile and pretend to be a nice grandfather type ... Bush and company just say whatever they think, unconcerned that we know what they're up to. To know what Nixon was doing, we needed the White House Tapes. To know what Bush is doing, you just turn on the news.

"Justice Dept. drafts sweeping expansion of anti-terrorism act"

Section 301-306, "Terrorist Identification Database": These sections would authorize creation of a DNA database on "suspected terrorists," expansively defined to include association with suspected terrorist groups, and noncitizens suspected of certain crimes or of having supported any group designated as terrorist.

Section 501, "Expatriation of Terrorists": This provision, the drafters say, would establish that an American citizen could be expatriated "if, with the intent to relinquish his nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United Stated has designated as a 'terrorist organization'." But whereas a citizen formerly had to state his intent to relinquish his citizenship, the new law affirms that his intent can be "inferred from conduct." Thus, engaging in the lawful activities of a group designated as a "terrorist organization" by the Attorney General could be presumptive grounds for expatriation.

where do we go from here?

I have often assigned Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “Where Do We Go from Here?”, to my students, usually alongside the much more famous “I Have a Dream”. Here is a brief excerpt from that speech, as the country celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Day:

[T]he Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?" These are questions that must be asked. …

If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit - One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn't get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn't do. Jesus didn't say, "Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying." HE didn't say, "Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that." He didn't say, "Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery." He didn't say, "Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively." He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic - that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, "Nicodemus, you must be born again."

He said, in other words, "Your whole structure must be changed." A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them - make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, "America, you must be born again!"

zero dark thirty, top gun, and me

I’ve already got my ticket: this evening I’ll be seeing Zero Dark Thirty, the latest film by one of my favorite directors, Kathryn Bigelow.

There’s a movie out there for which I have a hatred out of proportion to the film’s quality or lack of same. On the Internet Movie Database, Top Gun has an average rating of 6.7/10 from IMDB users. My rating? 3/10. You know how we get frustrated when we go to the movie theater and have to sit through advertisements (and I don’t mean trailers) before the movie starts? Well, from my perspective, Top Gun is nothing more than a commercial for the U.S. Navy. This didn’t just happen … the makers of Top Gun got plenty of help. From Wikipedia:

The producers wanted the assistance of the United States Navy in production of the film. The U.S. Navy was influential in relation to script approval, which saw changes being made. The opening dogfight was moved to international waters as opposed to Cuba, the language was toned down, and a scene that involved a crash on the deck of an aircraft carrier was also scrapped. Maverick's love interest was also changed from a female enlisted member of the Navy to a civilian contractor with the Navy, due to the U.S. Department of Defense's prohibition of fraternization between officers and enlisted personnel. …

The Navy made available several aircraft from F-14 fighter squadron VF-51 Screaming Eagles (which Tom Skerritt mentions in the scene at his home) for the film. … Shots of the aircraft carrier sequences were filmed aboard the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), showing aircraft from F-14 squadrons VF-114 Aardvarks and VF-213 Black Lions. …

A motion picture producer, John Davis, claimed that "Top Gun was a recruiting video for the Navy. It really helped their recruiting. People saw the movie and said, 'Wow! I want to be a pilot.'"

The United States Navy stated that after the release of the film that the number of young men who enlisted, wanting to be Naval aviators, went up by 500 percent.

Of course, Top Gun was not the first movie to be made with the approval of the military. But it must have been clear from the start that the Navy had nothing to worry about; the filmmakers wanted to make a pro-Navy film from the start.

I agree that Top Gun is an effective movie. But by effective, most people mean “works as a movie”, while I mean “works as a recruitment advertisement”, which is not the same thing.

Whatever … you might think I’m full of shit about this. I’ve been told that, on more than one occasion. The main point to take from this is that I find Top Gun objectionable for reasons that are not just because of what I see on the screen.

Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way about Zero Dark Thirty. Somehow this film has become a talking point prior to its release, mostly from people who haven’t actually seen the movie. Once I’ve seen Zero Dark Thirty, I might join the chorus of those who think it promotes a particular way of thinking, although since I think Bigelow is a very good director and thought Tony Scott was something less than very good, it’s likely I’ll prefer Zero Dark Thirty over Top Gun on artistic grounds, if nothing else. But I’m going to see the movie before I examine the film’s politics.

And what if I find Zero Dark Thirty objectionable? Will I be sorry, then, that I spent my money on the enterprise?

Let’s put it this way. I really don’t like Top Gun. But I’ve seen it several times. The first time, I found out I hated it. The other times, I’ve shown it in college courses. Because Top Gun is an excellent movie to analyze, because the context of the film is ripe for examination, because I like being challenged by students who don’t share my opinion about the film.

marvin miller, r.i.p.

I’ll be brief … there are already many excellent pieces about Miller floating around the web.

Marvin Miller died yesterday at the age of 95. He was the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966-1982, and his influence during those years was immense. When you read that Miller was as important a figure in baseball during his lifetime as anyone else you could name, it is not hyperbole.

While the head of the Union, he negotiated the first-ever collective bargaining agreement with owners … he got the minimum salary raised … he placed the arbitration process into the system … he was a key part of the destruction of the reserve clause that had effectively kept players signed to their current club forever (or until the club decided they were no longer needed). With this, he helped usher in the era of free agency that exists to this day.

Not everyone liked what Miller accomplished. I recommend Joe Posnanski’s article, which features an interview he did with Miller a decade ago, and details why Miller was a polarizing figure. (http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40433510/) Miller is especially critical of the role he thinks fans should play in labor negotiations (short version: no role at all). Given that many fans think athletes make too much money already, Miller was often on their shit list in any event. Owners hated him, of course. But what he did for the players was historic, and ever since, every player should thank Miller for being a part of their lives as employees.

I have a personal anecdote so slim it’s barely worth mentioning. When Miller first took the job as director of the union, he left his post as a high-ranked official in the United Steelworkers union. I was a member of the Steelworkers for a decade when I worked for Continental Can, and I can recall this one guy, who had the best sense of the history of the union as any of my co-workers, speaking highly of Miller’s work with the Steelworkers.

As I say, I don’t have a lot to add. But Miller was an important figure, and he deserves to be mentioned here.

losing

You could say that in politics, as in sports, there are winners and losers. Some would argue that everyone in a democracy wins when we have free elections; I don’t suppose the Republican party is feeling too good right now, just the same. Sports is more clear: the Giants won the World Series, and last night, I watched the San Jose Earthquakes’ delightful run to the MLS championship come to an end. Goonies never say die, but that doesn’t mean someone else can’t kill them dead.

There was a proposition on the California ballot that “my” side won. It turned out that 53.1% of my fellow Californians agreed with me on this issue. Yet I feel like I’m in the minority, because most of the people I know disagreed with me. And I don’t know if they realize this, because when the topic came up, I shut up. An election helps you understand that most of your friends and family are like-minded … most of them vote for the same candidates from the same party, most of them agree on ballot issues. Discussions are amiable, because no dissent pops up to ruin the mood. Well, if I’m any example, one reason is that amiable seems more important than dissent, when you’re just shooting the shit with friends. That is, dissent exists, but it isn’t always expressed.

My silence isn’t a good thing, though. It’s like being in a group of white men who start bashing minorities or women … if you don’t say anything, you’re part of the problem. And meanwhile, everyone else amiably assumes that we’re all in agreement.

So I’ll out myself here: I voted against Proposition 37, which would have required labels on foods with genetically-modified ingredients.

And hey, I “won”.

I’ve always made it a practice with the Giants, that the day after they are eliminated in a post-season series (if they make it that far), I wear Giants gear in public. You have to represent with pride, even after a loss. So, here are the people and ballot measures I voted on where my candidate/preference lost:

• Proposition 34 would have repealed the death penalty. I voted yes, 52.8% voted no.
• Proposition 35 increases prison sentences and fines for “human traffickers”. I voted no, finding it poorly worded, unnecessary, and potentially damaging to, among others, sex workers and their families. 81.1% voted yes.
• Proposition 38 was a substitute for Prop 30, which raised money for public education (and perhaps helped save my job). I voted a cover-my-ass yes, 72.3% voted no, the passage of Prop. 30 made it all irrelevant.
• For the city council representative from our district, with a ranked system, I left the incumbent off my ordered list of three (there were only three candidates), favoring Denisha DeLane. He won without my help, with 60.27% of the votes.
• Same system for mayor, the incumbent, who wasn’t one of my three choices, got 55.44%. My first choice was Kriss Worthington.
• For rent board (always a heated item in Berkeley), I voted for a slate of four that I found more pro-renter than the other slate of four. One of my four, Igor Tregub, lost … I wonder what separated him from his fellow slate members?

Other than that, I was a winner. Why don’t I feel better?

a vote for barry is a vote for fun, part 64

In 2008, 140 of my blog posts were tagged with “Current Affairs”. This number is inflated a bit, since 2008 was the year I spent posting about 1968, which added a lot of Current Affairs posts that weren’t actually “current”. Still, that’s about three times a week that I had something to say about current affairs.

This is the 12th post of 2012 that has gotten a Current Affairs tag. About once a month, rather than thrice a week.

Where did those 128 posts go?

I can think of a couple of reasons for why my posts on politics have all but disappeared. The primary reason is that I no longer feel qualified to speak on the subject. My specialty, as it were, has always been cultural studies, which often and perhaps always includes some measure of politics, but I know more about Bruce Springsteen and Citizen Kane than I do about the high and low points of politics. I’m not any less qualified now than I was before to write about these things. But I’ve come to the realization that my contributions are almost entirely of the “my opinion is” variety, which aren’t particularly useful.

There’s another reason why I tread lightly in this area. In 2008, and in fact for the first seven years of this blog, George Bush was president. I hated him so much, I made “fucking dickhead” into a minor-league meme. Whenever I needed to fill space, I could always count on the Bushies to do something worthy of my wrath.

Now? We’re finishing a fourth year with Barack Obama as president. I find a lot to like about Obama, but much of that pleasure comes from what he does when he’s being Barack rather than Mr. President. I’ve never understood the complaints that he doesn’t seem to blend in well with “regular” folks. I don’t see that. I see a man who can switch from Leader of the Free World to Guy Having a Burger or Guy Playing Hoops without a hitch. One of my fondest memories of the first four years of Obama’s presidency is when he had Willie Mays as his guest on Air Force One.

But what about that Mr. President guy? I’m not going to say there is no difference between the two major parties. I think the Republicans have done a terrific job of defining themselves out of the center, where the two parties might come together. And while I might find Obama less able than FDR or LBJ, the two presidents who helped form my vision of the possibilities of the presidency when I was a kid, I understand that times are different, that Obama faces different hurdles than did those other presidents, and that Roosevelt and especially Johnson weren’t what you’d call perfect.

And I admit that one reason I voted for Obama in the past, and will vote for him again later today, is because I think it is massively important, in cultural terms, that we finally have a black president. I’ve voted for many African-Americans for president in the past, as well as women, Latino/as, and other minority categories I can no longer recall … I have, as my mom used to say, “wasted” my vote plenty of times. But Obama is the first one who actually had a chance to win.

So why are there only 12 posts about politics this year, compared to 140 four years ago?

Because I get no pleasure from pointing out that Obama’s record on civil liberties has been shockingly awful. I think his continuance (and at times expansion) of his predecessor’s actions in this area will prove to be the most long-lasting of his policies. I think that he is helping to make outrageous intrusions into our lives into something “normal” and acceptable. And I think that one day we’ll have a president who isn’t as likable as Barack Obama, and he’ll take the powers that Obama has solidified and do frightful things with them.

I don’t know why I enjoyed beating up on Bush, but have pulled back for the most part from beating up on Obama. I suppose it’s a combination of the above: I don’t often know what I’m talking about, there is much to like about Obama, and I don’t want to bring up old fights about third-party possibilities. (It was one thing to hear people tout the greatness of Bush. It’s much more bothersome for me on a personal basis to hear my friends tout the greatness of Obama.) I feel for a lot of Obama’s constituents (my neighbors, to pick an obvious example) in ways I never did for Bush’s (i.e. not my neighbors).

So I’m not quite doing the “holding my nose” procedure when I cast my vote for Obama. But I don’t have much enthusiasm for that vote, which is ultimately as confused as this blog post.

does it make me shallow that i think this is cool?

Or that I love this, from Bruce’s website: “Springsteen isn’t often slated as a warm-up act, but this afternoon was an exception. Not that there were any flaws in Bruce’s performance, mind you, but Jay-Z came on after him and pretty much blew the roof off the building”.

who i side with

I went to the website iSideWith.com and took their poll, the point of which is to tell you which candidate you side with. Here are the results … the first parenthesis tells the candidate’s party, the second tells the issues where the candidate most matches my own opinions:

1. Jill Stein (Green): 94% (immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, economy, environment)
2. Rocky Anderson (Justice): 77%
3. Barack Obama (Democrat): 76% (social, science)
4. Gary Johnson (Libertarian): 73% (domestic)
5. Virgil Goode (Constitution): 7% (none)
6. Mitt Romney (Republican): 3% (none)

Listed by party (not sure where Justice and Constitution went):

1. Democratic: 93%
2. Green: 91%
3. Libertarian: 57%
4. Republican: 0%

From this, I learn that I agree with the Democrats more than I agree with President Obama. I also learn the unsurprising fact that I don’t agree with Romney and the Republicans on anything. Jill Stein is the easy winner, and I think we can reduce this to the following: do I vote for the candidate with whom I most agree, or do I vote for Obama?

It’s interesting that I agree with Democrats and Greens pretty much equally. I’m not as much of an anti-Democrat as I pretend.

Here’s the thing, while noting that since I’m in California, my vote doesn’t really matter. Before I took this goofy poll, I assumed the basic question was to vote my opinion, or to vote for the “realistic” candidate. I also assumed that I’d agree with the Greens on most issues (I used to be a member of their party). But I thought that Obama and the Democrats would end up somewhere under 50% in terms of agreeing with me. That’s a real “my person or real person” question, and I might not see the point in voting for someone with whom I agree with less than half the time.

But I agree with Obama 3/4 of the time, and with the Democrats even more than I agree with the Greens. So the choice becomes, not between the best and the lesser-of-two-evils, but between the best and the pretty good. Since the dark side of this would be a Mitt Romney presidency, and since there is more difference in my mind (according to this extremely unscientific poll) between Obama and Romney than there is between Obama and Stein, it seems clear that President Obama should get my vote. Because such a vote wouldn’t be tied to the “lesser of two evils” strategy, but would instead be a vote for someone I like quite a bit.

I wouldn’t have expected this.