It seems to be the topic du jour, so here’s my reaction to yesterday’s election results (which I’m sure won’t surprise any of my three loyal readers): I’m pleased. Pleased that the brakes can now be applied to the runaway “unitary executive” and that the rubberstamp Congress which enabled it has been disbanded.
Well, I fulfilled my civic duty this morning, for all the good it will do. Election results in Utah are highly predictable, not to mention one-sided, and if you happen to be on the, ahem, minority side — which I am, if you haven’t figured that out by now — voting tends to feel like an exercise in futility. Still, you’ve got no room to bitch if you don’t vote, right? And my three loyal readers all know how much I like bitchin’, so…
My actual voting experience went much more smoothly than I anticipated. I’ve been somewhat apprehensive about these fancy new computerized voting machines with their new-fangled touch-screens and all. I don’t trust them, to be honest; I worry about them being hacked or secretly programmed to produce a particular outcome. It’s all too easy to imagine my vote simply vanishing into the aether of cyberspace, or else being transmogrified into a vote for those other guys. I’ve also wondered what happens if the machine has a problem, and the only people available to try and fix it are the typical polling-station volunteers who tend to be so old that they still think color TV is a passing fad. And for today’s election, at least, I worried that the lines would be terrible because the machines are new and a lot of people would be slowed down by the learning curve.
To my surprise, however, the lines moved quickly, the machines struck me as very user-friendly — even my parents, to whom e-mail remains a deep and unfathomable mystery, had no problems figuring them out — and my concerns about security were somewhat mollified by a back-up system that generates an actual paper ballot. (If you haven’t seen the voting machines yet, your votes are recorded on a paper roll similar to a cash register receipt. The paper stays inside the machine, presumably for security reasons, but it passes through a little window so you can review it and make any changes before you hit the “Cast Ballot” button.) I’m still generally suspicious of the new machines and would prefer that we return to tried-and-true paper-balloting methods, but the back-up helped me to rachet down my paranoia a notch or two.
I have seen reports of local problems with the machines, but in my precinct, at least, everything was fine. The biggest problem I had was finding my polling place, because it seems to change every other election. One year, it’s held at my old elementary school; the next, it’s at the new elementary school that was built a decade or so back. This year, it was back at the old school, but my parents and I thought it was still at the new one, so we wasted a good 15 minutes driving around town. (We went to vote at the same time, but travelled in separate cars so I could go to work afterwards.) I suspect we looked like we were re-enacting the climax from the original Pink Panther movie, that farcical sequence where half-a-dozen different cars keep whizzing through a quiet village center from different directions.
Well, now, this is just childish: it appears that the NRCC — that would be the Republicans, kids — has orchestrated a nationwide campaign to annoy people into voting against Democrats by repeatedly telephoning the same households over and over with recorded messages that appear to be made by or on behalf of Democratic candidates. It sounds like a desperation tactic to me, and a pretty damn silly one, too, but there is anecdotal evidence that it may be having an effect. The mainstream media has thus far ignored the story, but thankfully Josh Marshall (among other politi-bloggers) has been on his toes; scroll back through his archives to see how the situation developed.
I can’t begin to tell you how much I despise this kind of sleazy, prankish nonsense, and I despise it even more when it appears to actually work. I fantasize about the day when we may witness some dignified, grown-up political discourse in this country. In the meantime, keep in mind that if you’ve been getting a lot of annoying “robocalls” over the past few days, the blame may not fall where you think, and anyway there are more important things to consider when you cast your vote tomorrow…
Last weekend, I watched one of my favorite old movies, The Guns of Navarone. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you immediately add it to your Netflix queue. It’s a 1961 wartime adventure starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn as commandoes tasked with destroying a Nazi artillery emplacement that guards a vital sea passage.
As the cliche says, they don’t make ’em like this anymore. War movies these days, on the rare occasion that somebody actually makes one, tend to be self-important, self-conscious, and burdened with the need to say Something Important. Guns isn’t like that; it takes its subject matter seriously enough, even allowing David Niven’s character to make a couple speeches about the pointlessness and horror of it all, but the film’s overarching goal is to entertain, not to enlighten, and it succeeds wonderfully in that regard.
I did notice something on this latest viewing that’s had me thinking, though.
Several of my daily-read blogs have been linking to the “Letter from Iraq” published on Friday by TIME.com. If you haven’t run across this yet, go check it out; it’s definitely worth a minute of your time.
The letter is a series of observations from an anonymous Marine officer who pulls no punches in describing his life in the middle of the war zone. Although I’m sure both sides of the poltical spectrum here at home can (and will) try to spin this to support their views, the letter itself, read in its entirety, strikes me as remarkably non-partisan, honest, revealing, and, ultimately, quite moving. It is also, in places, very funny:
Most Surreal Moment — Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. We had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.
Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied “Yes, you.”
As far as I can tell, this letter — unlike some of the supposed “real stories of our troops” that float around in e-mail form — is for real.
I shouldn’t say anything, because I know that political entries never bring happiness to anyone, least of all me. But I’ve been reading all about this developing scandal surrounding Representative Mark Foley and his messages to Congressional pages, and I want to make sure I fully understand the situation. So, let’s review:
My concept of America formed early and was gathered largely from old black-and-white movies, Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, and, yes, Star Trek, which despite all the lip service about a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-species crew projected a largely American (specifically JFK’s “New Frontier” America) sense of identity. And while I never subscribed to the jingoistic “we’re number one” mantra that so many of my classmates seemed to reflexively utter whenever news of some international dispute managed to filter down to our grade-school consciousnesses, I always understood that Americans were the good guys. I may not have quite believed in the concept of American exceptionalism, but I did believe that our country was respected in the world and, more importantly, worthy of respect, not because we were superior human beings who were inherently better than everyone else, but because we chose not to do the kinds of nasty shit that other nations did. Like Captain Kirk choosing to spare the helpless Gorn, who would surely have killed him, the Americans of my understanding struggled to rise above our brutal natures, to find a better, more humane way of doing things.
That meant we didn’t send our own people to Siberia for speaking their minds. We didn’t persecute people because of their religion or lack thereof. We didn’t invade and take over other countries in order to expand our own territory or influence. We tried to help the rest of the world, not just ourselves. We cared if innocent blood was unavoidably shed. And we most certainly did not, under any circumstances, torture people.
Score one for common sense: the House of Representatives cafeteria has quietly changed its menu nomenclature so that you can once again order french fries and french toast. Remember, if you will, the attack of silliness that broke out on the eve of the Iraq War when the hyper-patriots, miffed that the French weren’t tripping all over themselves to march into the meat grinder at our side, retagged the House’s potato wedges and grilled egg-bread with the prefix “freedom.” It was a ridiculous gesture that accomplished little beyond making Americans look offensively petty and stupid — something we really didn’t need considering the beating that our country’s image was taking in the international press anyhow — and it rightfully turned into a late-night punchline. And now it’s rightfully been rectified and consigned to the Memory Hole.
If only the war could be so easily undone as well.
When I was 16 years old, my uncle Louie was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. ALS is a neurological disease that causes the myelin sheath coating the body’s nerve cells to deteriorate. Think of this sheath as insulation around an electrical wire; when the myelin goes, the nerve short-circuits and ceases to function. The victim first loses strength in affected areas of the body, then loses control over them altogether. In time, the effect of the disease spreads throughout the body and, as the muscles receive less and less stimulation from the deteriorating nervous system, it begins to atrophy. The victim essentially wastes away.
So, federal anti-terrorism funding to New York City has been cut by 40% because the Department of Homeland Security says there are no icons or national monuments there. John Scalzi, a resident of Ohio mind you, identifies some of the “non-icons” DHS may have missed, including the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the New York Stock Exchange, not to mention that big green lady out in the harbor.
Is there anyone left out there who really believes the Bush Administration knows what it’s doing? Anyone?