Syndicate and Hague

I’m not entirely sure how to start this, so I will start by saying I’m going to obscure some specifics in this to protect someone I care about while still trying to communicate the larger implications/issues in the decision that was handed down.

Megan and I were asked to participate in an interview with a media outlet with a fairly large distribution. The interview was - in general - about relationship decisions and dynamics and whether the choices we made in ours caused us to fight less or made our relationship different from others.

I was surprised, and a little impressed, that they would be willing to interview a married couple about something that had nothing to do with our status as a “same-sex” couple. Of course, it was my friend who was hunting down people for the story, and we came to mind because Megan and I make a big effort to look at the major stumbling blocks of relationships - chores, responsibilities, money - and make explicit, managed decisions about things so that we don’t wind up passive-aggressively damaging the relationship due to resentment/grudges.

Also, we really like being happy.

Anyway, tonight the word came down that we couldn’t be interviewed because they didn’t think that it was “surprising that a same-sex married couple would *insert doing the thing we do here*” and needed a straight married couple for it.

My initial surprise at the wonderful banality of us doing a story that had nothing to do with our genders was misguided. It wasn’t the institution of media that didn’t care, it was our friend who analytically looked at the topic and decided we would be a great couple to speak to it.

And here is where the diatribe comes in:

In this instance, they didn’t want a same sex couple because then they couldn’t play traditional gender roles against the “change” that they perceive is going on. Essentially, the decisions themselves weren’t the story, but the perceived decrease of male authority in the household was the story.

Media is one way we interpret our existence. We consume it, we are influenced by it, and I think we often forget how contrived things are. People in general don’t spend a ton of time thinking about audience and how carefully interview subjects are selected to influence a certain desired perception in the audience. Yes, liberals deconstruct FOX News, but venerated news outlets spin constantly as well.

This is why it drives me crazy when straight people say things like “Well, we don’t have a ’straight’ pride parade, I don’t understand why you have to do that sort of thing.” Heterosexuality is inscribed and reinforced as dominant, and homosexuality is so threatening that - unless a story is specifically constructed around it - it cannot exist. It cannot be banal, it must always be controversial. Decisions are made on a daily basis about what can be spoken to and what cannot be, and without us running around waving flags and making our presence known, we would be swept under the carpet forever.

The media outlet’s decision on this was one part homophobia, one part sexism, and one part reinforcement of the aberration of female equality or power in a heterosexual relationship.

That last one is what really kills me about this. Let’s give the management the benefit of the doubt on the homophobia and say that wasn’t a factor (::ha::). The point of explicitly wanting to frame the discussion around a straight couple making decisions that, for some reason, you wouldn’t expect them to make should force the question: why is this an issue? Usually, it’s about some traditional female role that is being upended:

• she’s making more money now, how does the guy feel?
• the guy decided to stay home with the kids, is he being mocked?
• she has a more advanced degree, does that make him feel inferior?

I’m sure you could add to the list, because you read/watch/hear these stories all the time. And they reinforce to us as a society that we should feel surprised by these showings of female authority/power. That we should be concerned by the lowered status of men in these relationships. It inscribes a very specific kind of spin and serves as a form of societal push-back onto a select group of people who either represent a changing society or people fear are representing a changing society.

It’s messed up.

Anyway. I wish I could actually talk about what we were going to talk about, because it’s interesting, but I wanted to be able to be critical without jeopardizing anyone’s job. It’s crappy times out there, you know?

The other day, I was reminiscing with my friend Kristen about our first Thanksgiving together in New York (10 years ago) - and how it was pretty much the best Thanksgiving that ever existed.

If you’ve never lived far enough away from your family that traveling back home was too much to do for both Thanksgiving and Christmas (or just that time of year), you’ve missed out on something awesome. New York is full of youngsters, as we were, who can’t afford to travel around much and every Thanksgiving was full of drinking and food and dessert.

But the first year was really the most special. Kristen and I had just moved to what would become a terrible place in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and we decided we were going to host Thanksgiving for our friends there. We bought a turkey, which we discovered was too big to thaw in the sink, so my sharpest memory of the night before was of Kristen setting the turkey to thaw in the bathtub, and petting it, thanking it for giving its life so we could have a party.

We made the traditional potatoes and green beans, and what Kristen reminded me of yesterday was that we didn’t have enough plates for everyone to eat off of, and so we ate off saucers and bowls and anything that was a flat enough surface.

Ah, New York, people may think of you as the crowded city, but I think of you as a place where your whole building makes Thanksgiving together and it is awesome. (And I miss you guys.)

(Move to Minnesota.)

Stop sending me special offers.  Stop sending me those damned “checks” to use.  Just stop it.

I just spent 45 minutes ripping up your mail - and why did I have to be so careful?  Because you, Citibank, have to put my full name and address in about 10 different places in the mailings.  Because you, Capital One, insist on sending me checks that some random person could just write up and charge the hell out of my account.  Because every time I buy a shredder it breaks within a month and so I’ve given up and taken to tearing up the bits of paper with my hands because, despite the fears over identity theft online, it’s your own recycling/garbage that poses the biggest danger.

Every week, I get five (or so) new offers for cards or “special” offers from my current company offering me the opportunity to spend money I don’t have on impulsive crap I don’t need.

I hate you.  You are exploitative and predatory and suck in the needy and greedy, preying on people’s desires and desperation.  You are plunderers, pushing consumption as the norm and portraying yourselves as our security nets when we’re in need.  Of course, anyone who carries a balance with you could see the ground shift beneath their feet in a moment if you decide to arbitrarily increase rates or change fees or alter minimum payments.

Your leaders make out like the bandits they are - even when your companies fail, they land safely in their multimillion dollar Central Park apartments with their golden parachutes.  They make more from their failures than most of us will accumulate in our entire lifetimes.

Stop sending me mail.  Stop trying to convince me that impulsive/compulsive buying is acceptable.  You can try to blame individuals for making bad decisions and getting into trouble, but the fact is that you and the legislators who allow you to ravage all of us have created the culture in which you are a solution for our crises; orchestrated the financial collapse that hasn’t affected you at all; and systematized your consolidation of power - of rate adjustments and fees and whatnot - while we have nothing.

You totally and completely suck.

Also, I will never carry a balance with you.  Never.

Also, also: stop sending me mail.

Here is where I ramble on about my academic struggles. Just a warning.

As most of you who know me IRL know, I’m doing the PhD thing with a peculiar blend of program areas: Learning Technologies (education + technology in its myriad incarnations) and Culture & Teaching. I continue to be pretty bullheaded about the importance of merging the two, but this creates an almost constant sense of intellectual tension for me that I suppose is healthy and (in the long term) beneficial.

The core of my tension is this: as a front-end developer type and tech geek who finds no small amount of joy in embedding myself in the tools and flow of the online community, I’m concerned with creation and application. If I’m not making, I’m not learning; if I’m not learning, I’m already behind. I think this is elemental to those of us who create online designs, presences, websites, environments, applications, etc. We are doers and constructors. The attitudes and perspectives that fuel this type of person inevitably pour over into how they think about and what they focus on in research. The kind of action-oriented passion that drives the LT program is what drew me to it - especially after a year of reading about research done on mediocre projects, I cannot tell you what a relief it is that I wound up choosing a program in which the faculty create brilliantly designed applications for education.

But I’m not only focused on design/application creation. I’m also a writer whose primary fascination is the deconstruction of the political complexities that underlie our daily existences and our systemic structures. This also means I have a particular fascination with how what we build reinscribes modes of power or how (and for whom) the space is defined. This is why I needed the CAT program in tandem with LT. That sort of work is hardly ever done in the world of education + technology.

The problem/issue that arises with this disconnect is that most of the people who are studying technology and the digital sphere from what I would call an “outsider’s perspective” study this area from an “outdated perspective.” In this, I’m classifying people who do not create/do as “outsiders” and alleging that their separation from development results in a lack of understanding of what our technology is moving towards and therefore their studies and research are retrospective rather than current.

Does this make sense? Or am I getting to hung up in my own mental space?

What I worry about is that the middle ground that I want to exist - doing and deconstructing - doesn’t really exist. I worry that I will inevitably fall into one camp or the other and lose something as a result.

Anyway, I could go on, but we have an out of town visitor who just arrived - so that’s enough of that!

You may not know who Jessica Valenti is, but it’s never too late to catch up on a strong, smart feminist voice. I bring her up because of her recent marriage and how well she has spoken about the complicated feelings she’s had about the process and institution, as well as her intentionality about constructing a wedding and a marriage that reflects her philosophies and life.

Back in January, when she announced her engagement on her blog, she accompanied the post titled “Does the personal always have to be political? (And can’t it ever be private?)” with this e-card:

It was around the same time that Megan and I told people about our engagement and dealt with a smaller scale and less vicious set of questions (asked both of each other and by others), so I found myself relating to her in a lot of ways. Why did we want to participate in the institution of marriage? What does a feminist (in Valenti’s case) or queer/feminist (in our case) marriage look like? How do you redefine something that (traditionally and still) is so interlaced with male dominance and religious control?

Thankfully, we didn’t have gossip columns and publications like Playboy weighing in on the merits of our relationship or framing our decision as a “feminist-finally-gets-hitched” story like the NY Times did. (By the way, NYT: seriously?? You could have written about so many more interesting aspects of the marriage/decisions made about it and you chose the easy and kind of anti-feminist route. But I shouldn’t expect more depth from the section that usually profiles rich, ivy leaguers with famous parents.)

Valenti just wrote a new post called Well, I’m damn sure never getting married again and it pains me that she had to write it. She thought into constructing what it meant not only to be married, but to get married, and I think that is what you would expect from someone with a track record of critical thought and political engagement.

And let me tell you, it is hard to deconstruct marriage and the cultural weight embedded in it to reconstruct it to fit your values. As Valenti said:

When I wrote about Andrew and I planning a wedding, I wasn’t doing so to make some grand statement about what feminists should do when they get married. Or to suggest that my wedding was going to be The Most Feminist Wedding Ever. I wrote about it as an individual, as a person, who was trying to negotiate her beliefs with a traditionally sexist institution and the consumerist party-planning that surrounds weddings.

…

We wanted to make the wedding representative of the institution we’d like marriage to be, and I think we did a good job. Does any of this change the fact that marriage is a historically sexist institution or make it okay that millions of people are denied the right to be married? Of course not. But it made the celebration one that made sense to us, one that re-imagined what marriage as an institution should be about - love, equal partnership and community. (And seriously, to the some of the more conservative relatives at our wedding, hearing these sort of things at a wedding absolutely made an impact.)

Love, equal partnership, and community: that is how Megan and I felt about it.

I can’t speak for Valenti or any other feminists/lgbt folks who get married, but - for us - everything was put on the table. We broke down what things signified in general, what they signified to us, and what we really wanted rather than what may be culturally imposed. For instance: the rings. Personally, I have somewhat critical feelings about wedding rings - engagement rings in particular. As engagement rings are traditionally only given to the woman, I find them to be a societal symbol of purchase (our language supports that - an engaged woman is “off the market”) and that is problematic for me. Wedding rings have a similar problem for me as the last thing I want to be is “owned” by anyone else. And as lovely as Megan is, I don’t want to be owned by her (and vice versa).

But rings are pretty. And I wanted one. I was so happy to be marrying Megan (and am so happy to be married to her), and the idea of having something that she gave to me that I would have with me all the time made me happy. So we decided: no engagement rings, but we got really pretty and unique rings made for us that would give us each a symbol of our love and a reflection of how we’re linked that we would carry with us every day. Then, when friends gave us the stones for the rings, they also became a way in which our community supported us.

Does wanting rings without wanting the baggage of ownership - does redefining that part of weddings - make us bad feminists? I don’t think so. And I’m sure if we’d wanted to badly enough that we could have redefined the role of the engagement ring as well. Having the capacity to think critically about institutions and practices doesn’t mean that we have to swear off everything associated with those things. My perspective is that the process of critique and intentionality underlies the core of the philosophy of “the personal is political.” The decisions we make with that kind of reflection are invariably going to be truer to ourselves and our values.

Megan and I had a hard time writing a ceremony in part because every element of it was analyzed - but because of that it was also completely appropriate to us. We wrote it in Provincetown two days before the wedding and it was perfect. It was about love, respect, individuality, change, support, trust, adventure, discovery, and commitment. It was about how she makes me a better person (and vice versa). (She is so awesome.)

What I hope is that Valenti can ignore the haters to an extent and be happy that she and her husband got to put the kind of effort and intentionality into defining their wedding and marriage that they did, and know that the kind of critical thought she expressed in public was not wasted.

I spent much of the latter part of last week doing one of the things I do best (and enjoy most): being a thorn in the side of lockstep thinking. Even though I’m too much of a speck to truly change anything in this instance, the least I can do is challenge the assumptions people put forth as “common sense” (or even “commonly agreed upon”).

In my experience, it is very easy in marketing meeting type situations for people to blindly acquire and use the language presented as their baseline. What I mean by this is that, if the people running a meeting use a word like “spin,” the people in the meeting will think in terms of spin. This happens for a variety of reasons: people want to impress those who have more power and therefore don’t question underlying premises of a discussion; people are afraid of losing their jobs so they play along even if they’re annoyed; or people - when faced with contributing to something they disagree with - hold their tongues rather than speak up. The reluctance to speak up is sensible. It’s self-protection, but it’s just as likely a result of the speed with which and the manner in which people construct thoughts and arguments. Some people need to take time to dissect and construct and are marvelous thinkers - but aren’t quick thinkers.

Anyway, the series of discussions was about something of a pretty broad scope. It’s something I consider both potentially incredibly beneficial and dangerous simultaneously and my hunch is that it will be used in both ways, which I can’t do anything about. The most I can do is try to help construct and frame positive uses. But that’s not what I’m talking about here (if I tried to sum up everything I said, we’d be looking at an even more long-winded blog post than usual).

What I want to talk about is how we develop a lexicon and how destructive a lexicon can be once it is assimilated into regular speech. In this instance, the term “spin” came up (as in: how to “spin” the U in a positive light), as did the term “loyalty” (as in: how do we create loyalty to the U - implicitly, how do we create loyalty to the brand of the U?)

Let’s take on the word “spin” first, because it’s easier to deconstruct. In fact, Jon Stewart did it quite well several years ago when he deconstructed what “Spin Alley” (the place the cable news people cut to when discussing a debate) actually means during his infamous Crossfire appearance:

You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don’t you think that, for people watching at home, that’s kind of a drag, that you’re literally walking to a place called deception lane?

…

But what I believe is, they’re not making honest arguments. So what they’re doing is, in their mind, the ends justify the means.

Honesty is the core here. In “spin alley” you’re talking about dishonest argument, in “spinning the U” you’re talking about a dishonest presentation of the University. Nothing is inherently positive. No one is going to have exclusively positive interactions with anything ever. So the question is this: are you going to try to artificially force positivity or are you going to spend your time and money creating experiences and opportunities that people actually feel happy to be a part of?

For instance, if I say that the faculty of my PhD program areas of Culture & Teaching and Learning Technologies are freakin awesome, that isn’t spin. That is genuine sentiment based on a positive and ongoing experience. Creating positive experiences and painting positive pictures are very, very different things.

You get the picture. Let’s move on to the concept of loyalty.

In the context of this discussion, we’re essentially talking about getting people affiliated with the U to be loyal to the U. And here is where the problem of the lexicon comes in. If there is a group and those leading a session ask a question that is (paraphrased) “how do we increase people’s loyalty to the U?” then the group’s job is to respond to that without actually questioning the question. You respond with ways in which to increase loyalty, rather than to ask whether loyalty is what we should be working towards.

Since we’re talking broad scope here, we’re talking students, alums, external folks, faculty, staff…can anyone see the issue of using a term like loyalty with all its connotations (faithfulness, obedience, devotion) in regard to people whose economic and professional fates are tied to the institution? Additionally, the notion that we ought to be loyal to an institution rather than committed to a collective purpose strikes me as terribly hollow. If the U is merely a shell or a brand, then commitment is meaningless. It’s the U’s purpose that people are committed to, not a tagline or an institutional brand.

Of course, purpose is a tricky thing: it actually needs to be actively developed and worked at. A brand can coast on its merits and has sale value. A purpose is a moral imperative; veiling that moral imperative in branding language allows people to forget the purpose exists, it allows people to pursue the game of marketing for its own end rather than the higher purpose they are supposed to be serving.

Loyalty, however, if induced - the concept of “raving fans” was discussed - is a blind, emotional, and arbitrary tie. What does it mean to be a fan of the Vikings who paints his/her face purple? Who cares! They come to the game, buy the jersey, drink beer in the stands…they give us money.

That is the source of my aggravation. The thing that twists me in knots. If the goal is loyalty - a word chosen in a winnowing process of meeting after meeting after meeting - then it appears we want nothing more than consumers. We’ll provide them as much as the bare minimum they require in order to come back and purchase something another day.

And this is why language is important. If, instead of asking how to create “raving fans,” we asked questions about facilitating and building community, and how to maintain our own authenticity so that the actual experiences people have with us are positive/beneficial (rather than just spun to be so), we would be asking far better questions and getting entirely different answers.

(Now, one could say that my professors/TAs back in undergrad at the U did a pretty damn good job of helping me develop my critical reasoning skills, but none of these discussions are really about quality - just perception - so it’s kind of irrelevant.)

This isn’t really a movie review.

I sometimes wonder why sooo many crappy awful movies for dudes get made. And then I came across statistics - via Traction - that in 2008:

• Women comprised only 16% of all directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films (a decline of 3% since 2001 and of 1% since 2007).
• Only 9% of directors were women - no change since 1998
• 22% of the films released in 2008 employed no women directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, or editors. No films failed to employ a man in at least one of these roles.
• 90% of the films had no female directors.
• 43% of the films had no female producers.
• 79% of the films had no female editors.
• 96% of the films had no female cinematographers.

If you take a moment to think about what that means - that the vision behind the movies, how things are interpreted, how things are portrayed, how our attention is directed, how a story is cut, how a story is told, who the protagonist is, who we should care about, who we should forgive, all of it is predominantly controlled by the male perspective - it’s a bit overwhelming.

It seems beneficial to remind ourselves that as self-congratulatory as we can be about women’s progress, we started at such a position of disadvantage that we’re still not even close.  Actually, there was an article in Jezebel back in August that got this topic stewing around in my head.

In an article about an NY Times scan of the big studio schedules by Michael Cieply, they highlight one of his paragraphs trying to explain the disproportionate dominance of male directors.

In one respect, homogeneity among its film directors might actually help Hollywood in a business sense. Studio films, year in and year out, continue to pull in crowds worldwide at least in part because they look, sound and feel like what has gone before.

What can you say to that? I’ve been under the impression that Hollywood has actually not been pulling in the box office numbers they need to in order to sustain their business model, but whatever. It also completely ignores how movies influence our culture at large, and how alienating it is for people to rarely see accurate representations of their lives in film. That was one theme that came up in The Celluloid Closet in regard to queer representation in film - that there were almost no representations of real queer lives in film (this was in 1995ish).

So when we went to Whip It last night, I was thinking about all of this and paying attention to how the movie showed women’s bodies, lives, sexualities, and humor in a female-directed, female-written film. I’m not saying that the movie was some groundbreaking work of feminism - it was a fluffy, feel-good, entertaining movie - but the representation of these different aspects that I noted were actually significantly different from other mainstream films I’ve seen recently.

• The skating scenes, of which there were many, were striking in that they focused on the competition, athleticism, brutality, and sexiness of roller derby - as opposed to focusing just on the sexiness and turning the female characters into playboy versions of roller derby girls
• It is really nice to see the quirky, female character as protagonist - the character that gets to develop and discover aspects of herself and become a more complete person - rather than as the girlfriend of and foil for male protagonist development
• Speaking of that, it’s also nice that though the romantic relationship had an impact on the main character, it wasn’t the core of the female protagonist’s transformation. I hate how hugely rare that is, but it’s refreshing to see
• I just really liked the range of female characters, the ways the different ages of the female characters contributed to friendships and relationships and their interactions with each other

What I want: more movies with female protagonists, written/directed by women. Let’s just balance things out.

I wanted to open this by saying that there are so many things I don’t understand about the people crying “socialism” in regards to having public health care, but that isn’t entirely true. I intellectually understand a lot of the factors leading them to that reaction. Some of it is simply that they have good insurance through their employers and don’t want to possibly wait another day to get seen by a doctor so that we can all be covered. It’s a naive way to think in this economy when a person could lose his/her job and be without insurance or with insurance at staggering COBRA premiums.

I could go into the racial undertones of the anti-health care reform language (directed both at Obama, and at the “others” who may take away “our” health insurance/doctors), but what I want to focus on is why public health care is good for entrepreneurs - and, by extension, for capitalism.

If our leaders are really concerned with the needs of small businesses and individual start-ups of new businesses as they say they are, their resistance to publicly run health care is puzzling. Needing to maintain a relationship with a specific employer in order to have health insurance actually deters people from striking out on their own and becoming innovators.

I could write up some scenarios for you, but you should already know them. Someone with a child with chronic health conditions cannot stop working at a job with great benefits just because they “have a great idea for a business” because no individual plan would provide the level of care the group employee plan does (nor would the individual plan probably cover the child, what with the child’s pre-existing conditions and all).

You could have Crone’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, severe mental illness, whatever - and you are either lucky enough to be trapped with an employer who offers benefits that keep your illness from driving you into bankruptcy, or you get sick. And sickness can be disastrous.

So what are you going to do? Forget yourself, even - if you have people relying on you who absolutely need good medical care are you going to strike out on your own with that new business idea or are you going to stay at your job (hoping benefits don’t get cut more, hoping you don’t get laid off)? In my experience, people with great ideas stay at their jobs because when faced with the kinds of medical bills they would be paying without it, they simply can’t do anything else.

If you’re a capitalist who thinks big business is the only way to go, then this is a pretty good set up. However, no politician likes to go on about how much they looove big business. They’re always talking about “the little guy.” American ingenuity and exceptionalism blah blah blah. But they don’t really mean it. Our fates are tied to the whims of behemoths. Social programs support us so that we have a safety net. As anyone who has ever gone from a dangerous situation to a safe one knows, safety brings freedom. When you’re not in reactive mode, you can plan and dream and innovate.

It’s hard for me to untangle this argument from morality though. At its root, I think it’s immoral for us as a society to not leverage our power as a community to support and buffer each other so that we can all do better.

(A side note to the “SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST” screamers: please read Marx. It is so embarrassing when you use the term “socialist/communist” in place of “i don’t even want to hear what you say” because, due to the context in which you are using it, it is plain that you don’t actually have full knowledge of the tenets of that philosophy.)

School started up again yesterday. This is usually a very exciting time for me because excessive brain exercise=happy. However, I’m suffering from what I’m going to call “recession malaise.” I think a lot of us have this right now - it’s the knowledge that the people in power are screwing us combined with the knowledge that everything could be much worse, so count your blessings.

It’s hard to quell the discontent, though.

As I’ve said before, people in general like to say that we become more conservative with age. It was Winston Churchill who said “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” Personally, I see that as both a cop out and as arrogantly self-interested. (As it’s Churchill, I shouldn’t be surprised by the latter).

The older I get, the less patience I have with how business (non-profit, government, education, private industry, whoever) operates. The “tough decisions” rarely affect the bottom lines of the top administration’s remunerations/benefits or those of the people in their peer group. The “tough decisions” always, always, always result in stripped away benefits from low-/middle-wage workers, with a disproportionate burden of layoffs falling upon low-wage workers.

I understand the basic human nature behind these decisions. You want to protect yourself, you want to protect your friends, you want to ensure that - when it’s your colleague’s turn to make a “tough decision” that they spare you. People don’t want to give up the trappings of power or power itself.

It’s still wrong, though. It’s still unethical and immoral. And I know that many people think ethics and morals have nothing to do with business, and I thank them for allowing the financial sector to become what it is today - you know, the financial sector that almost singlehandedly set up the environment that would most easily facilitate an economic collapse. But hey, you can’t even live like a pauper in NYC on a salary of less than a million, right?

The thought process embedded in our organizations by this kind of lunacy - that executives should make obscene amounts more than their underlings - has infiltrated pretty much every aspect of our society, and this is a problem. It means that when terrible times come and a terrible governor makes the worst possible decisions about a great state’s welfare…well, sacrifice becomes the keyword of all state organizations. It’s not proportionate sacrifice, of course, because we operate with an oligarchy and: in good times salaries are justified by the good times and in bad times salaries are justified by how hard it is to retain such valuable employees in bad times.

The entrenchment of power never ends.

And so…malaise…

Way back during the Clinton impeachment hearings (over his blow job), my (dearly missed) grandmother and I were talking about the state of politics in this country. She said “If politics when your grandfather was alive was like politics now, I never would have allowed him to run for anything.”

What she meant, of course, was that character assassination was steadily growing as the focus of political battles. It didn’t matter how much damage it did to his family at the time, but if all the Republicans could distract us with about Clinton was that he got a blow job, then that was going to take precedence over policy and legislation.

I can’t imagine what her impression of the politics of today would be.

Here is the situation we’re in: a small minority of very loud Americans will do or say anything to bring down our president. I’d say that they get media play because the media gets a lot of airtime out of the Battle of Left Vs. Right, but I don’t know about that. Back in 2003, when the global Iraq war protest was staged, somewhere between 100,000-400,000 people flooded the streets of New York (the figure depends on the source), and between 6-10 million people protested that day in February in different cities all over the world. We weren’t covered with nearly the same seriousness as the town hall screamers are.

The anti-health care reform people; the birthers; the right wingers in general get a few dozen people at a rally - maybe even a hundred or two at a protest - and this is a movement? Yes, they’re loud and very good at parroting Fox’s talking points, but their numbers are hardly representative of massive public sentiment.

The problem is that every time their screaming town halls are reported on, it lends them credibility. Just like every time the media even asks questions like “should the president’s message to schoolkids be allowed in the classroom?” gives that insanity credibility.

(A sidebar on that: are you people fucking kidding me?????!!! He’s the president. George Bush made me want to gouge my ear drums out every time I heard him talk, but if he wanted to get on TV and tell the kids to study hard and have a good school year, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. And neither did my parents back when Reagan and HW broadcast messages to schoolkids. Way to raise your kids to have respect for this country.)

I just don’t understand why the media is legitimizing the ideas that are coming out of the right wing machine. It’s not like having “two sides” of an issue=critical analysis of an issue. There are things called facts, and when one of the two sides has an argument that consists of “socialism,” “death panels,” and “Hitler,” they are not a “side” of an argument, they do not have an argument.

To be clear, I have no problem engaging in a debate with someone who wants engage in an actual discussion of the pros/cons of various types of health care reform. However, I have found that many right wing-identified people begin an argument with me by calling me a socialist. That’s not an argument, that’s invective and hyperbole and has no place in a debate/discussion.

In fact, I want to extend Godwin’s law to the “Socialist” moniker. If you have to say “Socialist!” or “Socialism!” in order to win an argument, you automatically lose. It’s like sinking the 8 ball. You say “socialist” to win an argument, you fail.

Man, I really miss talking current events with my grandma, but part of me is glad she didn’t live to see this insanity.