Thought That Came Unbidden

I had a boss once who said he was a little afraid to seat me next to one of our department’s other staff members; he didn’t want to create a vortex of cynicism that might suck the entire organization into another dimension. His remarks amused at the time but the further I get away from them and the more I’m proven right when everyone else says I’m being cynical the less funny his observation becomes.

The thing is, I was starting to kind of like Barack Obama. No, he wasn’t my candidate of choice but so far he’s done the things that I thought needed to be done: he froze all of the Bush administration’s pending regulations, he reversed the “gag rule” that prohibited family planning organizations from talking about abortion, he’s made the moves to start closing down the abomination that is the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and he urged Congress to pass and then signed the Equal Pay Act but that all changed in the middle of the week.

Earlier this week DC got some of what meteorologists euphemistically refer to as “wintery mix.” Snow followed by sleet followed by sub-freezing temperatures overnight all combined to create a landscape coated in about 2 inches of solid ice. Given that we have actual terrain here unlike say, oh, Chicago where the landscape is totally freaking flat and they don’t have to worry about school buses (not known for their traction anyway) sliding backwards down ice-covered hills, several school systems closed on Wednesday and several more opened on a two hour delay. And it was on Wednesday that Barack Obama proved that he’s simply a politician. It wasn’t until Thursday that Obama, or President Jesus as we’ve taken to referring to him here (well, everyone is treating the man like he can walk on water) proved that he is the worst of all things: a hypocrite.

Wednesday morning during a cabinet meeting which, I hasten to point out takes place in the White House you know, where Obama lives so he didn’t even have to leave the building to get there, he made a special point of mocking Washington’s response to the weather going to far as to say “”When it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things.” Politico captured it on video (see below)

Yeah, OK, we get it: Washington has a tendency to overreact to winter weather. As a native I would point out that 90% of the people who live here aren’t originally from here and all of those folks who are from colder climes who complain about how no one in DC knows how to drive in the snow are the same ones who are bitching up a storm and turning their AC down to “hang meat” when DC is a swamp during the summer. Can’t have it both ways folks; either you can handle the weather, all the weather, and complain all you like or you can handle some of our weather badly in which case you have no right to bitch about how other people deal with the weather they don’t like.

And what bothered me was not that he holds the opinion; a lot of people hold the same opinion and are entitled to hold it (you can think whatever you’d like). What bothered me was that he went out of his way to mention it. What, tabletalk about the Superbowl would have been too sexist or something? The whole thing shows that Mr. Aloha Zen, Mr. Open to New People and Ideas has a distinct lack of empathy for anyone else’s circumstances. After all, some people actually have to get their kids to school rather than having them walk out of the East Portico into a motorcade that takes them there under siren running red lights all the way.

But then Thursday The New York Times published a puff piece on Obama’s “style” in the White House which is markedly more casual than Bush’s was. The press corps is so used to seeing POTUS in a suit jacket that to see Obama in the Oval Office without one was a shock. And according to David Axelrod the reason Obama is able to sit around in a just a shirt and tie isn’t just due to the fact that his personal style is less formal than Bush’s. No, there’s a more logical explanation for it:

Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

– “White House Unbuttons Formal Dress Code”, The New York Times, January 28, 2009

So, I’m a wimp for not wanting to walk half a mile over glare ice to the subway but this guy is tough even though he’s got the thermostat cranked up to what sounds like 80degF or 85degF because he “hates the cold?”

I guess Mr. Obama needs some of that flinty Chicago toughness himself…or maybe it’s the DC-native toughness that lets me keep my thermostat at 68degF during the day and 64degF at night.

Or maybe it’s all just an extremely clever political ploy to get us concentrating on his bullshit attitude and away from the fact the the stimulus bill he helped craft in the House, the one that gave so much away to the Republican party, didn’t get a single Republican vote.

Can’t make it to DC but still want a (semi) authentic inauguration experience? Follow these handy steps for recreating the experience of being on the Mall at the swearing in ceremony on Tuesday, January 20, 2009.

1. Go out and by a huge flat screen TV, 60 inches or better. Best Buy has one on sale for only $3,999.
2. Hang your new purchase on your living room wall.
3. Do you live some place cold?
   • If so, open all the doors and windows in your house. Do that now. Yes, I realize it’s Saturday. Make sure to turn your furnace off so it doesn’t kick on at any point during the proceedings.
   • If you don’t live some place cold, crank your air conditioner down as far as it will go. On Tuesday at about 4am – it’s important that you go out this early because we want you nice and tired during the event – go out and buy about 300lbs of ice. Randomly set big tubs of ice around your house to cool it down even further.
4. Invite 250 of your closest friends to come over for the swearing in. Make sure they know the festivities start at 10am Eastern. Let them know they need to be there at least two hours early to get through security. Don’t start letting them in until 90 minutes before everything starts.
5. Before your guests arrive, put on way more clothing than you would ever normally wear. Add some of those refreezable permanent ice cubes to your shoes and gloves (yes, your outfit must include gloves that make it impossible for you to grasp anything with out taking them off). Add a cold pack around your waist just about where your kidneys are.
6. Make sure that at least five of the people you invite are in the “extremely contagious, oh my god get your germs away from me” stage of a head cold. Provide no tissues for them to alleviate their symptoms with and no trash receptacles for them to throw out any tissues they may bring with them.
7. Don’t set out any food or beverages for your guests. In fact, confiscate anything they may have brought in a bag that is bigger than 8″x6″x4″ as any bag larger than that is on the prohibited items list. Also, if any one of them had the audacity to bring hot soup in a thermos, either turn them away or confiscate the thermos (no, they can’t get it back later).
8. Remove all the towels and soap from your one-seater bathroom. Add extra tubs of ice to make sure it’s nice and cold.
9. When the time comes for the festivities to start, crank the sound up on your speaker system so it’s just past the point of too loud and hovering around the edge of so loud its distorted.
10. Make sure that at least three of your friends with head colds are standing just inside your personal space limitations at all times during the event, and that there is at least one person who is five to six inches taller than you are standing between you and the screen no matter where you stand.
11. After the President is done giving his speech, make your guests wait at least 45 minutes before they can leave your house or apartment. This will guarantee that they get at least a taste of the crushing boredom that accompanies having to stand around while the transit system collapses because it’s handling about 5,000% more volume than it was designed to handle.

Follow these steps and I guarantee you will get a taste of the authentic inaugural experience.

So here we are on the last day of 2008. Resolutions will be made – quit smoking, lose weight, find love, make more money, save more money – and broken in the next few days by people all over the globe. And while I’ve got my own list of resolutions for 2009 this is more about what I’d like out of pop culture and advertising in the coming year.

1) Stop trying to use “change” to sell me products
Women’s magazines fascinate me. They’re basically advertisements with a sprinkling of content usually about improving yourself for “him” by buying the products around the article. As sniffers of trends, though, they can’t be beat.

The current issue of Vogue features Ann Hathaway, not exactly your standard enhanced beauty, on the cover along with a big banner headline reading “Change! Yes, you can” and the first item on the list: dress cheap & chic (aka: buy more stuff!)

Awesome, Vogue editors! You’ve sensed that people want change, that they’re tired of the status quo, but don’t you think trying to tap in to that desire for change to sell us makeup and shoes and handbags and clothing is just a wee bit cynical? How about using that energy for something positive instead, like helping women become more independent and confident? Radical, I know.

2) Enough with the reflexive, compulsory heterosexuality
The Washington Post has a pretty lame comics page. Not surprising since the comics page is possibly the second or third most contentious page in the paper and comics page editors are notoriously conservative. No chance the Post will ever run Mikhaela Reed (too political) or xkcd (too sarcastic and math-y) but there’s a big difference between being edgy and being regressive.

“Baby Blues” follows the daily life of a white, suburban family; Mom, Dad, three kids. Fairly stereotypical in and of itself but last Sunday’s cartoon really stuck it to me. I know that in the past few years the term “babe” has come to apply to both sexes but it’s largely something that applies to females. Now you tell me, is the heterosexuality in this cartoon really necessary? What could it have been like orientation neutral? (check the first panel, second row).

(Of course, this doesn’t get by the whole uber-creepiness of imposing sexuality on a character that is supposed to be about seven years old but I digress.) Maybe the joke at the end doesn’t work if you remove the heterosexuality (eeewww…girls are gross!) but that just gets back to that uber-creepy thing again.

It’s not just the comics, though, that are guilty of this kind of reflexive, exclusionary heterosexuality. Next time you’re reading an article directed at women, particularly if the subject is relationships, mentally substitute spouse or partner for boyfriend or husband and see if it changes the essential meaning of the piece. It won’t but making that change for publication would be an easy way to include all women regardless of their sexual orientation.

3) More fiction, fewer “memoirs”
Yet another “memoir” centered in the Holocaust has been discredited. That makes two Holocaust memoirs, two “outsider” memoirs, and one addiction memoir in the past five years to have been published, hyped, and knocked off the pedestal. Are publishers really not getting enough decent fiction submissions that they think the only way to make people buy books is to peddle them as true-life stories? Really? Seriously?

4) Stop peddling addiction as entertainment
Yes, I’m talking to you VH1. Regardless of whether you believe addiction is the result of bad choices, genetic predisposition, or a disease, it’s not entertaining. Watching people detox – the seizures, the vomiting, the random episodes of anger – and then watching them try to figure out how the hell they got to the fucked up place they’re in is only illuminating in a culture that actually makes people take responsibility for their actions, something that’s key to recovery and sobriety but not such a big part of American popular culture (big hint: just saying “I’m sorry” isn’t taking responsibility).

5) Start treating us like we’re smart, ’cause we’re smarter than you think
There’s a reason people are watching more basic cable and less network television: the quality of the programming is better. Yes, we can keep track of multiple characters that have multiple dimensions. We can to follow serial plot lines without tons of filler or reminders. Plot twists interest us, they keep us coming back for more. Look at it this way, if we don’t come back all that ad space will go to waste.

Just a few of my wishes for popular culture in the upcoming year.

Product Recalls
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; Page D01

Holiday Decorations

DETAILS: Hallmark Cards is recalling about 7,000 snowman snow globes, made in China and sold at its Gold Crown stores nationwide in October and November.

DEFECT: The transparent globes at the center of the snowman-shaped knickknacks can magnify the intensity of sunlight passing through the glass, causing nearby objects to catch on fire. The company said it has received two reports of the globes causing surrounding objects to ignite.

WHAT TO DO: The globes can be returned for a full refund. For more information, call 800-425-5627.

SOURCE: Associated Press/The Washington Post

Consider the idea that even though they are both based on natural, observable phenomena, the calendar and the clock are arbitrary. It is true that the seasons change, Spring turns to Summer, Summer to Fall, Fall to Winter, and around again to Spring, but what reason is there for some months to have 30 days, some to have 31, and poor, maligned February to have but 28 (and sometimes 29)? On a natural calendar would it not make more sense for each “month” to have 28 days? There are at least two observable reasons for that number to make the basis of the month.

And what of the clock? Why 24 hours in a day? Why 60 minutes in an hour? It’s clear that the sun progresses across the Earth in an observable pattern and that in our desire to categorize we call one part of that progression something (day) and the other part something else (night), but why apply that number to it? There is no basis human physiognomy for the number 60; a normal human has 10 fingers and 10 toes, so why not the number 10 or the number 20? Every answer I’ve found for the question about the clock is truly a non-answer – because the ancient Sumerians traded money in a basis of 60; because the Earth is divided into latitudes and longitudes that are measured in minutes and seconds. This last one amuses me the most with its backwards order of things.

But even though the calendar and the clock are arbitrary, they allow us to predict with modest regularity things that happen every year, things that when we were small and cold and mostly naked creatures in all likelihood scared us almost to death. Indeed, without astronomy to tell us that in areas where there are seasons yes, the sun will indeed come back and the Earth will warm up again, we developed rituals as humans are wont to do.

The noise, the laughter, the gathering of the community close to drive out all those things that have been breeding and hiding in the dark corners that have only gotten darker since harvest time. Blood on snow for the unlucky bastard who got a bean in his dinner, the necessary sacrifice to make the sun rise again. And because we are human, because we inherently recognize, even if we insist with vigor the contrary, that we don’t control everything in our world, we invented a god for whom these rituals must be done.

But then we got wise and discovered astronomy, and physics, and horticulture, and that the same patterns keep repeating. The day will get shorter, to a point, and then start getting longer without fail, without question, it always does. Yet…the part of us that never grew up, the part that pushed us to progress from the frightened mammal in the cave to the civilized people behind wavy glass whose homes were lit by modern gas lamps, to the species that dared leave the planet to explore, the part of us that kept us whole and safe in those dark, cave-bound times still believes that we must do what is necessary or things just will not happen.

Old gods do new jobs. Blood on the snow becomes the red velvet suit trimmed in white fur. Cacophony to drive away that which lurks in the shadows becomes carols about silver bells and sleigh rides. Huddling for warmth and to make the fear just a little bit less sharp becomes the open house and a moderately acceptable $9 bottle of wine and oh look, they have a cheese ball again this year.

Tomorrow “day” will be 2 seconds longer than today; the data prove it.

The one that matters is that second to last one, length of visible light. The rest is measured against our arbitrary clock and our arbitrary calendar.

In four days kids in the Northern Hemisphere will wake up to presents left by Santa, stockings filled with trinkets and things wished for and perhaps needed, plates with cookie crumbs and glasses slimed with the remains of milk downed hours ago prove the elf showed up and did his job. They will wake up on a day with more visible light than the one before and the one before that.

Old gods do new jobs.