In reading political blogs, one thing I have picked up is that most communities I associate with have been accused of intolerance. Far from it! I always try to empathize with and get inside the heads of people who disagree with me. There's no point in talking to them otherwise! On that note, I've come up with some reasons that I think can justify a vote for George W. Bush.
1. I am a partisan Republican and will always vote for my candidate, with the exception of flagrantly unacceptable candidates like David Duke.
At first glance, it is hard to sympathize with this point of view. It seems simplistic and amoral, and it removes almost all individual sentience from the equation. But the Bob Dole and Geoffrey Fieger campaigns prove that this sentiment is held by at least 40% of the population at both ends of the spectrum, so it must be accepted and respected as part of American politics. I've considered this position myself in the past.
By the way, I know the David Duke disclaimer is just for show and you'd vote for him anyway. It must be; Duke did as well as Dole and much better than Fieger. It's understandable--not admirable, but understandable--if you're reasonably certain he's going to lose anyway and the opponent is bad enough.
2. I believe that abortion is evil and will vote solely based on that factor.
No doubt, Bush has kept his promises to his supporters on this issue through the only means available to him. The judges he has named to the bench share an uncompromising view on abortion and can be counted on to place many creative obstacles on the path to the clinic until they succeed in overturning Roe. Whatever my own personal views, Bush has done well by the anti-abortion movement and has earned their support.
3. I think the invasion of Iraq was a wonderful act of humanity, but I'm not sure I want us to go doing stuff like that again.
I'm not a pacifist. I'm not even opposed to pre-emptive wars. I think I share with many Jewish people in America the sense that our country can't stand by and let atrocities take place if we have the ability to stop them. I was appalled by Bosnia's Kitty Genovese treatment in the early 1990s and applauded Clinton's (late) move against Serbia then and his (well-timed) actions over Kosovo. If I thought Bush had ever showed any follow-through at all in any initiative he had undertaken in his presidency--hell, his life--I might have accepted an invasion of Iraq.
But his administration screwed up the preparations, pushed the wrong schedule, lied to too many people, and then didn't plan for the aftermath, and it's not going well. So I could have supported a war against Iraq under better conditions, but not these.
I'm getting off-subject. There are people who think the cost in American lives and diplomatic credibility has been worth it so Iraqis can live in desperate hope, and God bless them, they've got the right to set their own calculus. You can be reasonably well-informed about the situation in Iraq and still be hopeful about the outcome, and at this stage in history, I'm not prepared to make my own judgment about your call.
That said, the conservatives who think Bush's invasion of Iraq signals a new moral calling for America are fooling themselves. Look, give it up. Anyone who took Shakespeare in high school knows why Iraq was target number 1, and I'm not making any simplistic bullcrap "blood for oil" arguments. If we're fortunate, Robert Mugabe will insult Barbara Bush's parentage and the world will luck into a desperately-needed intervention. I wouldn't bet on it. Anyone who votes for Bush based on projections of his own philosophy and morality onto this particular blank slate is failing himself. We know how this man operates. If you can recognize his tunnel vision and peculiar limitations, and fit it with your view of foreign policy, congratulations! You've earned the right to vote for him with a clean conscience. Because we won't be liberating other countries any time soon.
4. I don't like environmental laws, OSHA restrictions, and overtime requirements.
This is a shout-out to my Dad, who's a small businessman in a particularly pollutant-driven part of the economy. To his credit, he pays his men extremely well and completely above-board, and this despite having to compete with a lot of subcontractors who don't. He's never said anything to me about overtime or OSHA, but I know how he feels about the EPA, and I'm in no position to debate his stories. Again, it's not about agreement, just internal coherence. Bush has made these issues a priority.
More later as my mind clears. There are some deliberate exclusions from the list; they belong on the "flawed reasons to vote for Bush" and "stop shitting me and yourself" lists, either of which may come later if I think they're worthwhile.
So it ended this morning, about twenty minutes shy of the lunch break. The judge turned the peremptory challenge to the defense, and the defense thanked me for my service and excused me from the jury.
It started about a week and a half ago. I had a jury duty summons, so I drove on down to Hayward, figuring that I'd sit for a while and probably not even get called. There was the traffic, then the parking, then the juror orientation video (fourteen minutes of why we should all be proud to participate in the democratic society by serving on a jury), then the twenty minutes of orientation speech (mainly concerned with parking regulations and why you shouldn't kick the vending machines in the jury assembly room).
After that, they called a whole bunch of us down to the courtroom. They called more of us than I was expecting, but that wasn't what tipped me off that this wasn't just a regular trial. What tipped me off was the television news crew in the corner, filming the defendants as they watched us come in. I was seated up near the front, behind a reporter, and while everyone was getting settled I worked on reading over the reporter's shoulder to try and figure out what was going on. He was flipping pages in a notebook, so I mostly couldn't make anything out, but I caught the word "murder" and started to get nervous.
I figured it out somewhere during the judge's explanation of the case--the charges that he read to us included not only murder (and lesser included counts) but also hate-crimes charges. The nineteen-page questionnaire that they had us all fill out confirmed it: the trial I'd been called for was the Gwen Araujo murder trial.
So, yeah, very sincere apologies to everyone who's had to deal with me in the last week and a half, because I've been freaked out and distracted. Clearly I was never going to actually be a juror, for all of the obvious reasons and then some. But it took a week and a half to actually excuse me, a week and a half in which I've been thinking about this almost obsessively, swinging back and forth between "I really want to be on this jury" and "I couldn't possibly handle being on this jury."
But now I can talk about it. So plan on some more talking, as soon as I sort out my thoughts.
One of the nights I was visiting in Ithaca, the friend I was staying with opened up a bag of coffee that she'd gotten on a project demo. She's in business school, studying marketing and brand management, and sometimes companies come in to do product demos for the b-school students, give them free samples. So she opened this bag of coffee (blueberry flavored, actually) that was given to her by an exec at an up-and-coming regional coffee producer who's trying to cut in to the Starbucks market, and while the coffee was brewing, she talked to me about why these guys are unlikely to ever take customers from Starbucks.
The recurring problem with big chain monsters like Starbucks (and I trust I'm not saying anything here that anyone will find too shocking) is that good community-minded people never want to support them over independent community-based business, but that it's hard to avoid the fact that the big chain monsters are often pretty good places to shop. In Berkeley, it's easy to stick to my principles, to choose Berkeley Espresso or Caffe Strada or Brewed Awakening over Starbucks, to choose Moe's or Cody's over Barnes and Noble. Back in my hometown, though? There's a Starbucks in the shopping center downtown, in the corner spot where my mother's seamstress used to own a drycleaner's, and it's been a godsend. There just wasn't anywhere else to buy coffee in town. There's a big Barnes and Noble out on Route Seventeen, and that's a godsend too--there aren't a lot of bookstores between my mother's house and the big B&N, and the ones that there are, they've got crap selection.
What got me thinking about it this morning, though, was the Avenue Victor Hugo closing announcement, along with the subsequent announcement (which I found somewhere in the Making Light discussion of the AVH closing) that Other Change of Hobbit is also going out of business. There's no significant connection between the announcements and the corporate-monster musing; contrary to what the AVH people have said, I don't think that encroachment from large chain stores is what did in either of these small bookstore.
Maybe I'll take that back. I can see a causal connection, but it's a loose one at best. Maybe large corporate-monster stores, in combination with internet shopping, have fostered the idea that one can (and should) go to a bookstore not to browse, but to find a particular book that you already know you're looking for. Avenue Victor Hugo was never that kind of bookstore. If you wanted to spend a while wandering around thematically-sorted shelves and seeing what looked interesting, Avenue Victor Hugo was your place. If you had a book in mind and wanted that book, AVH would be at best an exercise in frustration. Maybe people's expectations for bookstores have changed? I don't know.
I hate the whole fucking metrosexual... thing. I hate it. I hate everything about it. I especially hate Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and I want to beat the Fab Five with sticks. Except for Jai, who I want to kick in the mouth and then beat with sticks.
The message of all these shows that celebrate the crassly image-conscious consumerist trend that is metrosexuality goes something like this: "You're too boring with your own personality, so buy some of ours. Look! It's Prada!"
Hate!
Hate hate hate hate hate!
Which is, ironically, why I am so happy about the launch of Conde Nast's new shopping magazine for men, Cargo. Flipping through one of the many many many unsold copies at my local newsstand, I have to agree with one critic's assessment that it's "nothing but all the kinds of stuff I skip over in other magazines".
If it hasn't hit your newsstand yet, I would describe it to you as a toned-down version of Abercrombie and Fitch's recently retired porn-tastic magalog, only with less bare manflesh and, amazingly, fewer articles.
That is to say, it's like A&F Quarterly, minus all of the reasons why anyone might ever want to read A&F Quarterly.
Critics are already predicting that Cargo is going to crash and burn in a major way, and I can't help but cheer its imminent demise. Let this be the first step in the end of an odious consumer trend.
Back to hell with you, awful magazine, and take those pointy-headed Queer Eye people with you.
I've been a bad boy on my alumni mailing list.
I'm sorry, but there's something unfairly inflammatory about contributing to a discussion about Iraq by posting two long paragraphs from Andrew Sullivan's blog and "he articulated what I was thinking so much better than I could have!"
I would have been a lot more civil if I'd been engaging with that classmate's ideas instead of Sullivan's.
If you want to see what was posted, scroll down to "Al Qaeda's Game Plan" and read that and "Not Just Iraq."
My capital informants seem to have a lot to get off their chests. Turns out we all missed our chance to snatch up girlsgoingout.com on eBay a few months ago. Here's the link to the auction. $250,000 may seem a bit steep at first, but do note the following: "As the CEO and creator of both GirlsGoingOut.Com & WOMagazine.Com, I can attest that there has never been a better business concept and one that women AND businesses BOTH want!" What a steal!
It's possible, though, we're being too harsh on Ms. Ashline. There's no better judge of character than eBay feedback, and she gets high marks. bombshellvintage is her biggest fan, announcing, "Thanks for a PURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRfect Transaction! >^..^<" and "What A Lovely Person You Are... Not To Mention Your Excellent Taste In Vintage!!" So let's give her a break, okay?
For whatever reason, I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about Frisbees -- I used to play a fair bit of ultimate back in high school, but hardly thrown one since. So when the weather hit a surprising 49°F on Sunday, we set out to obtain one at the Toys R Us near Fresh Pond Park.
It turns out that this Toys R Us didn't stock Frisbees. What they did stock was something called Tec Disc, a translucent knock-off with a floppy rubber rim, the whole thing done up in outlandish fluorescents. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and since these measures only cost 3 dollars, we grabbed one and took it out for a test.
After some experimentation, we concluded that the Tec Disc has two unusual features for a flying disc. First, it generates almost no lift when thrown. Second, the top and outer edge of the rubber rim is, to quote the marketing literature, "textured": covered in tiny, hard rubber cones; cones that managed, after a half hour of play, to cut open one of my fingers. That's right, the good people at Tec Disc have invented a spiked Frisbee.
I happened to be on BART yesterday just as everyone was returning from the protests. I've been pretty tired lately, so I spent the ride dozing and eavesdropping on my neighbors. Since September 11, restrooms in BART stations have been subject to access restrictions. Those in underground stations have just been closed up, and those in above-ground stations close whenever we go to orange alert. A fellow rider was full of righteous rage.
"I know several people who use those restrooms on a regular basis," he said. "It's ridiculous. I'm all for security, but even the Taliban and al-Qaida know there's no point in blowing up BART stations."
The people of Spain can sleep a little easier with that knowledge.