Here and There

You know what’s un-American? Torture.

You know what’s socialistic? Medicare.

You know what’s shameful? When the government does nothing.

You know what’s pathetic? Incompetence.

You know what’s Soviet-like? Gulags, indefinite detention*, extraordinary rendition.

* To be fair, the guy I voted for in 2008 recently endorsed this shitty policy. For shame.

Whoa, stop the presses, Cue the reel at CNN. There’s actual disagreement among Obama supporters, and the man’s not even president yet.

From Josh Marshall and John Judis joining some Democrats in Congress to demur on the stimulus, to Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, announcing flat out that Obama should rescind his nomination of Sanjay Gupta to become Surgeon General, it’s beginning to look a little like a democracy.

Do I need to say how great this is?

Just got done taking a Zogby poll. Setting aside questions of the pollster’s reliability, I like taking these surveys from time to time.

Something I had been thinking about as I was wandering the streets near my work the other day came up on this poll. It comes up frequently on Zogby’s, as I’m sure it does on others. It’s where the poll asks you to name what issues are most important to you (choose only two), and there’s a list of things like Taxes, Education, Economy, Space Exploration.

It seems more than a meaningless exercise to me. Because no one can solve all problems, and it’s best to have your priorities at the ready, I thought I’d share what I told the pollsters.

If I were allowed to choose five issues important to this country, they would be, in this order: Environment, Economy, Diplomacy, Education, and yes, Defense (thanks to the mess we’ve inherited).

Environment gets top billing because we’ve simply got to start, really start, making an effort now. Environmental damage is the farthest reaching and most potentially intractable. The economy trends up and down over time. Left alone, our climate is headed toward a condition in which no of us could live here anymore.

Economy because, frankly, it sucks. It sucks bad. Taxes are too low on the top earners, and too high and complex for the rest of us. It’s been seven years of skew, and it’s time to recognize that the experiment failed and get back to something more fair and sensible. A subsection to this issue is jobs, which can be created in areas concerning the environment, from cleanup to renewable energy, etc. Health care is tied in here, too. It should get its own topic, but there’s no lack of good healthcare in this country. There is, on the other hand, a telling lack of affordable healthcare.

Which kinda sorta leads to diplomacy. We’ve simply got to get our good standing back. Not launching unilateral wars for falsified reasons is a good start, but we’ve got to go so much farther. Helping struggling peoples where we can, but staying out of sovereign nation’s affairs is a safe bet, too.

Education is fourth, sadly. It should be first. But the world is fucked right now, so those others get 1-3. We’ve simply got to clamp down on education, from pre-school to college. Quality education needs to be made available at all levels. And affordable college, with reasonable loans in place, needs to be there, too. It will take a dramatic shift of emphasis, because at the current rate of school and student failure, this country is headed down the drain.

Defense because there are people who want to fuck shit up. We should be ready to stop them, but a true effort in these other areas might also reduce the threat. It’s all so wonderfully intertwined.

It’s amazing. Seattle artist Chris Jordan makes art of truly mesmerizing detail, and every bit, zoomed at every level, offers commentary on who we are and how we live.

I’m speechless.

This is the first installment of a new feature on Here and There, tentatively titled “mepedia.” I hope you enjoy.

These are some of the things I learned yesterday, Monday, August 13, 2007:

* Karl Rove will resign from the Bush administration at the end of August. Reactions are expected and generic, but my insight is that the “family” excuse is to politics what the “busy” excuse is to the rest of us. Sort of. At least in its transparency.

* Brooke Astor dies. Okay, “news” of a 105-year-old woman dying isn’t exactly, well, news. But I’d like to give my boss props for calling this one the night before (Sunday) on, as far as I can tell, absolutely no evidence. He also mentioned some friends of his at The New York Times who had Astor and Pavarotti on their death watch. Luciano lives another day.

* Finished an article in the August 13, 2007 issue of The New Yorker about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a rare, fucked-up disorder found only in males in which the sufferer is compelled to destroy himself. It manifests most readily in the eating of the fingers and lips. Article mentions a spectrum of self-mutiliating behavior that encompasses a bad habit of mine: eating cuticles till they bleed. Help! Danger!

* After going over a story on transit-oriented development somewhere in the Peninsula (in the city of San Mateo, I believe), a coworker told me about the idea of arcology, or massive structures of huddled humans living in a sustainable, ecologically sound way.

* From visiting the wikipedia page on arcology, I found the concept of the count noun, such as “cattle” or, formerly, “fish.” Never knew that term, but it’s handy for making people think I’m some kind of grammarian.

* Toward the end of the shift last night, a coworker informed me of Van Halen’s reunion tour, which former bassist Michael Anthony will unfortunately not be taking part in thanks to his sacking by Eddie van Halen earlier this year. The younger van Halen brother replaced the band’s longtime bassist (and proud purveyor of the Jack Daniels bass guitar) with none other than his own son, 16-year-old Wolfgang van Halen. Natch.

* Read somewhere that the new Minneapolis bridge(s) will have five lanes each way. Well, the smaller bridge didn’t work, so what else to do but build bigger??

* Another New Yorker tidbit: From James Surowiecki’s Financial Page, learned the term rent-seeker, describing “a company [that] seeks to manipulate economic conditions rather than actually create value.” Sounds vaguely familiar.

* Finally, began an article in the same New Yorker about elaborate, highly lucrative European olive oil scams. Learned a little about the process of making olive oil, which the author describes as similar to juice extraction. Also learned that olives are closely related to cherries and plums (and mangoes, which the author omitted), all of which are known as drupes. Nice word.

Bill Richardson has guts. I’m liking him more and more.

The New Mexico governor has said he will sign legislation making his the 12th state to legalize marijuana to be used as medicine. Nice.

When I saw “eye gunk” on the NY Times home page, I thought for sure they meant eye gunk, i.e., eye boogers.

But no, they’ve co-opted the term to mean “floaters,” or, bits of dislodged membrane on the eye.

Damn them for getting that click out of me (though in my advancing years, I should probably heed such medical information).

The other day, I began a work-in-progress (what, I ask, is not a work-in-progress?), compiling a list of things I like about the country I live in. I got up to 25.

Today, I’m adding to it, beginning with number 26. (Remember, there is no reason for the order of my list. It only denotes the chronology at which things come to me).

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Al Gore
4. Bill Clinton
5. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
6. The Bill of Rights
7. California wine
8. MIT
9. Spike Jonze
10. Charlie Kaufman
11. The New York Times
12. New York City
13. The Flaming Lips
14. The New Yorker
15. Benjamin Franklin
16. Thomas Jefferson
17. Thomas Paine
18. Teddy Roosevelt
19. Woodward and Bernstein (back then, anyway)
20. Wikipedia
21. Star Wars (the original trilogy)
22. Willie Nelson
23. Paul Krugman
24. Thomas Friedman
25. Frank Rich
26. Hendrik Hertzberg < <<
27. Keith Olbermann
28. The Atlantic
29. James Watson
30. The Grand Canyon
31. The Daily Show (who, much to my amusement, recently made its clips available through a proprietary player)
32. Texas barbeque
33. The Internet
34. The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways
35. Seinfeld
36. NPR
37. Frontline
38. Nova
39. PBS in general
40. The Discovery Channel

Had a thought last night that the majority of what people do today, their industry, falls into one of three categories, all of which are loosely connected:

Medicine, technology, and bio-tech.

It took me a few minutes to think of professions and/or products that didn’t fall neatly into one of these three categories. Of course, labor and natural resources are still huge, but they’ve been eclipsed by the so-called “service economy” of the “global” network. And when you think of it, labor is basically a service.

I don’t foresee an end to academia, nor to basic resource-extraction or labor. I just see the vast majority of enterprise headed in these directions.