I have been asked to elucidate upon my summary of the State of the Union Address. I can hardly do a better job than Sisyphus Shrugged's highly amusing exigesis or David Ehrenstein's lengthy and furious one or Ted Barlow's post so short, sharp and to the very heart.
What I can add is my sense that I was listening to a PowerPoint presentation. I heard bullet points laid out in orderly fashion, with their dependant, barely descriptive paragraphs. I did not hear any sense of flow, any integration of disparate elements into a coherent policy (except for the war, which seems to have a logic applying to itself alone), or any reference to just how we will get from here to there (wherever there is; wherever here is). In short, I heard the sort of presentation I hear, and doze off during, whenever I visit a corporation's headquarters (profit or non).
I am not alone in having heard "an agenda" without accomplishment. William Saletan remarks: "Record? That isn’t a record. It’s an agenda. An agenda is the measures you enact . . . A record is what those measures are supposed to accomplish"
And at Hullaballo, Digby says: "They do not reassess their policy goals, ever, because they do not really have goals. They have an itemized agenda."
Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with corporate life in America knows how ubiquitous PowerPoint has become. I'm reliably informed that it has gained currency, if not pre-eminence, in other fields and walks of life as well. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that this Administration, the most corporate we have ever had, should be the PowerPoint Boys.
Julia Keller has written an insightful examination of PowerPoint where she questions its effects on thought itself.
That rather neatly summarizes the Bush Administration and my reservations about it, though I might be less kind than "succinctness, directness".
In my work doing conflict impact analysis I am always told that any situation is very complicated, very difficult to understand. No one in my field disputes this: conflicts are complicated. However, most of the tools for analyzing conflict are simply itemized lists of circumstances that are broadly characteristic of conflicts. You run down the list, you make a checkmark next to everything that seems to be present in your context, you maybe write a paragraph about each checkmark, and you've done a conflict analysis. Staple it to your funding request and file it.
All the nuance of a particular situation, all the connections between the elements, all the history behind the present, and all the momentum toward possible futures, all of these are lost, collapsed into a series of one-size-fits-all categories. With this collapse also disappears any understanding of the link between outcomes and goals.
With a tidy set of bullet points, a clear agenda, or a shopping list I know precisely how to measure my outcomes. If I get home this evening having bought lightbulbs or having passed an education bill I can now check that item off my list. What I've overlooked is that the purpose of an education bill is so that American children will receive a better education — so I'd better fund it; or that to be able to see this evening, first I have to screw in the lightbulb. The goal, that better and brighter future for myself and for my country, is what all the outcomes are supposed to be building up toward. But simply achieving outcome after outcome does not build up to anything without a strategy that explicitly links the steps along the way to the goal.
Successful outcomes, completed on time and under budget, and measured by our own rigorous yardsticks, lead to consequences, some intended and some not. The consequences are human. They are what happen in people's lives, what people actually do and suffer. Much of the time, consequences are a part of the thinking about outcomes, but not always. George Bush has goals: economic prosperity and national security top the list. He also has an agenda. But successfully implementing his agenda point by point — the desired outcomes (pass a tax cut, go to war) — will neither ensure nor secure these goals. The agenda items are completely divorced from their human consequences because the consequences are simply left out of the equation as unquantifiable and, therefore, unanalyzeable.
(Whether they are in fact unanalyzeable is another issue. Unintended consequences are always being dismissed because "if we knew what the uninteded consequences were before hand, we'd compensate for them". That objection rather neatly shuts down all creative thought and contingency planning. In addition, by claiming that you cannot count certain things, you can avoid some messy questions. Well, until someone starts asking them anyway.)
Suggesting to someone in the Administration or to one of their Republican interpreters that they have not yet made the case for going to war with Iraq leads to intense frustration on all sides. The Republican hauls out his PowerPoint slides and goes through the presentation again. He thinks that this is making the case, that going over a Things-To-Do-Today list is an explanation. The questioner clearly isn't accepting this as any sort of analysis and wants to know how to get from one bullet point or slide to the next and, furthermore, what all of those things have to do with the larger goal of national security. You don't have to go far on the internet to find this cycle repeated ad nauseam.
The question being asked is simple: What if unintended consequences, or circumstances on the other side of the world, change the situation? The most common answer, we'll deal with that when it happens, is not encouraging and all too indicitive of PowerPoint thinking. PowerPoint does not allow questions to change the direction of the presentation, one slide after the other; it does not allow for questioning the assumptions leading from one slide to the next; it does not allow for more than one answer or more than one future. As Ms Keller says:
Good PowerPoint presentations are possible, but few and far between. An artist can, no doubt, use the program to capture nuance, organize analysis, and admit complication. Unfortunately, effective PowerPoint presentations, like the State of the Union Address, are all too common, stultifying thought and having no mercy on the audience.
If you define problems with bullet points, you'll conclude that the solution is bullets.
. . .
UPDATE: Title changed at the suggestion of Mrs Martial, who recommended that I not avoid the obvious alliterative. I bow to her understanding of poetics. A few edits.
As far as I can tell, the strangest, most culturally significant thing that happened during the Super Bowl has gone completely unremarked and without comment--which just adds to the significance.
The half-time entertainment included Shania Twain singing (as part of a medley) her "I feel like a woman" song and No Doubt doing "I'm Just a Girl".
"We pronounce that nuke-u-lar here in Amer-u-ca."
Following that Gratuitous Pronunciation Swipe we now recommend you go read something else.
When the economy was going gangbusters weren't the rich getting richer? Weren't they getting richer at a much higher rate of return than any tax break could hope to emulate? Wouldn't they recover that fast-track to (ever greater) wealth if the economy could be stimulated? Why create a set of circumstances that will reduce their ability to get richer over the long-term? Isn't it a basic set of conservative maxims that you look to the long-term, that you save and invest wisely, and that you will be richer for it?
. . .
All periods of wealth creation are followed by periods of wealth consolidation. The creation of wealth causes the status quo to tremble and shift, with some falling and others rising. Societies, even our restless modern one, seem to need periods of stability and reaction so that everyone can get back to their feet and see where they stand.
The 90s were exhausting; our money is tired from all that changing hands and amoeba-like fission. Our moneyed class also need a moment to turn the new money into old (through strategic marriages or country club admissions) so that we'll all, as a culture, be on the same page regarding the status quo that needs to be overthrown — or preserved at all costs.
" In the end, Bush's political gifts must make the difference. Like Franklin Roosevelt and other successful war presidents - and unlike, say, Lyndon Johnson - he must maintain his country's trust and continually renew its sense of purpose. And he must do so when the cause is not so clear, the going not so smooth, the threat not as discernible. " — John Aloysius Farrell, The Boston Globe, January 29, 2003
American policy since WWII has always been that the US be able to fight — and WIN! — two wars simultaneously. Lyndon Johnson tried to fight two and lost the War on Poverty, as well as setting the stage for losing the war in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan tried to fight a War on Drugs and the Cold War at the same time. He won one and lost one (though there is still considerable barroom argument that Reagan should get credit for a save rather than a win). George H.W. Bush continued the War on Drugs, losing ever more ground, and fought the Gulf War, whose results would have to be considered inconclusive at best.
The recent historical result of fighting wars on two-fronts, one foreign and one domestic, has been that America loses the one fought on our own soil. Among the reasons why the home-front has been lost have been the expenditure in money, in time and attention, and in political capital necessary to wage the foreign war.
Now we have a President who would fight a War on Terrorism and a War on Iraq. Most of us think the war overseas will be won with relative ease, though it may be extremely costly, especially of political capital. And so I worry terribly about the war at home, the war that is supposed to make the US safer and more secure. Do we have the resources to fight both wars and win them both?
See the puppet jerk on his strings
Hear his masters laugh in the wings
Watch the monkey jump up and down
The Emperor, I fear, is just a clown
How did we find ourselves in this mess?
Where most Americans make do with less
But his patrons are asking for more, more, more
And the chorus is shouting, "war, war, war"
A battle won't mend a broken heart
It won't give a child a head start
I can't buy a job with a tax break
If I can't buy bread, I can't buy cake
See the puppet jerk on his strings
Hear his masters laugh in the wings
Watch the monkey jump up and down
The Emperor, I fear, is just a clown
Electrolite reminds us what war, even the short, sweet Gulf War, is like. Click through to the pictures.
I have a friend who knows something about this upcoming war and the people who will be asked to fight it. He's Republican and conservative (unlike those deficit-doves down in DC). He served in the Marines during the Gulf War, leading ground troops. He saw that raw and bloody combat, he stood over those corpses himself trying to look calm and cool and collected. He's a pacifist.
His war, he feels, was a good one, a just one, one worth fighting and one worth, because it is always a risk in war, dying in. But he sets the bar very, very high for military action now. He knows the men and women who will go when the politicians send them, the men and women who will die and who will kill. He knows the price they all pay, the price even the ones who return from the battlefield pay. He knows war and most of you don't. He's been against this one for longer than anyone else I know.
MaxSpeak has a new quote up top: "The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry." [Bill Mauldin]
Oliver Willis, remembering the Challenger Disaster, also speaks to the future for many of us.
" I would still jump at the chance to go up, without a second thought. "
. . .
I remember where I was when I heard. I remember the shock we all experienced, all the science and computer and SF geeks, sitting around the chem lab in pain, and with the certain knowledge that the adventure of space exploration had ended for my generation just as we were getting ready to carry it on.
I too would go up and out without a second thought.
Ha! Next year I'm going with my heart all the way. My heart and the better defense.
Still, the Bucs did do what I said they had to do: they got a turnover in the 1stQ and turned it into points.
The loss by Oakland of their center, Barret Robbins (the reasons for which are still elusive), was crucial. The main reason I thought the Raiders would win is that their offensive line would overpower the Buccaneers. Without Robbins, the Raider OL is not the same unit, clearly, and this turned out to be the worst game the Raider offensive line has played in weeks. All the protestations by the Raiders about how such an absence makes no difference are complete hogwash.
Which leads me to wonder what the hell Raiders coach Bill Callahan was thinking? There is a time for discipline and for laying down the law and there is a time for winning the Super Bowl. Those two things need not be incompatible, but there are other ways to do it rather than sending home a crucial piece of your puzzle.
I must also acknowledge that the way Buccaneer defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin called the game was fabulous. He knew when the Raiders were going to pass and he knew when they were going to run. Everyone knows how good the Bucs are at rushing the passer, and it was a refrain this week that the way to slow them down was to run the ball right at the line. However, it seemed that every time the Raiders ran, the Buc defensive line held their positions and collapsed toward the runner, rather than being caught charging the quarterback. Great play-calling. Also, the second interception was set up by the fact that the Bucs went out of their standard Cover 2 (two safeties back, each covering half the field) into a Cover 1 (with one safety back in the middle of the field) on that play. The Cover 2 is vulnerable to being split by a post route down the middle, but the Cover 1 turns the same route into a pick.
(Len Pasquarelli at ESPN.com, who knows a bit more about football--and contemporary coachspeak terminology--than I do, says the Bucs were actually in a "cover 3", which usually means that three players drop back and cover the field in thirds. Well, that isn't how the play looked to me, but I haven't reviewed the tape.)
I love great defense!
"It's one of those mano and mano things, or whatever they call it, OK?" -- Simeon Rice, Buccaneer defensive end.
Should be a doozy. On paper they all are. Except for last season's Patriots-Rams epic. That "should" have been a blow-out.
The 1stQ will make all the difference in this one. If the Bucs force an early turnover and can get some points from it, they'll win (Derrick Brooks, we're looking at you). Otherwise, the big bad offensive line of the Raiders will dominate the game. They won't win the MVP award, but they--or Lincoln Kennedy, at least--will deserve it.
Winner: Raiders. The O-Line is too big, too good. That's what my head says. My heart, for some reason, still keeps saying Buccaneers (oh, yeah, its because I always love a good defense). And my heart said Bucs last week, while my head was saying Eagles; and last year my head said Rams, while my heart was shouting Patriots . . .
Its a good thing I'm not a gambling man.
I think maybe I'll cry. The Green Party is thinking about nominating Cynthia McKinney to run for national office.
Despite most of the two pages of the Boston Phoenix devoted to this story being written in the above "wait, this might actually be a good idea" style, Seth Gitell concludes with a resounding rejection.
The seriousness with which McKinney appears to be being taken by Green Party policy makers is quite disturbing. And all of their arguments seem to come back down to publicity and how to get it. This is a very, very, very bad reason to nominate someone as your candidate. Especially when all the mainstream publicity will be negative. What the Greens need is a clear platform, with substantive arguments for changing current policy — which includes an analysis of how things will be different if we somehow elected them. They also need a record of getting things done. What the Greens do not need is failure. Simply, nominating McKinney will destroy the Green Party.
Folks are digging the auto industry marketing report on SUV drivers ( " insecure and vain...concerned with how other people see them rather than with what's practical " among other, even less savory, characteristics ) and are getting their rocks off decrying the drivers. CalPundit says you are what the marketers say you are, but I wonder how much of this sort of blather is cold reading? Most of my friends who drive SUVs "seldom go to church", but most of my friends, no matter what they drive, go to church less often than they'll admit. Most people aren't good drivers, which is readily apparent the moment you get behind the wheel and get out there among them. It's a simple fact that no one else on the road is as aware or as good a driver as you are.
I'd go on for my own amusement, but I have a more interesting question to ask: Who was the first person you knew who bought an SUV? I don't mean your contractor father's pick-up truck or your rural, dirt-road cousin's jeep. I mean the first person you know who chose an SUV as a lifestyle choice. Who was it? How did that purchase make you feel at the time? What sort of asshole was he or she?
Back in 1995, a few jobs ago (this one in, ahem, marketing**), my boss asked me to do a memo on upgrading the office computer system. He wanted to know what our options were and how much they cost. Man, I was excited. I had been lobbying for an upgrade for months (efficiency! everybody on the same operating system! a network!). I knew how much money we'd made over the past year and I knew that we could afford something excellent, something righteous, something to brag about. Oh, was I happy.
I did my research, I focused my arguments, and I presented the memo Friday afternoon. "Good work. I'll read it over the weekend and have my decision by Monday."
Monday morning he pulled up in the biggest beast on the market in those long-gone and halcyon days (I'm sure it would look puny now; I don't remember the make). It was black, the back windows were tinted, it dwarfed every other vehicle in the parking lot. The guy swaggered in, threw the memo down on my desk. "I decided to buy a new car instead."
** That's a little joke there, dear reader. The job was indeed in marketing, and I learned an awful, terrible amount, but I never acquired anywhere near the knowledge base to be able to speak authoritatively about that field. I can, however, pretend that that particular employment gives me certain insights unavailable to most of the unwashed. Except for the fact that I've now spilled the beans on myself.
I should have titled the previous post on the Census "Thoughts" instead of "Questions" because the post turned out to be more thoughtful than questioning. I had asked several questions of the Census in the first draft of the post, but left them out because they didn't lead anywhere productive. That said, I'm still wondering a few things...
Mea culpa #2. Is Martial a close reader? Sometimes a bit closer than others. I used the words "African-American" when the news article used the word "black". It makes a difference.
Like everyone else, I'd forgotten how the 2000 Census phrased its questions about race. There are two separate questions: "Are you Spanish/Hispanic/Latino?" and "What is your race?" In answering the first, a "yes" is to be followed by a further designation; in answering the second, you are allowed to mark as many boxes as you wish.
These questions are not equivalent. I remember the confusion I felt as I read the form in 2000.
Adding to the confusion is another curiosity under the question "What is your race?". There is a box for "Black, African Am., or Negro". So, African-Americans, which is to say people with an ancestor who was enslaved in North America, might very well mark the same box as African-Americans, which is to say families who have recently immigrated from an African country, who might very well mark the same box as yet another set of African-Americans, which is to say people with a flavor of Romance in their accent who have an ancestor who was enslaved in South America or the Islands. All of these can lead to substantially different cultural experiences.
Yet Hispanic, "a cultural ... classification" into which people of any race can self-define themselves, has now passed Black, a racial classification based upon skin color (which, ahem, makes self-definition a little more difficult), but with a wide diversity of culture, for "largest minority". Forgive me if I express some disingenuous confusion here. I no longer know what the word "minority" means.
Let's return to the Census form. Unlike "Hispanics" (and American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians and Pacific Islanders), "Blacks" do not have a specific opportunity on the form to self-define into smaller, deeper, more characteristic groups. Of course there is the final set of boxes, little taken advantage of, "Some other race", but that just isn't the same.
In my neighborhood are black Brazilian-Americans, black Ethiopian-Americans, black Liberian-Americans, and black Jamaican-Americans. None of the adults of these groups share a mother-tongue. None of these people, no matter the hue of their skin, would fall easily under the mantle of "African-American". Why doesn't the Census recognize these stories, these histories? As I wrote yesterday, "if we try to use alien categories ... the story of who we are might well be lost". "Black"--or "White" for that matter--is an alien category, collapsing our stories, quieting our unruly history, and uprooting us from the dark, fertile, restless earth of our past.
Economists, their squabbles, and especially their vices would all be an amusing intellectual cabaret, if it were not for the very real consequences of all too human ambition on the teeming billions of us who only live in their world. Like high school, like most professions, in economics there is an "in-crowd" and their in-theories and if you don't toe the line, you're "out". The Chronicle of Higher Education reminds us all that "In June, in Kansas City, Mo., the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics will hold a World Conference on the Future of Heterodox Economics, offering thousands of marginalized economists a rare opportunity to gather en masse." Now that conference should be a blast! There's no one like a bitching heterodox economist to put away the pints.
. . .
Economics is on my mind today--and most days right now. You see, I'm trying to buy a house. That is more than enough to drive anyone heterodox.
Daily I receive the lesson that that most vital of underpinning neoclassical assumptions, the rational actor, does not exist. It is true that I am trying to buy a house in the Boston area, almost the most expensive place in North America. It is also a simple, brutal fact of life that the local real estate market can best be characterized as irrationally exuberant.
I have been looking for about six months. I have done my homework and I have done my legwork. I have as good a knowledge of the housing market in the area as anybody, professional or amateur. I certainly think that I'm rational and I seem to grow ever moreso as I acquire ever more local knowledge. All very neoclassical of me. Part of that knowledge is that the market, while having run up and up and up, is not now doing so; the market is now flat.
I placed an offer on a house that has been on the market, just sitting there, empty, for several months. I had passed it over early on as the asking price is just outside the range that I can rationally afford. But six months later, why not offer a little less and then dicker until we can agree?
My offer was rejected by a counter-offer that was higher than the listed asking price! A simple "no" would have served . . .
And I'm left wondering, what was the seller thinking? Is he just rude or is he stupid? Either way, the response was not exactly what I would call rational. And that house sits there still, empty and cold.
My first reaction to the story that Hispanics have "edged past" African-Americans as the largest minority in the United States was to wonder just how anyone could tell. What, after all, is a Hispanic-American? Cubans, Colombians, and Chileans, for example, don't have all that much in common. What do we do with the nice gentleman around the corner with the Italian name who nonetheless emigrated from Argentina and whose mother-tongue is Spanish? Is a racial category at all meaningful if it can be used to describe men dark as the soft, enfolding night and men fair as the implacable sun?
The Western Hemisphere is a mongrel nation, a bubbling cauldron of migration (voluntary and forced) and miscegenation (some voluntary and some forced), from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle. The Spanish speaking "half" of the hemisphere is diverse beyond my capacity to find even an approximate metaphor. All the ethnic shorthands begin to break down and seem more and more like nonsense when subjected to scrutiny, but "Hispanic" is practically hysteric in its complete disregard for historical experience or geographic continuity.
All that flew through my mind as I read the headline. And of course that is not enough.
That Hispanic-Americans now outnumber African-Americans is a testament to another continuity, that of self-defined cultural awareness. The US Census allows people a certain self-determination, to select the ethnic category into which they would place themselves.
Naturally, the Census provides a set of ready categories to assist us in our definitions, a ready-made bed we can choose to lie in, categories so that we might find ourselves and tell our brief stories and allow ourselves to be counted. There is something very flattering about being asked who we are and, that other essential question, where we come from. We all have histories that stretch back beyond human memory, every illustrious one of us, histories that culminate here and now in you and I. We almost feel compelled to use those categories that will be understood by our neighbors and by our representatives, otherwise, if we try to use alien categories or no categories at all, the story of who we are might well be lost.
MLK Day is a day for reflection and introspection on battles non-violently won; a day for gazing upon the golden future and planning how to lift up and carry everyone there; a day for remembering that freedom carries a cost and, though that cost is often terrible, destroying lives that justice should preserve, it is still worth fighting for, for all the generations that will follow.
Even though much ground has been gained and so many bridges built, so much done that we cannot even conceive a return to the old days and their old ways, we have not yet crossed completely over that Jordan. Even if poverty in the US no longer starves its victims, it continues to kill in other ways, and it continues to be so very unworthy of us. Even if lawful segregation has been stripped bare of its base justifications, tacit policies and quiet acceptance of racial separation--as well as outright, if coded, racism--continue to undergird some segments of our society, including the legislation and its enforcement (or lack thereof) that supports them. Since that terrible year of 1968 opportunities have been lost, advances once thought secure have been overcome by reaction, and the energy for continued struggle has been dispersed.
But there are signs that that energy is being gathered once more, the disparate streams of justice are once more flowing near and in the same direction. History's quiet whisper, the soft voice that nudged humanity out of the caves and invites us into the universe, so easily drowned out by the daily grinding, is once more raising itself just above the cacophony of modern life. I know you hear it.
"Tomorrow will be different than today. Make tomorrow better."
Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day.
Is it any wonder that Firefly was cancelled around the time that the Republican's Southern Strategy finally began to fail?
What, after all, was the show about?
A federation of more rural communities attempts, through a war, to maintain its cultural distance from an industrially powerful and hegemonizing Union . . . um, Alliance.
Our protagonists, though they fought heroically and struggled nobly, were on the losing end of this mighty battle (whose outcome was never really in doubt). In disgust, with bitterness and with pain, they head out West . . . um, to the frontier to prove that honor does indeed count for something, that there are individual values which transcend collective ones and which trump simple commercial ones, values that some villains, in our world, claim to uphold.
MaxSpeak, the web's premier Barbie blogger (Max also runs a fine patter on fiscal policy) explains why De Spectaculis doesn't count as a blog:
"For better or worse, InstaPundit has defined the form for blogging: an unending stream of short, punchy, provocative items containing links. . . .Some bloggers are writing essays or posts that could be columns. I have a high regard for these too, but they do not typify the essence of blogging."
This is, of course, why I have few, if any, regular readers. That and the recent slowdown in publishing here in the arena.
There is a curious law of the internet attention economy, and blogging exemplifies its practice, which states that "the more links out, the more links in". Here at De Spectaculis we call this law MOMI (more out, more in). An occupational hazard, of course, is that this can lead to an eruption of GIGO. Be careful . . .
Of course, I too could be short and punchy, but, while I'd have more readers, I'd soon be bored. That's just me.
Now that the new and exciting world of blogging has "claimed its first scalp" (in the immortal colonial language of John Podhoretz), we find the old media leading a rush to uncover a strange and wild land, to chart its rough geographies, to discover its savage natives.
Like all subcultures, blogging has to be "explained" to the straights. How fortunate that we have ready a horde of hardy explorers and pop anthropologists to do the dirty field work, to translate this "new" form of communication into the everyday. How surprising it is then to find that many of these prospectors after the ore of the authentic have mined the sphere so shallowly and have declared the quality of the ore found here to be so poor.
In a recent story from Wired News (an organ that you would think should be highly sympathetic), we learn that "the biggest interest that bloggers seem to have is blogging itself". The article never makes it clear what precisely this means. My own wanderings lead me to note that bloggers do refer to one another and to the practice of blogging a fair amount, but usually in the context of adding something to an ongoing discussion about something else. I imagine that this is similar to the way, say, journalists discuss political issues with one another: through the lens of shared and common experience.
The Wired News story is worth quoting a little further.
"But it'd be a big mistake to think that these Internet diarists are all supporting noble causes and high ideals. In fact, the biggest interest that bloggers seem to have is blogging itself, said MIT Media Lab researcher Cameron Marlow, who tracks such things on the Blogdex website. Only items about the Google search engine and those cult-inducing Apple computers seem to be able to pull bloggers away from the mirror."'Bloggers are navel-gazers,' said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California's School of Journalism. 'And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books.'
"She added, 'There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting.'"
I am a political creature and so spend more time reading political blogs than other sorts. I must confess that I have never thought to worry overmuch about a democratic people having opinions about politics or political issues. Odd, isn't that?
I would be reluctant to generalize about a population of a million, about their expertise or their resources or their modes of communication, and I would be especially reluctant to assume that this strange and pleasant land is more than a vacation of sorts for the admittedly bizarrely caparisoned natives. The most interesting bloggers (which, oddly, seems to be most of them--at least some of the time) clearly have outside interests, interests which they use to illuminate whatever they find compelling enough to blog about. It's almost like they were real people.
If blogging is navel-gazing, then my meta-blog posts are "oranges".
Mrs Martial and I yesterday celebrated her birthday, or, as she puts it, “the Worst Day Possible to Have a Birthday”. After ten years, I have come to agree with her (which, though sincere, is also good politics…).
There is the first and obvious—and very serious—problem of presents. Everybody with a birthday around Christmas resents this, though the problems appear to be exacerbated for those with nativities after that of the Christ child. These poor souls often receive gifts that are supposed to be jointly Christmas and birthday, thus reducing quite severely the number of presents to open.
What also happens is that these joints, or even the specific-to-the-birthday presents, are presented at Christmas holiday functions and the givers expect them to be opened right away. This serves the dual purpose of collapsing the birthday completely into Christmas, thus removing the focus from the person, and depriving of the birthday-girl of gifts to open on her special day.
There is another problem with having been born on the 2nd of January: everyone is plum partied out. No one wants yet another drinking bout or a feast of many courses. No one even wants to leave the house, their couch, and perhaps the football game. Everyone says, “Hold the party next weekend, she won’t mind.”
If you have a friend born in early January go out and party just one more time. Put off the week of actually trying to live up to your New Year’s resolutions; put off your post-holiday dieting; wrap up a special present (it need not be large—it is always the thought that counts); treat her like a queen for a day, treat her the way you want to be treated on your birthday.
Protesting the incessant civil war in Sudan, a movement has begun among some women to withhold sex from their husbands.
While this action may be little more than an amusing stunt (it certainly seems that way now, but most civil action does when it is beginning), I remember that women--and their principled objection to the violence--were instrumental in the formation of a peaceful Somaliland.
Oh, my friends, do what it takes for you to go and visit Kenya this year and celebrate, celebrate with them the end of a long illness!
Put aside your fears today, put aside your doubts and let your happiness well up and overflow your heart. Today, on the first day of a new year, Kenya carries with her all the hopes and dreams and joys of all freedom loving people!
Kenya has always been beautiful. But I cannot wait until I get to go there again and to see the smiles on my friends' faces as they tell me about the future that has for so long been deferred.