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Andrew Sullivan has an interesting article about Conservative intellectuals’ claim that Obama does not believe in American Exceptionalism, as allegedly demonstrated by this now-famous quote from him:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” 

Sullivan believes this is merely a Conservative smear campaign. I am not so sure. I think it illustrates a fundamental philosophical difference between the Conservatives and Obama.

I’ve blogged about this issue a lot, and I guess the easiest way to sum it up is to say that Obama is a Patriot, but he is not a Nationalist. The Conservatives are Nationalists. As George Orwell wrote:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” 

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I’d like to do a review of Bethesda Softworks and Obsidian Entertainment‘s game Fallout New Vegas, but the game is so massive and there are so many different ways to play that I don’t see me being able to do that before next September, if I hurry.

What I can say is that most of the reviews fall into two categories: those who love it because it’s “just like Fallout 3“, which they consider to be a very good thing, and those who think it is too buggy to even be playable.

I’ve had a few crashes, but I save often, and the game auto-saves frequently, so the bugs haven’t been an issue for me.

As for the “it’s just like Fallout 3” idea, I have to say that, while that might be true in terms of gameplay, it’s absolutely wrong in terms of story and dialogue. New Vegas is so far superior to F3 in these areas it’s amazing.

I thought Fallout 3 was okay, but overrated. I think Fallout New Vegas is a vast, vast improvement. So far, it seems to me to be one of the best games in years. The story is much better than F3’s, the atmosphere is just as eerie, and the dialogue is much more intelligent than F3’s was.

The other thing is that New Vegas‘s tone goes back and forth between uproarious humor and pitch-black seriousness with stunning rapidity. And unlike Fallout 2, it never feels jarring.

Be warned, it’s seriously dark at times; and not just because of the on-screen violence. As often as not, it’s the things you don’t see that are the most disturbing. (I am thinking particularly of one quest involving a sniper that ends on an absolutely chilling note. No spoilers, but if you played the game you know what I mean.) It definitely deserves its “M” rating.  Nevertheless, it’s a very good game.

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…time change, in fact.

I realized today that I don’t have any clocks or watches that I need to set back. My three main chronometers are my computer, my cell phone and a wall clock that is synchronized with the atomic clock, all of which update automatically, so I don’t have to think about it.

So, in that respect, the time change isn’t a problem for me. However, it still never fails to mess with my head for the first day or so. As I said in an earlier post, I like having routines, and the time change always screws them up.

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Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh uttered the priceless line: “The American people have just rejected liberalism. They need to be told that’s what they did.”

That is everything you need to know about the Republican media right there.

I wonder how many people really think that this past election marks some sort of seismic shift against Democrats for any meaningful period of time. I think most people are smart enough to notice that one major party rarely stays down for very long in American politics.

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“Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.” –traditional Guy Fawkes night rhyme.

Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot were popularized by the film V for Vendetta, and now it seems like everybody who’s protesting anything makes references to him. I’d heard of him before the movie came out, and always thought he sounded like a pretty interesting–pardon the semi-pun–guy. Then I read about him on Wikipedia and thought that his plot sounded kind of stupid. It’s not everyone who fails so spectacularly as to have a holiday dedicated to their failure.

But if nothing else, it makes for a good excuse to have a bonfire, and I think that it’s a good, melancholy sort of holiday, well suited to the season. In some ways, this atmosphere transcends the political purpose of the holiday. (For me, at least.) As Thomas Hardy put it in his novel The Return of the Native:

 “It was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into past ages, and fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had before been familiar with this spot. The ashes of the original British pyre which blazed from that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread. The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day. Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.”  

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Well now, this is very interesting:

“Co-founder [of the Tea Party Patriots] Mark Meckler tried to pre-empt expectations among the faithful that Washington would shrink and the federal deficit would close overnight, instead alluding to a “forty-year plan” that the group was busy working out with its members. The plan, according to Meckler, was a highway with four lanes, only one of which was explicitly political. The other three were educational, judicial and cultural.

‘All civilizations and empires have fallen because their cultures became decadent,‘ Meckler said. ‘We need to lift up conservative culture, family values and wholesome things by supporting conservative musicians, writers, artists and producers.’” [Emphasis mine]

If this vaguely Spenglerian quote really was said by Meckler–and I have my doubts because I haven’t seen it reported in many places–it certainly does make it sound like the Tea Partiers are not just Libertarian Free-Marketeers.

“National Greatness Conservatism“, thy time has come, it seems.

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This election would be much more interesting to watch if we hadn’t known more or less what the results would be two months ago.

Pundits sometimes use metaphors of sporting events like football games and horse races when discussing elections. Frankly, if elections were anywhere near that unpredictable, people would be far more interested and voter turnout would be much higher.

Of course, our political system really ought to be compared to a sports league that only has two teams in it… I don’t suppose that would be very interesting either.

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From a 2005 New York Times article by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt:

“Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost – in time, effort, lost productivity – with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your ‘civic duty.’ As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, ‘A rational individual should abstain from voting.’ The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim.” 

Well, the hell with that stuff. Vote anyway. But it is true that voting is not the most effective way to make your voice heard. If only there were some means of freely distributing your political opinion to many people at once in order to influence them…