I was just sitting down to do some blogging when my electricity went out.
In my last post, I talked about being nostalgic. So, in fairness, I shall now tip my cap to modernity, which for all its faults, has at least given us relatively reliable power compared to “the old days”.
I’ve been reading the John F. Kennedy/Ted Sorensen book Profiles in Courage. It’s a good read so far, though a little slow. Anyway though, what I wanted to mention here was that Kennedy/Sorensen quotes Congressman John Steven McGroarty as writing to a constituent in 1934:
“One of the countless drawbacks of being in Congress is that I am compelled to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you in which you say I promised to have the Sierra Madre mountains reforested and I have been in Congress two months and haven’t done it. Will you please take two running jumps and go to hell.”
Forgive me a bit of nostalgia–if you can be nostalgic for a time when you weren’t even alive–but it seems even insults were better in the old days.
I like that song, but if you’re like me, the definition of “wassailing” may have just temporarily slipped your mind. Wikipedia says:
“The practice has its roots in the middle ages as a reciprocal exchange between the feudal lords and their peasants as a form of recipient initiated charitable giving, to be distinguished from begging….
Although wassailing is often described in innocuous and sometimes nostalgic terms, the practice in England has not always been considered so innocent. Wassailing was associated with rowdy bands of young men who would enter the homes of wealthy neighbours and demand free food and drink in a trick-or-treat fashion. If the householder refused, he was usually cursed, and occasionally his house was vandalized.”
So, it’s basically going around making noise, demanding free stuff, getting drunk, and messing things up.
You know, I think everyone in America has heard the complaint that Christmas has become overly commercial, forsaking its spiritual meaning. Certainly, I had heard this as a kid, and I daresay I even believed it, though I never acted on it, always taking care to ask for lots of toys. Are all children materialistic, or was it just me?
‘Course, as the economy remains deeply depressed, I suppose everyone shall now have to ponder the spiritual aspects of the holiday more; but I wonder whether anyone thinks this is actually an improvement over the old (1990s) way of celebrating.
Exile: “Kreia, what are you–are you a Jedi? A Sith?”
Kreia: “Does it matter? Of course it does. Such titles allow you to break the galaxy into light and dark. Categorize it. Perhaps I am neither, and I hold both as what they are: pieces of a whole.”–dialogue from Obsidian Entertainment‘s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, The Sith Lords. 2004.
I must say, this “No Labels” thing just doesn’t impress me. It’s well-intentioned and interesting, perhaps, but rather naive.
Ironically, though, I think my problem is mostly with the name–the label, in fact. Labels aren’t bad inherently, only when they are used as a substitute for thought.
What do you think?
Andrew Sullivan makes a rather interesting point over at The Daily Dish:
“Mormonism is much more coherent a faith platform for the rightist religious popular front that the GOP increasingly is. Because it places Jesus in America and gives America a unique role in global salvation. Christianity – the actual religion, not its strip-mall bourgeois impostor – is universalist, not nationalist. What the far right means by American exceptionalism is a divinely blessed and guided country, whose enemies are God’s enemies, whose role in the bringing about of the End-Times is unique, and who therefore cannot truly do wrong.” [Italics his.]
Indeed. It reminds me of what P M Prescott said a few weeks ago:
“The Moral Mafia is claiming all of America as blessed by God so we can wage wars without guilt.”
One question this raises in my mind: Which, ultimately, is the driving force here? Are those whom Sullivan calls “Christianists” trying to create a Religious Nationalism, or are Nationalists just using the language of Christianity as a kind of veneer for their agenda?
The trailer for Mass Effect 3 is out:
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=708362
I admit I didn’t particularly like the first Mass Effect. In absolute terms it was a great game, of course, but it was poor relative to what BioWare had accomplished before it. Mass Effect 2 more then made up for it, even if its story wasn’t quite one what might have hoped for, the overall gaming experience was vastly superior. A joy to play, in fact.
I feel that the third installment will make or break everything. If it’s well thought-out, it will be one of the greatest video game series ever. If it continues to exhibit the same sort of story flaws displayed towards the end of ME2, it will rank as… well, still a thoroughly enjoyable series, but not quite the epic space-opera we all are hoping for.(Isn’t it telling that even BioWare’s disappointments are great games?)
(P.S. About the warning on that video: it only says that because it is a trailer for an “M”-rated game. There’s nothing terribly traumatizing in the trailer itself. At least, nothing you wouldn’t see in movie ads regularly on broadcast television at all hours of the day.)
“The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.”
I have never liked how the mainstream political reporters tend to use “centrist” as a synonym for “good”. As I’ve said, I dislike the Left-Center-Right model of politics that everybody uses, though it’s virtually impossible to avoid falling back on it to make generalizations and I have done so myself many times.
The first and most obvious problem is figuring out where this supposed center is. The geometry metaphor collapses in view of the fact there is no means of precisely measuring where one mixture of political views lies from another.
Truly, though, this does not matter that much. The center is not so much a place on the political spectrum as it is a state of mind about the political spectrum. It is, in fact, the one which permits of the existence of a political spectrum.
I think what gives the “centrist” concept its popularity is the fact that most people feel instinctively that is unlikely the platform of one party could be perfectly correct, and the other totally incorrect. The obvious resolution to this is to take some mixture between the two parties and call it the center and look for someone who fits in it.
Now, this isn’t a bad idea, really; and I can see how people thought it up. “Politics is the art of the possible,” as Bismarck is supposed to have said, and Western-European and American democracies are such that what is “possible” requires the agreement of two parties who disagree on everything. Hence, a candidate from one party ought to have something that appeals to people in the other.
But the problem is that eventually, people–and by that I mean the Washington Press Corps–internalize the concept of centrism to such an extent that they begin to lose the ability to think in any other terms, and centrism becomes an end in itself. At that point, it no longer matters what the two parties want, only that politicians govern from the center of it.
As you’ve probably guessed, my dislike for this left-center-right trichotomy is what prompted me to begin to use terms like “Nationalism”, “Cosmopolitanism” and “Materialism” instead. While they don’t totally eliminate the need for the old terms–you could use a sentence like “The Left is increasingly Cosmopolitan”–I’d like to they believe that they focus more on what the parties actually do, as opposed to defining them solely in terms of their relation to the other parties.
Every year people complain about Christmas decorations going up too early. I used to do this too, but apparently I’ve lately gotten used to it; and for some reason it no longer bothers me. I realized that several weeks ago as I was looking at a Christmas display while this song played in the background.
It’s funny; when I was a kid, Christmas would have seemed like several eons away from the 10th of December, now it feels as if it will be here in the blink of an eye.
P.S. That song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” has never been quite the same for me since I saw the Lovecraft-inspired parody. (Which will make no sense unless you’ve read Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth.)
