Ahhhhhh-AH

It doesn't matter how adult or mature I think I am. If Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" comes up on my iPod, all notions of decorum and public decency will go out the window. Because for those two minutes and twenty-eight seconds I am The Half-Drunken Viking, fearsome and fabled warrior of old. It's by the grace of Odin that the song has not come up while I'm driving.

Also, check out Page's coat--0:27 to 0:35. Where do I even get one of those? Seriously, if I thought I could pull that look off, I'd swear off leather jackets but good.

Undecided Voters

Once or twice a year, SNL still manages to get it right.

This morning's Washington Post Express carried this AP article. You've probably heard about--if you don't remember from every other general election of your lifetime--the importance of undecideds to politicians. Undecideds get a lot of attention this time of year from media and politicians because they are incapable of making up their minds. Or are playing coy. Or are lying to us. Or are dumb. Occam's razor allows for any of these.

I explained last week that I get how non-political people can be turned off to what little they do see of the campaign. The lies and the spin are tough to sift through, even for people--like myself--who follow the horse-race day in, day out. And this year--more than most--seems custom-designed to turn stomachs. Not to mention that the decision shouldn't be taken lightly and some people don't have the time to sit down, etc. I get all that.

But.

Mitt Romney officially launched his campaign on June 2, 2011. That's one way to measure the chronology of the campaign. You could also pick the day Obama announced his re-election bid (April 4, 2011). Some might go with May 11, 2011, the day a bloated, self-serving troll threw his over-sized hat into the ring. A cynical observer might pick the end of the 2010 midterms. And though traditionally the conventions mark the start of the general election, it would be more accurate to say that the general began when Mittens locked up the necessary delegates on May 29th of this year. No matter how one marks the calendar, voters have already had between four and eighteen months to come to a general decision. And yet undecideds cannot or will not figure it out for themselves. They don't want to be rushed, or they want to wait for "all the facts."

First: how many other life decisions require twenty months of reflection? And how does such a person function in every day life? Do they stand in front of the break room vending machine for seven hours, muttering, "Snickers or Milky Way? Snickers... or Milky Way? I just... I need more information. I can't tell them apart."

Second: the facts, such as they are, are out there. You can hem and haw about the vagaries of campaign promises and the natural dishonesty of politicians. However, uncontrollable world events aside, there's nothing coming in the next seven weeks that we don't already know--in large part because of those intentionally vague campaigns that will squelch anything that might damage their chances of winning. Also, those uncontrollable world events are ever-present possibilities. If something earth-shattering happens on November 7th and we're suddenly queasy about our choice: tough shit (unless the electoral college balks, but one messy situation at a time).

By the way, a decision doesn't mean a commitment. If it comes out tomorrow that Obama has used his office to personally select interns for the annual slaughter so that he might bathe in the blood of virgins to keep him ever-young, he's lost my vote. Some will claim that I'm in the tank for Obama. Or that I'm that repelled by Romney. The point is that--aside from more interest (and more time) than the average voter--I don't have access to any more resources than any one else. If, like myself, you largely use the Internet for news, your sources are equally as good as--and equally as bad as--mine. And I've made my decision based upon that same information that you have access to. If that same information turns sour, I can decide to jump off the bandwagon. Because that's the way human judgment works: you operate on the information you have and reserve the right to adapt when and if that information changes. If Drudge unveils evidence of Obama Bathory, I'll reassess my support. And few reasonable people would think less of me for it.

I could let all of this go if the undecideds had no interest in voting. That's a legitimate choice in American politics; it's not a choice I agree with and I think that not voting as a protest vote is as milquetoast as a protest can be, but it is a person's right. No, the problem here is that these people believe that it's important that they vote, regardless. Check out some of the undecided voter in Oregon:

“There’s a lot of people who have their minds made up too far in advance.”

Yep, our bad. We're the idiots. All 93% of us.

This is the aggravating part: the belief in civics that they sanctimoniously parrot while also refusing to engage in citizenship. Again, this election, for all intents and purposes, has been running for over a year. If you've accidentally picked up a newspaper or half-watched any news programming in the last few months, you've seen something having to do with the campaign. At some point, as the information rolls in, most minds will tend to pick a preferred candidate, even unconsciously. Not the undecideds, though. No, no. They need more. You can practically hear the SNL sketch: "some of us are just a little bit harder to please."

And so they'll get more. The bases are shored up and the informed independents have largely chosen sides. For Romney to come from behind or for Obama to clinch this thing, they have to appeal to the low-information, disinterested undecideds. And then we'll all get to hear those people vacillate back and forth for the next six weeks. Because why pick a side when everyone will bend over backward to hear your opinion? Do you know how much effort some of us put into opinion-shaping with little to no results to show for it?

Maybe they are smarter than we are.

EDIT: I shortened the original title of this post. It seemed edgy and attention-grabbing at the time. Two years later, I'm just kind of embarrassed by it. If you liked the previous one better, thank you. But that's not who I want to be anymore.

Orwell's Diaries

There's a thing about being an admirer of George Orwell that it's hard to acknowledge that admiration without instantly getting lumped in with the conspiracy mongers. You know, the ones who tout Nineteen Eighty-Four not as the forewarning it was intended to be, but as a threatened, point-for-point prediction of the future. Admittedly, I was one of those at one time in my life. We all have a right to be fifteen once, don't we?

The problem is that Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are required reading in many schools (and rightfully so) and so the name "Orwell" has a distinctively grim and paranoid ring for many people. There are few words so sinister as "Orwellian," a fact that might not do Orwell proud if he knew that his successors would be as powerless to halt the cynical obliteration of the English language as he was; that's the paradox of dystopic writers who remain relevant. Meanwhile, without seeking them out, few ever read Orwell's essays, many of which I would count among his best writing--some even surpassing his better novels. Here are a bunch of the essays; go nuts. They're also worth buying.

Reading Orwell's Diaries--recently published for the first time in the States--is not quite so pleasurable as reading those essays. The "Domestic Diaries" that make up large chunks of the collected works and catalog his agricultural activities near Kent and then in Hertfordshire held little interest and most entries seem to ask to be skipped.

The collection picks up during his account of the lead-up to the War, in which everyone around him seems oblivious to the oncoming crisis, even as the pub radio reports on Germany's designs on Poland in the summer of 1939. This ignorance-fueled-by-indifference flummoxes Orwell but doesn't stun him. Blindness to the inevitable--even from the sitting government--is something he's seen before. As he writes,

[Friend and writer] Stephen Spender said to me recently, "Don't you feel that any time during the past ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?' I had to agree to this. Partly it is a question of not being blinded by class interests etc... but where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in... I could not say exactly what wars and revolutions would happen, but they never surprised me when I came. Since 1934 I have know war between England and Germany was coming, and since 1936 I have known it with complete certainty.

It's this ability (elaborated upon in a rare moment of hubris) that lends some credibility to the aforementioned conspiracists, though not as much as they'll take. As a traveling journalist--the '30s saw him in the Spanish Civil War and North Africa--he was not so uniquely suited to see the world in ways his more disinterested contemporaries never would have. Combined with his journalist's understanding of human nature and his writer's imagination, it was only a matter of some effort that he was able to extrapolate the elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the world around him. Indeed, many of that book's most haunting moments are foreshadowed in the Diaries: the vague, sparse, and unreliable information regarding the War (irony of ironies: his first wife, Eileen, worked for the Censorship Department); the rampant reversing of loyalties at a moment's notice (Russia's shifting allegiances and English pols' corresponding stances deserve special attention); right down to the number of rats living in Britain (estimated at four to five million, he says).

After the War, it's back to domestic record-keeping, this time on the Scottish island of Jura. And minus a few brief, worthwhile observations from the hospital during Orwell's final illness, the Diaries return to their earlier lackluster form. It's a helpful reminder that these diaries were for Orwell's purposes--not ours (what can we do with the knowledge of how many eggs Orwell collected from his chickens?). There are a few mildly amusing anecdotes about censored acquaintances and observations on the living conditions of the rural working class (especially early in the book) in here. But they remain mostly filler, items to be skipped past on the way to Orwell's account of the war and the Blitz, which are mostly worthwhile.

As with any collected diary (as opposed to a memoir), this collection is only really recommendable if one already admires the diarist. Which, looking back, is the reason I purchased the thing.

Grade: B-

Mitt Romney's Special Kind of Terrible

It's not merely that he said this. It's not the ugly history and pointless division this conjures. It's not even that what he said was demonstrably false. And it's not totally about whether or not he believes it (though that's fun to muse on for a bit... and he probably does).

It's that this is what the base believes. Republicans can strive to separate themselves from it, but this is the trajectory the party has been on since Obama became president; hurdling wildly across the cosmos until it collides into a larger force. There remains hope on the saner right that that collision will come soon (perhaps in the form of an Obama reelection in spite of the efforts of countless yammering, semi-conscious, craggy-faced hyper-partisans). I tend to doubt it. Until Republicans have someone who can publicly dismiss Limbaugh and all the other braying, intellectual hacks without getting castrated and exiled from the "movement," that will always remain their own beautiful dream.

And now Mittens, already an inept campaigner, is caught up in it, as he was always going to be. Because for all the talk of his putative moderation, the standard-bearer of this Republican Party was always going to have to, well, bear this standard. Romney was always going to have to go through those motions to buy his party's clearance to run in their name. And then, governing in their name, he'd have to keep it up; Congress is still going to have the pungent stink of the Tea Party on it, remember? He wants the presidency. It's his birthright.

So when he's at a closed-door fundraiser, hot off surviving the primaries, and these people are looking for the right foreplay buzzwords to make them spread their pocketbooks, what was he going to do? Reveal that the man from Bain was alive and well and all too happy to reduce the American public into makers and takers, men and leeches? Or walk away in the middle of the question?

Political Ad Nauseam

For the first time in my life, I'm living in a media market inundated by presidential ad campaigns. I suppose that Virginia proved to be a bellwether late in the 2008 race, but I don't recall all that many ads at the time. Or perhaps I wasn't watching as much TV. The real kicker is that I don't even live in any swing territory; neither Maryland or DC are up for grabs. Obama and Romney are fighting over the handful of counties on the other side of the Potomac that just happen to share airwaves with the rest of the DC Metro area.

Initially, I refused to keep track of the ads that popped up during the Ravens-Eagles game on CBS yesterday (couldn't even flee to Fox since there was only the one game on at 1:00). But before long I realized that I was subconsciously keeping score ("keeping score" being one of those sicknesses that poisons modern political thinking and why people like me shouldn't be allowed to comment on politics). Here a Romney ad, there an Obama ad.  They seemed to be coming one for one. As the ads continued, and the game itself became more and more absurd, and I began to succumb to a migraine that I will assume is unrelated to the nonsense on my screen, I left the room altogether to take a nap. I've since happily forgotten how many ads I endured during the first half and the fourth quarter. But I can--and will, despite myself--try again next week. And the week after. And every week until the election, through Week 9: over half the regular season drowned in political ad nauseam.

I think I understand some of what the undecideds and un-interesteds have been griping about all these years. If you don't care about the election, there's a decent chance that your only exposure to the candidates and the issues are through these ads. And if you only know the election through the ads, you have every right to hate everything about politics. One guy says the other is lying; the other hurls back the same charge, with slightly different sinister music. One guy makes a claim that you know can't be verified but sounds good; the other makes a very similar-sounding and equally vague claim. Without context, politicians really can start to blend together in the mind's eye, giving rise to the very false common wisdom that "they're all alike." Even the positive ads grate, unrelenting and legion as they are--and because they remind us that we haven't yet seen the last of this campaign. It's enough to make a sane and decent person swear off the institution altogether.

And if I were slightly more cynical, I'd theorize that this is exactly the game plan--shake off the interest of everyone except the die-hards, who are so much more reliable and easier to control. Eventually, those are the only people you're talking to until political discourse on the airwaves is indistinguishable from the Internet.

Lincoln trailer

"Hell. Yes."
--Abraham Lincoln

At Least He Has Good Form

Because I can't accurately title this post "I'm Impressed With This Guy's Balls."

If asked to sum up American University in one anecdote, I would choose the moment during my Junior year when an anonymous young man decided he was going to streak across the quad. But not wanting to appear too immodest, he chose to hold a plastic bag over himself. An unfortunate choice because, as you may be aware, a plastic bag does not make for an especially reliable shield and a gentle breeze easily laid waste to the poor bloke's careful planning. Minutes later, I filed into my next class whereupon I observed one of my fellow students (straight-laced, College Republican, destined-to-run-for-president type (which, it cannot be repeated enough, happens a lot at AU)) dramatically shaking his head over having seen "everything." The brave soul somehow managed to soldier on through class.

I suppose that the current controversy my alma mater finds itself embroiled in is another pretty good example of AU-ness. But I honestly can't make myself care about that one way or the other.

9/11

I remember one of the history teachers--one of the ones everybody liked--interrupting our gym class to tell us what had happened after another student had asked about the rumors of what was happening in New York (no word of the Pentagon or Pennsylvania yet).  Afterward, the gym teacher took us right back into... basketball drills, I think?

The next day, most students and teachers were not wearing red, white, and blue. They wore camouflage: marking themselves as ready for the next attack, which would surely be targeting rural Virginia because "that would scare people--no one would suspect that."

Beyond such Fuck The 9/12 Project anecdotes, I'm afraid I'm useless for any kind of 9/11 remembrance. For that, there are more qualified people you can turn to.

Request Time

I said I wasn't going to do this, but since I've been asked, yes, Bill Clinton gave a pretty great speech last night. It's been accompanied by the usual hyperbole, as well as some healthy gushing. And both of those are to be expected. Whatever the man's flaws, Clinton knows how make politico's brains short-circuit--regardless of their party affiliation. His speech last night had the substance people never got from Paul Ryan's, a natural charm that Mitt Romney cannot contemplate, and the thorough defense of Obama's record that Obama has been unable to provide. I don't even care that it was long; you got something important to do? Grade: B+.

But for my money, Michelle Obama gave the superior speech. Satisfying though it was to see Bubba hammer the GOP on their lazy math and lazier lies (with a few nervous, dated, and--yes--lazy Lewinsky jokes hurled by the Right in panicky response), Obama spotlit the other pernicious lies that Romney shamelessly tolerates. She spat in the plug-ugly faces of the Birther-esque insinuations of Barack's foreignness, socialism, and thousand-years-of-darkness lunacy. Where Ann Romney pleaded with us to trust her that her husband is a great guy, Obama gave us anecdotal examples of her husband's humanity. Mittens might want to take us all home from the dance safely, but Barack wants to lift us onto the shoulders of past American giants to help us continue to live the Dream (yes, both of those analogies contain some Big Brother imagery; blame the generations of American voters who have demanded "strong leadership"). She took those lies, twisted them into inedible pretzels, and handed them back to the Republicans. All with a lump in her throat. Grade: A- (lost points for the saccharine "Mom-in-Chief" line).

Now we wait to see if her husband can trump both of them. Because make no mistake: he has to at least match that bar for any of this to mean anything. The guy better know how to give a convention speech.

Stop Making Me Love You, NFL

I had intended to write a longer post about my increasing apprehensions about the NFL and football in general. Concussions, suicides, bounties, Michael Vick, Ben Roethlisberger, Penn State, and a commissioner who vows more safety while simultaneously advocating for two more regular season games. All this added into a sport that never fails to draw me in, week after week, especially as late fall and winter kick in--more invigorating weather demanding a more energetic sport than late summer baseball usually provides. This is made worse when the Bears show signs of promise, as they do now (Urlacher's knee not withstanding--the man is superhuman and will overcome accordingly). I, like all of us, know on some level that the game can have horrible repercussions on everything it touches. This is most clearly understood during the off-season. But when September rolls around and the games begin, the blinders are always so comfortable. And that (in addition to the moving and the more time sensitive Bar Rescue) is why I'm having trouble writing that post just now.

Here are my predicitions for the 2012 Season:

• NFC North winner: Green Bay
• NFC East winner: New York
• NFC South winner: Atlanta
• NFC West winner: San Francisco
• NFC Wild Cards: Chicago, Detroit
• AFC North winner: Baltimore*
• AFC East winner: New England
• AFC South winner: Houston
• AFC West winner: Denver
• AFC Wild Cards: Kansas City, Pittsburgh
• NFC Title Game: San Francisco over Atlanta
• AFC Title Game: Houston over Baltimore
• Super Bowl XLVII winner: San Francisco over Houston

*Baltimore makes me a little queasy this year, what with Terrell Suggs' Achilles probably being the difference between a playoff berth and a Super Bowl berth. I've developed something of an emotional connection to the Ravens and am thus inclined to give them more credit than I really should. I actually tend to have a dimmer view of the Bears' prospects in any given year (or week)--probably something to do with experience and a deeper sense of risk. One is always more likely to be disappointed by their favorite child.

Bar Rescue, "Piratz"

Piratz was--and is again--a bar in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. It is pirate-themed. And it is not doing well. Owner Tracy Rebelo is, we are told, $900,000 in debt and living with her teenage daughter in her parents' basement. Hence the bar being featured in an episode of a reality TV show (if it had been thriving, Piratz could've gotten a nine-episode deal for its own show).

Spike TV's Bar Rescue pits bar expert and nightclub consultant Jon Taffer against bar-owners and their failing businesses. Taffer is a self-aggrandizing asshole, who yells far more than should be necessary for an adult. But nice, reasonable people don't usually get reality shows, so there you go. And we quickly see that, despite his flaws, Taffer generally knows what he's talking about and that he has the connections and resources to give struggling bars anything they might dream of.

As soon as the episode begins, Taffer is hung up on the idea that a pirate bar is an innately awful idea--especially in Silver Spring. I think he's half-right. A pirate bar could feasibly do well in places like St. Petersburg, Florida, or Nassau, Bahamas, where people might reasonably be looking for piratey kitsch. Keeping it in DC, a friend remarked to me that a place like Piratz--albeit toned down--might perform well in an area like H Street, where quirkiness is rather more likely to be embraced. But what Rebelo has is a building in downtown Silver Spring, where office workers dominate the lunch and happy hours, and the nighttime crowd isn't so gung-ho about donning their pirate gear, either.

Taffer rightly decides to target the office workers. He less rightly decides on an office-themed establishment, complete with motivational posters and While You Were Out notepads. Because everyone wants to go drink and have lunch in the same atmosphere in which they were just working. He also renames the bar: "Corporate Bar and Grill" (for all that Taffer is good at, he has trouble with names. In another episode, he re-christens a California dive-bar "Racks." Did I mention that this was in an attempt to differentiate the bar from the strip club next door?). Before the makeover, Rebelo pleas to Taffer that she doesn't want her bar to become just another soulless enterprise. Taffer replies that businesses don't have souls. And that's true. But in the bar business, it seems to me--and I have no claim to the knowledge or experience that Taffer has--the successful businesses are the ones that can project the veneer of a soul. Ostentatiously removing any trace of that seems to invite only the ironic visitors, looking for a quick larf at the idea that they're sipping PBR's at a board room table. 

But any of these solutions (moving the bar, changing the bar) assumes good management to see them through. Piratz real problem is that neither Rebelo nor her staff know what they're doing. Worse still, they don't seem to know that they don't know what they're doing. I visited Piratz with some friends a few years back and it wasn't until watching Bar Rescue that I was able to identify exactly what was wrong. I owe Taffer that much credit.

When a couple of Taffer's acquaintances sit down to do some reconnaissance (while wearing pirate gear because--and this is true--such attire the only hope for quick attention from the servers at Piratz), they are greeted by would-be episode stealer One-Eyed Mike, who slurs "just gonna seat yerselves wherever the fuck ye like, are ye?". This is roughly the level of awkward that I recall. And we haven't even gotten into the more important aspects of bar hospitality. Taffer soon sees that the menu is too long, that the atmosphere is more distracting than it is enchanting, and that the staff manages to be both inattentive and intrusive. I can confirm all of these from experience. It's little surprise that the food and drinks are lousy; what kind of quality comes to mind when you think of the authentic pirate diet?

I won't even get into the push-back from the Piratz staff. Their attitude is that this is a pirate bar and that anyone who doesn't like it should leave. It's a twist on the "haters gonna hate" logic that's so insidious because it's simultaneously wrong and irrefutable.

When Rebelo asks her staff at the new Corporate Bar, "How bad do we just want a vat of grog right now?" it's genuinely depressing. She never wanted a bar. She wanted a place to dress up with simpatico Renn Faire dorks whose passion would be perfectly acceptable (healthy, even), if they could put it aside long enough to acknowledge the damage it was doing. What Rebelo has is an insanely expensive hobby. She knew enough to call Bar Rescue and set up the potential turnaround, but couldn't be bothered to look at all the problems Taffer loudly pointed out to her. She didn't need a streetwise consultant; she needed an intervention.

According to the episode's postscript, the pirates reclaimed Corporate Bar within days of Taffer's exit. I considered paying them a second visit, just to bookend this post. And I may yet do that, just for the curiosity of what Yelp tells me is now a disconcerting hybrid of the old Piratz and the former Corporate Bar. But curiosity is what led me to Piratz the first time. And if Bar Rescue has taught me anything, it's that you need to learn from your mistakes. Otherwise, Jon Taffer will yell at you a lot.