Twenty years ago today I was in sixth grade, and I had the day off school for some reason. It was a Friday. I was helping my mom set up the new television we’d just bought, a 20″ Sony with a remote control, of all things. I was hooking it up to the VCR we’d bought the previous fall. It was a watershed year for the household, technologically, though our first microwave was still several months away.

We got the TV set up in time to watch George H.W. Bush get sworn in. I was hoping my mother wouldn’t remark on how I’d cried—shed actual tears—the previous November, on the night he defeated Michael Dukakis. I was righteously angry and sad, though I wasn’t really sure why, only that my parents were and therefore I should be too. But none of us could have predicted what the next five inaugurations would bring.

All in all, this morning kicks the ass of that morning.

Posted: January 20th, 2009 under Politics.
Comments: 5

Being the narcissist I am, I inevitably frame national and global politics in terms of the events of my own life, making connections—often tenuous—between the macro and micro in an effort to better contextualize historical developments so huge they defy contextualization.

Being the narcissist I am, when I think about what happened tonight, I think how I spent the bulk of the last decade. I am old enough to have plenty of unhappy adult memories of the years 2000-2008, especially the last time we tried to find a new leader. But I am still young enough that eight years feels like a really long time; a quarter of my life, in fact. And no eight-year span has ever felt as long as the most recent one.

Being the narcissist I am, I feel as if tonight, my country vindicated me by vindicating the whole.

Riding my bike home tonight I made a mental list of the ways things were different the last time I was proud of our country’s leadership:

- I was twenty-four years old

- I was living in Grinnell, IA

- I had a predominantly different set of friends than I do now

- My favorite band was the Dismemberment Plan, and they were still together

- Gas cost $1 a gallon

- My father was still alive

- I was a member of Speed of Sauce

- I was still in college

Things are different now, in a billion different ways. It might take me a while to get reacquainted with my own patriotism, but I’m looking forward to that process. If a person is bombarded by enough bad news, that person might begin to forget what good news sounds like.

Finally, some good news.

Posted: November 5th, 2008 under Politics.
Comments: 2

In my twelve years of public schooling, snow days were, obviously, thrilling anomalies whose excitement evolved in variety and intensity as I grew older. In elementary school their joys were simple and obvious: a chance to stay home and watch television, then venture outside to play in the freshly formed drifts.

In middle school and especially high school, the implications of snow days became variform and complex. My swim team would often get the news between sets as we bobbed at the end of the lanes during morning practice. Coach Stanley would bark that he’d just gotten the call: school was off; therefore, we had time for another couple thousand yards. We’d whoop and then immediately groan, and my consequent commingling of joy and suffering was never before in such perfect proportion.

Snow days in high school promised a wealth of quasi-adult activities: lunch at Pizza Hut, a nap, a trip to Wal-Mart for no particularly good reason. Or a group of us would convene in someone’s basement to watch movies. Or Phil and Wes and Mark and I would hold an impromtu band practice.

But whatever the age or activity, snow days were so blessedly perfect not just for their unpredictability but for the persistence of one grand, darkly reassuring notion: school had failed. The bureaucratic rigidity and institutional routine of school—the surest, most predictable thing about our lives up to that point—had, for once, broken down, however temporarily; the system was interrupted.

I am reminded of snow days now, at the end of September, not because I anticipate any of them in the near future, but because of the deep-shit mess in which our nation’s economy has gradually and/or suddenly mired itself. It’s a circumlocutory hike to that from snow days, so please bear with.

I should also preface the entirety of the following with a caveat and a guarantee: that I don’t know dick about economics, never have; and that I will not try and act like I do. Read more »

Posted: September 30th, 2008 under General, Politics.
Comments: 13

This is going to be yet another one of those embarrassingly earnest, emotionally vulnerable, hastily assembled blog entries I regret posting the next day but will nonetheless leave published in fealty to some lofty sense of vulnerable frankness or truth-telling rectitude or whatever.

I’ve been on edge all week, as I imagine many people in the Twin Cities, regardless of their political stripe, have been. Emily and I were discussing it today and agreed it’s a combination of the prematurely autumnal weather and back-to-school week and of course the Elephant in the Arena-Shaped Room. Anxieties and fear and rancor had been slowly building for a week / year / decade—until this week they cracked and burst and were then hastily sealed back up again during and after skirmishes and ill-considered displays of indiscriminate force by the authorities and indiscriminate hooliganism by a small faction of so-called anarchists, on either side of what has lately felt like a rapidly widening cultural and ideological chasm.

What I’m about to say might sound shrill and obvious, but violence on anyone’s part—whether that of the government, the police, or the young brash and bored—makes me sick to my stomach, and a week’s worth of that violence only compounds the sickening trumpeting noise already generated by the aforementioned elephant, resulting in a cacophony that has drowned out the majority voice: a voice of thousands of reasonable and peaceful and constructive people who put a lot of hard work into waging intelligent, inspiring opposition. But intelligent opposition (some of it extremely compelling, well-organized, elegant opposition, with a clearly articulated message that’s above reproach and a delivery mechanism that left me in tears on Monday) isn’t nearly as mediagenic as the hype and the chaos, so it’s lost in the din. Read more »

Posted: September 5th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Politics.
Comments: 3

RNC Day 1

Read more »

Posted: September 2nd, 2008 under Images, Minneapolis, Politics.
Comments: 1

I’ve spent the last couple of nights watching examples of a subgenre of documentary film I’ll call “feel-good documentary.” These films are firmly in the realm of Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom, and firmly not in the realm of, say, An Inconvenient Truth, or Jesus Camp. They’re both films I should’ve probably seen a lot sooner, so forgive me for being a Johnny-Arrive-Recently.

The first is Wordplay, which it’s ridiculous I didn’t see sooner, considering how much of a crossword junkie I am.

One thing this film drove home, however, is that I’m a downright novice compared to some of the endearingly obsessive fanatics who convene every year at Will Shortz’s annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. These are people who do the Monday crossword in under a minute and the Saturday in under twenty. These are people who create puzzles and mail them to Will Shortz for publication in the Times. These are people who look at a road sign reading “Intercoastal” and immediately say, “That’s an anagram for ‘altercations.’”

And then there are the appearances from celebrity puzzle solvers like Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart. Every film, no matter what it is, would benefit from cameos by Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart.

What I’m saying is that, as much as I’d love to attend the tournament, I’d get my ass handed to me right quick. I’ve done the Monday in six minutes, and I’ve finished the Sunday in under forty-five, but otherwise I don’t time myself. Still, though … I may just book myself a flight for Stamford CT next March.

Read more »

Posted: March 6th, 2007 under Film, Music, Politics.
Comments: 3

Bush unveils a sexy new campaign that will change the way we think about ill-conceived geopolitical quagmires.

Posted: January 11th, 2007 under Images, Politics.
Comments: 1

1. Saw Jesus Camp

2. Read “Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is reimagining U.S. history” by Jeff Sharlet, in the current issue of Harper’s

Going into Jesus Camp, I had my reservations. I worried that it would be another pointed confirmation of cosmopolitan Blue-Staters’ worst fears; yet another chance for people on the East Coast and in Western Europe to have a good chuckle about those nutty, misguided fools in the flyover states.

And to some extent, it was that. I sat in a theatre full of young, liberal Minneapolitans who laughed at the wayward provincialism of the people in the film, at the homeschoolers who don’t believe in science and the youth minister who aerosols her frosted hair into submission before blessing her flock’s hands with Nestlé bottled water.

And I laughed with them. But not nearly as much as I cringed at the film’s scenes that clearly weren’t being played for laughs: specifically the ones where children, young children under ten years, were driven to tears and writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues as adults browbeat them and called them sinners and explained that everything they liked in life (Harry Potter, ghost stories, recess, fun) was a direct product of Satan.

That made my face red, made me sink further into my seat, made me grit my teeth, perhaps because it got in and needled at something deeper and personal about my own childhood and the history of my relationship with religion and religious types to a greater degree than I really would have preferred any film was capable.

Needless to say, I did a lot more seat-sinking than chuckling.

The second item is also disturbing, perhaps more intellectually than viscerally. It’s about the attempt on the part of fundamentalist Christians to literally rewrite history, using specially-commissioned textbooks for homeschoolers and religious schools, so that every historical event and person is and was working in the service of, or in reaction to, God’s will. For example, did you know that:

1. The British defeated the Spanish Armada with help from God’s “Protestant wind” so that “the New World would not be overly settled by agents of the Vatican”?

2. The two world wars, the Great Depression, JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, AIDS, 9/11, and Iraq are God’s punishment for the New Deal, Roe v. Wade, and various Supreme Court decisions favoring secular institutions?

3. Stonewall Jackson is a national and religious hero, practically a saint, because he was a civil rights pioneer who taught slaves to read and led a crusade for states’ rights? and that the North was going against God’s will by “striving to alter basic American structures”?

4. Alexis de Tocqueville was an Evangelical Christian in disguise? (Yeah, I don’t get that one either.) (UPDATE: In disguise as a Frenchman, as Meredith helpfully pointed out—but I still don’t get it.)

A good companion piece is Sharlet’s previous feature for Harper’s, about the Rev. Ted “Meth and Male Prostitutes” Haggard, whose appearance in Jesus Camp can only be described as the very quintessence of irony.

I need to go do something fiercely secular. I’m still gritting my teeth.

Posted: November 20th, 2006 under Film, General, Politics.
Comments: 4

This morning I walked over to my polling place, Marcy Open School, which has the dubious honor of being the inspiration for the name of one-hit wonders Marcy (”Sex & Candy”) Playground.

I cast my vote with as much rage about the past six years, and especially about the past two, as I could muster. Because our voting machines were not manufactured by Diebold, and I don’t live in a precinct predominantly comprised of racial minorities and/or Ohio, I am reasonably confident that my vote will be counted.

Also, I’ve installed a widget, courtesy of the good folks at Minnesota Public Radio, which will post live returns from several Minnesota races. This may only be of interest to my readers in Minnesota, although the rest of you might enjoy such hilarious candidate names as Klobuchar and Wetterling.

So. Let’s not fuck this up, okay?

Posted: November 7th, 2006 under Politics.
Comments: 6

On Monday I returned the keg from my party to the liquor store. The woman who processed it lifted it and said, “Seems like you didn’t drink a lot.” I told her how the tap was a little wonky and even those present who had worked in bars and/or were hippies hadn’t been able to get it to work. She apologized and gave me a $25 gift certificate. (I’m determined to use it for something classy like nice wine, rather than two cases of PBR. We’ll see how that goes.)

Then, about an hour later, I’m at home reading when the doorbell rings. It’s a man and a woman from NARAL going door to door, collecting signatures and donations. I admire what considerable chutzpah it must take to go around a neighborhood (even an ostensibly progressive neighborhood in an ostensibly progressive town) and essentially say, “Do you support abortion? If so, give us money.” (Their pitch was admittedly a bit more nuanced than this.) So I gave them $25 and felt pretty good about myself.

So but then, as anyone who was outdoors in the Twin Cities area yesterday afternoon will know, there was a little plane flying around towing an enormous benner that said “10 WEEK ABORTION.” My initial reaction, before I could fully parse the message and its intent, was that the plane was advertising 10-week abortions. (I’m pretty sure I was not alone in this assessment.) Further inspection revealed that the banner also had an enormous photo of an aborted fetus. Classy!

I don’t know what relation the third paragraph has to the first two. Maybe a freakish, dispiriting epilogue.

Posted: June 21st, 2006 under Minneapolis, Politics.
Comments: 2