July 05, 2010
Why this liberal doesn't love the Second Amendment
:::
I was born in the US and have lived in Germany for the past 24 years, and although many Americans don't like to hear it, it remains an enduring truth: the proliferation of guns and prevalence of gun violence in the United States is appalling, tragic, breaks my heart as an American, and is utterly out of line with just about all of the Western democracies that we consider comparable to ours. No American, certainly no liberal, should be willing to stand for it a moment longer. Certainly it's possible to do a lot about that without changing anything about the 2nd Amendment, but if repealing the Amendment is what it takes, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest.
March 07, 2010
Process Over Principle
Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan — of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a “pragmatic agenda.” But pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and it’s not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.
That he hasn’t done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk “liberal.” That is admirable in intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his vision of America’s future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway. His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo “nonideological” enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted president.
During the first half of last year, Obama had an extraordinary opportunity to articulate the moral case for his causes, creating public pressure on the opposition not to stand in the way of his goals, and defining the broadest ambitions as the starting point of negotiations. Instead, he gave away concessions, before negotiations ever began, that a recalcitrant opposition has pocketed while stonewalling him on everything anyway, recognizing that he won't make them pay any political price for it. Maybe he can still recapture that moment, I'm not so sure if it's possible any more, but first and foremost, he'll have to want to lead that way in the first place.
February 18, 2010
Love is Like the Summer
Summer days can be blazing, blinding, overwhelming. It's prudent to protect yourself, with screen for the skin, a cover for your head, shade for the eyes, and maybe an extra layer of clothing after all. Sometimes it's necessary to seek out the shade, and some days you're better off just staying inside, avoiding the unbearable light and heat altogether.
Some summers can kill you.
Once in a while, a summer is a an extraordinary gift, with months of perfect days that never seem to end, lasting longer than anyone expected. Other summers are mediocre, and a few of them are frustrating disappointments, filled up with days of rain and overcast skies and mild temperatures, and too few redeeming days of sunshine scattered between them, ending abruptly when the chill of autumn arrives much too soon, so that we are left wondering whether the season was ever really there at all.
Summer is transient. We see the signs of its inevitable passing slowly but surely building up around us, the coolness in the air, the shortening days, nature's gradual retreat into dormancy. We bulk up and brace ourselves for the long season of darkness and cold. Winter is more oppressive and harder to survive. But it has its own kind of beauty, the quiet elegance of stillness and solitude.
Not everything about love is like the summer. The seasons are predictable -- we never know exactly when they will begin and end, but we know that they come and go once every year.
February 12, 2010
Cease, Desist and Cut That Out
By way of contrast, it makes perfect sense to tell someone not to "fold, spindle or mutilate" something. Folding is not the same as spindling, nor is it the same as mutilating; and you can spindle a thing without mutilating it, just as you could mutilate it without spindling it. Folding, spindling and mutilating are three different things, so if you don't want someone to do any of them, you have to tell them not to do all three.
A demand to both cease and desist implies that they're two different things, and you're demanding them not to do either one (ask your friendly neighborhood linguist about the Gricean maxim of quantity). Otherwise it's just a waste of words. To be sure, it only takes a second to say "cease and desist", but think of all the accumulated loss of productivity in all of the lawyer's offices all over the world, dictating and typing more than is necessary. Think of all the printer toner wasted printing out three words, when one would have been enough. In these difficult economic times, every little bit of extra efficiency makes a difference.
I'm troubled by the thought that I could get one of these things, and sincerely attempt to comply, but unwittingly fail because of some unfathomably subtle legal distinction between ceasing and desisting. A Kafkaesque nightmare scenario comes to mind -- cops and lawyers hammering on the door, the cops slapping on the cuffs while the lawyer cackles, "You CEASED but you didn't DESIST, SUCKAH!"
February 11, 2010
It's the Kitsch that Binds Us, and Sets Us Apart
Um, I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
"Komm", he said, exasperated at my Ami cluelessness, "you've lived here all this time."
The song was apparently a Schlager. Germans just love their Schlager (the word is presumably related to "hit"), popular music from German artists with German lyrics, with something of a 70's flair -- many of the popular numbers really are from that era, although they're still making them to this day. Kitsch is a German word, and Schlager form the Platonic ideal of Kitsch; an explosion, a fountainhead, a tsunami of schmaltziness. I'm certain that this is the music they play over the loudspeakers of Hell -- how could there be a worse psychological torture than having to listen to this stuff through all of eternity? And yet, I rarely see Germans getting more animated and loose than when the Schlager are playing. There are places around the Reeperbahn in Hamburg with jukeboxes fully loaded with the stuff, blasting out one after another all night long, while everyone in the place bursts out joyfully singing along, and I look around feeling bewildered and stupid. Every year, the weekend-long Schlagermove is one of the biggest parties in Hamburg (so much that they have three of them planned just for this year), complete with a parade of floats down the Reeperbahn, sort of a self-consciously lowbrow answer to the Love Parade. Everyone there is decked out in garish, hippy-ish outfits, the more outlandish, and the more outrageous the color contrasts, the better. I've had a great time when I've been there, but when everyone is singing along with the Schlager, I have to grin and move my lips as if I know what I'm doing.
I started typing at SureShot's laptop. "No, no," he said, knowing what I was up to, "no Roland Kaiser, not now, please ..." But he asked for it.
(It's about a guy imagining telling his neighbor that he has the hots for her, but he can't risk going through with it. "You'll lose your husband, and I'll lose my friend ...", cue the ominous minor chord.)
I've been in Germany for going on my 24th year now, and SureShot was amazed that I didn't know the first thing about Roland Kaiser, or most other Schlagersänger for that matter. To be sure, I'm now versed in German cultural references I never could have imagined 24 years ago, but you have to grow up with this stuff, or else it might as well be from Mars. "I grew up in America," I told him, "let me show you the kind of thing I know and you've never heard of," and started tapping at his laptop again.
February 10, 2010
Gifts from Chucky P
Count me among the legions of fans who think of "Fight Club" as a life-changer, high on my list of favorite films of all time. I have a standing challenge to SureShot that he hit me as hard as he can -- so far, we've both been too chicken to go through with it, but one of these days, if I manage to get him pissed off enough ... And like many other fans, I was turned on to Chuck's writing by the film. There was no way I was going to miss the reading, this would be a brush with greatness.
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The reading featured a man and a woman reading excerpts of the German translation of "Rant", and Chuck himself read a chapter in his native Upper Northwest accent. The best part of the evening, though, was the Q&A session -- all you had to do was get him going with a good question, and he would run with it, telling fantastic, hilarious stories. He wanted to encourage questions -- audiences in Hamburg tend to be very reserved -- so he promised that anyone who spoke up would get an envelope with an address, which you could send in, and he would send you a little something sometime later. He didn't elaborate. But that was good enough for me, I thrusted up my arm like an eager Arnold Horshack.
"Rant" is structured as a fictional oral history, told as quotations from various characters, and some of the quotations are attributed to the "Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms", which was not explained at the reading. So I asked Chuck what that was all about, hoping I would get him started on another good story. But it seemed that the question bored him; he gave a flat, matter-of-fact answer, and that was that. I was a little chastened, but I got the envelope, which was addressed to his agency in New York. I stuck in a note, saying that if I could wish for anything, it would be for an autograph with the dedication "Dear Geoff, I want you to hit me as hard as you can, Chuck", and mailed it in the next day.
The week after Christmas, a package arrived, and what a box of surprises I found inside.
February 08, 2010
Goodbye, Cruel Sun
The history of Sun's high ride and demise, and the continuing story of the newly-merged Oracle's fortunes, will occupy the minds of the IT industry and its pundits for a long time to come. I could easily go on and on about it, but that's not what I want to talk about here. Instead, I think that something should be pointed out about the way it all ended. It's another example of a phenomenon that's been covered extensively in political circles, and present in the public mind ever since the Wall Street collapse -- grotesquely extravagant compensation and golden parachutes for executives whose performance, on objective terms, can only be viewed as failure, compared to the burdens borne by laid-off rank-and-file employees who were far less responsible for the company's woes. What does this tell us about the Reaganist dogma of an unencumbered free market that currently has a powerful grip on the minds of almost everyone in the US ruling class? The circumstances of my own departure from Sun, under the laws and standards of a "socialist" European state, have something to say about that.
January 28, 2010
BITTE KAUFT MIR DAS AB!
Kuckt es euch an und kauft es mir ab, bitte:
http://www.quoka.de/searchresult.cfm?CUSTOMERDISP=15586174
Passend zu meinem Lieblingssatz aus Fight Club:
Je mehr du besitzt, um so mehr nimmt es Besitz von dir.
Und ebenfalls passend zum Film:
Die meisten Möbel sind von Ikea!
Danke für diese guten Taten,
Tyler aka Sureshot
December 31, 2009
The Zero Years
If this all sounds a little too depressing for your taste, go on over the jump, because things are looking up.
December 03, 2009
ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI ICH BIN FREI
ICH BIN FREI
FLIEG, SCHMETTERLING, LOS JETZT
DU BIST FREI
November 24, 2009
Sarah and the Buckeye Blockheads
I wish I could say I'm amazed, but I can't. The fact is that I've known a lot of people like this from back home, and I frankly don't know what can be done to get them to come to their senses. I'm immensely proud to be a Buckeye, especially last Saturday, but it's things like this that leave me embarrassed and close to despair.
(From NewLeftMedia, h/t Matt Yglesias via Ramou)
November 20, 2009
The Temple
One night he was telling me about his last visit with N., showing me pictures on his mobile that were getting increasingly racy. "You won't believe what she was doing," he gushed, "listen to this ...", and I started to recognize which way this was going. He was gathering momentum, pretty soon nothing be able to stop him.
"Whoa, whoa," I broke in, "wait a minute, don't tell me everything you're doing with your girlfriend!"
He looked back at me skeptically. "Why? We know we can trust each other. Why does there have to be something we can't talk about? Does there have to be something sacred?"
November 17, 2009
HALLO, NACHMITTAG.
WIE GEHT DAS MIT DER LEIDENSCHAFT?
WAS BRAUCHT MAN FÜR EINE POSITIVE LEBENSEINSTELLUNG?
WIE ENTSTEHT MUT?
WELCHE FARBE HAT ANGST UND WIE KANN ICH SIE UNSICHTBAR MACHEN?
WOHER KOMMT DER MENSCH UND WOHIN GEHT ER AM ENDE?
WIE FÜHLT SICH PERSÖNLICHER ERFOLG AN?
WANN WAR EIN LEBEN LEBENSWERT?
WO FINDE ICH, WAS ICH SUCHE?
ICH BIN BEREIT, NACHMITTAG.
AUF SENDUNG.
WENN DU ANTWORTEN FÜR MICH HAST, GIB MIR BITTE EIN ZEICHEN.
ICH BIN DORT, WO ICH IMMER BIN.
IM GEIST. IM BAUCH.
IM MOMENT ZUHAUSE.
DANKE, NACHMITTAG.
November 02, 2009
On This Special Occasion ...
November 01, 2009
In Which Your Author Extemporises Mellifluously While Gallivanting Through the Tenses
(h/t Plutonium Page)