I'm just too lazy

This week I'm just too lazy to cross post from my Vox blog.

Drink me under the table

I had to stop drinking halfway through the vice presidential debate, because Palin was killing me. We started with our usual list of "drink" words or moments: change, experience, Main Street, golly, darn, heck or any other folksy utterance, any instance in which Palin substituted a folksy story for actual policy substance, the moments when Biden fought laughter. We also had a special "English majors drink" rule: any time Palin racked up more than five dependent clauses without actually finishing the sentence. We hit two of those.

In the end, it was "maverick" that almost did me in, and that turned out to be Biden's fault. When he went on his rant about McCain not being a maverick, I finished off my last bottle of cider and declared my participation in the drinking game over.

The best line of the night, though, was Palin's use of the phrase "team of mavericks." Really, she and McCain are a "team of mavericks"? A TEAM of MAVERICKS? I checked the OED this morning to make sure I was being fair, but the OED confirms my understanding of the word maverick: an individualist. So, how exactly would one set about getting together a team of individualists? Exactly what would this team of mavericks rally around? (Or maybe Palin meant maverick in its Old West sense of "an unbranded yearling or calf." Well, it might describe Palin, but McCain? Hardly a calf.)

There were also two rather scary moments in the debate, the first when Palin established that she's not just Bush in a dress, but that she wants to be Bush in a dress. She actually used the word "nucular." Not once or twice, but perhaps a dozen times. I would not automatically ascribe that to any particular political feeling, as I grew up among people who said "nucular," including my dad. What happened as the debate wore on, however, is a different matter. Namely, Palin slipped a handful of times and said, "nuclear." Because the Alaskan dialect does not in fact feature the word "nucular." So, Palin had actually practiced using "nucular," perhaps drilled herself on it during the week of "debate camp" she attended to get ready for the debate. The thought of McCain being president doesn't absolutely terrify me, in part because I suspect he despises Bush. How could he not? Palin, though, seems to want to emulate the Worst President Ever. Yikes.

The other scary moment is one that is seared into my brain. A thing that made me want to run from the room and pour bleach in my eyes. Sarah Palin winked at me. She looked right into the camera and she winked at me. Our country has put up with a lot these last eight years: invasions of other countries, plunging home values, rising unemployment rates, the nepotic and necrotic demolition of revered American institutions. I've handled all of that, but I swear to you, if that woman ever winks at me again, I am going to go batfuck insane and take this country apart into a big pile of red, white and blue Legos.

I don't care if she wants to wink at the people who show up for Republican rallies and stump speeches, because they're her people. She can wink at them. But when I watch a vice presidential debate, I've invite the candidates into my home as guests. I expect them to act with appropriate decorum.

So here's the deal, Sarah Palin: you and me, we're not in on a joke together. We're not friends or compatriots or fellow travelers on this journey of life. You are Satan's favorite succubus, and I hate your stupid Amy Winehouse hair, and your five kids with their ridiculous "frontier" (maverick?) names, and the way you've stolen the word "Awesomest" from indolent teens everywhere, and the fact that you fired the town librarian over issues of "loyalty." Like you were the fricking Communist Party Boss of Wasilla, Alaska.

Do you hear me, Sarah Palin? DO NOT FUCKING WINK AT ME EVER AGAIN.

The memorial has already been built

On the radio this morning, I heard interviews with the relatives of people who died in the World Trade Center. On the news, I read more of the same: people lamenting that seven years after the 9/11 attacks, there is no memorial at Ground Zero to commemorate the loss of life.

I happen to believe that there is a memorial to the events of September 11, 2001. It was completed in April 2002 and is large enough to house 612 people. It's a little place you might have heard of: Guantanamo Bay. At present, roughly 250 prisoners are held at Gitmo. The vast majority have been charged with no crime. Some of them have been there for more than four years. The Bush administration has suggested that some of them will be held there essentially forever--for as long as the global war on terror continues.

Sadly, that is how we have memorialized the loss of innocent life on 9/11. We built a prison where we defile the very precepts of justice and freedom that we claim to uphold.

Consider Oklahoma City, where the site of the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building is now home to a very moving tribute to the victims of that ugly crime. And the men responsible for those murders? They had trials. They faced juries of their peers. They were judged and sentenced. I may not agree with speedy execution of Tim McVeigh, but I applaud the fact that he went into a courtroom and was represented by a lawyer, who defended him against the charges made against him. That's how it's supposed to work in America. That's what makes America a good place to live.

Perhaps the first step to building a suitable memorial at Ground Zero is dismantling the one we've built in Cuba.

Turns out teen pregnancy is cool!

Did I miss the memo? I realize it's been ten years since I worked for Planned Parenthood as a sex educator, so it's possible I haven't kept up with all the latest stuff on that front, but when did it become okay for teenagers to get pregnant?

I don't have anything to say about Sarah Palin's parenting habits, because teenagers will do stupid shit no matter how responsible and loving their parents are. So for all I know, she's the best mother in the world. As for her daughter, she's probably a nice, decent girl. Even nice, decent teenagers do stupid shit.

What I want to talk about is the total two-faced attitude of religious conservatives in America.

Apparently, the official response to Sarah Palin's 17-year old's pregnancy is that it's "great" that she's keeping the baby and getting married. What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? Really? Srsly? It's "great" that she's pregnant? What the fuck kind of mixed messages does that send? Oh, right, the same mixed message that abstinence-only sex education programs send.

Palin, of course, supports abstinence-only sex education programs, but I'd like to make a radical suggestion. Let's stop bullshitting each other about this. If a 17-year old getting pregnant is so great, why bother with abstinence-only sex education? If pregnant teenagers getting married before they're out of high school is so fan-fucking-tabulous, let's start promoting fornication-only sex education. Never mind condoms and STD slide shows, let's just show the kids a couple of pornos and turn the lights down low. Hell, fucking's fun, they should do it while they're young. Hey...that even rhymes. That could be the motto for our new sex education program.

All I want to know is what McCain/Palin's platform has to say about aid to women and children in poverty. Because if we're going to start encouraging teenagers to get knocked up, we need to be prepared to feed and clothe all those unplanned little bastards. Pro-life, pro-formula-and-diapers, pro-food-stamps, pro-welfare.

A brush with our nation's crumbling infrastructure

At least it wasn't a fatal encounter, as it was for the people in Minneapolis who didn't survive to tell their crumbling infrastructure story.

It rained all night and I went to bed hoping the basement wouldn't take on too much water. Nights like that I have serious buyer's remorse. Remorse that I didn't buy a boat. At about 1:30, I woke to the sound of my neighborhood transformer blowing. It's in my backyard, so it's hard to sleep through the conflagration that occurs almost any time it rains for more than hour, any time it snows more than an inch, any time the wind blows much, and sometimes when an errant sparrow flies by and farts in its general direction. It is a very sensitive little transformer.

So, after the transformer blew, I lay in bed, trying to convince the cats that despite the explosion and the bright lights and the cascading sparks, that we were not in fact about to be killed by terrorists. The electricity was out, naturally, so I also lay awake wondering how badly the basement would flood if it kept raining and the sump pumps didn't have power.

I had just started to drift back to sleep when I heard a man say, "Is that a toilet?"

Why, yes, yes it is.

Because the transformer is mounted on a pole in my backyard, when it goes kablooey, the city workers tromp through my yard to investigate. Often they wait until morning, and sometimes I actually sleep through their work, but not that night. It would have been hard to sleep through four massive trucks parked in front of my house and one in my drive and about seven guys in full-body rain slickers with halogen headlamps arguing outside my bedroom window. It was like something out of E.T.

Then the city workers began to chainsaw through the shrubs growing around the electrical pole. At 2:30 in the morning. This went on intermittently for another hour, and then two guys crawled up the pole, and the guys on the ground began hoisting up a variety of tools and equipment to them. Now, just for the record, take a good look at the pole:

See how it leans ever so dramatically off to the side. Nice, huh?

Then the city workers began to drill and hammer and generally run whatever noisy power tools they could get their hands on. All of that, however, wasn't the best part. The highlight was this snippet of conversation I overheard:

Pole Guy #1: I don't know where you think I'm going to bolt that L-bracket. About half this pole is rotten.
Pole Guy #2: It shoulda been replaced ten years ago.
Ground Guy #1: Yeah, well, considering there's no money for maintenance, it's probably not going to be replaced for another ten years.
Ground Guy #2 (laughing): or until it falls down.

In my backyard. Until it falls down in my backyard. In the middle of some wretched winter ice storm and takes out the electricity of three city blocks. So, that's where we are. Not just big, headline-worthy catastrophes caused by a failure to perform maintenance on bridges, but a nationwide, localized failure to perform every kind of maintenance on our infrastructure.

When I was in college, I had a friend who had grown up in Lebanon and we were once stuck together during an ice storm in Manhattan, Kansas. The power was out for five days and we were miserably cold and hungry. On about the third day, Nadal said, "You know what makes America great?" Don't laugh, but at the time--1992--I answered: "Our Bill of Rights?" (Little did I know...) Nadal said, "No, it's that even the poorest people in America can get running water and electricity 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Oh, sure, it's out now because of the storm, but it'll come back on and it'll stay on. We never had that in Lebanon."

At the time, I thought she was being funny, but sometimes I look back and agree with her. One of the things that made us great was the notion that we were all in it together and we were all going to sink or swim together. We were all going have lights and water and good roads and decent schools. I don't feel like that's a sure thing anymore. I feel like as the infrastructure falls apart, as we keep giving tax breaks to corporations and rich people, as we keep wasting money of wars and military technology, we may enter a new era when the electricity and the water and the good roads aren't a given.

The answer is fairly simple: it's the FUCKING TAXES, STUPID. If we don't tax the citizens appropriately, we don't have enough money in the coffers to pay for repairs to things like bridges and electrical grids. That's exactly what we've been failing to do for years. After the initial outlay to build all the metropolitan water systems and a national electric grid and an interstate system, we just stopped allocating tax money to maintain it. Like buying a million dollar house and then refusing to repair the rain gutters until your whole roof falls apart.

What do the anti-tax people think? That the Infrastructure Fairy is just going to pop by and drop off a few billion dollars? Or do they think that all this free market enterprise is going to magically produce companies that will dip into their profits to maintain infrastructure, out of the goodness of their hearts?

And that, my people, is part of the conversation I'll be having with my city commissioner just as soon as he calls me back.

Excuse me, that's my last nerve and you're standing on it

(Okay, okay, so it's been ages since I posted on Blogger. Just, you know, go visit my Vox blog.)

So, after months of inconveniences and mysterious dust and bobcats ripping holes in the wall below my window and a hammer drill running all the time that sounds distantly like a giant calico trying to hork up a hairball, I've finally had my first real temper tantrum. I came in this morning to find a professor in a tizzy, because he'd planned to show a movie in the conference room, but there were maintenance guys in there, who told him they'd been sent to remove the digital projector.

Now, I am the only person who would order such a thing. The only person who would initiate the work request paperwork for such a thing, so I knew something was wrong. When I went down to the conference room, I found two maintenance guys walking around in boots on my newly refinished antique conference table. They had just finished removing the projector from the ceiling. When I asked them what the hell they were doing, they said, "We got a work order to remove the projector."

From whom? The maintenance guys clearly recognized the danger I represented, because they were already apologizing as they fished out their work order papers. In full blown menstrual fury mode, with flames licking off the top of my head, I snatched it out of their hands. Scrawled there was the vague notation: "Remove dig. proj. from seminar room. Scribble Scribble Something. 2nd Floor." Signed: the Director of Construction at Design and Construction Management.

You know I got that fucker on conference call fast and proceeded to tear him a new one. His excuse for the vague instructions: he didn't know the room number of the seminar room where the projector needed to be removed, but it was on the 2nd Floor somewhere. The maintenance guys were quick to say: "This is the only seminar room with a projector on the 2nd Floor, so we assumed you meant this one."

The Director of DCM mumbled to himself for a while and said, "Well, that should be right, because it has to be removed prior to the duct work."

"The duct work in JANUARY?" I said. "Are you sure you don't mean the seminar room ON THIRD FLOOR, where they're doing duct work in AUGUST?"

Dead silence, then a tiny little voice said, "Oh, uh, right. I guess that's right."

Then I said a few things that may come back to bite me in the ass, if this guy is brave enough to tell anyone his mistake. Things like: "Dumbass. Moron. How can you be in charge of this project when you don't even know which floor they're working on? I'm just a lowly secretary and I can keep that straight."

So now I'm stewing around waiting for the maintenance guys to replace the projector, speakers and ceiling tiles, while walking around on my conference table in their socks.

Close enough for government work, I guess.

Documenting Tragedy

On viewing the first film footage of it, no one could agree on where the fire started. The film crew with the best view had stopped filming and didn't restart until the back quarter of the zeppelin was engulfed in flames. No one ever knows when tragedy is about to strike, and often no one is watching when it does. As W.H. Auden observed:

... even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

So Icarus falls to his death while the farmer plows, and in the midst of the maelstrom of fire that consumes the Hindenburg in less than 30 seconds, startled cameramen race to capture the last few frames of death and destruction.

It's the blessing of modern technology. That we have the pleasure and horror of gasping along with Herbert Morrison's live radio broadcast: "Oh, the humanity!" To live that moment over and over. Taste tragedy like live theater gone wrong, where the stage knife has no spring and Romeo gouts real blood, not ketchup.

The curse of that technology is that it leaves us breathless, cell phone cameras in hand, waiting for tragedy. Waiting, not to live, but to document.