Dave Writes Things

I wrote this in like ‘07 and somehow the Internet has NOT retained a copy of it. Fucking Internet. Anyway, here it is. DO YOUR JOB INTERNET.

Central Park. Friday afternoon. Late June. New book, uncracked spine. Sun shining down. Majestic rock on which to sit. Cool summer breeze ruffling my gorgeous, gorgeous hair.
 
And then… there it is! That sound!
 
Listen closely— can you hear it? You can’t miss it. Well, just pipe the hell down and focus, OK? This is important. Turn your ear to the East. Or for that matter to the West or North or actually just anywhere. Pick a direction. Yes! There it is! No, not the soft rustle of the summer wind through the leaves (or my hair). Not the joyous cries of children at eager play. Not even the omnipresent white noise of passing traffic. I’m talking about that other sound. That sound like… like… like somebody squeezing the life from an enraged cat. That sound like a preschool choir covering Bjork. That sound like the mating call of some sick, misbegotten offspring of a clarinet and Satan.
 
I’m talking about: that saxophone.

And the reason you can hear it? It is EVERYWHERE.

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originally posted at PoliSub 

I realize this is a little bit outside my normal purview, but the news that week was just all so effing bleak I didn’t feel like being funny about it. So.

New ball ok cold outside. Outside and run at ball to get ball. See squirrel. Bark at squirrel. Run and bark. Inside bed and warm. Quiet and bed and no running. One loud sky. Bark at loud and scared. Food a lot but want more some. Snuggle warm. Warm outside and sun. Get ball. See dog. Friend? Good friend. Other big dog bad. Not friend but some friends and chase and bark. Take ball and run. New smell by tree and find stick. Bite stick. Hide stick. Remember stick? Smell friend and run but no. Find food. Go away and stop and food to run. Sky flash loud banging and bad. Hide from loud bad. Get treat and snuggles. Hot and run and pant and friends and squirrels to barking. Find stick and take it. Friend? Friend? Leaves and running. Smell new smell and find it. Eat it but bad. Bad smell ok and run more and roll and stuff. Loud wind and barking inside but ok. Find food and get food and snuggles. Outside cold. Old ball and running get ball. Get treats and good dog. Good dog and good. Friend?

Nobody has ever said that I’m a pragmatic thinker. In fact, plenty of people have told me just the opposite: that I’m a “Utopianist”, that I’m unrealistic, that “other people don’t think like [me].” Somebody on the Internet once said to me “your pie is stuck so very, very firmly in the sky.”

And they’re right! I do not tend to think (purely) pragmatically; in fact, I often think that the notion of pragmatism is a crutch people use to avoid acting ethically. Whatever. People of good conscience can disagree about this, and it’s a discussion for another time. Preferably over beer.

Because today: I’m actually going to tell you pragmatically why — if you align closer to the Democratic party than the Republican party but still think the Democrats are insufficient — I think it’s a good idea for you to vote for Jill Stein for President.

If you live in California, Illinois, or New York.

Nate Silver gives those three states a 100% chance of going to Obama. Not 99%. 100%. Polls can be wrong, but Silver is not known for his inaccuracy (and even if he is off, he’s not wrong by 51%). Barack Obama is GOING to win California, Illinois, and New York.

The Electoral College sucks. All of our votes don’t count equally. That’s a raw deal, but in this case it might be a little bit of a blessing in disguise for those of us disaffected (or, you know, enraged) by the Obama administration, and rightfully terrified of the prospect of a Romney administration; we are stripped of the need to do the moral calculus necessary to see if we should suck it up and vote for Obama (despite the corporatism and the drone wars and the NDAA &c. &c.) or vote our conscience and risk not doing everything possible to stop Romney (worse than Obama in all the areas in which they differ) from getting elected.

(I mean, recommend doing this moral calculus anyway. It’s good homework!)

Go look at Jill Stein’s platform. It’s awesome, right? It’s the kind of platform I (and so many of the people I know!) want to vote for. But it’s one we don’t often vote for because we choose instead to vote pragmatically.

In this election, if you’re a resident of one of those three states, your pragmatic vote and your pie in the sky vote get to be the same. You can vote your conscience AND show support for a more inclusive vision of our nation. You can not do anything to increase the chances of a Romney victory AND show the Democrats that there are people out there wanting to move away from the broken Democratic platform.

The moral calculus in the other 47 states makes it harder. I get that. But really, if you live in California, Illinois, or New York the choice is clear. And pragmatic! Hooray!

Jill Stein. November 6th. Go to.

I will now go back to my vision of the world in which kindness and understanding rule the day. See you there.

Slaney asked me if I would write something for her college students on the anniversary of September 11th. So… here it is. Please know it is aimed at people who were seven or eight years old in 2001. And this wouldn’t be important if we weren’t friends, but we are, so please note that I think this is the thing I’ve had the most difficulty writing maybe ever, so… you know. Anyway.

*****

Let’s say you’re babysitting your two little cousins. One of them hits the other one. So you say “Jaden! What are you doing?” and Jaden’s like “Bella took my toy!” and so you’re like “It doesn’t matter, you don’t hit people, ever. You’re on timeout!” and then Jaden’s like “Aw, phooey!” or whatever it is the kids are saying these days.

By asking Jaden what he was doing, are you excusing his action? By trying to get to the root cause of the hitting are you taking Jaden’s side? Are you a Jaden apologist? Why do you hate Bella? Are you saying that every boy has a right to hit his sister and maybe he was even justified in doing so?

*****

I can’t prove it, but I’ll argue that the number of Actual Evil People in the world is vanishingly small. Part of the reason this is (likely to be) the case is that there is (likely) no such thing as Actual Evil. Listen, I’m as close to agreeing with Platonic philosophy as I can be without literally sitting in a cave with my back to the fire, and even I don’t think there’s Actual Evil in the universe.

Osama Bin Laden was a mass-murdering fuckhead, and I’m personally glad that he isn’t alive anymore. But he wasn’t evil in the way that, like, Skeletor is evil. He wasn’t steepling his fingers and cackling just because. He didn’t wake up one Tuesday and go “Hey, you know what would be fun?”

He killed a lot of people. But it wasn’t Just Evil and it wasn’t for kicks; he did it for a reason, and figuring out what that reason is is not excusing what he did, because what he did has no excuse, because killing people who don’t want to be killed is Wrong (I warned you about the Platonism thing). And for more than a decade now, I have been told by people in power that trying to figure out the reasons why he attacked makes me a terrorist sympathizer. People who say this are moral fucking simpletons, and this is coming from a Platonist, so you know it’s pretty extreme.

Look: imagine if Saudi Arabia had military bases all over the USA. Or imagine if Saudi Arabia were here dictating how we dig up our oil. That would be weird, and that would be upsetting, and so I imagine it is just as weird and upsetting in reverse for people in Saudi Arabia. So bin Laden saw military incursion into his home country. He decided to attack the Pentagon.

And the USA, with aid and diplomacy and the bully pulpit that comes with the loudest microphones, supports Israel in pretty much everything they do. This may have upset bin Laden at least partially because Israel has done some pretty heinous shit to Muslims. Which is not to say that he wasn’t an anti-Semitic shithead, because he was, but it’s not like when he said that Israel has committed atrocities against Muslims that he was totally wrong (again, please please please remember: it’s not OK for Jaden to hit Bella, even if she really did take his toy. Plainly: please don’t run airplanes into buildings. Ever. For any reason. Thanks.), and the US government has remained supportive even in light of those atrocities. He decided to attack the Capitol, or the White House, and it didn’t work, because the people on that flight traded their lives for the lives of others. (In the history of the world, there has rarely been such a clear act of heroism; we should learn their names, we should build of them statues.)

And bin Laden thought that the USA’s trade policies have disenfranchised and put into de facto slavery a significant portion of the world’s population, which is not only not wrong but completely factually accurate. He decided to attack the World Trade Center.

He turned commercial airliners into missiles and sent them at the centers of our military, diplomatic, and economic might. He had a reason.

But no, he does not get my sympathy. I’m glad he’s dead. Fuck that guy.

*****

You put Jaden into timeout because it’s not OK to hit your sister. But it’s also not nice to take somebody else’s toy without asking, so you put Bella into timeout too. She’s going to think this is unfair; aren’t you blaming her for getting hit?

But you’re not. You just want her to be a better person, regardless of who hits her.

Right?

*****

I know how hard this can be to think about. Or to talk about. Or even to think about talking about. It’s all so complicated and fraught: a well of sadness and anger and I can never touch the bottom no matter how deep I dive.

It’s a Tuesday in September. There has never been a lovelier morning, clear and beautiful and perfect. Squint skyward and listen: you can hardly believe how lucky you are to be alive.

originally posted at PoliSub

I was at the bar the other night sitting next to a college admissions officer. Because I am me I was like “OH WORD? What are the essay prompts?” One of them was something like “Tell us what you hope to experience in college” and because I am me I switched from the banana bread beer I was drinking to the one that tastes like cherries and said GIVE ME TEN MINUTES. We set a timer. And this is what I wrote.

originally posted at PoliSub.

I know it’s my job as a writer to explain to you why it’s so bad, but it’s literally beyond words. It’s something out of fucking Lovecraft. It feels like a viral ad for the voluntary human extinction movement. It’s aired by the Walt Disney Corporation, which spent your entire childhood telling you how magical and romantic life was going to be, and is now gamely attempting to obliterate your grown-up soul.

originally posted at PoliSub. also, full disclosure, it’s really dumb.

You know what we don’t talk about enough here at PoliSub? FOOD POLICY. 

originally posted at PoliSub

Hi. You probably don’t know me. Let me tell you about myself: I’m 5’11”. I really enjoy frozen yogurt. I sometimes go outside in support of an inclusive economy and then your police officers threaten to arrest me for crimes as eeeeeeeevil as “dancing in the street” and “having a stack of books for people to borrow” and “noticing how fucked up everything is and actually caring about it.” Release the hounds, right? So far, I’ve managed to avoid getting clubbed, punched, sprayed with toxic chemicals, having my head shoved against anything, being handcuffed for no reason, being left on the street seizing without anybody untying me, beaten bloody, or any of that really awesome stuff you guys are getting to be sooooo good at. 

Hey speaking of “blank” and “fine”, you know Lloyd Blankfein? (listen, I’m a professional writer; these are the kind of segues you gotta watch out for). He’s the guy who runs Goldman Sachs. And since you and I are both fully in support of arresting people, I was wondering: would you please go arrest that miserable asshole? You know that he illegally accepted naked short sales in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, enriching himself and his company while the world economy was crumbling? You know that he underwrote bonds and then went and illegally encouraged other customers to bet against those bonds? You know that he helped Greece hide the true nature of its debt in order to keep making money from them, helping the European economy and therefore likely the world economy to the precipice of collapse? You know that he “failed to disclose to investors vital information about the CDO, known as ABACUS 2007-AC1, particularly the role that hedge fund Paulson & Co. Inc. played in the portfolio selection process and the fact that Paulson had taken a short position against the CDO?” OH MAN that sounds complicated. I bet it must have been really bad, right? But what are we supposed to do about it if we don’t even know what it MEANS?

Idea 1: I will convince Lloyd Blankfein to come down and dance in the street. We all know how illegal THAT is. I’ll see him on the sidewalk sometime (we run into each other a lot, because we eat at the same restaurants (Taco Bell)) and be like HEY LLOYD. I FORGET WHAT THE MACARENA LOOKS LIKE. HELP A BUDDY OUT? And then BOOM you can send in the commandos with their machine guns and their Star Wars helmets to lock him up. And then when people are like “You can’t arrest him! He’s a rich white man!” you can be like “HE WAS DANCING IN THE STREET. WHAT ABOUT THIS DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?” and then you can arrest all of THOSE people too for having the temerity to question you!

I’ve already chosen my reward. Keep arresting us. But just tell me how many more arrests it’s going to take before you start to actually do your goddamn job.

This was originally performed at an actual wedding, but I just want to clarify that I was asked to do so. Karina and Taylor are wonderful and brave and I am honored to have been given this opportunity, and I promise not to do this at your wedding unless you also ask me to.

I posit the following: declaring your undying love for another person by offering to take part in a Bronze Age economic exchange is pretty weird. Right? I mean, that’s cool. Weird is good.

Of course, marriage is no longer explicitly a financial arrangement. Nor is it a business agreement intended to solidify family alliances or obtain lands. It is not a sworn contract meant to assure paternity. It is now, ideally, an act between two people who share romantic love. And in a vacuum, that’d be totally fine.

But despite how much the real world sucks, we do not live in a vacuum. Context, in a grand irony, always matters. It is impossible to separate this marriage we are here to celebrate today from the institution. They are, unfortunately, lawfully wedded.

I celebrate Taylor. I celebrate Karina. I celebrate [Taylor&Karina]. But this wedding also has a third party involved, and it ain’t the Holy Spirit. It is the State. After today, Karina and Taylor will be a legally recognized union, and with that recognition the State will provide a package of benefits and rights which should be inalienable, and offered to all people regardless of relationship status. These rights include but are not limited to joint holding of property as tenants, lower tax rates, access to joint healthcare, and, according to the Government Accountability Office, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of federal benefits, rights, and privileges. You may think it’s a big deal to update your relationship status on Facebook. When you update it with the State, you suddenly have more rights. You are more of a person now.

This should not be.

Applying to the State to endorse a relationship is ceding to the State the power to define, condone, and judge the validity of relationships. This is a power they do not have, and it is one I am distinctly unwilling to allow them.

I have many friends who were kind of with me. Who said they would never get married in a state that didn’t allow it for all couples. Now in 43 out of 50 states, as we know, these are rights provided only to pairs of people claiming to be on opposite sides of a gender binary. In 7 of the 50, including ours, they are accorded more broadly: now it’s pairs of people of any (well, they would say “either”) gender. Oh, not the federal benefits of course. Those are only available to normal — sorry “heterosexual” — pairs. Gay marriage does not fix this.

In fact as Michael Warner writes, “the unmodulated demand for same sex marriage fails to challenge the bundling of privileges that have no necessary connection to one another or to marriage. Indeed, if successful, the demand for same sex marriage would leave that bundling further entrenched in law. Squeezing gay couples into the legal sorting machine would only confirm the relevance of spousal status and would leave unmarried queers [which here can be taken to mean “everyone else”] looking more deviant before a legal system that could claim broader legitimacy.”

And it’s not just the law. Marriage should not be a goal; it should be a choice. One choice available out of many recognized as valid by society. But it isn’t. Not yet. Right now, as far as society is concerned, you are married or you are not yet married. And as that notion becomes further codified our freedom to make other choices steadily erodes.

Of course there is no problem with this particular marriage we are here tonight to celebrate. In isolation, it’s not even an issue. But, as David Mitchell asks, “what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” I believe that this is not a neutral event; that it is a small notch backward from a just society available and open to everyone.

And if we here in this room condone and celebrate this, what hope is there for a society open, with full rights and full social recognition, to single people, unmarried couples, or trios, or groups, or communes, or any other choice that we should in a free society have available to us? We gay, straight, bi- pan- and omni-sexual; monogamous and polyamorous and asexual; we Maddow watchers, Nader voters, and Warren supporters; we wacky East Coast artistic liberal elite so hell-bent on waging a culture war to destroy traditional values: if we gather together to celebrate the power of the State and of society to dictate and regulate acceptable personal relationships, what hope do we have?

I am so, so happy, Karina and Taylor, that you have found love with each other.

I hope that your love is true, strong, and abiding. That you build together the sort of intimacy that is only cultivated with care over long years. That you improve each other’s lives every single day.

Karina and Taylor, I hope will all of my heart that you are together forever.

And I hope with all of my heart that you get divorced tomorrow.

Thank you.

(originally posted at PoliSub)

OH HAI RUSH

Sorry about all this kerfuffle. I realize you must be pretty confused about what happened, so I wanted to offer some friendly advice to help you avoid things like this in the future. Here we go:

Originally posted at Political Subversities

Last Wednesday, occasional GOP frontrunner and completely non-racist hunting range owner Rick Perry exploded the Internet and his chances at the Presidency by forgetting what he was going to say. “The third agency of government I would do away with,” he said during a debate, after being asked a question that had nothing at all to do with which government agencies he would do away with, “The Education, the Commerce. And let’s see. I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Oops.”

“LOL,” cried the world as one, “What a n00b! No President can ever say “Oops” ‘cause then something something overwhelming terrorist victory.” (I’m paraphrasing.) The point is that, like Howard Dean’s candidacy being undone because he went “Ah!” that one time, Perry’s is now undone because he forgot what he was going to say and then used a word intended to show that he realized he had forgotten what he was going to say.

Rad. Good. He SHOULD be sunk. Not because he said “Oops”. But because remember what he said just before he said “Oops”? I do! I’ll give you a hint: he said he wanted to eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce.

Now, it’s pretty clear that Perry has never been the beneficiary of at least one of these services (spoiler alert: Education), but that’s no reason to unilaterally wipe it off the slate, right? Especially now. Because here’s what those Departments are in charge of:

Commerce: Creating sustainable infrastructure, and promoting job creation and economic growth, all of which, according to the latest Census data, are “fucked North, center, and sideways into an egregiously cocked hat.”

Education: EDUCATING CHILDREN OMG WHAT IS WRONG WITH RICK PERRY?

Srsly, what was the third one? Justice, because why bother? Housing and Urban Development, because if you don’t have a roof you’re probably a poor and therefore expendable? Health and Human Services, because just don’t get sick, idiot?

Rick Perry very, very, very, very (word count considerations stop me from going on) obviously shouldn’t be President. Not because he forgot what he was going to say. But because… um… uh… let’s see… I can’t think of the reason. Oops.

Haha, just kidding, it’s because he’s a moron.