Remind you of anything?

Okay, so President Bush authorized spying on American citizens without warrants or any oversight. The program expanded to include domestic political opponents, peace groups, the ACLU, etc. When this was finally exposed, the President gets up and gives a press conference that can be paraphrased basically as "Iraq, Iraq, Terror, 9/11, Al Queda, Terrorists, 9/11, fuck you all, I do what I want, terror, 9/11, al queda, 9/11. Thank you and good night."

(And the New York Times knew about this over a year ago, back before the election, and didn't report it. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, New York Times?)

Now THAT'S political theater

"“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who has led a bipartisan filibuster against a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, quoted Patrick Henry, an icon of the American Revolution, in response: “Give me liberty or give me death.”"


Y'know, in some ways the most disheartening thing about politics for me is how ridiculous it's gotten. Nobody takes it seriously. It's just sort of there. Maybe that's how it's always been, at the time. But politics should be interesting. It should be something people care about. It's arguing about how we want to live our lives and what we value as a civilization. There's a lot of fundamentally important things going on, along with a great many ridiculous things.

But most of it's so small and petty now. There's rarely and stands for great sweeping ideals. Who's going to quote any of the speeches or debates of the politicians these days a hundred years from now? Probably nobody. Maybe the problem is overuse. All the grand sweeping meaningful words, like Freedom, get overused until they become meaningless cliches, just obligatory punctuation for speeches. When George Bush talks about "freedom", it's just noise. And so all the ideals that are supposed to be there get dragged down by the people who try and hijack the ideals for their own petty purposes. People who just make the right sounds, with all the meaning of an empty formality. "My fellow Americans" isn't predicated on actual fellow-feeling, it's just How You Start a Speech. Any speech gets chopped up and dissected in minutes with the twenty four hour news cycle. Is it possible for things to seem grand and epic when we can see all the details of how they're done? I think so, but you need somebody who's good at it and actually cares, not just somebody who's running through the motions.

Which is part of what I think this essay "Your politics are boring as fuck" is saying. Though it's aimed at a the kind of "radicals" whose idea of radical action is to hang around in the student lounge and quote books they've only half-read.


1. Make politics relevant to our everyday experience of life again. The farther away the object of our political concern, the less it will mean to us, the less real and pressing it will seem to us, and the more wearisome politics will be.

2. All political activity must be joyous and exciting in itself. You cannot escape from dreariness with more dreariness.

3. To accomplish those first two steps, entirely new political approaches and methods must be created. The old ones are outdated, outmoded. Perhaps they were NEVER any good, and that's why our world is the way it is now.

4. Enjoy yourselves! There is never any excuse for being bored... or boring!

One of those things

She was "that other girl." That's how people always referred to her. They weren't being mean, they just couldn't remember her name. She wasn't generic, or shy, or even particularly quiet, she just never stuck in anyone's memory. She could have lived in a place for years, and no one would notice when she left. It wasn't just she was overshadowed by her friends, who were the kind of people who could inspire reverent legends in just a single day. It was just one of those things

Kate had to deal with it. Nobody'd have noticed if she bitched, anyway.

Apropos of nothing

Okay, so I sat down and read the archives of Anywhere But Here today, and added it to my bookmarks list. But I noticed something. There's lots about jazz in ABH, and then there's Gossamer Commons, which hasn't had much of anything about jazz at all lately, but it's still there, and there's of course Questionable Content, which isn't about jazz, but has lots of stuff about indie rock. And there's plenty of other examples, just not once I can think of at 11:30. So now I have all this music I've found out about from webcomics and feel like I should listen to. Stuff I hadn't even heard of before. So I just have this to say.

So, Webcomics? Dudes, stop trying to make me into a music snob, kthx.

(crossposted to snarkoleptics.)