Category: Current Events

Salon.com | Why Dean and Franken are so hot right now

A great look at the return of the left. Where ya been you slackers?

On Monday, the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney reported that the White House and the Democratic Party have both concluded that because of the increasingly polarized and evenly divided political landscape, the 2004 race will focus mainly on turning out the parties’ core voters, rather than appealing to swing voters and independents. This means a campaign unlike 2000, with its muted, centrist tones, but one that delivers red meat to the parties’ respective bases. And what is the temper of the Democratic Party base? They loathe Bush and everything he stands for — he’s become a lightning rod for dark and febrile passions in the same way Bill Clinton was (and is) for the GOP core. It’s not just his harebrained ideological nostrums for how to reorder America and the world. They hate him and it’s personal. They hate his frat-boy smirk, his phony fly-boy act, his cringe-inducing mangling of the language, his born-again sanctimony, even his Texas twang and his godforsaken, tumbleweed ranch where only someone as fence-post-dumb as W. would hole up in August. They hate him like their lives depended on it, lives that will certainly be unbearable if this bumbling extremist is reelected (or elected) in 2004.

We’re All Connected?

…flash mobs, in their apparent pointlessness, have steered so conspicuously away from being exploited by either commercial interests or the professional theorizers who will inevitably organize highfalutin conferences to swap career-advancing pronouncements on the trend; for now, mobbists serve the cause of no cause.

I remember an old Larry Niven story (which I have upstairs and am too lazy to run up and grab the title of, but it’s in his “Tales of Known Space” collection) about a free park where people can do anything they want as long as nothing violent happens. The power goes out and suddenly anarchy truly reigns. One group (or maybe it is a single person) is walking around with a blank sign. Maybe he stands for nothing at all. Maybe he’s letting his sign stand in for whatever cause you want to imagine he supports. Maybe he’s making a statement about making statements. At any rate, when the power goes out, he gets targeted by the angry mob that inevitiably forms. People were angered by him more than by anyone holding an actual sign with an opinion on it. The message I took away from that was that people hate ambiguity. Black and white thinking is not just popular because it’s easier than dealing with the messy reality of gray zones, it’s also comforting. (I’ll set aside my theory about fundamentalists (of any kind) being weak minded and that it’s only the stronger minds, the ones more willing to accept that there are few absolutes, the ones brave enough to live in a world in which there are more questions and answers who are the truly intelligent people.)

So, for now, I applaud the pointlessness of the mobs. But I also will welcome pointed mobs too. Say, on election day 2004? Wouldn’t it be great if far more people suddenly show up to vote for, say, someone who is not Bush, than anyone predicts or expects?