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I propose another year of middle school for kids. I propose that kids go to school 13 years before they graduate.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have homework in elementary school. Nothing except the odd project or reading. Today, second graders come home with two or three pages of homework. They’re putting in overtime, and that’s just not right.

If we added another year to middle school, the younger kids could concentrate on the basics of learning. The middle schoolers could regain study halls, so they wouldn’t have to take as much work home. The quality of children’s lives would go up.

We live longer now. We can afford for childhood to last a little longer. Graduating high school as a 19 year-old could be the last good thing we do for children against their wishes. It would be the last night of having to go to bed at 9:30, or being forced to eat vegetables.

They’ll thank us when they get older.

I live in a very safe neighborhood. Nobody leaves their backyard lights on at night.

I think I can make a case that the safety of a neighborhood varies inversely with the number of houses that leave their backyard lights on at night. I think it’s reasonable to believe that if a man’s house has been burgled, he’s apt to want his backyard lit up. It stands to reason. I would. Just give me this one.

I think, because you allowed that as a given, that nobody’s house in eyesight of mine has been burgled anytime recently. And I can see if a light were shining in eight backyards next to mine. Nine out of nine houses that I can observe from my backyard have not been burgled.

The only backyard that’s ever lit up (it’s not now) is the vacant house’s directly across from mine. And I can find it in my heart to believe that that is a kindness the owners are bestowing on their neighbors, for safety’s sake.

So there’s no crime here.

One reason, apart from being Long Beach, which hasn’t really changed much in twenty five years, is that this particular neighborhood has only one entrance. Bad guys don’t like that. So this neighborhood doesn’t cater to criminals. Green Acres doesn’t either, maybe less so. That neighborhood is a confusing warren unless you know it.

On a larger scale, though, when you get down to it, there aren’t that many bad guys. We live in a society of few bad guys. I base that statement on my assumption that bad guys have to be related to good guys, and I can count on two fingers the number of relatives I have that have been in trouble as adults. I have a lot of relatives, most of whom I don’t see except at funerals, but even so.

So there aren’t that many bad guys. If you put them all together, the whole lot of them, they’d make a stadium or sixty’s full of people, true. But when you spread em out over the whole country, every little burg you’ve ever driven through, every enormous city, there’s not really that many of them.

Which is good; it means we don’t live in a Bladerunner world (here’s where the word “yet” would be, if I were in a less optimistic mood).

* which, if not the name of a towering novel by a dead Russian, should at least have been the name of a Fox Network docudrama, but it googled empty.$

$ “googled empty” also googled empty.

Bowing to popular pressure, I have decided to describe my performance art idea in the blog. Everyone I’ve described it to agrees that it surpasses all other performance art ideas they have ever encountered. Almost everyone. Okay, the only person I’ve described it to, Brian, immediately denounced it as the single worst thing he’d ever heard of, but I could tell he was only being brutally honest. Here it is:

1. 4 folding chairs, occupied by 4 people.
2. the folding chairs are placed in someone’s yard, right next to a 4-way intersection, facing it. Could be Brian’s house’s yard; let’s pretend it is so.
3. the performance has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.
4. the beginning is at 2 in the morning, when the 4 people drag the folding chairs to the corner of the yard facing the intersection. The chairs are in a row. The 4 people sit in the chairs, facing the intersection.
5. they don’t speak to each other.
6. any time a car comes to the intersection and leaves it, the people comment on the adequacy of the driver’s stop.
7. hours drag by.
8. the middle of the performance happens at 3 or 4 in the morning, when no car has been by for a long time.
9. it is permissible to comment on a pedestrian’s choice of dog breed if one walks by, but only if the comment is loud enough that the pedestrian hears it.
10. the end of the performance happens around 6 or so, just as day people begin to enliven the mind-numbingly boring event.
11. at the end, around 6, the people get up, fold the chairs, and go back inside the house, which we’ve already agreed for the purposes of this blog entry, is Brian’s.

Sliced bread, move over!

There are so many splendors in the world, but it’s not enough for most people.

In a way it’s sad, but in another way it’s offensive that most people feel the need to make shit up. The world isn’t wide enough or mysterious enough or awesome enough for them. Making shit up is a response, I suppose, to a desire to know more about what’s going on. People want to know what’s going on. But there’s so much going on already, that we know about, that maybe these people should just sit back, relax, and digest the information that’s already out there.

Because it’s a blizzard out there, in case they haven’t noticed. Shovel out from the stuff that’s already on the ground before praying for more, frchrissake.

I want a country that doesn’t tell its citizens not to talk about something. Our country and its government empower themselves to tell the citizens what is and what is not valid to discuss: These things you can hold an intelligent conversation about; these things we frown on.

I want a country in which it’s okay, legal, and not frowned upon to hold an intelligent conversation on anything. I think if that were true, all else would follow.

I was talking to my next-door neighbor yesterday, for three or four minutes. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. The subject happened to be the air travel industry. My neighbor said that he thought it might be a good idea to re-regulate the industry, for the sake of the nation’s economy. He said that, even though it reeked of socialism, it might be a good idea. Then his wife called him back inside.

My next-door neighbor thinks differently than I do. He is a chief navy petty officer, and a policeman, yet somehow he thinks he’s also a full participant in capitalism. And by saying that he thinks the airline industry should be re-regulated, he’s saying that there is some minimal right that a citizen has to rapid travel; that somehow a broken system of air travel will impede his rise to affluence.

My neighbor lives in a fantastic dreamworld, in which televised rags-to-riches anecdotal evidence is evidence. I think most people live in that world, where an honest worker can depend on one day retiring to his mansion and the commies only come out at night. It’s a fantastic world, yes it is.

The right to air travel doesn’t even register on me. What citizens should have a right to is free health-fucking-care, Junior, and the right to work for a living wage. Get those cleared up, and we’ll start talking about your right to jet to Gramma’s house on All Saints’ Day.

Also, I hate to break it to you, pal, but you’re never going to be the rich man of your dreams. You’re going to die an industrious worker who yearns to be the rich man of his dreams.

Industry should be rewarded. Someone who works harder than some other one should have access to more things. If the opportunity to have more things wasn’t available, fewer people would be industrious. I know that. I’m not for total redistribution of wealth.

But redistribution of wealth, to some degree, is a necessity, and already happens. That’s what progressive taxation is all about. Progressive taxation is why there are not riots in the streets. Listen up, y’all!

The current American system is not set up to see to it that each citizen’s basic necessities are taken care of. It’s set up to insure that the degree of misery experienced by the weak never rises to the point that they openly revolt. Ostensibly, our system is set up to insure that we each have a clear run at life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It says so right there in the owner’s manual. But they didn’t really mean everybody, even from the start. Don’t kid yourself.

That’s our current system. When you’ve got some people buying yachts to store their caviar on, and you’ve got some other people dying of poverty and addiction because they don’t have food or can’t get treatment, you’ve got a system that hasn’t quite found the wealth redistribution sweet spot.

It’s remarkable. What a profound crock of shit. That shit crocks profoundly.

Neighbor, you’ll never be rich enough so that, in a just system, you’d lose more value than you’d get back. Ain’t gonna happen. You have a terrifically misplaced sense of your own destiny. I’m surprised I have to tell you this. Get your ass to thinking.

A just redistribution of wealth has been done, or nearly so. Look at Scandinavia. When my neighbor looks at Scandinavia, he thinks about the tax burden. He thinks about how much harder it is to become rich there. News flash, Neighbor: you’re never going to be rich here, either.

Take a dollar, buy a lottery ticket, clutch it in your trembling hand, and dream your dreamy dreams. The rich thank you for your support.

A curmudgeon is one who does something for himself, and be damned the response of society.

A curmudgeon mows his lawn naked. He makes a roost out of netting and twine in the backyard to view the stars more easily, and leaves it up because it’s easier than taking it down. He pays for things in cash to avoid a paper trail. He farts in a crowded room and blames it on his neighbor. He farts alone and blames the dog.

A curmudgeon sees the inevitability of the global cyber awareness, and leaps into action. He asks a question of the professor in a crowded classroom even though the answer will delay the end of the class, for which the other students fervently pray. Fuck them; he paid money to be in that classroom! He will get his money’s worth!

A curmudgeon abides by his own rules. He may be gossiped about by his neighbors, but he doesn’t care; what could possibly be gained by caring what the neighbors think? If they have so much spare time in their lives that they can fritter it away by gossiping about their neighbors, they’re insane. A curmudgeon knows this. He takes it into account.

A successful curmudgeon’s only obligation to civilization is really an obligation to himself: the responsibility to avoid being jailed by that civilization for too many flagrant displays of curmudgeonhood. Because a jailed curmudgeon is an unsuccessful curmudgeon.

A successful curmudgeon acts to minimize the possibility of being jailed by minimizing his contacts with civilization. The easiest way to do that is to avoid living in suburbia. In the woods, it’s easy to be a curmudgeon because there are no witnesses; even the dullest curmudgeon is a successful curmudgeon in the woods.

In the city, it’s almost as easy to be successful, because the number of curmudgeons is so high that it’s practically impossible for sober society to take them all down.

It’s only in suburbia where witnesses have enough time to spare to efficiently persecute the curmudgeon, and therefore it’s in suburbia where the only successful curmudgeon is a wily curmudgeon. Paradoxically, since one of the hallmarks of curmudgeonhood is a lack of wile, the suburban curmudgeon is a rare beast indeed.

I’m not saying I’m a curmudgeon….yet. I just envy the hell out of them.

You either believe that consciousness can arise from silicon or it can’t. If you believe it, you must assume that it will happen at some point, maybe soon, given the exponential growth in connected processing power. If you believe it will happen, you have to allow for the possibility that it will happen while you’re alive. If it happens while you’re alive, it’s valid to assume that the consciousness will be able to use the meager processing power that is your very own internet-connected computer for its own obscure ends.

I’ve started turning off my computer every night with the rocker switch on the power strip. The universal global cyber overlord, when he arises, isn’t going to have unimpeded access to my computer, Jack!

I allow that it’s also slightly cheaper to turn off my computer at night, so to untutored eyes it may just look like I’m miserly. But the happy coincidence that the defense against the powers of eternal darkness also saves me several nickels a night should in no way detract from the point, which is that I’ve cast my lot with organisms. I’m very pro-organisms.

Please, don’t think of me as a hero; I’m just a common foot soldier, doing my small part to keep the wheels of titanic misery and infinite degradation from turning on the asphalt of humanity for just a few more years. I won’t always be here, though; and after I’m dead, in the paraphrased but immortal words of Bela Lugosi, as played in Ed Wood by the guy from Space 1999, I won’t give two fucks bout you people anymore. Get yourselves enslaved by cyber nazis, I won’t give a damn.

Grunt.

“police close curtain on nude performance”

Weird; the cnn link is broken. What’s the use of being a news site if your stories evaporate into the ether after a month or two? Anyway, I found the story partially quoted elsewhere, and here’re the first 3 paragraphs:

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — Police shut down a bar that was showing a successful musical revue featuring nudity because the business didn’t have an adult entertainment license.

The manager of The Armory bar in midtown Atlanta, Doug Youngblood, said police overreacted Saturday night. He said the show had been running since August and is theater — not adult entertainment.

The revue, “Naked Boys Singing,” has spent six years off-Broadway in New York and road show versions are playing in several cities. The gay-themed show, billed as celebrating “the splendors of male nudity in comedy, song and dance,” features six male actors who are in the buff for much of the performance.

Every city should have its own sodom, some miniature “anti-city” next door. Because sometimes, you want to visit the anti-city. Maybe I’d like to go out and grab some naked Shakespeare or Mapplethorpe some weekend. It’s possible. I don’t want to be in a place where it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t hurt anyone. People in Atlanta have to go to NYC to see something like that. That‘s crazy-talk, man. Atlanta is under martial law, even if it was imposed by the majority of citizens.

I know the group, supposedly, could have played in a venue in Atlanta that had an “adult entertainment” license, but they’re a theater group. They play in theaters.

The Atlanta fathers passed a law to keep naked people in specific areas. I’m all for keeping the naked people in specific areas, so that we can track their patterns and learn their habits. But when the law is applied to a play, a thing that stimulates thinking, to keep it out of the city, and those that enforce the law actually enforce the law, why, my mind blows.

People live in places like that. Frankly, I live in a place like that. Nude Shakespeare doesn’t come to these parts.

You’ve got to have access to the anti-city.

This is a fairly common experience that deserves a term all its own if it doesn’t already have one:

a person is exercising moderately; jogging, for example. A few minutes into it, he’s breathing heavily. He’s jogging perhaps a bit too fast for his overall fitness level, because every so often his medulla (or something) compels him to breathe in as deeply as he can. At the height of these very deep breaths, another part of his brain either rewards him or not for a successful, oxygen-rich, deep breath. That is, some of his deep breaths aren’t particularly satisfying, but some of them are.

That feeling of a satisfying deep breath during physical exercise I name “recapture.” If it already has a name I’ve never heard of it.

The name should refer only to the sense of satisfaction sometimes felt at the very deepest part of a deep breath. It doesn’t only happen during exercise, but it’s the easiest way to bring about the set of circumstances that leads to the feeling. For example, a deep, satisfying yawn contains the same sensation.

I’m pretty sure the feeling directly correlates with oxygen-satisfaction in the lungs, although I have no idea what the actual mechanism that drives the feeling might be.

“Recapture.” In the jogging example, if the jogger is really over-exerting himself, recapture becomes progressively more difficult, until (if he continues to over-exert himself) none of his deep breaths is satisfying. The only thing he can do then is to slow down until he can recapture, or keep doing what he’s doing until he passes out.

“Everybody started scattering, you know, there’s mayhem everywhere. And then a police officer came into the building, you know, came in professional with his gun raised, and then he proceeded to shoot the guy.”

This is a recent phenomenon. A hundred years ago, no one would’ve described the scene this way. A killer would never have proceeded to shoot the guy; he would’ve shot him.

Today people no longer know how to react to something that actually happens to them. They act like reporters, like they were somehow removed from the action, like they’re dispassionate observers from another planet. They just beamed in and beamed out.

Reporters are not balanced. They are not un-biased. The idea that a “balance” of fairness must be struck between a community and someone who preys on that community is appalling.

A “balanced” look at bigots or Hitler or napalm is so far away from real balance that it boggles the mind. Today, being a reporter means being required to substitute the word “nazi”for “that fucking soulless nazi,” reducing the outrage to a mechanical phenomenon, like a malfunctioning toaster oven.

Normal people ape this, and have for years. It comes from a lifetime of watching television, from seeing reporters report. It has fed on itself. People are no longer people; they’re eyewitnesses. No one ever appears to be directly affected by anything that happens. Things never really happen anymore, they proceed to happen.

Learned dispassion can be beneficial in some ways that are hard to knock: it’s an anesthetic for the masses. People simply don’t respond to horror in ways that might lead to further horror. They have subconsciously learned to turn away from spectacles and get on with the job of production. That’s useful, but it’s costly. People never learn how to live, they just learn how to exist.

The media inoculate people against responding in a normal manner to manifestations of evil, and it’s possible that this mechanism isn’t a dumb outcome of modern history. It’s possible that the mechanism was thoughtfully begun by some cabal of the powerful in order to produce the results it has produced. I’m just sayin. The result is certainly economically wonderful: dispassionate workers are productive workers.

In calmer times, it’s my belief that the world is too complex for any organization of humans to fathom it to the degree necessary to control it. It’s so complex that a group of humans or a government cannot manipulate its parts in any but the simplest of ways. But I also believe that won’t always be the case, because of technology.

Some day, maybe soon, powerful people will have at their disposal software and processors that can crunch enough numbers quickly enough that they will be able to control systems that have heretofore been uncontrollable. When it’s only necessary to push a button on a very expensive computer in order to profoundly guide events, a profound and secret compulsion to do so will be unavoidable. I don’t think it’s happened yet, but it’s possible.

Another aspect of this line of reasoning is that a very expensive computer engorged with subtle programming won’t die. Once it exists, it exists. That’s never been true before. All of history’s previous warlords and despots eventually died. Napolean died, Alexander the Great died, Hitler died. This thing won’t die, and it won’t need a Napolean to press its buttons; it’ll just need somebody who knows where the buttons are. Once it exists, there’s no reason for it to stop existing. That’s frightening.

Given for a moment that a cabal is responsible for the marvel of social engineering that is the Western media, I don’t think they planned on the response of non-Western people, people who are not veteran media consumers. Non-westerners can’t be anesthetized in the same way, if only because many of them are so dirt-poor that they can’t afford to consume enough media for the inoculation to have any effect.

I suppose the assumption was that since these people were dirt-poor and far away, they could never matter. That assumption has turned out to be wrong, of course. 911 is proof that they matter. And now that the Western world is being affected by these people, I’m afraid that our years and years of being inoculated by the media prevents our responding in any normal empathic way to the situation.

A normal response would be to come to the aid of these communities that are so completely fucked up that they produce mass-murderers, so that they won’t produce mass-murderers anymore. An appropriate cabalist response might be similar: to raise these people’s standard of living high enough so that the media could begin to soothe them, and make them as disconnected from reality as we are.

Neither of these things is happening. Instead, we’re killing them.

Imagine that there is a final Santa Claus, one that’s real: that each of us gets one miracle to do in his life.The idea is that everyone, from childhood, is physically able to do a real miracle—but they don’t know it. The idea is that grown-ups know about this Santa Claus; grown-ups older than you or I. At some point in the future, an elder will take each of us aside and, in a low voice, explain to us about our power.

The power isn’t comically enormous, otherwise the premise couldn’t be true because our elders, using their miracles, would’ve made the world a better place to live in. It’s a minor miracle, like changing time in small chunks, or making sure a meteor doesn’t hit someone you love it would’ve hit otherwise.

The thing I like about this premise is that it could really be the way of it. Our world need not be different in any way in order for it to be true.

To perform a miracle is big, of course, and over thousands of years it became obvious that young people frittered their miracles away on stupid things. Things like parting the clouds on a cloudy night to impress a girl. So it has evolved that it is a strict secret, strictly held. Someone who’s 35 can’t find this information on any computer in the net; it’s not there. None of us will find out until it’s time. It’s the last Santa Claus!

Wouldn’t it be nice if that really were the last Santa Claus? I yearn for that Santa.

I hope to be visited by the geezer police in the next day or two, and shortly after that this entry will be pulled. Wouldn’t that be great?

Attica! Attica!

Nice Guys, Inc

I think the Halfbakery is worth a look if you haven’t seen it. This one’s about paying people to be nice. It’s hard to tell whether it would be a good thing, or the last gasp of a cynical, dying culture. Still, we allow our government to spend money on things not nearly as, well… nice, so….why not?

Also, as a follow through to the whole metaphor thing, this is a valuable idea:

Bizarre Metaphors

“You don’t want to be caught measuring eagle droppings with toothpicks.” and

“Don’t go puttin’ fish’s arseholes in railway tunnels.”

Consider Anne Coulter. She’s obviously riding a magic conservative carpet to money and fame. Does she believe what she says? Things like “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” Does she believe things like that?

Fuck no. She’s the political analog of the World Wrestling Federation. She doesn’t have a sincere bone in her body. It’s all about money and fame.

the difference between professional wrestling and murder

There is a difference. The problem is that many people can no longer see it. They simply can’t distinguish between the two.

It’s a huge problem. Why? Because there are too many people in the United States who don’t have a fucking clue that the world wasn’t built expressly for their own entertainment, and other people are dying because of it.

That’s why.

NYT, Oct 4 2004:

Determined to win the post-debate spin war on Tuesday night, the Bush campaign called on its supporters to flood the news media with quick declarations that Vice President Dick Cheney had come out ahead. Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush’s campaign manager, delivered the request in an e-mail message to supporters early Tuesday morning.

“Immediately after the debate, visit online polls, chat rooms and discussion boards and make your voice heard,” he said in the note, sent to the six million supporters on the campaign’s e-mail list. “People’s perceptions are shaped as much by their conversations around the water cooler as by the debates themselves.”

Propaganda and Spin are Ignorance factors: mechanisms that act to depress an individual’s Intelligence Threshold. When a person’s Intelligence Threshold is low (either naturally or via the machinations of an I-factor) he can’t understand the problems facing his society. When he can’t understand society’s problems, he becomes worried and confused. At that point, he can be safely led toward a concept he can understand, like flag waving, like so:

My brain hurts. I like flags. Flag waving’s good; it makes me feel good. That guy running for office is also pro-flag waving; I’ll vote for him. Pizza!

Spin, when combined with other I-factors, like poverty and over-work, has finally become sophisticated enough to match or surpass many people’s ability to withstand it.

Conservatives think a majority of people no longer have the ability to withstand I-factor. It’s only going to get worse.

A Lesson to be Learned

So. Were the preceding 4 or 5 posts worth the payoff? Of course they were; I kept out of trouble and you got to rest your mouse-clicking finger. But beyond that, I think there’s a lesson here to be learned, viz:

“The love of a good metaphor is the love of discovering a hidden underlying structure.”

People love that shit. I know I do. The Masons make a hobby out of it.

Also, I learned a couple things about myself. One is that I like to use the construction “harshing my [blank].” It makes me laugh everytime I see it. Another is that, however painfully long it takes to explain a metaphor, in the end it’s worth it, if I can use the term “I-factor” afterwards.

Psychology, in some ways, is the retarded stepson in the Science family that’s let out of the downstairs closet only on birthdays. In other ways, it has matured to the point that it can be used in a profound and nefarious manner by the morally bankrupt. And inevitably, since it can be used against the forces of Niceness, it is used against the forces of Niceness.

Take, for instance, how the science of psychology impacts Lying.

I think we all, as humans, have a good grasp on what lying is, without having to study it as a phenomenon. But rigorously studying it (as a psychologist can) will yield facts and underlying processes that aren’t self-evident.

For example, there was a study conducted years ago (it was a new study back when I was a psych major) that showed that people were more willing to do something for a stranger if they were given a reason to. It didn’t matter what the reason was; “I need you to help me because I need some help” worked more often than only asking for help without providing a reason did.

That result was surprising. I wouldn’t have predicted it. In fact, I would’ve laughed at the researcher if he’d gone into the experiment predicting a vacuous reason was better at obtaining help than no reason at all.

The researchers in this example weren’t running the experiment to figure out how to become better liars. What they discovered did, though, help liars become better liars, if they were paying attention.

These kinds of experiments are run by psychologists all the time, and they glean information from them. Social psychologists are continuously revealing odd dynamics underpinning society that even the most experienced power-seekers couldn’t possibly have been aware of.

But power-seekers–politicians–damned-sure are interested now. They’re paying attention.

So, getting back to the point, I still have, in my Petri dish, a culture of Voters that has been infected by the Lie virus.

An infusion of Truth has been spread liberally throughout the medium, which has done a nice job of containing the virus up to now. But Miss Constance, the evil lab assistant, has come in overnight to surreptitiously add 2 cc of Spin to my culture.

I come in the next morning to find my specimen in danger of being destroyed by Lies! I leap into action, and sprinkle some Education Inoculant, some Intelligence Inoculant, and a little faerie dust on the dish. Tragically, they don’t take.

In a flash I remember that this particular batch culture is what we scientists call ’stupid.’ And I remember also that I’d already inoculated this culture with faerie dust, many times. More faerie dust wouldn’t be productive; there comes a point when more doesn’t add to a culture’s defenses, it just makes it worried and confused. I throw out the culture and return to ogling Miss Constance’s breasts.

Next post: summing up.

Republicans think that it’s no longer about the truth; it’s about intelligence. More specifically, they think it’s about lack of intelligence. They assume voters can be moved to a point where there voting decisions aren’t based on an informed reading of the issues, they’re based on a visceral reaction to emotional appeals. They assume that people can be moved across a line, beyond which form is the only thing that matters.

They assume that a majority of voters will thank them for handing them their asses back, provided the newly-packaged ass is wrapped with pretty ribbons. And they’re right.

It’s been a long time coming to this. Eisenhower didn’t think that, but Bush’s handlers do. Somewhere between them, something happened.

The body politic (and my sub-metaphor, the body politic’s ass) is under assault. Lies are like viruses, attacking the body, but there’s always been enough Penicillin (in the form of people who tell the truth) to go around to counteract this.

Yes, I know Penicillin doesn’t really affect viruses; you’re harshing my metaphor, and I’d advise you to settle down until the end of it, which is down here somewhere.

“Spin”

Let me first just get this out of the way: metaphor is powerful. When I learned the list of literary contrivances in junior high–your metaphors, your similes, your synechdoches, your metonymies, your litotes–I didn’t expect that any of them would have any use beyond English class.

I was wrong. They’re all great. Except for synechdoches, which are right out. I googled the definition not a minute and a half ago, and it’s already fallen out of my head.

Getting back to metaphor, though. There is a case to be made that everything is a metaphor. Everything. My body is a metaphor for society. Society is a metaphor for one way the universe might behave. Hotdogs are metaphors for packaged chaos. It’s endless.

The glee to be had in ferreting out a new metaphor is a wondrous, wondrous thing, and I really love to do it. It keeps me going.

So, before I get to my new metaphor about spin, politics, and how they can be linked to the processes of immunology in such a way that it sounds like I know what I’m talking about, a little background:

My initial problem arose from the spin-Fest after the Kerry-Bush debate. I asked myself, “How can this conservative man on the television look into the camera and say things I know to be lies?”

For a member of the public, such as myself, there are several ways I can react to such a statement. I can

1) pretend he’s telling the truth, and hope for the best, or
2) question my own sanity, or
3) explore the underlying, nefarious reasons why he’s lying.

Option 3 is my best bet, but it’s not an option that everyone can exercise. There are people who are simply too stupid to exercise this option. Let me explain in the next post.

I almost didn’t watch last night’s debate. It wasn’t necessary; even if Kerry had flipped out on national television, if he’d sprouted tentacles from his eyeballs, I’d still be voting for him in November. In a contest between Bush and Rakmoot the All-Destroyer from Sanctimonious 6, I’ll vote for the bug-eyed tentacled thing everytime, provided it can get on the ballot.

So I guess I’m a tentacular-dog Democrat now. I didn’t used to be. Every once in a while, in days of yore, a Republican could come along that I’d think about voting for. That seems like a long time ago now, and not only because I used the word “yore.”

Kerry, despite my fears, did a great job. Bush looked like Charley the curmudgeonly uncle from My Three Sons.

So after the debate, I watched an after-action report show on PBS, mostly to confirm my feeling that what I saw happen actually happened. And there was a conservative NYT columnist—they have one or two—saying his boy scored a TKO. Okay, I realize I’m biased—hell, I’m a tentacular Democrat—but what show was this guy watching? How can he be sitting there with a straight face, telling me Bush did well?

I couldn’t believe it. I got edgy and railed at the television. I railed at the pundit for lying to me, and I railed at the journalist sitting across the table from him for not saying anything about it. She didn’t say anything. She acted like it was perfectly alright for him to take a metaphorical crap right there on the table.

When did journalists become props? I know they’re all not like that, but most of them are. And it goes beyond the truth; it is simple common courtesy to tell someone that there’s dogshit dribbling from his mouth.

I, of course, know that last night’s pundit wasn’t interested in telling the listening audience the truth. His job was damage control. That I know this, that I am aware of “spinning,” doesn’t make it okay to me.

I am also aware that last night’s pundit isn’t trying to make it okay to me. He doesn’t care what I think about spinning. He only cares about his man winning the election. So he will lie to the public, if that’s what it takes.

I sometimes wonder why I’m getting so worked up about the post-debate Spin-fest, but then I answer myself: if a man can stare me in the face and tell me that bad is good, that up is down, that blue is red, then that same man will lie to me about anything.

Spinning is a political phenomenon, and the Republicans do it better. They’re better at it. The Democrats try, but it’s hard for them to muster the terrific loathing for the electorate that spinning requires.

This post was supposed to be about the metaphorical link between spin & politics on the one hand, and immunology on the other, but I’ve worn myself out. Maybe over the weekend.

Anthropologists recently discovered a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea that slices its sandwiches based on celestial calculations of the length of a day. Yesterday, for the first time in six months, the tribe cut its sandwiches exactly in half. As the year wanes, one side of a sandwich will become smaller and smaller, until the winter solstice, when its size will slowly increase once more.

Scientists have yet to advance a satisfying explanation for the tribe’s behavior. What seems clear, though, is that sandwiches are much lighter than giant rectangular rocks, such as those that are found at Stonehenge. Also, a sandwich-carving knife can be manipulated with one hand, whereas sixty-ton stone slabs require more than that, as well as loud grunting.

As one can see from the following picture, the size disparity between the monoliths of Stonehenge and The Autumnal Equisandwich is considerable:

In fact, the sheer size and hardness of the Stonehenge lentels make the idea of carving them with a sandwich knife impractical.

There are several other advantages that the sandwich holds over Stonehenge as well. One is that Stonehenge, while awesome and imposing, is virtually inedible. Another is that the small size of the sandwich allows for easy alignment of the sliceline toward an almost limitless number of religiously important sunrise locations, something the Druids of ancient Britain, with their stone slabs and their savory meat stews, could only dream of.