No. More. Election. Ads.

For the last few weeks my friends and family have complained about the incessant election advertising constantly bombarding them.  Most ads are mean spirited, all are annoying and according to NPR's fact checking, most of them are "Barely True."

It's a problem I have a great deal of sympathy for, but one that, thankfully, I no longer have to deal with myself.  In fact, it's been many years since I've seen an election ad and now I only see them when I purposely choose to go on YouTube and look at one being ridiculed on a national (or international) level, such as Christine O'Donnell's recent (and I must say, HILARIOUS) "I'm Not a Witch" ad:


How did I get so lucky? Well, when my daughters were very young, we chose to eliminate cable television.  We had many reasons for this, and certainly an important one was keeping them free from advertising assaults.  I knew though, that the greatest risk was that I might use the "babysitting" benefits of TV a bit more than I ought.  It was just too easy... always there, always on and a guarantor of instant peace from wailing toddlers.  Now, I'm no saint... I kept the DVD player!  Occasional peace is something I value quite highly and there was no way I was going to go cold turkey.  Nevertheless, this decision gave me a measure of control I'd forgotten about.  I chose the DVDs and I chose when we watched them.  This has worked out amazingly well for my daughters.  They still watch plenty of TV, but very little of it is advertising and I choose the content.

Everything is on DVD or netflix, so we don't feel deprived in the slightest.  In fact, when my kids watch a show like "I Love Lucy" at their grandparents' house, they can't figure out why said grandparents put up with those stupid commercial interruptions every few minutes.  How can they stand it?

When I tell people we don't have cable, they often look at me as though I've told them we don't breathe air.    It's a hard concept for people to grasp at first, but it really has made our lives better.  I now make election decisions based on my own research.  I get my news on the internet, on the topics I'm specifically interested in -- which means that if I don't consider finding out who got voted off Dancing with the Stars last night to be NEWS, I just don't click on that particular news byte J.  Yippee!  I still watched EVERY SINGLE episode of "Lost" and "Mad Men" is an obsession I won't easily give up.  But, come November 2nd I won't need to celebrate the end of election ads -- I can just celebrate... well, my birthday, which happens to fall on election day!

I am the very model.....

Politics and music are just colliding for me lately.  A friend posted this on facebook and I love it!  As a child I had an intense fling with Gilbert and Sullivan (basically, when Linda Ronstadt made her version of Pirates of Penzance).  I fell in love with Kevin Kline as Pirate King and now I think I'll always see Obama as the Modern Major General...  I mean "Modern U.S. President:"

It's an Ironic World After All.....

Sorry to mix my musical metaphors, but um... Toto?  Did you know that Obama and Palin are distant cousins.  Yup!  I love this little bit of info and wish I'd had it earlier this semester to help illustrate the notion of "Irony" in my literary comedy class.

But, wait... it gets better J Obama has another surprising cousin -- Rush Limbaugh!  Seriously, I'm not making this up.  This was part of an AP News Release from 2 days ago.  I must quote:

"A genealogist at the Utah-based Ancestry.com, Anastasia Tyler, said Obama and Palin are 10th cousins through a common ancestor named John Smith, a pastor and early settler in 17th-century Massachusetts. Obama is related to Smith through his mother, as is Palin, Tyler said.

"Smith was against the persecution of the Quakers," Tyler said in an interview. "He was a very socially conscious man."

As for Limbaugh, he's also a 10th cousin of the president — one time removed — through a common ancestor named Richmond Terrell, who Tyler said was a large landowner in Virginia, also in the 17th century. "His history is a little more nebulous," Tyler said."

And frankly, the 17th century (relatively speaking) isn't so very long ago.  Of course, the fact of their familial relation doesn't in itself demonstrate irony -- family feuds are hardly uncommon.  The irony here is tinged for me by the barely beneath the surface racism encouraged by Palin and Limbaugh through their encouragement of groups that question Obama's religion, place of birth, etc.  

It all just makes me want to break out in song:  

There's so much that we share,

That it's time we're aware,  

It's a Small World After All! 

113

Seriously... 113 degrees today in L.A. -- Hottest day ever in 130 years of record keeping!  And the temp may have been even higher, but the thermometer broke at 113!  Can you say Al Gore?

In 1993, I made this book required reading for a paper I was having my students at USC complete.  It struck me then as a well-argued wake up call.  When Gore ran for president, I was horrified by the criminal way in which that election was stolen from him by Bush, Jr. and spent 8 years regretting that Gore was not in that position -- for a multitude of reasons.  But, I was heartened that Gore returned to his first and most important cause -- environmental issues.  When his movie and book came out:  Inconvenient Truth, I made them required reading for my current, most important students... my daughters.  We baked and sweat through our day long activities down in town today and I thought about how we'll manage when it hits 120 degrees.

I follow Gore's Blog and his entry today was no surprise:
“Record-breaking summer temperatures and the warmest year to date in 131 years are wreaking havoc on the global environment, say climate scientists.”

“The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, is about to report near-record loss of sea ice this summer, and modelers say total ice volume is at a record low. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued warnings about coral bleaching throughout the Caribbean, a problem exacerbated by high water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean.”

“According to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the first 8 months of 2010 is the warmest such January-to-August period in climate records stretching back 131 years. This period was nearly 0.7 degrees C warmer than the average temperature from 1951 to 1980. (NOAA announced roughly the same finding today, using many of the same temperature stations but a different analysis method.) Scorching summer temperatures set records across the United States, and nighttime temperatures hit record highs in 37 U.S. states this summer, the Natural Resources Defense Council will announce in a new report tomorrow.”

What will we tell our kids? How bad do things have to get before the ridiculous global warming naysayers, who either can't understand simple scientific research or refuse to stop protecting their personal interests above all else, get scared?


I've always thought the slogan "Save the Planet" was misleading.  How about "Save the People!"  Maybe then people will get it!  Let's emphasize that the planet will do just fine, it's us who should be worried! 

The Wit and Wisdom of Anne Lamott

I've always had to be careful where I read Anne Lamott's books.  I'm not a big guffaw(er) type, but she can always make me laugh out loud unexpectedly -- a dangerous thing if you're drinking coffee or quietly reading in study hall type settings.  Less distracting though, is her ability to make me nod my head in agreement -- another thing I don't often do.  Her article in today's L.A. Times got me on both counts.  I'm still cleaning coffee stains off my computer screen...

She includes some great lines about recent disturbing female politicos:

"Nor do I want to hear another judgmental word about Mrs. Palin, Mrs. Angle or the astonishing Miss O'Donnell. These women are the three finest natural comediennes to hit the national scene in decades. No one else has come close to bringing me the number of laughs that these gifted conservative women have. Every day brings new one-liners and mirthful observations from one of them, and these never fail to lift my spirits. In fact, some days Sarah Palin is the only thing that keeps me going."

She continues with other wittily on target things to say about the current political scene and as usual gets right to the salient points.   My favorite book of hers, Bird by Bird, is filled with the best sort of "just get to it" writing advice I've seen and this article takes a similar approach to politics.  She cuts to the main point of it all and I for one, very much appreciate her efforts to re-focus people's attention.

Ayn Rand? Seriously???

CNN is running an op ed piece this morning advocating a new moral code based on Ayn Rand's tired old "serve only thyself" ethic .  Two questions for the ages:  How has Ayn Rand, who's lack of writing talent ranks right up there with L. Ron Hubbard as an easy target for ridicule, ever amassed a following that gets her ideas a forum on CNN? and more to the point:  If "the pursuit of personal profit" is your moral ideal -- what care you for other's opinions of your conduct?  It seems odd to spend any amount of time trying to institute a "moral code"  for others that sanctions your behavior.

A friend from high school (popular, though admittedly not the sharpest tool in the shed) first recommended I read The Fountainhead,  I'd been in an existential philosophy phase and with my Dad's urging had been reading lots of Sartre/Camus and this friend thought of Ayn Rand as a philosopher (definitely a stretch -- Oddly, said friend later became a rather "in your face," born again Christian... never noticing that Ayn Rand was the antithesis of a Christian worldview -- although perhaps not so odd;  the individual was clearly flailing about for something/anything radical to be immersed in).  At 16, I was underwhelmed by the tediousness of Rand's writing style and disgusted by the world view she promoted.  If memory serves, this was also the year I'd read Elie Wiesel's Night and the contrast was dramatic.


Imagine my surprise when a few years later, I saw posters advertising Ayn Rand Society meetings at UCLA!!!  My first thought was that the posters were gags, but soon discovered there actually were people who met to discuss Rand as a serious philosopher.   The same morbid curiosity about "how people get hooked by idiots" that sometimes leads me to listen in (lurkingly) to Rush Limbaugh programs, almost got me to attend one of those meetings.  If I could've been a fly on the wall, as I am on the internet or listening to "I can yell the loudest" radio, I might have gone.

Because I teach argumentation and how to use logic in writing, it's useful to know how students think they can get away with fallacy-filled essays.  Listening to Limbaugh and his ilk provides painful clarification of how students are learning to argue.  It takes a great deal of patient logic training to undo the damage caused by talk radio.

Anyway, I'm wandering off topic here.  I would've loved to listen in on the A.R. Society meetings back at UCLA just to be able to grasp how they rationalize her ideas.  Reading the CNN piece today gave me some sense of that... and as I expected -- it's a type of circular, self-justifying logic that makes sense only if you come in convinced already that self-aggrandizement should be the primary goal of every human being.  And I'm sorry, my opinion of Ayn Rand is the same now as it was when I was 16 -- she just wants to justify being a selfish bastard.  Yet I'm still surprised that she and her proponents expect those whose interests are more expansive, those inclined to find value in promoting community welfare, to alter their underlying moral structure.  Basically, "change your values and you'll agree with me." Huh?

The only rationale they hold up for such a change (at least in today's CNN piece) is that progress has been made by those who place themselves first.  But their evidence won't hold up to even the barest of scrutiny.  They claim that science has been behind most medical and technological advances (and few will dispute that), but they hold that up as though the scientific inquiry were made out a spirit of purely self-promotion, rather than for communal benefit.  Were Galileo, Newton, Pasteur and Darwin only out for themselves?  That's a pretty big leap.

The Ayn Rand types don't even like a world with compromises.  They complain that the Bill Gates entrepreneurs of the world should expand the discoveries of science and then hoard all profits -- they see no value in his philanthropy and seek to discourage it.  Odd, since it's precisely the medical, technical and educational philanthropy of entrepreneurs like Gates that will create possibilities for further advancement in future generations.

I just can't follow their logic and so, I'm back to my original question:  how have Ayn Rand books sold millions of copies?  Why is her stuff still even in print?  Considering what's out of print, that's just a shame.