Lessons Learned?

What can be drawn from this recent election that speaks to America? To listen to the bombast, this election is all about money. Who has it, where it comes from, what it’s to be spent on, when to cut it off. An angry electorate looking at massive job loss and all that that implies tossed out the previous majority in Congress over money. This is not difficult to understand. People are frightened that they will no longer be able to pay their bills, keep their homes, send their children to college. Basic stuff. Two years into the current regime and foreclosures are still high, unemployment still high, fear level still high, and the only bright spot concerns people who are seemingly so far removed from such worries as to be on another plain of existence. The stock market has been steadily recovering over the last two years. Which means the economy is growing. Slowly. Economic forecasters talking on the radio go on and on about the speed of the recovery and what it means for jobs. Out of the other end of the media machine, concern over illegal immigrants and outsourcing are two halves of the same worry. Jobs are going overseas, and those that are left are being filled by people who don’t even belong here. The government has done nothing about either—except in Arizona, where a law just short of a kind of fascism has been passed, and everyone else has been ganging up on that state, telling them how awful they are. And of course seemingly offering nothing in place of a law that, for it’s monumental flaws, still is something. [More . . . ]

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Tabbi on Olbermann

Matt Tabbi has a way about putting things into perspective:

I just found out about the suspension of Keith Olbermann for making political contributions . . . We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney's hair and Tiger's text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined ... and it's Keith Olbermann who should "pay the price" for being unethical? Because, and let me get this straight, he donated money, privately, to politicians? This is absurd even by GE's standards. There is no reason, not even a theoretical one, why any journalist should be prevented from having political opinions and participating in election campaigns in his spare time.

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Tell Me a Joke

Sunday evening I was at a Halloween party, just milling around. Suddenly a tall twenty-something blond in a little black dress appeared in front of me, eagerly brandished a bag of candy, looked directly into my eyes, smiled shyly, and said, "Tell me a joke." Um. I draw a blank. In casual conversation , I am usually full of amusing allusions, anecdotes, word play, and allegory. But I stare helplessly at this vision with her eager smile, silent. I can't think of a thing to say. She stands there waiting. Anyone who has been through college knows about test freeze. You have the answers somewhere in your head, but an impenetrable glacial wall prevents you from getting to them. It was much like that. My mind was a-whorl and adrift. I know that I know a few thousand jokes. Too many of them unusable for a variety of reasons, mostly obsolescence. But I cannot come up with anything. Then another young woman comes up behind me and offers answers. She starts in with a series of blond jokes! Oy, I think, vay. This isn't helping. I mutter something like, "Catch me later," and wander off. Now in retrospect, I ask myself, "Where are my jokes?" I never have been an adept social animal. But I have read dozens of joke books, and scholarly articles on humor. But my lifestyle may also cripple me. I am not agoraphobic, but I don't often meet people in conversational settings. I work from home, communicating primarily by email. I field few phone calls; spending maybe a half hour of phone time a week. Face time? Aside from my wife, I usually go for a week at a time without conversing beyond pleasantries. This is far from the typical office or factory setting where one interrupts conversations to get occasional hours of work in, or where one can converse while working. Most of the joke books I have predate color television. Jokes about FDR or LBJ don't play well any more. Those jokes that I can use are pretty long. Too long to use as a glib response to, "Tell me a joke." I also haven't watched television or listened to talk radio for a couple of months, so I have no idea what currently is passing for humor. But enough about my infirmities. Tell me a joke that I can collect in a repertoire, in case I get another such opportunity.

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The Pundit’s Whine

I try to ignore Glenn Beck. I think he’s pathetic. All he can do is whine about things he quite often doesn’t understand. For instance, his latest peeve has to do with being bumped out of line by science fiction. Yeah, that’s right. Glenn Beck’s book Broke has been number 1 on Amazon for a while and it apparently got beat out finally by a science fiction anthology. His complaint that this is from “the left” is telling. First off he’s trying to make it sound like some profound philosophical issue, that a science fiction collection outsold his book on Amazon. (He also noted that the Keith Richards autobiography bumped him as well and please note the twist he gives that.) Why the Left? Is science fiction a left-wing thing? I know a lot of SF writers who style themselves right-wing, libertarian, conservative, etc. Some of them are very good, too, and I have read some of their work with pleasure. Unless they were writing from an overtly political stance, I found no reason to call them on their “rightishness” because they outsold another writer’s work that might have been a bit leftish. This is just a silly complaint and displays an obsession with partisan politics or just immaturity. This is, of course, Glenn Beck we’re talking about, who seems to find more reasons to evoke Nazi similes than any other pundit I know of and has occasionally shed tears over the abuse he sees our great country enduring from the left. But this is ridiculous. Because isn’t this…I mean, Glenn, isn’t this just the free market making itself heard? Your book can’t stay number one because that would belie the whole principle of competition you claim to believe in. Everybody who works hard and honestly should have their shot at being number one for a little while and this anthology is a poster-child for hard work and perseverance because, well, it’s self-published! It doesn’t even have a major (or minor) publishing house behind it! It got there all on its own, man! This is the flower of the free market! David whupping Goliath’s ass! This should make you proud! No, he berates it because it has to do with death or the culture of death, which he equates with left-wing politics somehow. And for good measure drags Keith Richards into the whole death equation. [More . . . ]

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