| I Live! |
[Sep. 8th, 2007|01:55 pm] |
My dear readers (the plural may be rhetorical here),
Since my last post, I've been quite busy. I'm being published (forthcoming, insha'allah), I got blessed by a bishop, I was admitted to a top 10 law school, I deferred that admission, I've picked up a crimson degree from a school just outside Boston, and I've been compelled to flee the United States. I now reside in exile in a tranquil emirate on the Persian Gulf (or, as my hosts insist on calling it, the "Arabian Gulf").
Just as I have fled my beloved old American Megalopolis for foreign lands, so must this journal migrate to a new world of its own. Livejournal's great and all, but, well, you know. Anywho, once I have the new blog up and running, I shall attempt to post a link to it here.
So good bye for now, gentle reader. If applicable, cherish the blessings of life in the United States. Cherish real pork, bacon, ham, and sausage. Cherish tofu too. Cherish alcohol, big bookstores, rain, Jews, gays, the dogs in your neighborhood, unpretentious people, and turn signals. All these I miss, and more besides.
Fare thee well! |
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| A Christmas Message from Richard Nixon |
[Dec. 25th, 2006|12:15 am] |
[December 25, 1973. A scowling Richard Nixon appears on the television screen, hunched over his desk in the Oval Office]
Nixon [gruffly]:
Good evening. I come before the nation this Christmas day with sad tidings, to announce the sudden passing of my daughter [glances at cue card] Tricia. The story of her death is a grisly one [music starts] and it goes a little something like this:
Nixon [singing off key]:
Tricia got run over by a reindeer,
Just outside the White House, Christmas eve.
You can say there's no such thing as Santa,
But as for me and Agnew, we believe.
She'd had far too much bad acid,
And we'd begged her not to go.
But she'd left her tranquilizers,
So she stumbled out the door into the snow.
When they found her out on K Street,
At the scene of the attack,
There were hoof prints on her forehead,
And incriminatin' Claus marks on her back.
Now were all so proud of my wife,
She's been takin' this so good.
See her in there watchin' football,
Drinkin' gins and tonic with Rosemary Woods.
It's not Christmas without Tricia.
Checkers 'n me have got the blues.
And we just can't help but wonder:
Should we try to pin her murder on the Jews?
Now the goose is on the table,
And we've trimmed off all the grist.
But I'll tell you one goddamned thing:
Santa's number one on Nixon's enemies list.
So if you're listening, Father Christmas,
You should watch your fucking back.
I'll burglarize your psychiatrist,
And leak your files to a right-wing media hack.
Tricia got run over by a reindeer,
Walkin' from the White House Christmas eve.
You can say there's no such thing as Santa,
But as for me and Agnew, we believe.
[Flashes double-handed victory sign and exits] |
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| The Mideast War of 2006 |
[Dec. 1st, 2006|06:34 pm] |
Last night (by which I mean this morning) I dreamed that I was in the "Middle East," the entirety of which was roughly the size of an American football field. War was raging between "Iran" and "Israel," which were about three hundred feet apart, with two small mountain ranges and a large field in between them. It was nighttime. For some reason (latent jihadism?), I was in Iran. The entire country was essentially one big command center, approximate in size to an endzone. The Iranians were busily launching rockets over the mountains that stood directly in front of us; the Israelis were bombarding us in turn, although none of their rockets seemed to be doing any damage to Iran.
I didn't know anybody on the Iranian side, so I decided to cross over to Israel. I walked around the mountains, then past the grassy no-man's land, lit only by the missiles streaking overhead. Then I walked around the other mountain range into Israel. Israel was more crowded and better lit, and had nicer machinery than Iran. The President of the United States (Josiah Bartlet) was present. The phone rang, and President Bartlet picked it up. He announced that Iran had surrendered, and that the war was over.
The President then invited everyone (myself included) back to the White House for refreshments. We arrived instantly and went upstairs to the residence, where Mrs. Bartlet (ably played by Stockard Channing) served drinks and tasty hors d'oeuvres. As we talked, Mrs. Bartlet suddenly turned pale. She then pointed to particular tray of appetizers, announced that they had been poisoned, and said that anyone who had eaten them had about two minutes to live. She then revealed that she had cancer, and that this was her chosen method of suicide. I had not eaten anything from that particular plate, but several other people had. They were quite irate. |
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| The Gap That Wasn't There |
[Nov. 12th, 2006|09:08 pm] |
Last week I ventured a guess as to Barack Obama's interest in the US Senate race in Tennessee. If I was right, then Obama's people should be fairly happy. With 48 percent of the vote, Harold Ford performed slightly better than predicted by the non-partisan polls taken before the election. In this black-white contest, at least, the "15 percent gap" seems to have disappeared.
On a totally tangential note, Harold Ford was banging a girl from Georgetown who was the same year as me--when she and I were both sophomores, and he was a member of Congress. Her blog is the ideal to which my own humble writing aspires. |
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| The "Democrat" Victory |
[Nov. 11th, 2006|04:15 pm] |
If you have been paying fairly close attention to George W. Bush's oratory during the election cycle, you may have noticed something odd. The President of the United States, a man who by all rights ought to know the opposition party's actual name, has consistently referred to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Party." Is this grammatical laziness? Faux-folksiness? A circumscribed speech impediment akin to Dr. Adams' inability to pronounce the "t" in "planetarium"?
None of the above, actually. It is a time-honored and deliberate tactic, the essence of which is to "deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation." The New Yorker did a piece on the interesting history of this tactic back in July. |
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| Their Eyes Were Watching Ford |
[Nov. 2nd, 2006|10:15 pm] |
I've read that Barack Obama is closely following the US Senate race in Tennessee, and that he may take its result into account as he mulls a presidential run. At first, I couldn't understand the Tennessee race's relevance to Obama. Harold Ford's politics are well to the right of Obama's, and Tennessee isn't Ohio or Missouri or Illinois--it's not one of those states that can be characterized as "the United States in miniature." But I now have a guess as to what Obama hopes to learn. He's not so much interested in whether Ford wins or loses (he's going to lose, incidentally). Rather, Obama's looking to see the extent to which Ford's poll numbers accurately correspond with Ford's actual share of the vote on election day. This numerical relationship is of especial importance to African-American candidates.
Because of modern America's anti-racism taboo, almost nobody contacted by political pollsters will admit to voting against a black candidate solely or largely because of the candidate's race. However, quite a few of those polled will often claim to know "someone else" who does automatically vote against black candidates. Some political scientists have posited a gap of up to 15 percent between the percentage of whites who claim to support a given black candidate in pre-election polls and the percentage who actually vote for that candidate. What Obama is watching for in Tennessee, then, is whether Ford polls 47 percent on November 6 and then draws, say, only 39 percent of the vote on November 7.
I would nevertheless caution Obama (a daily reader of this page) against drawing too broad a conclusion from the Tennessee contest. Ford is no Obama (in a number of respects), and race plays differently in Tennessee than in the United States at large. And finally, although America's anti-racism taboo may conceal our remaining racists from pollsters, that same taboo also means that millions of white Americans are dying to vote for an African-American president--to prove definitively to themselves and the world that our politics have transcended the color line. |
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| The P's |
[Nov. 1st, 2006|12:35 am] |
When I mention what I study, I am sometimes asked where American evangelicalism comes from. My standard answer has tended to be a rambling tour through early American intellectual history with little structure and, I fear, less coherence.
Recently, however, I came across a helpful mnemonic device that doubles as a quick summary for evangelicalism's origins. According to Randall Balmer, who I think is a pretty good scholar of the subject, American evangelicalism is a blend of "Three P's"--late New England Puritanism, Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, and Continental Pietism--forged together in the crucible of the mid-eighteenth century First Great Awakening. It's a simplification, to say the least, but one that I think does more good than harm. It's also a good indicator of just how distinctly American American evangelicalism is.
I might, however, add one further "P" of my own--Pentecostalism. This latter-day P, appearing in force at the start of the twentieth century, has gradually infused a charismatic strand into many evangelical churches, so that today the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" are found within many non-Pentecostal evangelical denominations. |
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| It's time for... |
[Oct. 17th, 2006|11:29 pm] |
... a drive-by complaint about grad school! People here proudly present themselves as experts on conservative evangelicalism thanks to the most tangential personal connections imaginable. They claim special insights into the mysterious workings of the evangelical mind because (in the tremendously self-impressed words of a vapid non-entity in one of my classes) "My uncle sometimes goes to Saddleback Church."
Well. Your uncle goes to Saddleback? Your great aunt reads Left Behind? Your ex-girlfriend's cousin got roughed up by James Dobson for a love offering? Guess what! This is the United States in 2006. EVERY FUCKING AMERICAN IS NO MORE THAN ONE DEGREE REMOVED FROM A HARD-CORE BIBLE-THUMPIN' DRENCHED-IN-THE-BLOOD-OF-THE-LAMB EVANGELICAL.
And if any of you claim I am wrong on that last point, then I will immediately convert to hard-core evangelicalism. Then you'll know me, and you'll be wrong. |
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kaptainkool's journal
