Well, the Inauguration is under way. It is painful to watch and worse to listen to. Yeah, the worst part about this whole thing is the music. Patriotic songs are not my thing.
You see, it isn't that patriotism rubs me the wrong way (although too much empty-hearted patriotism makes me ill) but bad music does. Patriotic songs are like Christian rock: the message doesn't suck nearly as much as the music does.
"Let the mighty eagle soar, from rocky shore to golden shore"? That is soo bad. How can a country that has produced some of the greatest music in the twentieth century, some of the greatest musicians -- Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, Ray Charles, even the Presidents of the United States of America (or POT USA, as they prefer) -- play music found in the dregs of the Best Buy bargain rack?
Sousa marches? Great. Traditional American songs? Awesome. "Let the mighty eagle soar"? Not so much.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
A belated New Year's resolution
I don't normally make New Year's resolutions. But I have made some this year.
Most notable, I would like to try and reduce my dependance on certain words and monikers. I am trying to use words like liberal and conservative, right-wing and left-wing, and others of that ilk less often.
I would like to be able to evaluate and relay the idea of other without having to rely on branding the person or opinion as liberal or conservative. Words like that are always under-defined and over-interpreted. I can describe the person next to me as being liberal, but what does that really mean? We live in an age when many Republicans brand anyone less than a flag-toting, chest-thumping, Glory-be-to-God-crying American as a liberal America hater. All people are a little of one and some of the other: socially liberal and financially conservative or t'other way 'round.
Unfortunately, as soon as someone says liberal these days, the image of a penniless hippie comes to mind; as soon as someone says conservative, one can't help but think of a legislator who will lower taxes, brutalize criminals and rule the people like a king.
I think what this might come down to is a desire to be ruled less by my own history and by my ideology. It is so easy to rely on the fact that I have been a liberal minded individual my whole life. My parents are, my sister is, my friends are, the people I work with are. I feel that I live too much in an echo-chamber where my opinions are repeated by others close to me thus giving the impression that everyone thinks the way I do.
But clearly the rest of the US doesn't.
So, the idea is to, shock! evaluate arguments without appealing to the fact that some Republican forced it out of his blowhole. It will be difficult. Labeling something makes it easier to ridicule and I love to ridicule (even if I haven't done much of that on this page in the past couple of weeks). But I think this will be a benefit to me in the long term.
Most notable, I would like to try and reduce my dependance on certain words and monikers. I am trying to use words like liberal and conservative, right-wing and left-wing, and others of that ilk less often.
I would like to be able to evaluate and relay the idea of other without having to rely on branding the person or opinion as liberal or conservative. Words like that are always under-defined and over-interpreted. I can describe the person next to me as being liberal, but what does that really mean? We live in an age when many Republicans brand anyone less than a flag-toting, chest-thumping, Glory-be-to-God-crying American as a liberal America hater. All people are a little of one and some of the other: socially liberal and financially conservative or t'other way 'round.
Unfortunately, as soon as someone says liberal these days, the image of a penniless hippie comes to mind; as soon as someone says conservative, one can't help but think of a legislator who will lower taxes, brutalize criminals and rule the people like a king.
I think what this might come down to is a desire to be ruled less by my own history and by my ideology. It is so easy to rely on the fact that I have been a liberal minded individual my whole life. My parents are, my sister is, my friends are, the people I work with are. I feel that I live too much in an echo-chamber where my opinions are repeated by others close to me thus giving the impression that everyone thinks the way I do.
But clearly the rest of the US doesn't.
So, the idea is to, shock! evaluate arguments without appealing to the fact that some Republican forced it out of his blowhole. It will be difficult. Labeling something makes it easier to ridicule and I love to ridicule (even if I haven't done much of that on this page in the past couple of weeks). But I think this will be a benefit to me in the long term.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Pro-This, Anti-That
Got this from The Atlantic Monthly.
He has a good point and one that I tried to make during the protests a couple of years ago -- it was misleading for anti-war protesters to argue that the war was wrong because other countries didn't want to participate and the US just went ahead and invaded. What they really meant was this war is wrong because all war is wrong. But, that was a much harder argument to sell to people. You had to say "I know Saddam is a bad guy and all, and he shouldn't be the guy running Iraq, but we shouldn't go to war to remove him." The qualifiers in the beginning lessened the impact of the anti-war statement. But that statement would have been a little more straightforward; I really doubt the Stop the War Coalition was really against the war just because a handful of Security Council nations.
Same thing with Kyoto and the International War Crimes Tribunal. A country shouldn't enter a treaty just because lots of other countries have. But that is what the criticism of the US's non-ratification normally amounted to. A treaty is supposed to give all sides a justified payoff for a justified expense. Now, perhaps the US should have signed up to both of those things but it is misguided to argue that a country should sign a treaty just because everyone else on the block did.
This goes both ways. Sometime I get the feeling that the US doesn't go along with the program simply because other nations are. That is just as bad.
He has a good point and one that I tried to make during the protests a couple of years ago -- it was misleading for anti-war protesters to argue that the war was wrong because other countries didn't want to participate and the US just went ahead and invaded. What they really meant was this war is wrong because all war is wrong. But, that was a much harder argument to sell to people. You had to say "I know Saddam is a bad guy and all, and he shouldn't be the guy running Iraq, but we shouldn't go to war to remove him." The qualifiers in the beginning lessened the impact of the anti-war statement. But that statement would have been a little more straightforward; I really doubt the Stop the War Coalition was really against the war just because a handful of Security Council nations.
Same thing with Kyoto and the International War Crimes Tribunal. A country shouldn't enter a treaty just because lots of other countries have. But that is what the criticism of the US's non-ratification normally amounted to. A treaty is supposed to give all sides a justified payoff for a justified expense. Now, perhaps the US should have signed up to both of those things but it is misguided to argue that a country should sign a treaty just because everyone else on the block did.
This goes both ways. Sometime I get the feeling that the US doesn't go along with the program simply because other nations are. That is just as bad.
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