Passing the buck

Last month I was chosen to attend a "town hall" meeting at work. It was a chance to meet our new CEO, to find out the company's official corporate goals (executive summary: global domination), and to voice our questions and concerns.

Several employees voiced concerns about our terrible benefits package. We work for a ginormous health insurance conglomerate, and yet we get shafted by the insurance policies written by our own employer. It makes me sad when I have to quote benefits to a member whose plan is more reasonable than my own.

Our new CEO said that they are aware of employees' dissatisfaction with the benefits and that they were diligently working on something better in preparation for open enrollment season.

Well, open enrollment season is upon us, and guess what? Our benefit package is even worse. Mrs. Gerbil and I will see up to a 10% increase in our premiums, our already stratospheric deductible, some prescription co-pays, and our out-of-pocket maximum. The official reason for the increase is that it reflects "rising healthcare costs."

Now, I may be a cynic, but I happen to believe that a major factor in rising healthcare costs is insurance companies. Yes, they want to protect their profit margins. But think about it: advances in healthcare technology (including medicines, laboratory tests, and procedures) don't come without a price tag. Yet providers must accept very low reimbursement rates in order to participate in managed care networks. For example, I recently had standard prenatal bloodwork and (on account of my Ashkenazic heritage) some genetic testing. The lab charged my insurance company over $1000, but because they are a network provider, they'll be paid only about $300. Sucks to be them. But it also sucks to be the rest of us, because if the lab pressures the insurance company for a higher reimbursement rate, the insurance company will pass the increased cost along to the employers who buy their packages... who will then pass it along to employees in the form of higher premiums and/or crappier coverage.

There are, of course, other explanations for rising healthcare costs. This article from the Annals of Internal Medicine does a good job of outlining them. But in the end, I still think that the industry which currently pays our bills has created a fantastically self-perpetuating cycle of cost increases. So I'm all for socialized medicine--even if it means I'd have to find another job.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering: all that expensive labwork came back normal. Go little developing gerb!)

Rebel with a Self-Perpetuating Cause

In these parts, everyone's got a cause. Whether it's immigration, keeping immigrants out, world peace, taking over the world, stopping global warming, disputing global warming, gay rights, "traditional family values," preserving Lake Tahoe, developing Lake Tahoe, keeping sex ed in schools, keeping sex ed in the home, gun control, the right to bear arms, multiculturalism, hegemony, keeping God in the Pledge of Allegiance, removing God from the Pledge of Allegiance, eco-sustainable-green-whatever, NIMBYism... well, let's just say James Dean wouldn't have stood a chance in the rebellion department.

I guess if you want to be an agent for social change, the Bay Area is a good place to be. After all, this was the hotbed of radicalism in the 1960s. (Some people seem to believe that it's still the 1960s, but that's another story). It's said that if you throw a rock in Manhattan, you will hit either a psychoanalyst or a person who's currently in psychoanalysis. Around here, I think that if you throw a rock, you hit a social change organization. And the funny thing is that there are hundreds of tiny organizations working toward the same goal--but not always together. Sometimes they don't even know that their comrades exist; other times they just don't want to cooperate, often for reasons of personality politics.

(To wit: I once was asked in an interview how I would increase the organization's visibility to queer youth of color. I said that I would find out first which other organizations were already successfully providing services and activities for this demographic--of which there are many--and then see if we could co-sponsor some of their programming. The interviewers' collective response was one of stunned silence. I'm still not sure whether mine was just such a novel idea, or completely the wrong answer. Whichever, I didn't get the job.)

Now, I'm all for social change. The status quo is certainly better than it used to be, but it's not as good as it could be. What saddens me is that I see a lot of pushing for too much, too soon. Let me be clear that I don't think we should just hang around until public opinion changes, and then move in and re-work the system. I'd love it if, overnight, marriage equality were a reality across the US. But realistically, that's not going to happen. Eight years ago, there was not a single state in the US which offered any official sort of recognition of same-sex relationships. Now, seven states and the District of Columbia offer at least some rights to same-sex couples. Yes, there are still those who think that Massachusetts is going to slide into the Atlantic on account of marriage equality (come on, it's been over four years! so where's the sliding already?) but I think there are also those who've figured out that two chicks getting married isn't actually all that bad.

Simply put, every one of us is afraid of change; and so if we try too hard to change, there's going to be backlash. Even changing for the better is scary. In fact, fear of change has been hypothesized to be a sort of "allegiance to the self"--when you change, even for the better, in a sense you lose the person you were before. I think this happens on a societal level too. The more a small group of people yells, "THIS HAS GOTTA CHANGE!" the more the rest of society girds its loins.

But then we have another problem, which is that the more the agents of change are told to sit down and shut up, the more frustrated they get, the louder they yell... and the more they are told to sit down and shut up. If they are wise, they will take a moment and re-evaluate their tactics. But throwing tantrums is human nature; and it takes a lot of mental and emotional wherewithal to decide to take things slow when you want what you want and you want it yesterday. So in many caes, nothing gets accomplished--

--except that as long as the status quo remains, there's something to try to change. Not changing tactics is a very self-protective mechanism for those who are oriented toward fomenting social change. For once you've completely accomplished your goal, your choices are either sit back on your laurels or find some other cause to champion. And sitting back on one's laurels is pretty antithetical to the personalities of those who work toward change.

So there you have it: Change, and the world changes with you. Keep doing the same thing over and over, louder and louder each time, and you might find yourself the chronic kvetcher amongst a whole lot of pissed-off sticks-in-the-mud.

Aha!

Mrs. Gerbil and I have a bad habit of going to the corner store in the evenings for a pint of Breyer's A&W Root Beer Float ice cream. We indulged said habit last night. On the way out of the store, I pointed out the top headline on the Contra Costa Times, which read as follows:

Warming called security threat.

Mrs. Gerbil and I were both struck by the absolute absurdity of the story. But whereas my first thought was "Well, there's a way to get the federal government to pay attention to global warming," Mrs. Gerbil's was "Oh, my God. That's a real newspaper, isn't it."

(In Mrs. Gerbil's defense, here in Alameda County, the Contra Costa Times isn't a very popular paper. The same niche is filled here by the Oakland Tribune, which has made several aggressive attempts to court our readership. Alas, we are loyal to the San Francisco Chronicle.)

But still, the idea that global warming might possibly attract the attention of the current administration seems more appropriate for The Onion than for real life. On the other hand, if the powers that be predictably get their very powerful panties in a bunch about national security, then why not try to spur some action on social issues by fabricating connections to terrorism?

I've already pondered the connection between marriage equality and national security. I'm sure someone else can spin the United States' failing health care system as a threat to national security. And then there's the state of public education (not to mention the cost of higher education). It should be pretty easy to work in the future of Social Security--I mean, they already have a word in common.

Any takers?

(PS: The point of terrorism is to make people fear your next move. In a twisted way, it's kind of like panic disorder--which, at its core, is the fear of having another panic attack. I know I'm not the first to say this, but I think it bears repeating: declaring a "war on terror" means you've already lost. Food for thought.)

The nanny state

There is much kerfuffle out here in California over so-called "nanny state" legislation. Members of the state senate and assembly have come up with a number of fantastically intrusive proposals in recent months, including bans on

1) incandescent light bulbs;
2) spanking;
3) children under 4'9" in the front seat of the car;
4) children under 4'9" in the back seat of the car without a booster seat; and
5) smoking in the car while children are present.

The state senate is to hold hearings on smoking in cars in the very near future. Now, I do believe that smoking is a public health issue. Smoking is prohibited in a lot of places in California, including restaurants, hospital entrances, and Berkeley bus stops, although citizens like myself are left to enforce the latter with varying degrees of success. Several months ago, at the Hayward BART station, I had the following exchange with a woman who meandered into my personal space with a lit cigarette:

me: Excuse me, would you mind smoking somewhere else? This is a no-smoking zone.
smoker: What the hell? I just came over here. I can smoke if I want to.
me: I have been sitting here for a while, and I don't mind if you smoke elsewhere. Just not here.
woman: What the hell?
me: Thank you for respecting the needs of a person with asthma.
woman: Oh, respecting your needs? What about mine?
me: I don't mind if you smoke somewhere else. But it's against the law to smoke right here, and I have asthma. Thank you for respecting my health.
woman: [wandering away, talking loudly into her cell phone] Sorry, some white bitch says I can't smoke near her ass. Oh, wait, that white bitch don't HAVE no ass.

So yes, smoking is a public health issue. But there's something about this no-smoking-in-your-personal-vehicle thing that really gets to me. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that one's car is an extension of one's residence. It's a private space. But the boundaries between private and public are a lot blurrier in the car because, unless your ride is pimped out with tinted windows (which are heavily regulated in this state anyway), everyone can see what you're doing, all the time.

If you smoke in the car with the windows up, your car smells like an ashtray. If you smoke in your house with the windows closed, your house smells like an ashtray. Anyone in a closed car will inhale second-hand smoke--but so can anyone in a closed room. Is it really worse to be in the car than in the house? I'd be willing to bet that kids spend a lot more time in houses full of second-hand smoke than in cars. So why target cars?

I think the answer is that it's a lot easier to enforce a ban on smoking in the car. The police can obtain immediate evidence that someone's smoking in the car--no need to justify a search warrant if you can see the crime in progress.

But you know, there are many other things in California which pose health hazards to children and other living things. There's pollution, crime, poverty, homelessness, abuse, disease, neonatal drug addiction, abysmal public education, gang violence... all of which are much harder to solve with a single piece of legislation.

If this bill passes, I hope someone will be able to sleep better, knowing that parents will be fined for lighting up while driving their children to school--in a district where less than 50% will receive a diploma and where gangs have more power than the principal.

In sickness and in health

Mrs. Gerbil and I have been thinking (perhaps obsessively) about little gerbs. Conveniently, I've just begun a new job that will not only help fund the production of little gerbs, but also provides much more affordable and comprehensive health benefits. This job is very pregnancy-friendly, and at the moment there are several pregnant or recently post-partum people on site. This is all very good news for the two-member Committee on Gerb Production.

Our new health package includes full coverage for preventive care. Fantastic, I thought, because prenatal care is, by its very nature, largely preventive. But then I asked someone whether prenatal care is covered as preventive care, and I was sorely disappointed to hear that it is not. And then it dawned on me: Like most other health plans, our shiny new one considers pregnancy a sickness.

To be a covered "sickness," pregnancy must have its own diagnostic code, at least for purposes of billing. In the ICD-9 (the current US standard), the diagnostic code for normal pregnancy is V22.2. Anything diagnosable is de facto abnormal, and thus normal pregnancy is abnormal.

("Okay, okay," you are saying, "pregnancy is a departure from normal bodily functioning, so isn't this diagnosable sickness thing warranted?" But humor me here.)

Sickness is by definition bad. Nothing good can come directly of sickness. Sure, you might have a renewed appreciation for life if you survive a serious illness or injury; but the most positive direct result of sickness that I can think of is that once you've had the chicken pox, you are almost guaranteed not to have a repeat performance.

And yet every single human being that ever was is the result of pregnancy. Perhaps you are a cynic and believe that human beings are no good. But hey--you wouldn't be around to hate your fellow human beings if not for pregnancy. Which, I hasten to add, is diagnosable.

Now I shall blow your mind some more with my, well, mind-blowing logic. Even in our enlightened times, women are expected to want to have children. Those who do not want to have children are, at least in some circles, considered abnormal.

Thus: In order to be considered normal, you have to be considered abnormal.

I rest my case.

War on Christmas

This time of year is really hard for me. Historically, I start getting depressed just before Thanksgiving and stop sometime after my birthday (10 days after Christmas, hint hint). In recent years things have been somewhat worse. It could be that I've already been under stress before the ever-lengthening holiday season and therefore have had a lower tolerance for Enforced Happiness.

Or it could be Enforced Happiness in general. There are exactly two Christmas carols which I actually like--I am a secular Jew, mind you--and these are "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "Angels We Have Heard on High." The rest I could do without. Especially in stores; stores are overstimulating enough already! Enforced Happiness also includes advertising of all sorts, including (but not limited to) radio, television, and print ads.

Or it could be this whole "War on Christmas" myth. I do not understand this business. If anyone's trying to remove the meaning of Christmas, it's those who make it into a capitalist orgy. The way I see it, retail workers who wish people happy holidays instead of a merry Christmas are actually preserving the meaning of Christmas. When did Christmas become a reason to spend lots of money? I might be a secular Jew, but I know that Mary and Joseph weren't exactly rolling in dough.

When I was a baby, my parents decided that we should give presents on Christmas. We lived in a very WASPy area, and they didn't want me to feel left out once I began school. Every year we constructed a Christmas bush with branches clipped from our pine trees and a whole bunch of electrical ties. Sometimes my mother would pick up discarded bits of real Christmas trees on her way to work and add them to our bush for extra variety. One year we discovered--the hard way--that I am violently allergic to white pine. As soon as I could open my eyes again, we transferred the ornaments to the ficus. After that incident, we decided to hang the ornaments from the piano instead.

Perhaps I grew up with a skewed version of Christmas. Christmas was something which belonged to other people and which I could dabble in, if I wished, but it was never something I could do for real. Christmas meant shopping and wrapping and stress and you know, I used to love it... except that it was always phenomenally depressing.

So I reserve the right to wish someone happy holidays if they wish me a merry Christmas. Does that make me anti-Christmas? No stranger has ever come up to me on the street and wished me a happy Hanukkah, nor a comfortable fast on Yom Kippur, nor a happy new year in September. But that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when people get all het up (in Decembers of late) when someone wishes them something other than a merry Christmas.

Does it really matter? If Jimmy the Cashier doesn't wish Mrs. Jones a merry Christmas, is Mrs. Jones doomed to have a terrible time on December 25? Isn't it okay just to acknowledge that there are a whole slew of holidays in December (Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, and the winter solstice, to name but a few) and cover all the bases with a generic holiday wish?

If Mrs. Jones needs prompting from Jimmy the Cashier to have a merry Christmas, Mrs. Jones has some serious issues.

I'm glad Christmas comes but once a year.

It is what it ain't

George Orwell, of course, taught us that

WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Recently, George W. Bush taught us that

"'Stay the course' means keep doing what you're doing... Don't do what you're doing if it's not working -- change. 'Stay the course' also means don't leave before the job is done."



And according to my crossword puzzle this morning, everything else you know is wrong too:

Stop right there, cowboy

Ground has been broken for a memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. I think this is fantastic, and long overdue.

US Presidents number 42 and 43 were there:


But just why is Bill gripping George W.'s wrist so tightly?

Does George W.'s left hand know what his right is doing?

Perhaps the most important question of all: Do the rest of us want to know?

On choosing sides

In a nutshell: I don't care who's killing whom over what. People should not be killing each other.

Recent events in the Middle East have nudged my normally cheerful wife into a funk. Sometimes she's cranky, too, but she attributes this to my asking her how she's doing before the coffee is even made. I should know better, I suppose. But anyway, even before this latest game of "let's bomb the crap out of each other!" she seemed a lot more supportive of the Palestinians than of the Israelis.

Now, my wife is quite Christian and I'm (at least culturally) Jewish. So, as you might imagine, we have a lot of interesting discussions even when people aren't bombing the crap out of each other. As a (cultural) Jew I feel a great deal of pressure to side with Israel, no matter who the other party happens to be. Do I think Israel ought to remain a country? Sure. Do I think Israel is always right? No. Some might say this makes me a bad Jew. I say it's just awfully arbitrary to decide it's okay for Group A to attack Group B, but not for B to attack A.

I have heard pro-Israel folks describe Palestinians as terrorists, and I have heard pro-Palestinian folks describe Israelis as state-sponsored terrorists. Okay. If you are going to go out and bomb some civilians or their infrastructure just to say "Hey, what's up? We don't like you and hope you all die. Have a nice day!" then what does it matter who sponsors the weapons? It's still bombing the crap out of people. And bombing the crap out of people is not cool.

When I was in the third grade, the district was in the process of moving all the elementary students from the old historic Chancellor Street schoolhouse to the newly renovated (read: bigger, more accessible, uglier) Goodnoe Elementary. That year there were six third-grade classes--four at Goodnoe, and two at Chancellor Street--and we were assigned based on where we lived, rather than the usual luck of the draw. School-age territoriality being what it is, Mrs. Hintenlang's class occupied one half of the Chancellor Street cafeteria, and Mrs. Parent's class took the other. We knew food fights were strictly prohibited, so we tried to intimidate our peers by proclaiming in our outdoor voices, "We're gonna bomb Mrs. Parent's class back to the Stone Age!" None of us really knew what this meant, bombing back to the Stone Age, but it sounded fairly ominous... and besides, we knew that Mrs. Hintenlang's class was inherently superior to Mrs. Parent's class anyway.

Mrs. Hintenlang's classroom and Mrs. Parent's classroom were actually a single huge classroom with an accordion divider down the middle. Mrs. Hintenlang's side was slightly bigger, so we hosted the grade-wide activities, like the ghost stories at Halloween. This one kid in our class, who eventually got sent to military school, used that event to show off his machismo. He positioned himself out of sight of the teachers and passed his finger back and forth through a candle flame, grinning like a madman. We all knew he was completely bonkers and that it was only a matter of time before he was expelled to military school. But he got special dispensation because he was One of Us. If Mrs. Parent's class had a problem with him, any of the rest of us, or our turf, we would just bomb them back to the Stone Age, and don't say we didn't warn you.

All the bombing-the-crap-out-of-people that's going on now in the Middle East reminds me of the (completely arbitrary) Hintenlang-Parent rivalry. Only this time, people are being bombed back to the Stone Age. On both sides. And that, as previously stated, is not cool.

I don't choose sides because I don't think either is less reprehensible than the other. My grandmother doesn't seem to want to choose sides, either, and this makes me feel good because she's been around a lot longer than I have. My grandmother says that people need to realize that they don't get to decide who gets the land and who doesn't, who lives and who dies, who's right and who's wrong. All of this, she says, is up to G-d. And if people succeed in destroying everything, then maybe G-d will just find another planet, plunk down another Adam and Eve, and hope the outcome is better.

In the meantime, though, this madness has got to stop.

Wordsmithing (or, A semi-serious entry)

I like words.

I like to do silly things with words. One of the first inside jokes my wife and I developed was a strategic mispronunciation of "gnocchi," such that the "g" was no longer silent and the whole thing rhymed with "rocky." Thus we could rap on a door and giggle, "gnocchi-gnocchi!" and it was all very cute and fun.

For a while we signed letters to each other using words that almost rhyme with "love," such as "mauve," "larva," "knave," and "locomotive." This was all very fun and cute, until we ran out of words that almost rhyme with "love." So we moved on to words that almost rhyme with words that almost rhyme with "love," and then it just got plain silly.

I used to be a star on vocabulary tests in high school. I can still spell all the words I learned, but in the decade or so since the era of vocabulary quizzes, I've forgotten what many of them mean. Every so often I will come across one, like "raconteur" or "impecunious" or "refulgent," and I'll have a vague idea of what it means but have to sneak off to the dictionary for a consult anyway.

Yes, indeedy, words are wonderful.

It pains me to realize that there are certain words which are in themselves totally wonderful but have acquired totally un-wonderful connotations. I'm talking about words like "traditional," "family," "values," and "morals." I have grown to despise these words, for they have begun to invoke in me a panic reaction.

Some awful, hideous person out there is probably tittering with delight because these words have begun to strike fear into my heart.

But that awful, hideous person hasn't quite accomplished his/her aim. Oh, verily, the T-word, the V-word, the M-word, and the F-word strike fear into my heart, but not because I see any inherent conflict between any of them and my fabulously gay, fabulously committed life. No, I panic because my first thought upon reading these words is oh, shit, who hates us now?

And here's the thing. Most of the time these words occur in contexts that have nothing to do with sexuality. I am addicted to counted cross-stitch, a traditional yet decidedly unsexy pastime. Safeway often has the best values on basic food items, but sometimes I want to spend a little more for organic products elsewhere. You can't talk about Aesop's fables without mentioning morals. And the next person who tries to insist that a family can only consist of an opposite-sex couple and their descendents really ought to brush up on biological nomenclature.

So here it is, Pride Month and the eve of San Francisco Pride Weekend (I ask you, isn't every weekend Pride Weekend in San Francisco?), and my excitement is tempered by the fact that completely innocuous, positive little words have somehow become weapons of mass destruction.

By the way, and this is pretty disgusting, "Karl Rove" almost rhymes with "love."

Dissidence

I've been Mick Jaggered, been silver daggered
Andy Warhol, won't you please come home?
I've been mother, father, aunt, and uncled
Been Roy Halleyed and Art Garfunkeled
I just discovered somebody's tapped my phone
Simon and Garfunkel, "A Simple Desultory Philippic"

My mother was once accused of being a Communist. By her high school principal. Because she didn't like the topic she had to use for her valedictory address (what the school had done for the class of 1968) and so she shook it up a little (what the class of 1968 had done for the school). The principal was pissed. As the story is told, there was a threat of her diploma being yanked.

When I was in high school, I once said to my mother that I was really sad that I hadn't been around in the 1950s or 1960s.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because it was such a cool time! The music was awesome! I would've been a hippie, maybe, but without all the drugs." This latter part was actually true. Among other things that distinguished me from most of my peers, I had no interest whatsoever in drugs.

My mother got an odd look on her face. "It was a really scary time," she said. "We had bomb drills in elementary school. Duck and cover!"

"We had a few bomb drills in elementary school," I reminded her. "Also tornado drills. And this isn't tornado country." This was also true. Plus, my mother grew up in Indiana, and although she often talked about bomb drills, she'd never mentioned a single tornado drill. So there!

I held onto this idea that the Boomers had it best. Their generation even had a name. Me? I was born in 1980, but by my count I'm not an 80s child because I turned one before Reagan took office. I went to school with Generation X kids and Generation Y kids, but no one seemed to know whether the class of 1997 was Gen X or Gen Y. Plus, most of my school chums were born in 1979, making me a 70s child by proxy.

For a long time I was stuck on this idea that, for any particular era, popular music is an excellent indicator of quality of life. Perhaps this is a result of having come of music-market age just as New Kids on the Block burst onto the scene. (I hated the New Kids on the Block. And yet I can still sing along when they come on the radio. Go figure.) I didn't think much about things like the Cold War or McCarthyism or Vietnam.

And now I'm scared out of my pants by the way that history repeats itself.

At the moment I am greatly unnerved by warrantless wiretapping and telephone data-mining. I doubt anyone's actually tapped my phone, as the only international call I've made in the past 5 years was to Toronto, and I think Canada's probably more afraid of the US than the US is of Canada. But data-mining?

Let me tell you why this scares me.

I would estimate that about 80% of my outgoing calls go either to my wife or to my mother.

My wife's gay.

My mother's apparently a Communist.

Earth logic, she go boom.

I think I might possibly scream the next time I come across the following argument for the Patriot Act, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dubya's second term, or wiretapping:

"We are doing the right thing, because there hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since ______." [choose one]

• the Patriot Act was enacted
• we went into Iraq
• we went into Afghanistan
• eight months into Bush's first term
• we started listening to your pizza orders

Dude. This is so illogical that I want to vomit. But I will distract myself by waxing pedantic about this particular type of illogic. It is called the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, or "after this, therefore because of this."

Post hoc, as it likes to be called on the street, refers to a perceived relationship between two events. Event B happens after Event A, so therefore Event A must have caused Event B. You forget your umbrella one morning. Just before the end of the work day, you look outside. It's pouring. You berate yourself for forgetting your umbrella. Whenever you bring it, it doesn't rain; and when you don't, it does.

Post hoc has a sibling called cum hoc ergo propter hoc. Cum hoc, or "with this, therefore because of this," is known in statistical circles as a confusion of correlation and causation. Here, Event A and Event B occur at the same time, so either Event A must have caused Event B, or vice versa. Let's say you are taking a walk. Your cell phone rings. You stop to answer it. It's your dad, who is panicking because your mother has fallen and she can't get up. You happen to look down at your feet--and one of them is right on top of a crack in the sidewalk. As the guilt starts to set in, you start to hope that you still have your old therapist's number.

So obviously illogical, yet so disgustingly common.

So, okay. There hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since September 11, 2001. (I was in statistics class at that moment. It was my first semester of graduate school. We saw some stuff on TV during the break, but our professor didn't realize what exactly was going on, so we kept learning about standard deviations or whatever it was. Then right afterward we had our pictures taken for the student bulletin board. We all smiled, but those pictures turned out pretty creepy. But I digress). Guess what? Congress didn't pass the Patriot Act until late October. Guess what else? There wasn't a terrorist attack on US soil in those 6 weeks. There also wasn't one between September 11, 2001, and the initial invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor between September 11, 2001, and this creepy, unassailable wiretapping business. Nor in the first eight months of Bush's presidency. For that matter, there wasn't a foreign attack on US soil before September 11, 2001, in the first place.

Hm, if there hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since September 11, 2001, then there also hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since May 17, 2004. That's the day same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts. Therefore,

GAY MARRIAGE PREVENTS TERRORISM!

Eat your hearts out, ye defenders of homophobia, hegemony, and half-wittedness.

Anyone listening?

In Washington the atmosphere was tense today as a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities continued its probe into anti-Vietnam War protests. Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings when they began chanting anti-war slogans. Former Vice-President Richard Nixon says that unless there is a substantial increase in the present war effort in Vietnam, the U.S. should look forward to five more years of war. In a speech before the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in New York, Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.

Simon and Garfunkel, "7 O'Clock News/Silent Night"

I always feel some obligation to watch the State of the Union address. My wife wasn't planning on joining me last night, but then I said she could play Civ III on the laptop during the speech if she turned off the music and left on the sound effects. I don't play this game, but I really like its sound effects. Especially the grunts. I was hoping for some well-timed grunts last night. I was richly rewarded.

I don't have much to say about the speech itself except that more of its 50-some minutes were devoted to other countries than to the United States. I wasn't surprised, really, but I did feel kind of cheated anyway. I mean, I wanted to hear about how (if?) Bush plans to mend our broken democracy here at home, not about how he wants to mend supposedly broken countries by giving them a copy of Cowboy Democracy for Dummies.

My dear friend Kara took this picture, posting which saves me at least a thousand words:



May Google save my mortal soul.

By any other name

I think it would be most lovely to have the wordsmithing prowess of Donald Rumsfeld. I mean, the man's press conferences are downright poetic. There's a book to prove it. And, apparently, an album of art songs.

Poetry in motion is one thing. What I want to do is rewrite the dictionary. Rumsfeld would like to redefine insurgency. Actually, what he wants to do is to stop using the word "insurgent" because the word is too good for the people he used to describe with it.

Now, Rumsfeld is not the first to come up with this idea. Shakespeare, or possibly Christopher Marlowe pretending to be Shakespeare, put it this way:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Regardless, this is absolutely BRILLIANT.

The possibilities, though Orwellian, are ENDLESS.

This whole who-uncovered-the-CIA-agent mess? Didn't actually happen the way people think it did. See, someone decided that "Valerie Wilson's husband" was a better name for a colonial seamstress than "Betsy Ross." "Couldn't find" was ever so much better than "sewed the first." "Yellowcake" is just so much more descriptive than "American flag." It's very simple, you see. No one was actually talking about weapons of mass destruction they said "Valerie Wilson's husband couldn't find yellowcake." It was just a third-grade history lesson gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Now I need to go see about dinner. I think I will grill a slab of nice, juicy filet mignon for dinner, where

grill a slab of = heat a can of
nice = cheap
juicy = salty
filet = vegetable soup
mignon = from Target.