Stupid but well meaning slogans

I was driving into St. Louis yesterday and one of those lighted construction signs flashed the following message at me:

Buckle Up

Arrive Alive

The problem is that I actually thought about what the sign said instead of focusing on, and associating, the words “Buckle” and “Alive.” Silly me.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I fully support seat-belting and believe that the car should not move unless everyone is buckled-in, even if all you are doing is changing parking spaces in a lot. So I’m absolutely pro the intent of the sign. It is the expression that is ill conceived.

Think about it for a minute. If you are buckled-in and, God forbid, need to have been buckle in, then you are likely not going to be arriving at your destination anytime soon (unless you just happened to be headed for the hospital). Buckling-in does NOTHING with regards to arrival anywhere, and, in fact, if you do happen to arrive on time, you probably avoided mishap and being buckled-in mattered not an iota. It is the association of arrival with buckling that causes the dissonance, because those two are not related. It would have made much better sense to say:

Buckle up

Stay Alive

Or

Buckle up

Arrive or Alive

Or something along those lines; not to implicitly associate seat belts with arrival. Putting the way I saw it on the sign means that anyone who thinks about what was said will realize there is a certain disconnect there. That makes the person who authored the message less intelligent and by implication, less authoritative. And that devalues the entire message which is… tragic.

Here come the ads...

On day after Florida and six days before Illinois and Missouri vote and I saw my second ad now third ad of the season. (#3 came on while I was typing this).

Ad 2: Hillary (as her sign says in big letters; apparently Clinton is something she wants to forget). The ad had Hillary giving a speech that amounted to saying she can't get what she wants instantly, but she tries every day to do something nice for someone. In other words, we should vote for her because she is a good person. No issues. No nothing except she is a good person.

Ad 3: Obama. Didn't get a good look, but the gist seems to be that he can get Republicans and Democrats to work together. At least that matters.

What McCane wishes he could say...

There is a Republican debate tonight and, over lunch, NPR was talking with a GOP strategist who said that if Romney doesn’t act swiftly, soon McCane will have overwhelming momentum. One thing the strategist expected Romney would do tonight is to hit McCane on the question of Immigration. He expected to hear Romney say “amnesty” a lot. The host commented that even if Romney did not say it, Rush Limbaugh probably would.

It occurred to me that there is a response that McCane could make, but won’t because it’s so un-politic that it would cost him votes, or at least he would be afraid it would. (Have you ever noticed that although the voters tell you they want honesty and forthrightness from their politicians, they tend to reward it by voting for the other guy? There’s what monkey says and what monkey does. One gets you elected. Which do you think politicians pay attention to?) So, I’m going to reply to the question on Senator. McCane’s behalf and say what I think he wishes he could say. Mind you he has not been consulted in this nor has he endorsed this answer.

Q: Do you think we should give illegal immigrants amnesty at some point?

A: Before I respond to that on a policy level, I want to respond to that on a strategic level. No matter what we do, amnesty or not, some of those immigrants will eventually become legal immigrants or have families who are legal immigrants, and some of them will become citizens. At some point, most of us, had an ancestor who was not born in this county but came here from abroad, so you all know how that works. Now, you all know that citizens vote. If we deport their Maria or expel their Johann, they will remember it when they vote. If we become the anti-immigrant party, then all the newly minted citizens will vote for the other team because they will believe that those people are their friends. All those new voters, all voting Democrat, not because they agree with the Democrats on policy issues, but because they think we are their enemy. That is how you go the way of the Whigs and the Tories. We cannot afford to have the legal immigrants see us as the anti-immigration party. Whatever policy we state on immigration, including this issue of amnesty, must be sellable to new citizens who have family still living abroad. So before you decide how you feel about the rest of my answer, you need to realize I’m a damn sight better for you, long term, than taking a position that puts a Democrat in the White House.

With that said, I can answer your specific policy question….

This is why Evil will win; because Democracy is dumb.

Florida has voted and I take back every nice thing I said about them yesterday.

Florida's election proves that the pundits who said, "You must do well in the early small states." are right. Small, early state victories, combined with Media coverage of "The Frontrunners" (said with a sort of a breathy lust) triumphs. Floridians shouldn't care what has happened in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, or Nevada. Obviously, they just want to follow the pack.

I renew my call for a national Primary/Caucus date so that all states vote at the same time. I further call on the Press to restrain itself until all polls close as part of its civic duty to the democracy.

However, I expect the establishment to have too much of a vested interest in the status quo to even entertain these suggestions. Candidate can save $ by only having to campaign in a few states and the Media makes oodles of $ by having prolonged election coverage. What power does fairness or even common sense have against dollars?

Sad, but off base

Apparently a boy in Lee's Summit (the Kansas City side of Missouri) killed himself because he was being teased at school. This is sad, regretful, and I feel awful saying what I am about to say, but it needs to be said.

Like the 13 year-old girl locally who committed suicide because people made mean remarks to her via her MySpace page, we now have the boy who killed himself because the other kids at school were mean to him. Of course, his mother plans to sue the school. (Mind you if the public decides this is a silly suit, the lawyers will get blamed, not the member of the general public.)

Kids are vicious; anyone who survived grade school and high school can tell you that. Most of us get through it without suicide. Everyone should get through without feeling the need to kill themselves. We can feel sad when a child dies for any reason, especially when it is suicide related, but this cannot blind us to the fact that the child in this case died merely because someone was too mean to him. In life, people will be mean to you. It happens and people need to be able to deal with it.

In blaming the "them," (whether "them" is the evil, demon-possessed, other kids who did the "being mean" or the "teasing;" or whether "them" is the school which allegedly should have seen this coming and stopped it somehow, probably by creating the Biblical scale miracle of having kinds not torment the weaker, less popular, other kid); we allow ourselves to ignore any fault on the part of the child who is dead. After all, it seems cruel to us to blame the dead, especially when the dead is a child. Likewise, it seems cruel to blame the parents who we know must be mourning for the child. So we look elsewhere, because a tragedy like this makes us want to blame someone. Yet, logically if, as the parents are quoted on CNN, the school should have seen the problem and read the warning signs (and I'm certainly not saying the school is innocent), how much more true must this be of the parents? If the child had problems at home, how is this something that can be laid at the feet of the school? The school does not replace the parents and in the end, the buck stops with the parents. Of course, the parents can't emotionally admit fault and so, they blame the school. Human nature.

The bottom line is that no one should take their own life just because someone else was mean to them. The person who made the conscious choice, however young they may be, is the one who could have stopped the incident from happening, should have stopped it from happening. That person ALONE is most at fault for the (usually) fundamentally selfish act of suicide, and therein, however tragic, lies the blame.

My final thought is this. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and let the person who never tormented anyone, was never mean to another kid, who never made another miserable during their entire K-12 experience be the one to cast this first stone. Before you blame the school or the mean other kids, look in the mirror. Take a long, hard, look. How many can say it was never I?

The role of the 26 year-old man in society

NPR ran a piece yesterday about how the lifestyle of the late college male is changing. The officious expert on the show referred to them as Boy-Men because they were in a sort of second adolescents. There was an air of condemnation in her attitude. This made me think and I got back to Milton; hence the previous post.

On January term about 1992 or 1993 I took a “Male Studies” class with Professor Paul. Generally it was an interesting class as we examined gender roles for men and other related topics. The relevant portion here is the observation that several scholars had made that while the 1960’s on feminist movement had redefined the role of gender women in America, it had largely ignored how this might change the gender role of men. For example, while in 1990 most people, if asked, would have expressed the idea that a woman could be just as good a business manager as a man, but would still pick a woman child care provider over a man because the woman seemed safer. Inherent in this is a notion that for a man to want to be a day care worker, something must be wrong with him (more prone to being a pervert). If challenged though the person would have backed up the “safer” assertion by pointing out that most sexual predation is, in fact, committed by men.

Another example from one of our texts: The author noted that when he was a boy, his father had rather roughly explained on the way to church one morning that gentlemen walked behind the ladies when going down the sidewalk. Thus, the author was amused in a faculty cocktail party to hear one of his female colleagues explain how it was so sexist in Japan where they made the women walk behind the men.

Also commented on in the texts was the idea of the Super-Mom. We’ve all seen her in the advertisements. She comes breezing home from her office, changes the oil in her car, fixes little Betty’s sled, makes dinner, and works around the obstacle presented by her well-meaning but inept man, all with hyper-competence. She is, of course, married to the guy who can’t work the toaster, who does not understand basic home products, or whose idea of “making dinner” is screwing it up and then secretly ordering out. In other words, this is a woman who has successfully “invaded” the traditional provinces of the male counter-pointed with a male who is completely inept at anything resembling the traditional provinces of the female. (Once someone points it out and you start looking for it, you see it everywhere too. Pet peeve here.) Think about the message that conveys for a minute. Think about what that tells young men about who or what they are supposed to be.

Why is this relevant?

The liberation of women allowed them to move into the work place. Being less focused on raising a family, women were marrying less and at older ages; something remarked upon by many Hollywood types recently as they discussed trying to balance career with their desire to have children. Consider that, largely, if the young women are not getting married and having children, then their male peers probably are not either. Society is not, however, suggesting to these young men that they need to go out and vigorously pursue a career to prove that they can, nor is society really offering these young men alternate gender roles. They are, largely, adrift.

So they fill their time playing xbox and PS3 and watching “guy movies.” It seems kind of disingenuous to praise young women for being liberated, yet look scornfully at the result this creates in their male counterparts.

MyPetPeeves

Pet Peeve time. I hate iX and MyX. In grade school, I learned that we should embrace our differences, our diversity, our uniqueness. It almost came to the point that we were taught that conformity was bad and being different was good. Maybe when dealing with the pack mentality of adolescents, you have to do that; I dunno. However, as an adult, I can observe that damn few societies function without a degree of conformity. On same days, I worry that we have come so far in promoting the virtue of tolerance that we have passed the point of virtue and moved into the twin vices of self-absorption and selfishness.

This brings me to the pet peeve and today’s example, computer software. We have MyDocuments, MyDownloads, MyMusic, MyPictures, etc. Mac’s have ichat, imusic, iphoto, imovie, itunes, etc. It’s all my my my, me me me, i i i. (To be fair, the original itunes may have been a reference to internet tunes.) In our drive for uniqueness, we have marketed self-identity and in so doing, I’m not sure we have done ourselves any favors. Where is OurPictures or FamilyDocuments or Everyone’s tunes? Are we losing the other and becoming absorbed in the I?

Clinton, Obama, and the legacy of Jessie Jackson

Many of you probably know that there is “increasing acrimony” between the Obama and Clinton camps, going back to the New Hampshire primary and the utterly stupid race/gender speculations about the candidates. You might also know that Billy-boy (aka Slick Willy in southern Missouri), has become his wife’s “attack dog.” Apparently Bill has been stumping around doing his wife’s dirty work, coverage of which threatens to overshadow his wife’s campaigning if NPR is to be believe. This conduct is pissing off many Democracts according to the Press who believe ex-Presidents should be quiet elder statesmen. (See Jimmy Carter.) Here’s what I don’t get:

Why does this seem to surprise anyone? Clinton’s term in office made it clear that he is a total opportunist with little of a moral compass to guide him. If the advantage lies in having him run around attacking Obama so his wife can pretend she isn’t an opportunist, he’ll do it. When confronted with statements he’s made about wanting to see the first African-American President, his responses was that he still believed that, but not this election. That made more people mad. Again why are they surprised? Clinton could have simply said he’s married to one of the candidates and was voting that way. I can’t even fault him for that.

In law school, I had a professor, African American ex-marine guy, who noted that Clinton talked the talk, but rarely walked the walk when it came to African Americans. He said pro-African-American things and appointed a handful to positions in his administration. BUT, not the important posts and not in his “inner circle.” My professor professed amazement that so many of his peers saw Clinton as their boy, when his actions failed to fulfill the promise his rhetoric made.

In a reaction to Obama winning South Carolina, Billy shot off that even Jessie Jackson had won some states when he ran for office. This has apparently outraged several people although it proves that in adversity is the best time for a tiger to show its stripes. Bill hasn’t changed his.

Florida got it right

I heard something good about Florida. This is a state where I root against all their football teams, roll my eyes at their politics, and figure the folks who live there, deserve it. Florida however, apparently requires people to be registered members of a political party to vote in that PARTY’S Primary. Go Florida!

Milton is the biggest genius ever!

According to my sister, who is usually right about stuff like this, Milton posits in Paradise Lost that the Devil can “physically” leave Hell whenever he wants to. The problem is that damnation goes with him wherever he goes, turning it into Hell. As an observation and a metaphor, that is… incredibly astute; people, Devil or not cannot escape the damnation they bring with them when it is an essential part of who they are.

When Becky mentioned it, I believe it was in the context of all the folks who were exiting California and moving to Montana to “get away” from the noise, the congestion, the crabby people, etc. They got to Montana and discovered a land where the grocery store closed at 7:00 and Starbucks was only a stock ticker. Despairing that they had come to such a wasteland, soon their conveniences followed them on a wave of entrepreneurial spirit and malls, 24 hour groceries, coffee shops, and all the other amenities sprang up. Then. Lo, they looked forth one day and realized the place they had come to was every bit as noisy, congested, and unfriendly as the place they had come from. Puzzled at this strange fact, they moved again, to get away fro it all, only to discover yet another barren heathen wasteland. No worries soon conveniences would follow.

Milton’s model can be applied to almost every aspect of modern life. Cell phones, politics, economics, all of it. People always bring their own hells with them and then wonder how it is they can never seem to “get away.”