How did I become a registered democrat? I'm not going to analyze the evolution of my political beliefs here. I started there. It was really boring.
I grew up in subdivisions on the south and south-east side of Green Mountain, a part of Lakewood just over the hill from Golden which is the Jefferson County seat. Jeffco is one of the more conservative counties in the Denver metro area and maybe in Colorado itself. [1] Dad and his family are proud republican natives with roots on the Western Slope and Mom was a republican when I was young, as are at least some of her siblings. Given those significant influences it's somewhat surprising that I find myself so deeply opposed to the Bush administration.
My first memory of showing any interest in politics was in junior high or high school when I asked Mom about her political views. She described herself as a republican but disagreed with the party on a few key points. She supported a strong military, favored business, and particularly emphasized fiscal responsibility [2] while favoring democrats with regard to the pro-choice, gun control, and environmental issues. It wasn't a long conversation, but it introduced me to the US political battle lines. It's also where I started politically -- a little right of center. Most people in this state would tell you I have spent too many years living in the People's Republic of Boulder.
Then there's my other notable childhood political memory.
I was over at my best friend Shannon's house when Reagan was elected to his first term. I didn't understand much about politics. Dad sometimes called people jackasses which explained the donkey, but I couldn't figure out the elephant and didn't know which mascot belonged to which party. I knew democrats were left and so were communists. But I couldn't make heads or tails out of the red connection between the commies and the republicans.
We were up way past my bed time. My eyes were swollen, my nose was running, and I was having trouble breathing -- allergic reaction to the dog, cats, rats, gerbils, and probably the tarantula, iguana and boa constrictor too. The room was dark, lit only by the glow of the television. On it was a map of the United States almost completely colored in red. Shannon stood between me and the TV with both middle fingers extended at the country exclaiming "You mother fuckers asked for it! You fucking asked for it."
We were eleven years old.
I'll repeat that for emphasis: we were eleven years old. He was precocious and obviously not a republican.
Tonight Sarah and I listened to Fresh Air on Colorado Public Radio. Terry Gross interviewed Richard Clarke about his book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. With the recent 60 minutes interview with Clarke and the testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Clarke is getting a lot of air time. My reaction to the interview this evening wasn't what I was expecting.
Clarke's story is everything I want to hear. It confirms all my darkest suspicions about the Bush administration -- everything is exactly as bad as I feared. And that is exactly the problem. The match is too good. It is propaganda.
Effective propaganda must be true. But it must also be completely one sided. Nothing in life is ever so clear cut. Everything has complicating nuances. Propaganda simplifies issues to serve an agenda, and Clarke's agenda clearly includes undermining Bush's re-election. Clarke believes his own story, which explains his agenda. He believes the Bush administration has undermined the security of our nation. But my awareness of the spin denied me my self-righteous indignation.
Here's the problem. The United States is really two completely different countries. They read their books and listen to their news sources and we read our books and listen to our news sources. They use their propaganda to dismiss ours and we return the favor. Actually I have that wrong. There's a third country in there composed of citizens who don't identify with either party, and those who are convinced that their vote and their voice doesn't matter because its only one among hundreds of millions.
Alas, my enthusiasm for self-righteous I-told-you-sos dried up in arid and barren realization that I would be preaching to the choir and ignored by those I would hope to persuade. In that cracked lake bottom I wallow frustrated and maybe a little depressed. Gary Hart convinced me that I have a civic duty to remain engaged, but there is no engagement. Only a lot of passionate yelling of propaganda -- no listening, no real dialog.
Taxes blah blah blah. War blah blah blah. Terrorism blah blah blah. Break to commercial.
[1] I tried to dig up some stats to back up that claim, but couldn't turn anything up quickly. I'm often struck by the huge contrast between the ease with which I can find technological things via google vs. how often I fail to find the social and political things I want there. Is it google, or the demographics of the web, or just that I don't have the right vocabulary to increase the accuracy of my searches outside of technology?
[2] My drift away from the right is strongly related to the complete failure of any recent republican administration to demonstrate any fiscal responsibility whatsoever. Apparently that's not really a republican value after all.
There's many other things I would have rather done with my free time tonight, but I had to finally do something about the blog spammers. I've hacked Movable Type's comment system to allow me to moderate comments.
I'm a professional perl hacker these days and thought I'd find a way to wire in Spam Assassin. Before starting I checked Google and found a much more simple solution: Edith Frost - Movable Type comments moderation.
All I had to do was comment out six lines in lib/MT/App/Comments.pm...
# $app->rebuild_indexes( Blog => $blog )
# or return $app->error($app->translate(
# "Rebuild failed: [_1]", $app->errstr));
# $app->rebuild_entry( Entry => $entry )
# or return $app->error($app->translate(
# "Rebuild failed: [_1]", $app->errstr));You can't use the comments popup window anymore if you want to do this. I don't think so anyway. So I changed all the links on the index, date-based and category templates to point towards the comments section on the individual archive.
This cool trick just disables the automatic rebuilding of the indexes and entry. That keeps the comments off of the web until I manually rebuild my site. The comments are actually saved, just not published into the indexes nor appended to the entry. Editing the index and date-based archive templates to change the comment links is important. Left at the default, those popups point to the mt-comment.cgi which will happily display the not-yet-approved comments thereby defeating the point. Like Edith, I changed them to link to the entry archive.
The last trick is to tell the search engines to ignore the cgis:
document-root/robots.txt User-agent: * Disallow: /dobbse-cgi-bin/
Hopefully that will deny the spammers whatever link juice they think they can get from my site.
Update: I took a further measure of adding the following lines to the view method in Comments.pm:
sub view {
return <<END_HTML;
<html>
<head><title>Blank</title></head>
<body><h1>Blank</h1><p>This space intentionally left blank.</p></body>
</html>
END_HTMLNow even the mt-comments.cgi won't display comments -- they'll only show up on the individual archives which I control through manual updates.
My former boss, Coyote Gulch was caught on film [1] at the 2004 Emerging Tech conference.
James posted a picture of the lobby bar and the Ol' Coyote is seated with his powerbook in the lower right corner of the picture.
It's a moment right out of Smart Mobs -- one unsuspecting blogger is captured by the digital camera of another blogger who publishes the evidence. A third blogger connects the dots. Fun.
[1] "caught on film" -- odds are good the camera was digital and not film, but somehow "caught on CCD" doesn't quite ... um ... capture the image. :-)
Charles Miller suggests introspection is the enemy of blogging.
Some of these topics have been on this list for more than a year. And I can't say any of them are any less interesting to me today than they were when I put them on the list.
The single attribute they share, however, is that I've allowed myself time to think about them. The inspiration has faded, but in thinking I've given myself even more ideas that I need to perspire over before the article is done.
And that's what kills them.
Unpublished and half-written entries are scattered in text files around my computer like boxes in the attic. Sometimes while rummaging around for something else I come across an incomplete idea that catches my attention anew. Sometimes I'll dust it off and witness myself edit it into something satisfying. Sometimes in my editing I just kick up the dust and end up filing it back in the attic. I'm reminded of a scene from Finding Forrester. Here's how I remember it whether or not it actually appeared this way on film. :-)
William is sitting at one typewriter clacking and dinging away. Jamal is sitting across from him leaning on an elbow, his typewriter silent.
William: What are you doing?
Jamal: I'm thinking.
William: Don't think. Write.
In sophomore language arts in high school, Mrs. Starkey expected us to produce ten pages of free writing in our Big Chiefs each week. We were given five minutes at the start of each class in which we were expected to write -- to keep our pens moving continually producing words on the page. The words and sentences were less important than keeping the flow of words on the page. If we stopped writing she would gently bonk us on the head. William Forrester would have approved. Don't think. Write.
Occasionally we would turn in our Big Chiefs and some weeks later get them back with comments[1], mostly empathizing with our teen aged angst. Some comments would highlight passages that were poetic or used an effective metaphor. Having evidence that she'd actually read what we wrote had two important side effects. As teenagers, we knew that someone in the world knew about our problems. As writers, we had an audience.
Ten years later I rediscovered free writing under a different name. I read The Artist's Way cover to cover and practiced "morning pages" and sometimes practiced the "artist's date". Another ten years have passed and only now have I connected the dots between Mrs. S's free writing and morning pages, though the practices differ only in details. Or perhaps I did connect those dots before and the additional ten years are starting to show. :-)
That second exposure to free writing opened another dimension to writing that I had not appreciated. I spent several months writing for an hour or so every morning. It's pretty well impossible not to notice when the same issue keeps showing up in the morning pages week after week. Free writing became a vehicle for self-exploration. It's an entirely different sort of introspection.
For those several months gymnastics and ballroom dance kept recurring. I finally took the hint and looked for classes in the area. The gymnastics class wasn't being offered but ballroom dance was. I eventually became a member of the UNLV Ballroom Dance Team, through which I was introduced to Lindy Hop. When I moved back to Boulder it was through Lindy Hop I was introduced to Sarah. (Watch out if you take up the pen -- no telling where it might lead. :-)
Free writing has come and gone over the years. For a time my writing changed to journaling which is a different mix. There's more thinking in it. The exercise isn't about recording thoughts on paper in a pure stream of consciousness. Rather, the goal is to record Something Important -- memorable events or interesting thoughts. There's nothing like Something Important to stop your writing in its tracks.
When I started this blog I thought I was going to be able to combine interests -- my interest in journaling with my interest in the 'Net. Turns out not. Blogging is publishing. And besides Something Important, there's nothing quite like thinking about a Public Audience to stop writing in its tracks. Permalinks compound the problem. I expect my writing to remain published here indefinitely so that I don't break other people's links -- part of the social contract of blogs.
Note to self: Don't think. Write.
[1] 10 pages/week x 34 students x 5 classes x 18 weeks/semester = 30,600 pages/semester of mediocre, angst-ridden, sloppy, teen-aged writing. Sure some students wouldn't write 10 pages/week, but a number of my classmates wrote 20. Adjusting to 7 pages (a grade C), there's still 21,420. Nothing I wrote in high school was particularly complex. Even so, it's an enormous volume of reading. And this was in addition to our more formal writing assignments. Mrs. Starkey must have counted pages and read and commented on only a few of them for each student. Either that or she was an incredibly fast reader.